American Studies is a vigorous, bold account of the changes in the field of American Studies over the last thirty-five years. Through this set of carefully selected key essays by an editorial board of expert scholars, the book demonstrates how changes in the field have produced new genealogies that tell different histories of both America and the study of America. Charts the evolution of American Studies from the end of World War II to the present day by showcasing the best scholarship in this field An introductory essay by the distinguished editorial board highlights developments in the field and places each essay in its historical and theoretical context Explores topics such as American politics, history, culture, race, gender and working life Shows how changing perspectives have enabled older concepts to emerge in a different context
A Collection That "Represents The Heart of Menand's Work . . . And Demonstrates His Status As His Generation's Premier Critical Talent" (Los Angeles Times)
“What if American Studies is defined not so much in the pages of the most cutting-edge publications, but through what happens in our classrooms and other learning spaces?” In Teaching American Studies Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Joseph Entin, and Rebecca Hill ask a diverse group of American Studies educators to respond to that question by writing chapters about teaching that use a classroom activity or a particular course to reflect on the state of the field of American Studies. Teaching American Studies speaks to teachers with a wide range of relationships to the field. To start, it is a useful how-to guide for faculty who might be new to, or unfamiliar with, American Studies. Each author brings the reader into their classes to offer specific, concrete details about their pedagogical practice, and their students' learning. The resulting chapters connect theory and educational action as well as share challenges, difficulties, and lessons learned. The volume also provides a collective impression of American Studies from the point of view of students and teachers. What primary and secondary texts and what theoretical challenges and issues do faculty use to organize their teaching? How does the teaching we do respond to our institutional and educational contexts? How do our experiences and those of our students challenge or change our understanding of American Studies? Chapters in this collection discuss teaching a broad range of materials, from memoirs and novels by Anne Moody and Octavia Butler to cutting-edge cultural theory, to the widely used collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies. But the chapters in this collection are also about dancing, eating, and walking around a campus to view statues and gravestones. They are about teaching during the era of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, and giving up authority in the classroom. Teaching American Studies is both a new way to think about American Studies and a timely collection of effective ways to teach about race, gender, sexuality, and power in a moment of political polarization and intense public scrutiny of universities.
Mark Merlis' exceptional first novel. Dark humour, biting wit and dazzling prose infuse this story of desire and betrayal, history and healing. Reeve thinks his life is over. His career is at a dead end, his face is a mess, and his landlord is evicting him from his aprartment because he made too much noise when a hustler beat him up. As he lies in his hospital bed, figuring our what to do next. he finds himself brooding about the parallel ruin of his old college mentor Tom Slater, a famous American literary scholar who was betrayed and driven to suicide during the McCarthy era. Offering a welcome distraction is the patient in the next bed, a slient youth who arouses feelings Reeve vowed he would renounce, the dangerous longing for the sweetness and menace of straight men. Never at a loss for the tellling of caustic aside, Reeve reconstructs the troubled worlds of Tom Slater and his own insouciant youth, and horny old age. American Studies is an ambitiously achieved sweep of twentieth-century experience, a novel which triumphantly succeeds as both tragedy and farce.
Asian American Studies Now truly represents the enormous changes occurring in Asian American communities and the world, changes that require a reconsideration of how the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies is defined and taught. This comprehensive anthology, arranged in four parts and featuring a stellar group of contributors, summarizes and defines the current shape of this rapidly changing field, addressing topics such as transnationalism, U.S. imperialism, multiracial identity, racism, immigration, citizenship, social justice, and pedagogy. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen have selected essays for the significance of their contribution to the field and their clarity, brevity, and accessibility to readers with little to no prior knowledge of Asian American studies. Featuring both reprints of seminal articles and groundbreaking texts, as well as bold new scholarship, Asian American Studies Now addresses the new circumstances, new communities, and new concerns that are reconstituting Asian America.
Excerpts from and citations to reviews of more than 8,000 books each year, drawn from coverage of 109 publications. Book Review Digest provides citations to and excerpts of reviews of current juvenile and adult fiction and nonfiction in the English language. Reviews of the following types of books are excluded: government publications, textbooks, and technical books in the sciences and law. Reviews of books on science for the general reader, however, are included. The reviews originate in a group of selected periodicals in the humanities, social sciences, and general science published in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. - Publisher.
In Property Rules, Robin L. Einhorn uses City Council records-previously thought destroyed-and census data to track the course of city government in Chicago, providing an important reinterpretation of the relationship between political and social structures in the nineteenth-century American city. A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book" "[A] masterful study of policy-making in Chicago."—Choice "[A] major contribution to urban and political history. . . . [A]n excellent book."—Jeffrey S. Adler, American Historical Review "[A]n enlightening trip. . . . Einhorn's foray helps make sense out of the transition from Jacksonian to Gilded Age politics on the local level. . . . [She] has staked out new ground that others would do well to explore."—Arnold R. Hirsch, American Journal of Legal History "A well-documented and informative classic on urban politics."—Daniel W. Kwong, Law Books in Review
American Studies has long been a home for adventurous students seeking to understand the culture and politics of the United States. Despite being taught in universities around the world, American Studies has resisted developing a coherent methodology for fear of losing the flexibility and freedom to imagine new avenues of thought. But what if these fears are misplaced? Through a fresh look at the origins of the field, this book contends that a shared set of “rules” can offer a springboard to creativity. American Studies: A User’s Guide offers readers a critical introduction to the history and methods of the field, useful strategies for interpretation, curation, analysis, and theory, and case studies of American Studies in practice.
The discipline of American studies was established in the early days of World War II and drew on the myth of American exceptionalism. Now that the so-called American Century has come to an end, what would a truly globalized version of American studies look like? Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar offer a new standard for the field’s transnational aspiration with Globalizing American Studies. The essays here offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. The contributors explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture: the traffic of American movies within the British Empire, the reception of the film Gone with the Wind in the Arab world, the parallels between Japanese and American styles of nativism, and new incarnations of American studies itself in the Middle East and South Asia. The essays elicit a forgotten multilateralism long inherent in American history and provide vivid accounts of post–Revolutionary science communities, late-nineteenth century Mexican border crossings, African American internationalism, Cold War womanhood in the United States and Soviet Russia, and the neo-Orientalism of the new obsession with Iran, among others. Bringing together established scholars already associated with the global turn in American studies with contributors who specialize in African studies, East Asian studies, Latin American studies, media studies, anthropology, and other areas, Globalizing American Studies is an original response to an important disciplinary shift in academia.
The America that seems to be disappearing before our very eyes is, George Lipsitz argues, actually the cumulative creation of yesterday's struggles over identity, culture, and power. At a critical moment, this book offers a richly textured historical perspective on where our notions of national knowledge have come from and where they may lead. Showing how American studies has been shaped by the social movements of the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s, Lipsitz identifies the ways in which the globalization of commerce and culture are producing radically new understandings of politics, performance, consumption, knowledge, and nostalgia. Book jacket.
