The current generation of scholars in American Studies finds itself wrestling with the specter of American exceptionalism, an amorphous multifaceted belief that the United States is somehow exempt from the rules governing all other nations, including those of theoretical models as well as legal dictates. Ridding the field from such false assumptions proves a daunting task; as the editors point out in the introduction, from its very founding, the field of American Studies has been implicated in a tripartite interpretive matrix with exceptionalism and the concept of “The American Century.” But as a sense of American hegemony began to wane at the close of the twentieth century, so too does this sense of chauvinism, and members of the field are left asking how best to study the United States if it is indeed just a nation like any other? This is the central question that forms the heart of Globalizing American Studies, or, as Donald Pease phrases it in the first essay: “can American Studies exist after American Exceptionalism?” (p. 47).
The answer, both Pease and the editors suggest, lies in reforming the field's methodological assumptions and practices. Essentially, the discipline needs to allow space for alternative interpretations of the concept of “America” as it is understood in different contexts outside the United States. This goal can be accomplished first of all by inviting more foreign scholars into the conversation, and secondly, by expanding the field's metaphorical archives to include overseas sources. In providing a model for this new approach, the collection features a series of essays from scholars from a variety of national backgrounds, writing about how America manifests itself in diverse sites in Central America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Individual essays are grouped in three sections with rather loosely defined common themes (a necessity given the wide range of subjects treated in this book.) Part I addresses how individuals have defined America's position in the world through personal experience. Here the reader learns how colonial doctors (Kariann Akemi Yokota), post World War II female memoirists (Kate Baldwin) and the author Ralph Ellison (Brent Hayes Edwards) came to formulate unique understandings of their situation within international networks of knowledge production. Part III directly examines foreign interpretations of American-ness, and could also be considered the books “methods” section. Here scholars re-iterate the importance of incorporating other viewpoints by examining texts in new genres as well as new languages (Wai Chee Dimock), and by taking into account how overseas American Studies Departments formulate the object of their study (Brian Edwards). However, Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams warn that these foreign actors can themselves fall prey to hegemonic conceptions of America and Other, as they demonstrate in their explication of “neo-Orientalist” works created by Middle Eastern authors.
The book's middle section deals with the circulation of American capital once it is divorced from human actors, and includes several essays that might be of particular interest to Asian Studies scholars. Brian Larkin explores the commercial exportation of American cinema to British India in the 1930s. Officials began to fret about the notions of whiteness that their colonial subjects might be learning from movies portraying white Americans engaging in sex and violence. The essay reveals a multilayered system of imperial domination, wherein American commercial hegemony comes to undermine more traditional British colonialism. Naoki Sakai's contribution in this section focuses more on the circulation of ideas that Americans have used to justify their nation's economic dominance. He examines how current conceptions of Japanese nationalism are paradoxically dependent upon the assumptions underlying United States foreign policy. In establishing itself as a universalist power following World War II, the U.S. needed Japan to appear to be a completely unique nation in its role as subject. Additionally, by pointing to their nation's submission to U.S. power, Japanese nationalists are able to more convincingly protest their innocence in imperialist actions toward China, Korea and Southeast Asia.
But the issue remains of what this collection as a whole might contribute to the field of Asian studies, as the issue of overcoming the presumptions made during a century of global dominance might seem to be itself an exceptionally American problem. As with most anthologies, these essays vary both in quality and accessibility to readers outside their field, and here especially often fail to cohere with one another, most likely by design. However, taken together they offer encouragement to similar scholarship discovering any alternative lenses through which Asians may have come to view America. Also, perhaps if it is true that the “American Century” is indeed giving way to a new “Asian Century,” this collection could further serve as a cautionary tale to the discipline to be wary of its own hubris in a future that might position U.S. scholars on a new periphery.
