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Boundary as Center: Inventing an American Studies Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Michael Cowan
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Extract

When the American Studies Association chose “Boundaries of American Culture” as the theme and San Diego as the site of its 1985 biennial convention, it made a particularly appropriate match between theme and site. Seen from my hotel balcony in a hazy autumnal glow, San Diego appeared a boundary city in at least three senses of relevance to the Association's work. First, lying at the border of the United States and Mexico, it hinted at the rich possibilities available to an American Studies willing to reach imaginatively beyond national boundaries, both north and south, toward a genuinely pan-American studies. Second, as a three-block walk to the beach from the convention hotel amply confirmed, San Diego borders what several commentators have called “the Mediterranean of the future”–a major arena of the globe too long and too much neglected by most Americans and Americanists. It was stimulating to welcome to the convention distinguished visitors from a dozen Asian and South Pacific countries, and more than a few speakers expressed the hope that such interaction would significantly further the comparativist and internationalist perspectives that they believed increasingly incumbent upon a nonparochial American Studies. Certainly the heartening presence in San Diego of both long-time and new colleagues from Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and the South Pacific reflected a slowly but steadily growing impulse in the Association, a concrete dramatization of the premise that ideas and values, not to mention trade and power, do not stop at a nation's borders, although they may be often slowed down or even transformed at those borders.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 12 , October 1987 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

NOTES

Author's note: This essay is a revised version of the keynote address delivered at the 1985 convention of the American Studies Association.

1. Gottmann, Jean, ed., Centre and Periphery: Spatial Variation in Politics (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1980)Google Scholar. Of particular use to Americanists are the essays in this volume by Gottmann, Raimondo Strassold, Paul Claval, Alan K. Henrikson, and Owen Lattimore.

2. See, for example, Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine 1969)Google Scholar; Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar; Cohen, Abner, The Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in the Dramaturgy of Power in a Modern African Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Barth, Fredrik, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969)Google Scholar; and Berger, Peter L., Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1977), esp. ch. 10.Google Scholar

3. Among Eliade, Mircea's many relevant works, a very accessible starting point is his 1952 study, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Mairet, Philip (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969).Google Scholar

4. Lopez, Robert S., “The Crossroads Within the Wall,” in Handlin, Oscar and Burchard, John, ed., The Historian and the City (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1963), pp. 27–43Google Scholar, and Mumford, Louis, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), passimGoogle Scholar; my own thinking about the problematics of boundarycenter discourse has been signficantly influenced by Mumford's brilliant meditation on the complex dialectical relationship of the city as “container,” the city as “magnet,” and the city as “dynamo.”

5. Among many recent examples, see Hartman, Geoffrey, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Leitch, Vincent B., Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Rowe, John Carlos, Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and a number of the essays in Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

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7. Wiebe, Robert H., The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

8. Douglas, Mary and Wildavsky, Aaron, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 153–54.Google Scholar

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14. American Quarterly 1 (Spring 1949): 2.Google Scholar

15. Preface, in Cohen, Hennig, ed., The American Experience: Approaches to the Study of the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), p. v.Google Scholar

16. Smith, Henry Nash, “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?”, American Quarterly 9 (Summer 1957): 348CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further page references are in parentheses in the text itself.

17. Mechling, Jay, Merideth, Robert, and Wilson, David, “American Culture Studies: The Discipline and the Curriculum,” American Quarterly 25 (10 1973): 370CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further page references are in parentheses in the text itself.

18. See, especially, Turner, 's The Ritual Process, chs. 3–5Google Scholar, and From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), pp. 20–59.Google Scholar

19. Douglas, and Wildavsky, , Risk and Culture, pp. 120–25 and passim.Google Scholar

20. Wise, Gene, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly 31 (Bibliography Issue 1979): 293–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further page references are in parentheses in the text itself.

21. Lenz, Guenter H., “American Studies-Beyond the Crisis?: Recent Redefinitions and the Meaning of Theory, History, and Practical Criticism,” Prospects 7 (1982): 53–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Mechling, Jay, “Mind, Messages, and Madness: Gregory Bateson Makes a Paradigm for American Culture Studies,” Prospects 8 (1983): 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar