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Salzburg Global Fellow Deborah Cohn explains how the field of American Studies can be used to explore contemporary transnational dynamics

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This op-ed was written by Deborah Cohn, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023.

American studies as a field began to emerge in the US in the 1930s in response to scholars’ interest in pursuing interdisciplinary work that crossed the boundaries of the departments and disciplines within which they were housed. However, the field’s rapid expansion in the post-World War II era had a very different and also border-crossing impetus: the belief that American studies, by teaching and researching the US, could be a vector for shaping the nation’s image for domestic and international audiences alike.  As disseminating knowledge about American institutions and culture was thought to strengthen belief in the democratic system and help to create what Jarol Manheim has described as a “supportive symbolic environment” within which the US could pursue its foreign policy objectives, American studies assumed an ambassadorial role for the nation. Hence, the frequent designation of the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, first held in 1947, as a “Marshall Plan of the mind”.

The synergy between state and scholarly interests that was evident in the growth of American studies was hardly anomalous during the Cold War. The emergence of area studies during this period, of course, owed its genesis to geopolitical concerns. But while government agencies, philanthropic organizations, and private donors rushed to create and fund initiatives to support the expansion of American studies programs in the US and around the globe, this was not a top-down movement.  As David Price has observed, in the 1950s, “attitudes supporting World War II intelligence work were still strong, and much of America’s psyche was still caught up in the patriotic ethos of the previous decade’s total war effort.”  From the very beginning, scholars, too, believed in the potential of American studies as a mode of cultural diplomacy, and they partnered with public and private agencies to develop programs that took American studies around the globe.¹

If the expansion of American studies through the mid-1960s was fueled by transnational interests, the focus of research and teaching within the field was largely on the US itself.  The social, political, and academic changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, changed the shape of the field in many ways, as well as putting an end to the synergy between state and scholarly goals.  The growth of ethnic and women’s studies and the emergence of a Radical Caucus within the (US) American Studies Association (ASA) also pushed the boundaries of American studies and its parent organization in new directions, even though the fields, and the scholars within them, did not always overlap or even easily coexist. In fact, Mary Helen Washington’s 1997 presidential address to the ASA, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?” thematized the distance initially separating them, despite common interests.

At the same time, though, Washington also notes that “One of the most striking things about scholarship as it has developed since 1985 is that in 1997, categories like race, class, gender, sexuality and language cross-cut, intersect, and impact one another, and so it is impossible to keep these categories separate.” The boundary-crossing nature of these categories that was “striking” in the 1990s is, for many in American studies today, the starting point.  Borders and transnational dynamics and flows, as well as the (neo)imperial power grabs that are often involved in these, are now also centered in and central to the field. But where American studies was, for its first few decades, an integral player in a state-scholarly network that sought to expand and strengthen the borders of the Western bloc, it is now much more of a home for scholars, many of whom are also often working in ethnic studies fields and/or other national and linguistic traditions. Their work demonstrates how, while national borders and boundaries are erected to keep “Others” out and construct homogeneous national selves, those “Others” were often already present as an integral part of the US’s national histories and traditions. I thus see American studies now and in the future as a powerful means of exploring contemporary transnational dynamics as well as those that helped to constitute the US in the past, challenging monolithic notions of national identity and national borders alike.
 

1: After participating in the first Salzburg Seminar, Margaret Mead declared that “understanding of America [belonged] on the same plane as sending food to Europe.” Nevertheless, organizers worked carefully to ensure that the Seminar could not be discounted as a mode of US propaganda or cultural imperialism, and faculty were not paid for their teaching to avoid any appearance of the Seminar being propagandistic. (Mead, “The Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization,” 1947 report to the Harvard Student Council, RF Archives, RG 1.2 (FA 387), Series 200, Box 111, Folder 974, RAC.)

Deborah Cohn is provost professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of several books and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the American Philosophical Society, and the Harry Ransom Center, among other sources. Her areas of research include Cold War cultural diplomacy, especially the use of academic disciplines such as American studies and language study as a means of bolstering the US national interest.

Deborah attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023. The 2023 Salzburg Global American Studies Program focused on the contestations and renegotiations of boundaries beyond the nation-state, and how they are changing the representation of democratic pluralism.