American Studies at the Crossroads: A Dialogue Toward Decentralized American Studies
American Studies at the Crossroads: A Dialogue Toward Decentralized American Studies

Summary/Abstract: American Studies does have a future. It is an inexorable future dictated by historical necessity. When necessity dictates, the outcome is not necessarily any more predictable than when the results might be dictated by chance or contingency. While human ingenuity has attained some success in preconditioning results, the law of unintended consequences is far from being domesticated to suit human intention, however.While a future for American Studies may seem to be inevitable, then, the shape of that future is far from certain. A modest quotient of certainty in this regard might consist in the plausible likelihood that the future of American Studies will be different from what its past has been. The measure of this difference can be attributable to two factors: 1) the transformations in the object of study and, 2) the transformative character of the disciplinary and discursive instruments with which American Studies carries out its labors as scholarly and pedagogical institutional formation. The changing morphology of the first (America) outpaces the morphing parameters of the latter (the Studies).

• Details
• Contents