Transnational American Studies: Vision, Politics, and the Truths of Discourse

Ok folks, I've started to follow my stats in a sort of off-hand way. They show me things like what posts are most viewed and what searches lead there, what countries my viewers are found in, etc. These posts on Transnational American Studies are not my most popular, but they're largely in the top ten. Below you will find two things. 1st, the abstract of the paper. 2nd, a stable link to a PDF of the entire text of the paper which is around 15K words, the complete bibliography of roughly 50 items. The text of the paper has changed in a variety of ways from how some of its sections appear here initially. I hope that these are all useful changes and that I caught all my typos and goofs, but who knows. One thing I do know…

Done is Good

ABSTRACT

This paper begin with a brief introduction to Lacan’s theory of discourses, with particular attention to what he called the university discourse which is explored through two examples, one of which is from Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 presidential address to the ASA. The section following explores the ways in which Transnational American Studies has reconceived both its object of study and its own disciplinary self-image. I then turn to a consideration of politics and the political offering a definition which is intended to clarify the political import or lack thereof in this scholarship and scholarship more generally. Armed with this definition, I then consider the fraught notion of American Exceptionalism, how it has been critiqued and more particularly how it is still being found in contemporary scholarship by a number of critics. My conclusion looks at a narrative of the field’s desire offered by Winfreid Fluck and offers a listing of problematic issues which will not be new, but which, in light of my earlier ruminations on politics, I will have specific positions on and, in some cases, answers to.  

Download the paper with this link.