About
The initiative to create a "Critical U.S. Studies" program at Duke began in 2001 as an effort to respond to recent transformations in the field traditionally known as American Studies. Chaired by Jan Radway, a committee of scholars from a diverse range of disciplines envisioned a lasting interdisciplinary institute that would promote innovative, critical inquiry into the variable relationships that have been constructed between the United States and areas around the globe and that would examine the ways in which the very concept of the United States may be (and has been) reformulated and reconceived in response to shifting economic, social, political, and intellectual developments. The Institute that has resulted from the work of this committee assumed formal existence the fall semester of 2004 and has placed at the center of its mission both a thorough-going examination of the social, cultural, political and economic histories of the United States and a critical re-appraisal of the U.S. as an object of institutionalized knowledge practices.
The Institute will promote collective re-thinkings about formulations that challenge older ways of conceptualizing space and regions, approaches that challenge what Lisa Maalki has called "the metaphysics of sedentarism," the profoundly territorializing tendency to identify peoples and cultures with particular pieces of land and to isomorphically relate people and place to nation. We also anticipate looking more systematically at the ways in which new formulations are frequently posed with a keen eye to the contributing and intersecting effects of raced, classed, gendered, and sex-based differentiations themselves generated by the conjuncture of a range of economic, social, and political developments. Some of the newest work in a more broadly conceived U.S. Studies project focuses on the ways in which categories of difference have been fundamental to the construction of structural, economic, and legal inequalities that are central to definitions of citizenship and the nation. At the same time, however, this work also asks what political possibilities have emerged. The differentiating process also gives people reason to find common cause with each other, producing dissident understandings of what constitutes an "American" and what defines "America." As much as the new research is attentive to the macro and micro processes through which U.S. national power has been exercised, it also addresses the contradictions produced by that power. The forces that brought the nation into being also produced equally powerful critiques on which the Institute plans to build.
As the global political, economic, and social developments mentioned above have transformed relations among nations and peoples, so too have they altered the intellectual field traditionally known as American Studies. Not least among the effects registered in recent years has been a plethora of challenges to the field’s very title. Many have noted, for instance, that the name of the field conflates the idea of who and what is "American" with the history and interests of the United States. Not only is the U.S. a relatively recent creation, but its early history is not particularly suggestive of the kind of modern "nation" posited by the field of American Studies, as it was initially conceived in the post-WWII era. The conflation of "American" with the modern nation that the U.S. became ignores the legitimate claims that other people, nations, and political formations might make on the notion of who is "American" and what constitutes "America."
We thus seek to foster a program of scholarship that refuses an automatic claim to the idea of "the American" even as it seeks to understand the nature of the relationships among different people and political visions within as well as outside the borders of the U.S. Our goal is to establish a program of critical U.S. Studies that will rethink older versions of American Studies in relationship to this newer, more globally aware, more multiply conceived version of the field that focuses on the history of the United States and simultaneously de-centers the U.S. by seeing it always in relationship to other histories and other political projects.
Read about the Institute's new Introduction to Critical U.S. Studies course, offered in Spring 2007.