Internationalizing American Studies
For people with a privileged view from the Northern Hemisphere, the map above is upside down. But perhaps it is Northerners who are upside down, or rather perhaps it is "the West" whose mapping of the rest of the globe has, since the beginning of the colonial era, literalized being "on top of the world" in revealing ways.
The field of American Studies has often neglected the wider world, both as a site of impact from United States economic, political and cultural power, and as a source of insight into and impact upon the US and those US scholars who presume to know their "own" nation best.
These North-centric and US-centric viewpoints have been under critical challenge for several decades now within the field of American Studies, but there remains much work to be done to relocate the US within wider global patterns of power, privilege and resistance.
The Washington State University Program in American Studies has long been, and continues to be, deeply involved in a number of significant efforts at "internationalizing" the field of American Studies. We believe that the domination of American Studies scholarship by US scholars is profoundly limiting and we support the efforts of many in the US-based American Studies community to include in our curriculum and scholarship the many brilliant critical voices from outside the United States.
We also strongly encourage international students to apply to the program and continue to seek ways to better meet their particular needs as scholars and teachers, from whom the US-born faculty and students learn an immense amount. Graduate students and visiting scholars have come to our program from Brazil, Denmark, China, Germany, Great Britain, Korea, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Moldova, Morocco, New Zealand, Okinawa, Panama, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, and Ukraine, among others.
Another key aspect of our internationalization efforts has been scholarly and curricular exchanges. Official efforts in this regard began for us in the fall of 1998 via a series of colloquia held here for international scholars enroute to ASA convention that year in Seattle.
Growing out of this project, we began a major four-year collaborative effort between WSU and several universities in Ukraine. Our task was to build a college-level American studies curriculum that was to become the model curriculum for the entire nation of Ukraine. The highly successful project involved a series of faculty exchanges and conferences over a period of four years.
When our Ukraine project was near completion, we became involved on a similar effort with Yunnan University in Kunming, People's Republic of China. We continue working with faculty at Yunnan to assist them in creating the first Master's degree in American Studies in western China. In turn, their faculty have worked with us to improve the quality of graduate education we offer international students in our WSU program.
We have also been involved for several years in a major transnational collaboration with Japanese scholars at ICU in Tokyo on peace studies. This extensive collaboration, working toward an interdisciplinary theory of peace and security, has produced several volumes of rich scholarship, as well as creating many highly productuve professional and persnal cross-cultural exchanges.
The "internationalization" of American Studies has been going on since the inception of the interdiscipline some fifty years ago. In recent years, however, these efforts have greatly intensified through such projects as an online electronic forum for critical discussion of American studies in international perspective, translation and publication efforts aimed at bringing foreign scholarship about America to US audiences, and increasing numbers of scholarly exchanges and collaborations (including bi- or multi-national courses conducted via the Internet), among many other efforts. (See our Key International AmSt Links).
The impulses behind this newest phase of internationalization are many and varied, but prime among them is a strong sense that forces to which scholars give such inadequate names as "globalization," and "transnationalism" are rapidly creating a more interdependent set of cultural relations in the world. We believe scholars reared outside the United States offer perspectives not generally available to US-born scholars, particularly with regard to the impact of American economic, political and cultural power on the rest of the world. And we believe the insider knowledge available to scholars raised in the United States can be useful to others around the globe.