WORLD-SYSTEMING AMERICAN STUDIES
WORLD-SYSTEMING AMERICAN STUDIES

Summary/Abstract: Thomas Kuhn argued that theoretical paradigms fall away when they become increasingly unable to explain the material effects that their evidence presents. Something similar is happening within American cultural studies with the recent calls to internationalize its perspective. What institutional impact this rhetoric will mean for the current hegemony by US-based scholars on the conference-journal-press nexus remains to be seen. The slogan, however, accurately reflects a demagnetization of the field’s compass first noticeable with the growing interest in postcolonial theory. Could the study of a settler colony cite its own struggle against the European metropolis as authorizing credentials in the project of ‘third-world’ or ‘Southern’ antiimperialism? Or was this desire to incorporate postcolonialist discourse another international division of labor with the consumption of theoretical models produced by those associated with the peripheral regions?Postcolonialism’s reception in American Studies can be traced through the ensuing interest in globalization and oceanic studies, like the New Atlanticism, but its best legacy might be with the interest in redefining American Studies through the historical sociology of world-systems analyses, mainly associated with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. The grand narrative of world-systems analyses offers a more judicious mechanism for evaluating the place of the United States within the world (which also has implications for how postcolonial studies defines itself), and one, for reasons explained below, that is more open for Americanists outside of US institutions to participate in as equals.

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