All Together Now Cover Image

All Together Now
All Together Now

Author(s): Sheila Hones
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Other Language Literature, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego

Summary/Abstract: In what way, exactly, is IASA international? First let’s acknowledge that the ‘international’ in the title is quite nicely ambiguous. On the one hand, it can mean that its subject is an international America. On the other hand, it can mean that it is an international association. And of course, in a neat con"ation, it can mean both: it can be an international association engaged in the study of an international America. Either way—international America or international association—the idea of the international is right at the heart of IASA. But what does the word actually mean in this context? How do commonsense understandings of ‘the international’ shape the ways in which IASA is perceived and performed? These are the issues I would like to address in this short comment, concentrating in particular on the link between the idea of the international and the concept of scale.While I think that this connection could be usefully explored in both of the dimensions folded into the association’s name (subject and practice, international America and international association), I would like to focus primarily on the latter, because it seems to me that the burning question facing IASA today is the question of membership. Given that most potential IASA members already belong to at least one other American studies association, where is the incentive to join (or become active in) this one? A good argument for investing in IASA is that, as an international association ‘one scale up’ from the various national associations, all of its members should be equally ‘at home’. In a multi-centered, international collective, nobody should be able to derive authority and authenticity from their literal or relational proximity to a dominant domestic center. But an alternative argument for joining IASA reads the association, just as cheerfully, as a space that is not so much multi-centered as uncentered, not so much the ‘top layer’ in an arrangement of scales as a space of constant internal realignments and co-presence, not so much an inter-national association as a not-national association.

  • Issue Year: 1/2006
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 18-25
  • Page Count: 8
  • Language: English