The twenty-first century has opened with a series of disasters closely associated with the United States: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the economic crash – disasters political, cultural, environmental and economic suggestive of the possibility that US power is on the wane.
These ongoing crises, with deep historical roots, contradict the triumphalism of the so-called ‘American Century’, that brief moment of post-war optimism, when the dream of rising living standards for all was briefly fired by a national culture that presented itself as an example to the world. While US action at home and abroad consistently challenged the nation’s claim to moral exceptionalism, the gap between the ideal and the reality seemed possible to navigate, inspiring a host of progressive political and cultural movements.
On Saturday 22 November 2014, Birkbeck, University of London was host to an international conference looking at new directions in the field of American Studies. The event was hosted by Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature and sponsored by the AHRC.
Conference organiser Anna Hartnell introduces us to the conference aims
Anna has created a blog, After Katrina: A View From the Outside which supports the conference and covers many of the ideas explored at the event.This pod academy series will consist of the following talks and presentations:
- Technologies of Crisis, Zara Dinnen, Clare Birchall, Kristin Veel, Seb Franklin
- The Star-Spangled Banner, Caryl Phillips
- Faulkner Networked: Regional, Indigenous, Trans-Pacific, Wai Chee Dimock
- Petrochemical Gothic: True Detective and the Energy Unconscious of American Studies, Georgiana Banita
- Future Readers: Narrative Knowledge in the Anthropocene, Pieter Vermeulen
![IMG_0246[1]](https://podacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_02461.jpg)
According to Lauren Berlant, investment in narratives of progress are now fading as the mirage of the American dream is increasingly shown to be an instance of ‘cruel optimism’, an investment that has repeatedly failed to come good.
For Donald Pease, the events that defined the opening decade of the twenty-first century have delivered an unprecedented blow to the narrative of American exceptionalism.
For Amy Kaplan, the embrace of the US as ‘Homeland’ in the post-9/11 period signals an emergent national investment in roots that contradict the defining mythology of the US as a nation of immigrants uniquely committed to a boundless future.
For Paul Gilroy, the roots of the architecture of the so-called war on terror can be traced back to the European colonial administration, the spectre of which flies in the face of the claim that the United States represents a fundamentally anti-imperialist national project.
For Michelle Alexander, ‘the age of Obama’ continues to bear witness to a ‘new Jim Crow’. Given that the African American experience has long acted as whistleblower in relation to national myths and their progressive unfolding, the image of the plantation transformed into the site of mass incarceration for disproportionate numbers of the nation’s black population speaks powerfully to the lingering narrative of US triumphalism.
The conference sought not so much to assess the veracity of an emergent narrative of US decline, but rather to explore its representations in literature, film, political and journalistic discourse. It sought to explore the implications of the unravelling of American exceptionalism for a discipline that has been so dependent on this concept, however critical its engagement with it may have been.
What happens when, as Wai Chee Dimock suggests, we read US culture not as a ‘discrete entity’ but ‘as a criss-crossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures’? How can the field of US studies respond to the apparently changing status of the United States in the twenty-first century? What new narratives are emerging in response to new understandings of cultural, economic and environmental threat? What might it mean to inhabit a post-American world?
This Pod Academy Series was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley
Tags: American exceptionalism, American studies, Birkbeck University of London, US Studies
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