Broadway and main: Crossroads, ghost roads, and paths to an American studies future

American Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1-25

  Deloria, Philip J ^a,b,c,d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

^b American Studies Association   (United States)

^c Organization of American Historians   (United States)

^d National Museum of the American Indian   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69449092128     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0065     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (67)

1. See Samuel Charters, Robert Johnson (New York: Oak, 1973): 7-8,
2. as cited in Robert Johnson Lost and Found, by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003): 120n11.
3. On the Johnson myth, see Patricia R. Schroeder, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
4. The song itself has nothing to do with making deals with the devil at midnight, but rather with the social realities of African American travel in the South, as I will discuss below. See Leon Litwack, Troubl in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books, 1998): 410-11.
5. The ASA conference theme in 2004 was "Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies." See Shelley Fisher Fishkin's presidential address of the same title, American Quarterly 57.1 (March 2005): 17-57. The first iteration of the American Studies Association Web site, operational beginning in 1994 through Georgetown University, with the ASA being given "pages" in 1995-96, was named "Crossroads." Though the ASA launched its own site in 2007, Crossroads continues to be an important Web project. Leading American studies scholars sit on the editorial board of the University of California Press's "American Crossroads" series. These are hardly the only instances of the metaphor's use. One should note the ways in which its borrowed meaning is quite distinct from that of "borderlands, " another common conference theme metaphor.
6. Not all will agree, of course, with these provisional definitions. But it is clearly the case that we've lost control over the meanings of these words and any effort to pull them back into some kind of order is probably an effort worth making. These are my own shorthand definitions, but they owe a debt to Julie Thompson Klein, "Blurring, Cracking, and Crossing: Permeation and the Fracturing of Discipline," Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, ed. Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993);
7. Klein, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
8. On trans, thanks to Karen Halttunen for sharing her thoughts. See also the suggestive discussion of transculturation and disciplinarity in Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N J.: Princeton University Press, 2000): 205-8.
9. Klein, "Blurring, Cracking, and Crossing," 192.
10. Gene Wise, "Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement," American Quarterly 31.3 (1979): 301-8.
11. See also Jay Mechling, "Commentary," in Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, ed. Lucy Maddox, 211-14 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999).
12. For a suggestive rereading of Wise's essay, see Donald Pease and Robin Weigman, "Futures," in The Futures of American Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 1-22. As they note, Wise's essay was "not simply a history of the field" but "a founding gesture" that sought the impossible: to bring coherence to the past so as to render the present-and the fragmented future - equally coherent (2-3).
13. Here, I want to make clear my debt to James Brown. His as-yet-unpublished paper, "Cold War American Studies: A New Archival History," presented at the 2008 ASA conference, was the winner of the Gene Wise-Warren Susman Prize (for best graduate student paper) and I have benefited from his research in important ways. See, in particular, "Cold War American Studies," 4-11.
14. Radway J., What's in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 20, 1998, American Quarterly 1999, 1-32.
15. Linda Kerber, "Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies," American Quarterly 41.3 (September 1989): 415-31;
16. and Allen F. Davis, "The Politics of American Studies," American Quarterly 42.3 (September 1990): 353-74.
17. See also Josephine Martin Ober, "History of the American Studies Association" (master's thesis, Bryn Mawr C llege, Pa., 1971).
18. Michael Goldberg, "Articulated Interdisciplinarity and the 'Discipline' of American Studies," unpublished paper.
19. Simon J. Bronner, "The ASA Survey of Departments and Programs, 2007: Findings and Projections," American Studies Association Newsletter 31.1 (March 2008): 15. Bronner notes, among many other transformations in the field, the collapse of the joint appointment. It's not clear whether the data can distinguish between the "wet" appointment (that is, actual budget lines) and the "dry" (courtesy affiliations). At least one program (mine!) apparently filled in the survey using the latter rather than the former.
20. Bronner, "ASA Survey," 16-17.
21. Thomas Apel, "Report of the 2006-2007 Survey of Doctoral Recipients in American Studies," American Studies Association Newsletter 31.1 (March 2008): 8.
22. See Apel, "Report," 8. Note the difference between Apel's gloomy assessment of decreasing production and increasing rate of underemployment and Bronner's cautious, long-term optimism. The data here is complicated and perhaps incomplete, particularly in relation to the broader problem of the overproduction of humanities PhDs relative to the assault on the tenure track position and the rapid increase of temporary and adjunct appointments. Bronner's survey also revealed less interest in traditional interdisciplinarity and more concern with "culture," a broad term that also opens the door to consider "American studies" dissertations written in English, history, ethnic studies, women's studies and other programs.
23. My short history here draws upon the extensive genealogy traced by James W. Cook and Lawrence Glickman, "Twelve Propositions for a History of U.S. Cultural History," The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. James W. Cook, Lawrence Glickman, and Michael O'Mall y (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2009).
24. See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, "It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation," Hypatia 13.3 (Summer 1998): 62-82.
25. The word emergent in this context is meant to suggest a relation to American studies rather than the creation of fields. The linkages between the political, the intellectual, and the institutional takes us to the heart of the question. There is, on the one hand, Gene Wise's sense of the American studies problematic of the post-Myth and Symbol moment: that social movements might fragment whatever epistemological coherence the field possessed; and, on the other hand, George Lipsitz's inversion: the sense that American studies' most critical role is to theorize on behalf of social movements. On the former, see Pease and Weigman, "Futures," 2-3;
26. on the latter, see Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
27. Disability studies, like many of the interdisciplines, is organized around a shared subject matter rather than a common methodology. For an overview of the field's emergence, see Lennard J. Davis, "Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies," American Literary History 11.3 (Autumn 1999): 500-512;
28. and Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
29. One scholar explains that her overarching goal is "to shift our conception of disability from pathology to identity." Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 137.
30. Other points of intersection include queer theory - Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006);
31. law - Anna Kirkland, Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York: New York University Press, 2008);
32. performance - Petra Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (New York: Routledge, 2003).
33. "Crossroads" gives us a particular metaphor, in which we intersect with one another while traveling distinct roads. Those intersections become both places of danger and sites for the new. "Home" offers a rather different metaphor, in which American studies - both the annual meeting and individual programs - offers a kind of institutional and intellectual refuge. "Partnership" suggests a third, emphasizing transactions and relative autonomies - and there are of course others, all carrying the problematic baggage of overloaded and transferred meanings that comes with the use of metaphor. The emergence of "crossroads" as a field metaphor in the 1990s might be seen as a kind of soothing cover for the real difficulties that accompany the exchanges among strong interdisciplinary fields with their own distinct histories, goals, and structures. The simultaneous fetishization of "interdisciplinarity" might be seen to serve a similar purpose in a similar context. The parallel emergence of the metaphorical cluster surrounding "borderlands," "borders," and "boundaries" speaks, from a different position, to similar questions, although with a distinct political valence. See Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987);
34. José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 159-83;
35. See, for example, Alice Kessler-Harris, "Cultural Locations: Positioning American Studies in the Great Debate," American Quarterly 44.3 (September 1992): 299-312.
36. Mary Helen Washington, "Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?" Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 19, 1997, American Quarterly 50.1 (March 1998): 1-23;
37. Philip Deloria, Robert Warrior, and Jean M. O'Brien, "Forum on American (Indian) Studies: Can the ASA Be an Intellectual Home?" American Quarterly 55.4 (December 2003): 669-702.
38. For a thoughtful engagement with this question, see Joel Pfister, Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).
39. Kerber, "Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies," 420;
40. Ober, "History of the American Studies Association" is a relentless account of the repeated gathering together of a "few good men" (125).
41. Carl Bode, "The Start of the ASA (1960),"
42. appendix B in Josephine Martin Ober, "History of the American Studies Association," 122-35.
43. See 125 for Bode's list of his original advisors, which included not only faculty from Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins, but also public scholars from the Music Division of the Library of Congress, the ACLS, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. "The Society," Bode recalled, "was not to be a professors' club but something wider, more humane" (128). It should come as no surprise that many ASA members have found in Bode's history a usable past for the contemporary ASA. See, for example, Radway, "What's in a Name?" 1-4.
44. Mary Kelley, "Taking Stands: American Studies at Century's End," Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1999, American Quarterly 52.1 (March 2000): 3-4, quickly surveys the uses of Bode and Spiller in past presidential addresses.
45. James Brown, "Cold War American Studies," 12, 6-7;
46. Tremaine McDowell, American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948): 88-90.
47. On Smith, see, for example, Jon Lauck, "The Old Roots of the New West: Howard Lamar and the Intellectual Origins of Dakota Territory," 18: "Despite later criticism from New Left historians, scholars in American Studies could hardly be dismissed as pro-American conservatives. Henry Nash Smith was an open man of the left who backed Henry Wallace for President in 1948, left the University of Texas for a more hospitable environment at the University of Minnesota, and said he embraced the 'Marxist hope for peace at last after world revolution and the establishment of a classless society.'" Leo Marx, an early leader in American studies, recently recalled that "virtually all of the scholars involved in founding American studies at Harvard were of a liberal or outright Left persuasion. This meant being anti-capitalist or at least highly critical of the capitalist system."
48. See also Elaine Tyler May, "The Radical Roots of American Studies," American Quarterly 48.2 (June 1996): 179-200;
49. Michael Denning, "The Special American Conditions: Marxism and American Studies," American Quarterly 38 (1986): 356-80,
50. and The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996);
51. Pfister, Critique for What? 8-11 and passim.
52. See James Brown, "Cold War American Studies," 2-4, for a quick survey of such work.
53. See also Linda Kerber, "Diversity and the Transformation
54. Larry J. Griffin and Maria Tempenis, "Class, Multiculturalism, and the American Quarterly," American Quarterly 54.1 (March 2002): 87-88;
55. Cook and Glickman, "Twelve Propositions."
56. I thank June Howard for continually pointing me toward Betty Chmaj, and Mary Kelley for stepping me through the institutional histories of women in the association. See Betty Chmaj, Image, Myth, and Beyond: American Women and American Studies, 2 vols. (Pittsburgh: Women's Free Press, 1973);
57. Griffin and Tempenis, "Class, Multiculturalism," 74-77;
58. Alice Kessler Harris, "Cultural Locations: Positioning American Studies in the Great Debate," American Quarterly 44.3 (September 1992): 304-5;
59. Allen Davis, "The Politics of American Studies," 362-64. Davis's essay presents the late 1960s-early 1970s moments of change within the ASA in both personal and systematic ways, and should, to my mind, be on most American studies reading lists.
60. Wise, "Paradigm Dramas," 300.
61. see Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, 4th ed. (New York: Plume, 1997): 33-34.
62. Charles Tilly, "Selecting a Dissertation Topic: Range and Scope," Columbia University, 2006. Tilly asks dissertation writers to imagine a continuum from "low risk, low reward" (confirms already-answered question) to "high risk, high reward" (redefines not only the answer, but the question asked). He suggests that the ideal dissertation rests somewhere in between, and that scholars save the "high risk, high reward" projects for later in their careers.
63. I want to be clear that I am not suggesting any kind of return to the obsessions emerging from the American studies of the 1950s and 1960s, which focused on finding a single coherent methodology as a way to synthesize and define American studies. The structure I am suggesting is simply a useful template that seems to characterize at least some forms of practice; it does not emerge from the metadiscussion about methodology that characterized these earlier interests in method, though of course it takes these seriously. On the question of political import, see, for example, Michael Bérubé, "The Loyalties of American Studies," American Quarterly 56.2 (June 2004): 223-33.
64. Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
65. In many ways, Noxious New York stretches the methodology I have outlined. If one were to imagine that methodology in exacting terms, one might be led instead to a number of equally powerful books. See, for example, Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Klein's introduction offers a surprisingly precise and contained demonstration of movement among various registers, texts, and theoretical frames.
66. See Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, 315.