The Liberty weathervane points left.

Schmidt, Peter

"In a world such as you inhabit, Mr. Stencil, any cluster of phenomena can be a conspiracy. So no doubt your suspicion is correct."

--Thomas Pynchon, V. (1)

The Futures of American Studies, edited by Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 612 pp. plus index. $74.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

THE COVER IS SUBLIMINAL. A Statue of Liberty weathervane, with Liberty balanced on an arrow holding her tablet in one hand, torch high in the other. It is the kind of piece that in the naive old days of American Studies would have been called "folk art." Using computer graphics, the book designer has added a blurred shadow to the statue, as if it's in motion. But the arrow points fixedly to the left.

It would be easy to begin this review by claiming that Futures of American Studies is a good example of the bright prospect and diverse resources of U.S. Studies as it enters a new millennium. For certainly exciting work is being produced in this field, and Pease, Wiegman, and others are right to sense that a new paradigm for U.S. cultural studies is emerging. This new paradigm builds on New Historicist and Postcolonial criticism, among other sources, to construct complex and multivalent relations between cultural forms and their historical contexts. It also tends to be critical of U.S. state power as it is wielded at home and abroad, and skeptical of the ways in which the field of U.S. Studies as a whole has tended to validate dominant U.S. nationalist narratives and even the U.S. appropriation of "American." For these reasons, Pease and others have dubbed the new paradigm transnational, or postnational. Such nomenclature makes some sense, especially when new approaches to race, ethnicity, and class explore how these configurations contest nationalist narratives as well as political boundaries. So this reviewer approached this anthology with interest and anticipation. But my reading experience compels me to begin this review on a different note. Overall, working through this tome was an enervating, not energizing, experience. Its selection of essays and approaches is not nearly as wide ranging and memorable as an earlier volume co-edited by Pease (with Amy Kaplan), Cultures of United States Imperialism, (2) that indeed was a successful intervention into discourses dominating American Studies at the time.

Despite the presence of some first-rate essays and many scattered insights of some brilliance, there was a great deal of pretentious writing to slog through. And such narrowness of vision. Such a small range of cultural examples chosen for investigation--and such an obsession with arguing with other academics. Such an overwhelming self-righteousness about how to interpret present and past history. In short, such scholasticism and dogma, even though the anthology purports to be the opposite. And this from one of the leading academic presses in the country. So before discussing some of this collection's strengths, I want to cast a cold eye on the "futures" of American Studies here being marketed.

Twenty-four essays: it purports to be a generous range. Good that the editors have an in with Duke so that they can receive 600+ pages to work with. But consider the results. Of the twenty-four essays, fully one quarter were published in Cultural Critique in just two issues from the late 1990s. A fine journal to cull for essays, but totally out of proportion when we consider other central journals in the field, many of them unrepresented here as contributing to American Studies' future. Only one essay from American Literature, one from American Quarterly, one from Arizona Quarterly. None from American Literary History, or Callaloo, or MELUS, or Amerasian Journal, etc. And where do the authors come from? Aside from one doing performance studies and a few in American Studies programs, just about everyone else teaches in a literature department. No one doing innovative cultural studies while based in History, or Sociology, or Anthropology, or Art or Architecture, etc., was seen as having something to contribute to this vision of the "futures." I understand that much of the inspiration for topics and authors came from the important conferences on American Studies that Pease runs out of Dartmouth in the summers. Yet that makes the scant compass of journals and fields and points of view represented all the more disturbing.

Also, given the new transnational paradigm for American Studies that this anthology is promoting, and the considerable number of essays that rightly chide American Studies in the past for ignoring the perspectives of non-U.S. scholars, wouldn't you think there would be more than two writers out of twenty-four who would be based outside the U.S.? Apparently the only such perspectives the editors thought worth representing come from Germany. Both German scholars--Gunter Lenz and Winfried Fluck--contribute fine essays; my quarrel is not with their inclusion.

And what about the range of topics to define the new transnationalism? What different kinds of material get close reading, and how varied are the models for interpretation? The first half of the anthology contains an analysis of the fragmentation of New York City's culture of public sex (Munoz), Death of a Salesman as received by Russian audiences (Heller), an interpretation of Sartre apropos a refutation of Ignatiev's race traitor project (Benn Michaels), discussion of the movies Falling Down and Forrest Gump and a KKK museum in South Carolina (Gutierrez-Jones and Wiegman, in separate essays), and a reading of a Toni Cade Bambara story (Barrett).

All these essays have some fine things to say, and I would in particular single out Heller's essay for its curiosity, courageous questioning, and generous openness to a variety of interpretive voices. But note the miniscule historical range and variety of examples used here, and the looming lack of coherence in subject matter or topic or approach as we try to move from one model to another to another. Given that the editors had over 600 pages to work with, the number of non-academic cultural documents and events given close and careful interpretation is criminally small. The editors attempt to mask these and other lacks by grouping the essays in the table of contents into categories that have a spurious solidity to them--essays are classed according to whether they are "posthegemonic," "comparative," "differential," or "counterhegemonic." (Sure is nice to know that some authors are "post-" but not "counter-.") Furthermore, the key terms for the supposed new paradigm, transnational and postnational, are never carefully defined or evaluated by the editors.

The only essay in the first half of Futures that considers a broad range of non-academic cultural events in a coherent historical context is Amy Kaplan's now-classic "Manifest Domesticity," which analyzes the conjunction between domestic order and imperial adventure in fiction and non-fiction by mid-nineteenth-century writers, especially women. The rest of the essays in the first 300+ pages that are not focused on very specific topics such as Death of a Salesman in Moscow are meditations on the state of the profession, general surveys of U.S. historical developments that are rarely groundbreaking, and extended (and I do mean extended) arguments with or paraphrases of other academics and critics.

I am all for intelligent critique of an essay such as Gene Wise's 1979 "'Paradigm Dramas' in American Studies," which Pease and Wiegman seek to supplant with their own more critical reading of the field's past and sanguine vision of its future; or commentary on C.L.R. James's 1952 book on Melville, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways; or Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, John Guillory's Cultural Capital, or John Bellah's Habits of the Heart. All those teaching U.S. cultural history need to consider well the arguments raised by Jan Radway in her 1999 presidential address to the American Studies Association (and those plumbed by Mary Helen Washington's from the previous year, one of Radway's sources of inspiration). All need to know John Carlos Rowe's takes on the histories of imperialism, postnationalism, and globalism. It is invaluable to have reprinted Robyn Wiegman's skeptical survey of "whiteness" studies up through the late 1990s, though I wish she had more to say than a footnote on the central contributions of Ruth Frankenberg or anthologies such as David Roediger's Black on White. And Lisa Lowe, in her piece "The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique," makes a valuable contribution, even if her essay is more like an introductory guide to her topic than the kind of advanced and sharply focused approach allowed other anthology contributors. Why not have also included another bright examplar of how much Asian-American Studies has contributed to the transnational "turn" in recent U.S. Studies?

In general, as I read through the essays listed on the first page of the introduction, my main reaction was William Carlos Williams's lament in his elegy "Asphodel": "look at / what passes for the new.... "I will turn to some of the anthology's strengths to conclude this review, but first I'd like to probe deeper into this collection's weaknesses by evaluating key interpretive moves three representative essays make.

In his essay, Jose Esteban Munoz is intent on finding utopian moments in the Magic Touch sex club in Brooklyn, among other sites, in contrast to the Gaiety theater or the Disney-fication of Times Square, which in his view represent the twin demons of mass cultural commodification and erasure of gay sexuality. His piece seems in part inspired by Samuel R. Delany, in part by Fredric Jameson's decoding the utopian in popular cultural moments. He has keen insight into the importance of mass movements and visibility, particularly instances of New York queers organizing against the Giuliani police state. But when it comes to interpreting a site that is very important to him, the Magic Touch, Munoz's essay reveals serious problems. He quotes an anthropologist friend who calls it the "Tragic Touch" because of the "pathos of the young hustler/older john relationship at the heart of the scene." What is Munoz's response? Without ever questioning whether it is accurate to say that hustler/john interactions are in fact the heart of the club, Munoz shuts his friend's voice down with abstract jargon and conflicting cliches:

 [T]his economy of hustler/john is an alternative economy where
 flesh, pleasure, and money meet under outlaw circumstances. This
 economy eschews the standardized routes in which heteronormative
 late capitalism mandates networking relations of sex for money.
 This economy represents a selling of sex for money that does not
 conform to the corporate American sex trade.... At the Magic Touch
 we see men of all colors relating to each other.... We glimpse a
 whole that is diverse and invigorating," etc. (p. 103)

Underground economies in no way mimic dominant ones? Is such a dismissal of dialogue really the best way to argue for alternative spaces within commodity exchange, or to demonstrate the "future in the present," as Munoz's title claims?

A second instance of this anthology's failure of imagination comes in Pease's essay on C.L.R.James's book on Melville. Certainly Pease is right that James's reading of Melville should be better known and juxtaposed in literary history with other commentaries on Moby-Dick that were published in the 1950s that, unlike James's, led to what Jonathan Arac might call Melville's hypercanonization. Pease's previous scholarship has changed forever how many of us read American literary criticism in mid-century. If many U.S. critics then celebrated Moby-Dick as an allegory of totalitarianism vs. individualism--and thus aided the institutionalization of American Studies in the academy by aligning its critical agenda with that of the Cold War--James had the courage to ask whether Melville's work demonstrates not that individualism survives but that a society of free individualism will inevitably give birth to totalitarianism and be unable to defend itself against it. James's exploration of how the seeds of totalitarianism grew as strongly in Ishmael's adventurist opportunism as in Ahab's monomania is prophetic of much "new Americanist" work on Melville published since the 1980s, including that of Michael Rogin and Wai-chee Dimock.

All these aspects of James's cultural work on Melville Pease rightly seeks to celebrate. James is positioned as offering an interpretive model for the new, transnational futures of American Studies, or (less adeptly), a "postnational fable of transnational America(s) studies" (p. 153 ff.).James's isolated act of counter-interpretation--performed ironically on Ellis Island as he was in the process of being deported under a law (the McCarranWalter Act) that has disturbing parallels with Attorney General John Ashcroft's current curbs on civil rights--does indeed serve as a splendid model of intellectual independence. In fact,James's courage and eloquence makes the alleged radicalism of some of today's tenured scholars look rather pale and their prose rather crabbed.

I must add that any balanced evaluation of James on Melville ought to consider what in James's approach is problematic. Pease never does that. Critical history should not primarily be about the construction of a "fable" of non-conformist heroism in contrast to apologists for the state. Pease never questions what he calls "James' indictment of Ishmael" in favor of the harpoonists, and he appears to agree with James that Melville "discontinued" a specific "narrative intention" and became afraid to narrate the possibilities of mutiny in Mob?Dick. Many readers will agree with Pease and James that one of the narrative functions of the Ishmael/Melville narrative voice is "the quasi-colonialist project of absorbing the mores and customs of third-world nations into an allegory of nation-formation." They may agree further that Melville's 1950s interpreters validated this process, designing a "cultural typology" and a "Cold War canon" with which "to interpret and thereafter to subsume other literatures and geopolitical spaces into a universal Americanism" (p. 150). But that is hardly the whole story. Ishmael also struggles against such narratives, in part because of what he has learned from Queequeg's skeptical intelligence. As Pease says, James superbly discusses the displaced and occluded knowledge of the Pequod's harpooners, the "unnarrated memory of the harpooners' pasts" which James invoked via his own "recollection of the histories of colonial exploitation, Indian removal, and the African slave trade that Melville's fear had disallowed" being present in the text (p. 146). But is Ishmael/Melville really so absolutely closed to such histories as Pease implies? Are the futures of American Studies well served if such a reading of a conflicted Ishmael is never even given voice in an essay like this one?

Pease makes similarly totalizing moves regarding his portrait of James's contemporaries among Melvilleans. Pease not only implies a total Cold War consensus among scholars of the "myth-symbol school"; he aligns those past interpreters with the U.S. state security apparatus: all Melvilleans had the same agenda, and all were agents of the State. Think I'm exaggerating? Then read this:

 The disciplines within the field of American studies intersected
 with the United States as a geopolitical area whose boundaries field
 specialists were assigned at once to naturalize and police. Previous
 interpreters of Moby-Dick had accommodated its themes to the
 discourse of U.S, exceptionalism, through which they had demarcated
 and policed the national border. (p. 157)

Which Melville scholars is Pease implicating? He never names names here, though it's easy to infer whom he means. Who "assigned" these border guards and cultural SWAT police? Or was it all done voluntarily, as a way of gaining status? The first sentence in the above quotation uses passive verbs and promotes a conspiracy theory of top-down control; the second, a theory of collaborative hegemony in which the scholars themselves get to draw the borders and then police them. Does it really do honor to James's intellectual border-crossing to imply that F.O. Matthiessen, say, functioned like a migra (INS officer)? For a more intellectually honest portrait of Matthiessen in this very volume, see Paul Lauter's essay (pp. 493-494), which (with unintentional irony) stresses the need not to erase the "unresolved contradictions" of Matthiessen's leftist social activism and scholarship. For a more nuanced account of James's interventions in intellectual history, see Aldon Nielsen's C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, never cited by Pease, and Cedric J. Robinson and William E. Cain's anthology C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies. Pease cites a Robinson essay in Legacies that took issue with his earlier work but pointedly ignores Cain's essay in that same volume--an essay whose topics just so happen to include James's reading of Moby-Dick.

Can a healthy "futures" for U.S. Studies be built on such a simplistic and serf-serving vision of the past? This is not New Historicism or new Marxism so much as Old Melodrama passing as intellectual history (melodrama being a form that works by resolving all tensions into an easy opposition between good and evil.) Pease's dichotomies are meant to honor James but they give us a past sanitized into easy choices between right and wrong, one that ironically duplicates just the kind of Cold War rhetoric that Pease purports to despise. Many U.S. Studies scholars are fully in agreement with Pease regarding the dangerous allure of "heroic" individualism that is part of the legacy of the myth-symbol school in Melville criticism and American Studies. We are not unwilling to give Pease credit for asking dangerous questions about the icons of an earlier generation of Americanists. But the rhetoric in the indented quotation above is faux Foucault and bad Oedipal. Better to consider Sirius's serious advice in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: "The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters."

The journal boundary 2 was one of the first forums for Donald Pease to proclaim his version of the "new" in American Studies (see especially issue 17, from 1990). No critique the New Americanists launch can be pure enough and anti-foundationalist enough for Professor Spanos, who warns repeatedly that however vigorously they apply themselves they have so far remained "vestigially inscribed by the ideology of American exceptionalism" (p. 388). (What is a vestigial inscription, anyway?) The solution, predictable by now, is an academic inversion of John Ashcroft's Code Orange security alerts: eternal deconstruction and self-questioning, "exile," and writing the voice of "silence" and the "shadow." (Sounds as much like a certain 1930s radio show as it sounds like Derrida.) Spanos has well-reasoned praise for Melville and Henry Adams and others as models, as well as acerbic aspersions for those who, like Richard Rorty, offer tempting panaceas to the problem of what contemporary criticism should do. Regarding Spanos's claim that "it has not been adequately noticed" that American "exceptionalism" was not a radical break from the idea of Europe (p. 391), however, Spanos should give more credit not only to Sacvan Bercovitch but also to David Noble, whose The Ends of American History (1986) is discussed by George Lipsitz in this very volume--not to mention Edmundo O'Gorman's The Invention of America (1961), never cited in Futures.

One test for whether Spanos practices his principles as well as he preaches them comes in his analysis of American pragmatism. I'm not sure Spanos passes such a test. Spanos is right that some in American Studies yearn to substitute empiricism for endless theoretical debates, as if empiricism somehow transcended problems of theory and method. But Spanos's claim that Pragmatism is the villain here is farcically simplistic. He demonizes Pragmatism as mere quantitative problem-solving, "absolutely stripped of any consciousness of particularity, especially human particularity," denouncing such instrumental rationality as "the fulfilled allotrope of the American pragmatist tradition" (p. 405). He further castigates American Studies for not being attentive enough "to the inordinate degree to which the dominant American culture has appropriated and assimilated technology into the American language" (p. 407). Excuse me, this topic has not been central to both the "old" as well as the "new" American Studies? And is a naive belief in instrumental rationality really the only feature of Pragmatism worth acknowledging? William James and John Dewey were primarily intellectual technocrats, mere forerunners to Robert McNamara? Du Bois and Yezierska and many others were naive to draw from Pragmatist ideas? John Carlos Rowe's essay in this volume includes a better honed assessment of the linkage between Pragmatism and anti-theoretical tendencies in American Studies (p. 169; see also p. 179n5).

Again, a reader has a right to ask what sort of intellectual history is being offered here as a model for our "futures." Most revealing in the above diatribe is Spanos's use of the phrase "the fulfilled allotrope" (my italics). An allotrope is one of several forms a chemical compound may take, such as carbon being charcoal or diamond. But Spanos misuses the word and suggests that there is only one form in which pragmatism can appear, and that is bad. I'm all for critical and historical projects in the name of "those nomadic political constituencies of the human community that have been unhomed by the depredations" of imperial prerogatives (p. 410). But simplifying the past in order to find easy villains is not the solution. Once again, Futures offers us intellectual history as male Oedipal melodrama.

Other essays in the second half of The Futures of American Studies, besides Spanos's, are worth commenting on briefly, for they will allow me to sound a more positive note. Ricardo Ortiz meditates on the Latino/a presence in Canada, arguing that the primary task of a study of the Americas ought to be to examine the functioning of ideology in everyday life (an injunction perhaps not followed by this anthology as well as it might be). Ortiz accompanies anecdotes and analysis with the just warning that "transnational" cultural forms may reconfigure nationalism as much as they challenge it. Nancy Bentley studies representations of polygamy in nineteenth-century discourse, including fiction, a topic that has not received much attention until now, yet is of central relevance to understanding domestic fiction, particularly the issue of women's consent. Gillian Brown considers the paradoxes involved in child-abuse testimony, discovering that the abuse recovery movement "draws on, and reconfigures, a crucial concept of the liberal tradition: the longstanding identification of individual entitlement with children" (p. 374). Gunter Lenz places Donald Pease's projects in light of the recent past and offers some injunctions and some prophecies of his own.

Questioning how the "new American studies" might be a stronger reformist presence in both academic institutions and society at large is a central theme for the essays that accompany Lenz's in the "Counterhegemonic" section of the anthology and its coda. These essays are some of the very best in the anthology--which is not surprising, since the authors represented are Michael Denning, George Lipsitz, Paul Lauter, Eric Cheyfitz, Russ Castronovo, and Dana D. Nelson. I don't have space to discuss in fitting detail their nuanced and varied critiques of the current institutionalization of American Studies teaching and scholarship, other than to say that they all provide a good balance of positive examples as well as negative critique, and most (unlike some of the earlier essays) make their moves with a minimum of jargon. Russ Castronovo's essay in particular is eloquent and unsettling, especially in the ways he links the anti-nationalist rhetoric currently fashionable in U.S. Studies with its interdisciplinary utopianism. He sees most American Studies programs profoundly mimicking the rhetoric of corporate globalization as they compete for students with other fields. Castronovo also gives us as a bonus a wry reading of The Blithedale Romance that made me envision the entire Futures anthology as a kind of tragicomic Hawthornian masquerade.

Michael Denning's contribution trumps Raymond Williams and presents one of the most scintillating brief surveys you will ever read of shifts in the meaning of the word "culture," comparing and contrasting recent theories that interpret culture, respectively, as commodity, investment, discipline, hegemony, and recognition. Unfortunately, Denning's lucid history is too focused on developments in Europe and slights the contributions of ethnic- and race-studies scholars elsewhere in fields as varied as literature and anthropology--why does this continue to happen? I should also add that Denning's influential book The Popular Front is a central focus of Lipsitz's essay, and rightly so.

Since all of the authors I have just named focus on the threat that current trends in higher education pose for a socially engaged vision of American Studies, I would like to conclude this review with some brief comments on their vision of activist American Studies programs. Many, perhaps all, would agree that the new American Studies should seek to reform not just its curricula but the ways its institutions function. All would probably also agree with Cheyfitz that the democratization of academia that advanced steadily from the 1950s through the 1970s is now in danger of being reversed. Having the Supreme Court in 2003 affirm the importance of "diversity" and egalitarianism in higher education provides a deceptive gauge to measure what is actually occurring. Primary and secondary school education in the U.S. has always been sharply stratified into haves and havenots, but beginning in the 1960s higher education began to be available to a much wider range of people of color, as well as students coming from the lower middle classes and below, many of them the first generation in their families to attend a college or university. One reason for this shift was a revamping of state- and federal-supported programs, so that the university systems in many states, including most notably New York and California, greatly expanded, as did financial aid policies and changes in admissions, making available many more classroom desks to those who aspired to them. (The model behind this revolution in higher education was probably the success of the post-World War II GI bill.) Since the 1980s, however, this trend has in many ways been reversed or at least halted. Upper education is now sharply class-stratified, with financial aid cutbacks and decreased funding for community colleges and "lower"-tier state universities, and the teaching profession is increasingly segregated, with part-timers and those without tenure hefting much more of the burden of teaching and grading. Corporations and fund-raising play an ever-larger role in the universities, and teachers and graduate students at these schools are in a much more precarious position than in the 1970s, with less independence to design their own courses and syllabi and (if they choose to do so) link learning with activism. All of the authors in Futures are concerned with these trends and how to counter them, but the essays by Lipsitz, Lenz, Lauter, Cheyfitz, Castronovo, and Nelson are particularly pertinent and ask difficult questions about the ethical and pedagogical obligations of U.S. Studies scholars. I highly recommend reading their essays all at once, and contrapuntally.

Cheyfitz gives a fascinating summary of some programs he participated in at the University of Pennsylvania that attempted to spread "cultural capital" out of the closed circuit of the university, using new American Studies curricular ideas to aid West Philadelphia high school students and (in a separate program) Navajos in the Southwest. Cheyfitz's moral vision is compellingly presented here. Yet this reader cannot help but think that his essay, because of its strengths, represents a good example of a huge opportunity missed by The Futures of American Studies.

If those teaching U.S. history should not just try to change how their classrooms work and how their institutions function but also aid their students in being engaged in egalitarian social change rather than merely being credentialized as citizens of corporate America--a big if, for many reasons, but let's accept for a moment that such a goal is a worthy one--then why shouldn't The Futures of American Studies feature a debate about this activist goal? Is such an anthology really doing its job if only one side of the issue is presented? How about lots more details about successful classes and programs linking study with activism?

What is Dartmouth doing, and Duke, and the many other elite schools whose professors are in this anthology? What current American Studies programs (or programs associated with other relevant Departments in the humanities and the social sciences) have requirements that allow students to mix what is sometimes called "service learning" with classroom analysis? How should a "successful" mix be defined, and how can it be reproduced at other, different institutions? What pitfalls do such scholaractivist programs need to anticipate and avoid? Also, will an emphasis on volunteerism in academia preclude analysis and action regarding the responsibilities for social justice held by the institutions--including academia, foundations, business, and government--that occupy key power points in U.S. society?

Eric Cheyfitz and Farah Griffin's University of Pennsylvania course The American Literature of Social Action and Social Vision was taught twice, pairing Penn undergraduates with West Philadelphia students and using their grant money to buy books and other materials unavailable to the rest of the students at a local public high school. But as Cheyfitz admits, it affected only twenty high school and twenty university students over two semesters because the classes had to be kept small in order to work. Immensely more resources would be needed to implement the program's successes in even one urban school. There are no essays in Futures comparing such activist programs at different institutions, and all but one of the authors in Futures have their perspectives shaped by teaching at elite four-year universities.

My own institution, Swarthmore College, has a number of ways in which students may integrate academic study with volunteer work with service organizations in local communities, if they so choose. One such program is run out of the Political Science department, but that is hardly the only department or program at Swarthmore that makes use of the current generation of students' high level of activism and social engagement. (Students are often much more progressive and creative in integrating study and social activism than their professors, I might add.) Swarthmore's programs have mixed but commendable success avoiding two dangerous pitfalls: 1) projects must not be dictated more by academic institutions' and students' needs than those of the communities they are supposed to be helping, and 2) professor-student interactions must not be fragmented; they must be sustained enough to help both understand how experience in a local community can supplement and critique academic forms of knowledge.

Yes, I know I'm being damnably pragmatist. I'll end with three other brief points. How well will the current "turn" in American Studies mixing historical revisionism with activism hold up in the light of our own history, particularly the 1930s and 1940s? Then, scholars (including F.O. Matthiessen) as well as artists, poets, and writers routinely participated in social movements; taught adult education classes to working people, not just privileged twenty-year-olds; and in all kinds of other ways tried to integrate intellectual work with activism on both the local and the national level. How well do we, in 2003, measure up?

Second, what is lost if, in the name of the "transnational" and the "postnational," we define narratives of U.S. national coherence merely as false consciousness and empire building? Who has the right to mandate such a consensus? How can the trans- or postnational be a paradigm unless we define a variety of national narratives to work for or against? And remember Ricardo Ortiz's warning (see above). In what ways can an insistence on the anti-, trans-, or the postnational preclude a critique of the roles nationalisms play in the discourses of globalization?

Finally, consider the futures of American Studies as envisioned in 1979 by Gene Wise, in "'Paradigm Dramas' in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement." (3) In opening this anthology, Pease and Wiegman position Wise as the fall guy, the antithesis to their own project: "Wise's prescience was tempered by his inability to locate a coherent identification with any of the alternative futures made possible by social movements" (p. 3). They are shrewd about a number of blind spots and anxieties in Wise's essay, including his implication that "subfields" are undermining a coherence once gained by validating American exceptionalism. But overall Pease and Wiegman's introductory salvo is as shrewish as it is shrewd. It's remarkably ungenerous, the better to elevate their own vision as the One True Way. I think it is very much an open question as to which performance displays the most anxiety about managing the future (s) of American Studies.

Like a good number of American Studies scholars from the 1960s and 1970s, Wise made a critique of American exceptionalism important to the field's growth. Pease and Wiegman's volume is in the Wise tradition more than they will admit. In his concluding peroration, Wise rather wisely argued that the following other trends in American Studies give it strength: its "concern for anthropological definitions of culture," its "emphasis on social structures undergirding intellectual and artistic expression," and its "reflexive [i.e., self-critical] temper." He also prophesied the following future: "a pluralistic approach," a "rediscovery of the particular," "an emphasis on proportion rather than on essence," and "a comparative, cross-cultural" approach (pp. 331-334). Sure, a good deal of Wise's rhetoric has dated and he has little to say about power and less about empire. But a reviewer is right to wonder whether better following the above principles might have helped construct a less Stencilized anthology.

(1) 1961; New York: Harper Perennial, 1999, p. 160.

(2) Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

(3) American Quarterly, 31 (1979), 293-337.

PETER SCHMIDT

Swarthmore College