The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

4. Areas of Concern

Area Studies and the New American Studies

The following chapter deals with the relationship between the micropolitics of academic disciplines and the macropolitics of nation-states. When neo-conservatives complain about the “politicizing” of education, often insisting that all forms of education remain “free” of political interference, they ignore the fact that educational curricula and pedagogies have always been deeply involved in specific political practices and positions. Insisting that we keep education free of political interests is simply unrealistic; students should learn instead how to negotiate specific political positions based on available information and defend their positions accordingly. It has often been argued that entire fields are shaped by specific epistemologies, which in turn represent particular political interests. The histories of both American Studies and various “area studies” are good examples, especially insofar as “area studies” have had close relations with state sponsorship, both intellectual and economic, since their beginnings. The following chapter treats the critical interpretation of these political interests of American Studies (both traditional and “new”) and of various “area studies” as political practice, arguing that the activism of the new American Studies should not be restricted simply to macropolitical issues, such as those treated in the three preceding chapters.

American Studies has thus far avoided the heated debates concerning the restructuring of area studies prompted by dramatic changes in the geopolitical and economic maps as a consequence of globalization. In view of the U.S. role in the economic, political, and cultural changes produced by globalization, we might expect that American Studies would be as fiercely contested in its disciplinary borders as East Asian, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, Soviet, and Latin American Studies, to mention only a few of the areas established by post-World War II scholarship and facing dramatic challenges since the 1970s, especially in the aftermath of Soviet decolonization. Of course, the area studies model has defined primarily the social sciences—economics, political science, and sociology—and interdisciplinary conjunctures of history and the social sciences, including “historical sociology” and “social science history”. [68] Given the centrality of cultural production, especially literature and the visual arts, and traditional history in the field of American Studies, it is not surprising that American Studies would be considered eccentric to the debates concerning the scholarly map of a new world order governed by new political, economic, and social forces. Whether treated as epiphenomenal or superstructural, the objects of study dominating post-World War II American Studies—“myths and symbols” to use a convenient tag—hardly warranted the attention of serious scholars dealing with urgent issues of global political instability, economic crisis, war, genocide, famine and drought, and the spread of infectious diseases.

In ancient Greece, geographers divided their field into three major continental areas: Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa). [69] The sixteenth- to eighteenth-century voyages of European exploration and the consolidation of what Walter Mignolo terms the “modern/colonial world system” expanded the ancient continental model while relying on many of its basic assumptions regarding both the hierarchy of civilizations and the uniqueness of the peoples in these different regions. [70] The “seven-continent model of the modern elementary school classroom” led to refinements and subdivisions, most of them reflecting specific European colonial interests. As Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen have written: “[S]cholarly divisions of labor showed that the tripartite global model of the ancient Greeks was deeply entrenched. The West (North America and Europe) was conceptualized as the site for serious history and the social sciences; the East (stretching from Morocco to Japan), as the zone where Orientalists could ponder the cultural flowers of supposedly fossilized civilizations; and the rest of the world was the domain of anthropologists, who specialized in ‘primitive’ cultural and social systems” (163).

According to the “Best is the West” thesis, the U.S. and Canada shared the privileged status of Europe in the traditional area studies model that dominated the social sciences from their institutional inception in the nineteenth century through the formal reforms instituted by the Ethnogeographic Board commissioned by the U.S. government in 1942 (Lewis and Wigen, 163). Certainly the confusion of nationalist and racialist ideologies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to such myths as “the March of the Anglo-Saxon”, whose “destiny” ranged from Northern Europe to England, Ireland, Scotland, and then across the Atlantic and the North American Continent in a “manifest destiny” that would civilize triumphantly the rest of the world. According to this familiar notion that the United States in particular (although Canada first as colony and then as member of the British Commonwealth also qualifies) is merely an extension of European Civilization, creating the “greater” Western Civilization also thoroughly challenged from the 1970s onward, it would seem that the United States and Canada (North America) and their prototypes in Europe would constitute the most important “area” for study and thus draw as much as possible on complementary fields such as American and Canadian Studies.

Yet this was obviously not the case when modern “area studies” operated under the shadow of the modern/colonial world system. Neither American nor European Studies existed in the period of nineteenth-century nationalism, the consolidation of European imperialism, and the emergence of U.S. imperial authority. The “serious history and social sciences” Lewis and Wigen contend were devoted to North America and Europe offered primarily a model to the rest of the world for “civilization”, both in its contemporarily achieved and its ideal or destined forms. Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871/1876) is neither sociology nor history, but its incorporation of the rest of the emerging world into the “cosmic” destiny of U.S. democracy and individualism exemplifies this paradox that the privileged “areas” of Western Civilization—the U.S., Canada, Europe, and their Greco-Roman sources—are not “areas” at all, but conceptualizations or idealisms capable of thriving anywhere and everywhere, like the mind of God. [71] Neither North American nor European Studies were necessary to “study” such a historically and geographically specific suite of phenomena, because they were indeed the intellectual complements of the modern/colonial world system, hardly subject to the internal critique or metanarrative that might have resulted from taking “America” or “Europe” as “objects of study”.

When at the beginning of World War II, the “U.S. government called upon the Smithsonian Institution, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council to form a body known as the Ethnogeographic Board”, the charge to create “a new system of global divisions” was hardly intended to do away with imperialist hierarchies of the older “area studies” and their commitment to “the West is the Best” (Lewis and Wigen, 163). The Ethnogeographic Board was formally established in June of 1942. [72] Carl E. Guthe, the anthropologist who chaired the new Board, characterizes it as “a non-governmental agency established in the name of the scientists and scholars of the country for the purpose of aiding the government” (Guthe, 189). This curious alliance of putatively independent foundations, scholars, and governmental institutions—a “state-scholarly complex”—continues to shape area studies to this day, even after the Cold-War era and funding have passed. What motivated the U.S. government was the need for more effective “language training” and “cultural fluency” to enable the U.S. and its allies to conduct “the war effort across large spans of the globe” (Lewis and Wigen, 163).

The work of the Board is characterized by Guthe as “interdisciplinary in scope, seeking to use the facilities and knowledge of the earth sciences, the biological sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, in so far as these relate to regions outside of the continental United States” (Guthe, 189). Lewis and Wigen note that geography played a much smaller role on the Board than was initially imagined; Robert B. Hall is the only geographer on the original eight-scholar Board (Lewis and Wigen, 163). The Board membership in 1943 listed by Guthe includes two archaeologists (if you count Strong twice in this list), three anthropologists, a historian, a geographer, a biologist, a public health specialist, and an East Asian languages scholar. [73] Chaired by Guthe, the Board was directed by William Duncan Strong (1899–1962), the Columbia University archaeologist and anthropologist (1937–1962), who specialized in the indigenous peoples of North and South America, especially the Incas of Peru. [74] Thus Guthe’s specific exclusion of areas within “the continental United States” clearly did not include “indigenous peoples and their cultures”, reinforcing the notion that this “area studies” model was fully committed to the modernizaton and development processes. Archaeology and Anthropology (especially if you count William Duncan Strong twice, as his expertise in both disciplines warrants) account for more than half of the disciplines represented on the Board (5 of 9). Only two of these scholars can be considered vaguely connected with the “humanities”—the Sinologist Mortimer Graves and historian Carter Goodrich. [75] Neither “American Studies” nor “American Literature”, indeed any literary or cultural specializations, other than those covered by the anthropologists and archaeologists, are represented on the Board.

The unmanageable “seven-continents” model and its “European colonial” subtext of the prewar era was replaced by the more specific “areas” proposed by the Ethnogeographic Commission: East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, North America, Russia and Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Oceania (Lewis and Wigen, 163–164). The older colonial hierarchy was replaced by goals of “modernization and development”, whereby North America and Western Europe still retained their status as “superior civilizations” by virtue of technological advances and claims to political innovations. The interdisciplinary alliance between the social sciences, the humanities, and geography was not realized. Lewis and Martin point out that although two “prominent geographers, Isaiah Bowman and Robert Hall, were appointed” to the Ethnogeographic Board, “few geographers became involved in the intellectual work of the board, and the task of delineating areas fell primarily to anthropologists and other social scientists” (163). [76] Indeed, “the anthropological imprint is evident in the use of the term area (derived from ethnological studies of ‘culture areas’), rather than region”, a symptom to my mind of how such “area studies” were already motivated by the “modernization and development” models isomorphic with neo-imperialism, especially later versions of “free-trade imperialism”, and third-stage, postindustrial capitalism in its global form.

Interestingly, the work of the Ethnogeographic Board occurs contemporaneously with the emergence of American Studies as an “interdisciplinary field”, however we might quibble over exact “origins”, in the influential work of F. O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance is published in 1941. And yet American Studies, especially in the Myth-and-Symbol School so often traced back to Matthiessen, is by no means an “area studies” field as it was conceived by the anthropologists, geographers, biologists, and other scholars serving on the Ethnogeographic Board. If there is a connection, then it must be made through the cultural idealism of American Studies supporting, often unwittingly, the “modernization and development” ideology of the area studies developed by the Ethnogeographic Board in the early 1940s and fully institutionalized during the Cold War, especially with the “1958 National Defense Education Act, Title VI, […] which supplied the funds to establish university area-studies centers” that by 1990 totaled “some 124 National Resource Centers,[…] each devoted to the interdisciplinary study of a particular world region” (Lewis and Wigen, 164). Of course, since Donald Pease published his pioneering “Moby-Dick and the Cold War” in 1985, much valuable work has been done on how American Studies participated in Cold War ideology, especially its articulation of an American Exceptionalism subsequently challenged by a “new” American Studies vigorously committed to transnational, postnational, postcolonial, indigenist, and multiethnic goals for understanding the “United States” in global contexts. [77]

Indeed, the critique of Cold-War area studies, initiated largely by left intellectuals in the 1970s, once again coincides historically with the criticism of first-generation American Studies (primarily the ideology of the Myth-and-Symbol School) directed by feminists, ethnic studies, postmodernists, gay studies, and other minoritized intellectuals at how their interests and rights were at worst neglected or at best “synthesized” in traditional American Studies. Lewis and Wigen attribute the “crisis” in area studies that begins in the 1970s to “the stalling out of the growth of U.S. universities in the 1970s”, the “end of the Vietnam War” resulting in “a major loss of funding for Southeast Asian Studies programs”, and extending to the more urgent crisis at the end of the 1980s “when the end of the cold war undercut the geopolitical rational for area studies expertise just as the demise of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence rendered the postwar area-studies map outdated” (Lewis and Wigen, 164). The Gulbenkian Commission convened by Immaneul Wallerstein in the mid-1990s to propose alternatives to the area-studies model in its 1996 Open the Social Sciences, also cites “the challenge […] from […] ‘cultural studies’” according to “three main themes”: “the central importance of gender studies and all kinds of ‘non-Eurocentric’ studies to the study of historical social systems; second, the importance of local, very situated historical analysis, associated by many with a new ‘hermeneutic turn’; third, the assessment of the values involved in technological achievements in relation to other values” (64, 65). Wallerstein’s Gulbenkian Report considers these developments to promise new relationships among humanists (especially “among scholars in literary studies of all kinds”), anthropology, and “the new quasi-disciplines relating to the ‘forgotten’ peoples of modernity (those neglected by virtue of gender, race, class, etc.), for whom it provided a theoretical (‘postmodern’) framework for their elaborations of difference” (65).

But this promise to “open the social sciences” beyond the Cold-War area studies model to include developments familiar to scholars of the “new” American Studies does not sufficiently take into account the enormous institutional resistance of scholars trained in area studies, still committed to their specializations, and in some areas, notably “East Asian”, “South Asian”, “Middle Eastern”, and “Latin American”, benefiting, rather than suffering, from the collapse of “Southeast Asian Studies” and “Soviet Studies”. Area Studies are alive and well, defending their territories with the determination of scholars whose very existences depend on this fight and have at their command an impressive arsenal of “common-sense” arguments opposing coalitions with “new” American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and virtually any version of “postmodernism” and its assorted complements, “cosmopolitanism” and “post- or neo- Marxism”. In these intellectual fights, there are lots of interesting figures at the vanguard; Walter Mignolo’s “border thinking” and Juan Poblete’s Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (2003) force area-studies scholars to defend explicitly intellectual boundaries that still retain their imperial legacies, buried for a time beneath a certain pseudo-scientific reliance on empirical data and disguised in part by a post-World War II U.S. provenance casting a vaguely “democratic” aura in which the “modernization and development” ideology is clearly announced.

Why should American Studies scholars engage in these fights, which are often staged in terms of national languages, local and regional histories, and institutional politics in which we are unevenly trained? And if we are committed, as I am, to the comparative study of Canada and the Americas, rather than merely U.S.-centric “American Studies”, however diverse we may make it, then how do we respond to the familiar challenge from Latin American area specialists that our project is simply the next stage of U.S. imperialism stretching from the Monroe doctrine through the Spanish-American War to the Pan-Americanism of the Cold War era? Finally, is not this commitment to “hemispheric study” of Canada and the Americas merely a revival of the much older continental model for area studies, replacing contemporary problems with even more insidious difficulties haunting us from the European imperial past?

There are practical answers to each of these questions. American Studies must develop curricula that require foreign languages relevant to the different communities in Canada and the Americas, just as we should broaden our curricula to deal with local and regional histories beyond the United States. Of course, we must be attentive to the problems of linguistic, cultural, and epistemological imperialism, especially in a global era shaped by neo-imperialistic practices that work as much through cultural and intellectual means as through military, political, and economic tactics. But not all study of other societies is inevitably imperialist, especially when the method of scholarship is intended to investigate precisely the imperialist inclinations of knowledge to follow power. Comparative study of the different communities in the Western Hemisphere is intended to pay particularly close attention to the historical power dynamics that created hierarchies along the North-South axis as troubling as the imperial assumptions implicit in an earlier East-West divide (monumentalized in Hegel’s ineluctable evolution of World-Historical Spirit from east to Western Civilization). Finally, the “Western Hemisphere” reproduces the older continental model of prewar area studies if we focus upon its “exceptional” status, either in its pre-Columbian, premodern indigeneity or in its extraordinary uniqueness as the “New World” that would realize the ideals of European imperialists. Understood as a particularly instructive instance of what Mignolo terms the “modern/colonial world system”, the Western Hemisphere cannot be disengaged finally from the global processes in which it has been historically involved, including those that traversed it long before the arrival of European invaders. In this context, we must begin to think less in terms of the pertinent “rims”—Pacific, North Atlantic, mid-Atlantic, Caribbean—and more in terms of certain “flows” describing the terrestrial, maritime, modern avian, and postmodern transits of outer (military and communications’ satellites) and inner (bodily prostheses and virtual realities) spaces. [78]

These answers are not really what many area studies specialists want to hear, because the threat posed to their disciplines also involves an internal critique already well underway in U.S.-centric American Studies and increasingly evident in Latin American Studies. Despite the very different European imperialisms and their historical modalities informing traditional studies of the “Americas”, they have in common the Creole nationalisms that developed in rebellion against their imperial masters. Following Enrique Dussel’s The Invention of America, Mignolo points out:

The “creoles” to whom Mignolo refers are the descendants of Spaniards or Portuguese born in the colonies, from whom “liberators” like Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín would emerge to lead the national revolutions of the early nineteenth century in what they themselves would come to term “Latin America”.

Although we do not refer to the U.S. “founding fathers” or cultural nationalists, such as Emerson and Hawthorne and Whitman, as “Creoles”, they fit Mignolo’s conception of the anti-imperialist aura of national ideology in the Western Hemisphere. [79] Despite the enormous differences between Bolívar’s struggle against Spanish imperial power in decline and Franklin and Adams’s struggle against British imperialism, increasingly triumphant around the globe, South American and North American “Creole nationalisms” commonly “filled a space that was broken in the process of conquest and colonization” (130). Mignolo is referring to the massive destruction of indigenous societies by European conquest and colonization, and it is indeed remarkable how often U.S. and Latin American revolutionaries would invoke the imperial destruction of indigenous peoples as a justification for Creole revolution, despite the open hostility most Creoles displayed to their own indigenous populations. From American rebels disguised as native peoples their forefathers had slaughtered in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War to the melodramatic outrage expressed by Bolívar regarding Spanish atrocities against Amerindians or José Martí’s paternalism with regard to North American Indians with whom he claims a tenuous bond, the political writings of the Creole nationalists in North and South America are full of passionate commitments to the liberation of indigenous peoples from the slavery and exploitation of their common imperial masters. [80]

Despite very different national policies toward indigenous peoples throughout the Hemisphere, the “national” stage of the modern/colonial world system displays the perpetuation of colonial oppression under the guise of “national development” and “necessary modernization”. And although these bourgeois, Creole nationalisms appear to have continued the policies of their imperial masters in ways that perpetuated the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural differences distinguishing Spanish, Portuguese, and British imperialisms (to deal with only the three most powerful between 1500 and 1800), they developed a certain strategic commonality that persists to this day and may well be one reason why Latin American area studies’ scholars fight so vigorously against the hemispheric comparatism of the “new” American Studies. Mignolo is particularly clear on the development of an intriguing “commonality” of these diverse American “nations”:

Mignolo identifies in this passage a nineteenth-century “American Exceptionalism” of hemispheric and transnational scope. We recognize immediately a host of possible examples ranging from the fierce struggle for “literary nationalism” in the antebellum U.S., which is haunted by European allusions and models, to comparable struggles of Latin American intellectuals to break free of European sources by adapting them to South American, Caribbean, or Meso-American human and natural environments. The latter project seems brilliantly represented and satirized in the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953), often cited as one of the first works of the so-called “Latin American Boom”. [81]

In the print-dominated era of nineteenth-century nationalism, literature played a crucial role in constructing and interpellating this national imaginary. The anti-imperialist rhetoric dominates not only the overtly “democratic” literature of the traditional “American Renaissance”, but also includes many key Latin American literary texts of the period. Jicoténcal, the anti-imperial Mexican novel published anonymously in Philadelphia in 1826 and attributed by some scholars to the revolutionary Cuban priest, Félix Varela, occupies a celebrated position in the Latin American literary canon, in part because its stinging indictment of Cortès, his consort, Doña Marina (La Malinche), and the Catholic priests accompanying his military invasion appears written in support of the Mexican revolution against Spain, other revolutionary movements in Latin America, and the novel’s vigorous defense of indigenous rights as equivalent to those of the Creole revolutionaries realizing three centuries later the failed democratic aspirations of the Tlaxcalan eponymous hero, Jicoténcal himself, and his long suffering lover and wife, Teutila. [82]

The “commonality of the difference” Mignolo finds in Creole nationalisms in the Western Hemisphere links these emancipatory movements with the imperialist agendas they transcoded from their imperialist masters: Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, England, and France. Although the North-South divide in the Western Hemisphere has long been defined by the radical differences in public policies regarding ethnic and racial identities, there is also a “commonality of the difference” across this border when we consider how these same Creole nationalisms treated indigenous peoples and Creoles of color. At the height of nineteenth-century nationalist ferment in the hemisphere, Creole revolutionaries rarely invoked the Haitian slave rebellion, arguably the first successful slave revolt in history, and consistently incorporated indigenous issues into their own nationalist platforms while perpetuating, in many cases worsening, the social and human conditions under which indigenous peoples struggled to survive (Mignolo, 139). Immediately upon establishing “national” boundaries, most emerging nations also initiated vigorous campaigns of territorial expansion, entering into struggles with neighbors that in some cases last to the present day.

I repeat Mignolo’s phrase “the commonality of the difference” in order to stress the point that a comparative study of the communities of the Western Hemisphere is not a question of identifying their deep-structural unity or their distinct “national exceptionalisms”, as an older Comparative Literature did with its largely European models in the misnamed “World Literatures” project. The imperialist subtext I have interpreted as “common” to Creole nationalisms hardly leads to positive answers to such questions as posed by Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s influential collection of 1990, Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?, or Mashall Eakin’s more recent query, “Does Latin America Have a Common History?” [83] There are nevertheless points of contact and commonality that allow us to conduct such comparative work at crucial intersections or contact zones, rather than producing yet another testament to a monumental “exceptionalism” that is at root neo-imperialist. I will conclude by identifying and then discussing briefly some of the more important of these intersectional sites as ways of following out the logic of what Mignolo terms “border thinking”.

National expansionist projects in contestation with other nationalist projects in the Hemisphere are particularly worthy of our attention. Mignolo focuses on 1848 and 1898 as crucial historical moments in “the early division between Anglo and Latin America” (136). The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo concluding the Mexican War (1846–1848) “was a conflict between new emerging nations”, Mexico and the United States, and the open imperialism of the U.S. has often been cited as one reason the War has until recently played such a small role in U.S. cultural and social history. [84] Its significance in shifting the “border” between North and South, as well as incorporating in a very short span a significant “Latinidad” into the United States, cannot be ignored by the “new” American Studies. In most accounts, the focus is on victimized Mexico, just a quarter of a century free from Spanish imperial control and continuing to struggle with internal political and economic problems at the time of the War’s outbreak. Lost in the course of most accounts, including literary and cultural histories, are the indigenous peoples, already systematically displaced, enslaved, and murdered during Spanish and subsequent Mexican colonization of Baja and Alta California, then subject to a host of new laws and rules imposed by postwar American officials and less formal, but accepted, practices of genocide practiced by U.S. citizens well into the twentieth century.

For Mignolo, 1898 also redraws the hemispheric map, ostensibly by asserting overtly the imperialist agenda of the United States in its invocation of the Monroe Doctrine and the collapse of Spanish imperial claims in the Hemisphere (136). I would add that U.S. negotiations with Great Britain for a Canal Treaty and during Secretary of State John Hay’s “Open Door Policy” in Asia have to be considered, insofar as the result of these negotiations was that Great Britain agreed basically to U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere in exchange for British dominance in Asia. [85] Too often forgotten in the invocation of 1898, however, is the U.S. co-optation of the republican struggles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as in the Philippines. To study 1898, we must travel one of those strategic “rims” or follow one of those historical “flows” across the Pacific, recognizing that the U.S. suppression of Philippine nationalism in the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) followed out the foreign policy the U.S. applied in the Caribbean, especially to its current protectorate, Puerto Rico, and troublesome Cuba. The relationship between the U.S. and Spain in the Spanish-American War cannot be understood adequately without also examining the U.S. relationship to Cuban and Puerto Rican nationalisms. As scholars from Sundquist to Brickhouse have explained, the revolutionary ferment of Cuban nationalists in the nineteenth century is complexly entangled with different U.S. political and economic interests, including pro-slavery interests in controlling Cuba as a source of slaves after the banning of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. [86]

Once again, the “border thinking” required to understand the historical development of these Creole nationalisms in contestation with each other must involve recognition of the forgotten populations on these islands. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, we cannot speak any longer in the nineteenth century of “indigenous” peoples, although Puerto Rican activists still refer to themselves as “Borricuans”, in reference to the first inhabitants, because those indigenous populations were murdered by European imperialists. But in Cuba, Afro-Cubans and descendants of maroon communities must also be identified as the “forgotten” populations who historically demonstrate a repertoire of means to resist and evade imperial extinction and national incorporation. Once we think of the intersection among the different peoples and communities marginalized by European and then nationalist imperialisms, we begin to recognize how “border thinking” leads to the several versions of “mondialization” Mignolo invokes in his recent work. Non-European populations in the Western Hemisphere brought with them and elaborated differently over time and in specific sites their African, Asian, Oceanic, and Amerindian heritages, including non-European languages and religions and cultural practices. Sometimes these non-European influences were hybridized with EuroAmerican cultures, but there are many instances of what I would term “maroon” styles, forms, and practices surviving as resistant discursive practices that powerfully mark the “horizon” of the EuroAmerican imaginary.

The troublesome linguistic divisions of the Hemisphere seem to confirm the strict divisions of the “Anglo” North, the “Spanish” Southwest, and the “Portuguese” Southeast, with epiphenomenal traces of linguistic imperialism scattered here and there, especially in the polyglot Caribbean from Dutch Aruba through French Martinique. Yet when we take these linguistic divisions in the historical, cultural, and geographic contexts of the entire Hemisphere, we must recognize that we are following the tracks of European and Creole nationalist imperialisms, ignoring the massive destruction of Amerindian languages and their related cultures as well as the suppression of non-European languages occasioned by slavery’s systematic detribalization and its customary ban on literary and other formal education for slaves.

Werner Sollors’ and Marc Shell’s wonderful Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000) gives us barely a hint of what a genuinely “multilingual” account of Canada and the Americas would be like, if we were to overcome what Mignolo terms the systematic imperial “denial of coevalness” between European and Amerindian semiotics. [87] Colonial semiosis depended crucially upon the destruction of the Amerindian archive of knowledge and the repression of that history, just as slavery depends on the systematic denial of African retentions, including languages, religions, and cultural practices. A similar colonial semiosis is structurally integral to Creole nationalisms, as even the casual tourist cannot help but notice in the plethora of signs that testify to various nations’ presumed “rootedness” in their Amerindian histories, even as their policies toward indigenous peoples have been consistently genocidal. What would happen if we were to attempt “border thinking” that instead of “adding” Amerindian and diasporic semiotics to the variety of European-based languages would challenge the “commonality of the difference” in those imported languages and their epistemological protocols? In short, the traditional “problem” of different “languages” dividing the “areas” of the Western Hemisphere turns out to be even more complicated when we factor in the numerous languages (and semiotic systems) occluded by this apparent diversity of the imperial legacy.

The other “area” neglected both by “area studies” and by American Studies, new or old, also suggests how we might approach “Hemispheric Studies” from beyond the shadow cast by European power/knowledge. Mignolo’s emphasis on colonial semiosis at times ignores the biological transit of imperialism and the literal destruction not merely of the “texts” of pre-Columbian peoples but of their bodies and biochemistries. Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005) summarizes the new scientific evidence of the impact of European diseases on indigenous peoples throughout the Hemisphere. [88] Infectious diseases like smallpox, influenza, and measles had dramatic impacts on Amerindian populations between 1500 and 1900, and for many Europeans appeared to support claims to the “superiority” of European “civilization”, even when crudely calculated according to a Social Darwinist standard of “survival of the fittest”. Area studies following the ideology of “modernization and development” would in many ways reinforce just such an ideology, often manifested in the “conflictive encounters between Old World Europeans and pre-Columbian peoples of the Andes, Mesoamerican, and the Caribbean” in terms of a “dialectic of the filthy and the clean, the fetid and the fresh”, even the “healthy” and the “sick” (Mignolo, 153). Indeed, the prevalence of public health programs and policies in the rhetoric of “modernization and development” is just one example of how this binary continues to do imperialist work, even with the most benevolent and humanitarian purposes.

We now know that the “immunities” Europeans acquired over the centuries against the infectious diseases they spread with such devastating consequences in the Western Hemisphere had much to do with the domestication of livestock they had learned from Middle Eastern agricultural practices they had followed and were thus hardly “inherent” to Europeans. [89] And the inoculation practices Europeans would adopt experimentally and unevenly in the eighteenth century were adapted from practices employed in China as early as 1100 to prevent the spread of smallpox. Add to all of this that the genetic differences between Amerindians and Europeans do not signal the superiority of one biology over the other, but simply human differences whose contact produced extraordinarily negative results for one group. Western “modernization and development” take on rather different ethical meanings when we are forced to conclude that in the case of the Western Hemisphere, such “progress” required the deaths of anywhere from 40 to 60 million Amerinidian people between 1500 and 1900.

“Border thinking” should deconstruct the “differences” between European imperial powers and Creole national powers, among European languages, and other manifest differences, such as those between the supposedly Catholic South and Protestant North, not only to expose the shared history of the “modern/colonial world system” worked out systematically for the first time in the Western Hemisphere. Such border thinking should also represent the histories and contemporary retentions of societies and communities that were overshadowed by the more imposing authority of their imperial masters. Adapting W. E. B. Du Bois’s model of “double consciousness” to the study of the Western Hemisphere and drawing thus explicitly from minority discourses, Mignolo suggests that such a comparative approach to the Western Hemisphere might open us to a broader “worldly” thinking he projects doubly as “the future planetary epistemological and critical localism” (157).

I am happy to conclude that I am not certain what he means by what he also terms a “border gnosis” that would allow us to think differentially across the divides of those geopolitical, imperial, and semiotic “borders” that have been imposed upon us as scholars, as citizens, and as humans. What I do know is that Mignolo’s challenging methodology enables us to achieve the sort of double-consciousness the “new” and “postnationalist” American Studies should welcome. With one consciousness, it enables us to understand the “conflicting homogeneous entities (Latin America, France, the United States, etc.) as […] part of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system” (170). With another consciousness, we can understand that to “think ‘Latin America’ otherwise, in its heterogeneity rather than in its homogeneity, in the local histories of changing global designs is not to question a particular form of identification (e.g., that of ‘Latin America’) but all national/colonial forms of identification in the modern/colonial world system” (170–171). I would add that Mignolo’s project, ostensibly the deconstruction of “Latin American” area studies, applies as well to North American Studies and “American Studies” as we know it in its modern and postmodern versions. [90]

I have focused on how the conflict between area studies and the new American Studies impedes the development of a comparative study of the many different communities in the Western Hemisphere, but Mignolo’s “modern/colonial world system” is not restricted to this region. In the aftermath of 9/11, the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq, its central role in the war in Afghanistan, foreign policies that contribute significantly to the imperial subjugation of the Palestinian people, and growing Arabic immigrant communities in the U.S., “the Middle East” is a crucial field in the new American Studies. Yet the field itself is already defined by the area studies model I have traced back to the politically motivated work of the Ethnogeographic Board of the 1940s. Edward Said’s criticism of nineteenth-century Western Orientalism needs to be updated to take into account more recent developments, and in that work the U.S. role in restructuring what George W. Bush termed “the Greater Middle East” needs to be challenged in relationship to U.S. academic models for studying “the Middle East”, global Islamic communities, Arabic cultures, and specific immigrant groups from these regions and communities now living outside their ancestral homelands as a consequence of diaspora or choice.

Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) fundamentally challenged “area studies” definitions of Caribbean, African American, and black British communities, directing us both literally and figuratively to the “Atlantic world” in which transnational flows of people, goods, and cultures moved incessantly and diversely. [91] David Lloyd and Peter D. O’Neill’s The Black and Green Atlantic shows how the Black (African), Green (Irish), Red (Communist), and still other “Atlantics” have followed and broadened what we today understand as this oceanic complexity beyond the presumed stabilities of geopolitical states. [92] We need similarly flexible, transnational conceptions in the new American Studies that will work cooperatively with “critical area studies” of Latin America and the Middle East to respect the diverse communities we find in these regions and provide the critical terms for challenging their marginalization, even exclusion, by more powerful nation states.

In re-conceptualizing the global scope that American Studies must undertake to respond to U.S. neo-imperialism, we must remain vigilant regarding the specific ways knowledge and power have been coordinated historically. We would be naive to think that the production and circulation of knowledge in the late-modern research university can remain separate from the economic, political, and social interests of the states and industries that fund such work. Whether public or private, the research-1 university still functions as a representation of the nation in which it is permitted to exist, but such universities are also today pulled in a number of competitive directions by different state and corporate interests. We are already witnessing the globalization of the student, faculty, and research components of these educational institutions, and we must find the intellectual means to assure that such globalization works dialectically, offering those peoples rendered stateless, culture-less, and otherwise economically and politically disempowered the means of “decolonizing the mind”, as the great Kenyan novelist and postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, has put it. [93]