| Popis: |
his is no ordinary time for American studies. It has never been more difficult—yet never more important—to explain how the abstract idea of "America" works in the world, to analyze the social relations it both enables and inhibits, to examine both the bright promises and the bitter betrayals of egalitarian and democratic aspirations that are voiced in its name. At this moment of danger, scholars in the field are asking, where does American studies stand and what do we do now? The nation whose history and culture frame American studies scholarship and teaching seems to be unraveling at the seams. Its economy, environment, and educational system are all in crisis because of the cumulative consequences of four decades of neoliberal dispossession, displacement, and disciplinary subordination. Unprecedented prosperity for the upper classes creates austerity for the masses. Privatization schemes enable elites to loot public resources for private gain. Corporate-controlled media outlets promote a pervasive culture of cruelty, callousness, and contempt. Warfare is now embraced enthusiastically as a permanent condition rather than tolerated reluctantly and regretfully as a temporary emergency. Long-standing legal and moral commitments to due process, habeas corpus, and equal protection have been abandoned. Relent- less regimes of race-based surveillance, mass incarceration, and targeted voter suppression systematically undermine the capacity of aggrieved communities of color to defend themselves politically. The criminal justice system routinely degrades and punishes poor people, but refuses to hold employers, investors, and owners accountable for continuously violating laws that prohibit housing and hiring discrimination, that protect the environment, that require payment of minimum wages, and that guarantee decent working conditions. Fear-laden fantasies about allegedly nonnormative sexual practices and gender identities fuel waves of moral panic about welfare, gay marriage, immigration, and reli- gious differences. A small cadre of affluent individuals—who comprise what surely must be the most sullen, surly, self-pitying, and sadistic group of "haves" in the history of the world—are no longer content with directing recreational hate against their usual targets: people of color, immigrants, Muslims, the |
