Hemispheric Studies

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Bauer
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Investigation ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Hemispheric Studies ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
The 1960S

When, in 1990, Gustavo Pérez Firmat asked, “Do the Americas have a common literature?” He was responding to a fledgling critical endeavor that had been pioneered during the previous decade in only a handful of studies, by such Latin Americanists and literary comparatists as M. J. Valdés, José Ballón, Bell Gale Chevigny, Gari Laguardia, Vera Kutzinski, Alfred Owen Aldridge, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (“Cheek” 2). Although “inter-American literary studies”—the comparative investigation of the “literatures and cultures of this hemisphere” as one unit of study—seemed to Pérez Firmat “something of a terra incognita” in 1990 (“Cheek” 1–2), the hemispheric conception of American studies had originated in the United States some sixty years earlier with the Berkeley historian Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870–1953), who argued, in his seminal 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, for an “essential unity” in the history of the Western hemisphere (472). Although the contributing historians in Lewis Hanke's 1964 collection of essays Do the Americas Have a Common History? gave this “Bolton Thesis” a decidedly mixed review, the thesis provided the inspiration for Pérez Firmat's landmark collection and a starting point for much subsequent hemispheric scholarship. Meanwhile, inter-American studies has had a strong tradition in Europe that is, in fact, older than Pérez Firmat's or Hanke's collection. As early as the 1950s, the eminent Italian Americanist Antonello Gerbi was publishing his groundbreaking works in comparative hemispheric and Atlantic history, which studied the early modern polemic about the degenerative influences the New World environments had on plants, animals, and humans. Also, Hans Galinsky, at the University of Mainz, was exploring the literature of the European discovery and aesthetic forms such as the baroque in the early Americas from a comparative perspective in the 1960s.

Territorial and Early Statehood Periods

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresita Majewski ◽  
Lauren E. Jelinek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Southwest ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Cultural Heterogeneity ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Formative Time ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Trajectory

The archaeology of the territorial and early statehood periods (1850–1917) in the American Southwest was virtually terra incognita until the advent of government-mandated archaeology in the 1960s. Subsequent work has shown that historical archaeology has much to contribute to a fuller understanding of this dynamic and formative time in U.S. history. Historical-archaeological investigations have demonstrated that although the United States formally exerted control over Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico by the last half of the nineteenth century, the interactions among its Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican inhabitants strongly influenced the territory’s historical trajectory into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter provides a historic context and a selective overview of archaeological studies that relate to the key themes of shifting economies and cultural heterogeneity.

scholarly journals REVISTAS ACADÊMICAS DE EXTENSÃO UNIVERSITÁRIA NO BRASIL

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-75
Author(s):  
Geraldo Ceni Coelho
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
American Continent ◽  
Electronic Edition ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Distribución Geográfica ◽  
The 1960S

A publicação de revistas multidisciplinares dedicadas à extensão universitária é um fenômeno notável em vários países da América. Os periódicos mais antigos desta natureza são dos anos 1960, nos Estados Unidos, quando surgiu o Journal of Extension. No Brasil, foram detectadas 29 revistas multidisciplinares dedicadas à extensão universitária ainda em atividade, e as mais antigas entre elas foram iniciadas nos anos 1990. Porém, outras revistas com perfil editorial semelhantes foram detectadas e, embora descontinuadas, iniciaram na década anterior. A região Sul apresenta 12 (41%) das revistas em atividade, e a região sudeste nove (31%), o que indica uma distribuição geográfica desigual no país. O número de revistas multidisciplinares dedicadas à extensão universitária cresceu muito, praticamente triplicando nos últimos dez anos. Nas revistas brasileiras, há uma forte predominância de trabalhos publicados cujo conteúdo se refere a relatos de experiências de projetos de extensão. Poucos são os trabalhos oriundos da pesquisa na extensão universitária, ou em temas que possam subsidiá-la. A qualidade editorial da maioria das revistas apresenta aspectos a serem aperfeiçoados, destacando-se, o corpo editorial e a periodicidade. Palavras-chave: edição eletrônica, extensão universitária, periódicos.     Academic Journals on University Extension in Brazil Abstract: The publication of multidisciplinary journals dedicated to university extension is a remarkable phenomenon in several countries in the American continent. The oldest publications of this nature date back to the 1960s in the United States, when the first issue of the Journal of Extension was released. In Brazil, 29 multidisciplinary active journals dedicated to university extension can be detected, being the oldest among them released in the 1990s. Other journals with similar editorial profile were detected in the previous decade, however, these publications were later  discontinued. In the Southern region of Brazil there are 12 (41%) of the extension journals in activity, and in the Southeast region there are nine (31%), indicating an uneven geographical distribution in the country. The number of multidisciplinary journals dedicated to university extension has almost tripled over the last ten years. In the Brazilian journals, there is a strong predominance of publications whose content regarding experience reports of extension projects. A few are derived from research activities in university extension projects, or on topics that may relate to it. The editorial quality of most journals shows areas to be potentially improved, especially regarding the editorial board and the periodicity. Keywords: electronic edition, university extension, periodicals.   Las revistas académicas de extensión universitaria en Brasil Resumen: La publicación de revistas multidisciplinares dedicadas a la extensión universitaria es un fenómeno notable en muchos países de América. Las revistas más antiguas de esta naturaleza son de los años 60, en los Estados Unidos, cuando surgió el Journal of Extension. En Brasil, se detectaron 29 revistas multidisciplinares dedicadas a la extensión universitaria y que siguen activas, siendo las primeras iniciadas en la década de 1990. Sin embargo, se verificaron otras revistas con perfil editorial similar y, aunque discontinuadas, se iniciaron en la década anterior. La región sur de Brasil tiene 12 (41%) de las revistas de extensión en actividad, y la región sudeste tiene nueve (31%), lo que indica una distribución geográfica desigual en el país. El número de revistas multidisciplinares dedicadas a la extensión universitaria ha crecido hasta casi el triple en los últimos diez años. En las revistas brasileñas, hay un fuerte predominio de artículos cuyo contenido se refiere a informes de experiencias de proyectos de extensión. Son pocos los trabajos son derivados de la investigación en la extensión universitaria, o en temas que puedan subsidiarla. La calidad editorial de la mayoría de las revistas muestra áreas de mejora potencial, destacando el consejo editorial y la periodicidad. Palabras-clave: edición electrónica, extensión universitaria, publicaciones periódicas.

Repositioning Indianness: Native American Organizations in Portland, Oregon, 1959––1975

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Shifts

This article examines the processes of community building among American Indians who migrated to Portland, Oregon, in the decades following World War II, contextualized within a larger movement of Indians to the cities of the United States and shifts in government relations with Indian people. It argues that, during the 1960s, working-and middle-class Indians living in Portland came together and formed groups that enabled them to cultivate "Indianness" or to "be Indian" in the city. As the decade wore on, Indian migration to Portland increased, the social problems of urban Indians became more visible, and a younger generation emerged to challenge the leadership of Portland's established Indian organizations. Influenced by both their college educations and a national Indian activist movement, these new leaders promoted a repositioning of Indianness, taking Indian identity as the starting point from which to solve urban Indian problems. By the mid-1970s, the younger generation of college-educated Indians gained a government mandate and ascended to the helm of Portland's Indian community. In winning support from local, state, and federal officials, these leaders reflected fundamental changes under way in the administration of U.S. Indian affairs not only in Portland, but also across the country.

Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Virgin Land ◽  
American Values ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Adam

While American Studies continues to be a popular subject in universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, several influential critics have recently expressed some sense that its methodological direction appears increasingly uncertain. To be sure, there never was a time when this field's methodology has not been problematic: arguments about what American Studies should include, and indeed whether its eclectic narratives could reasonably be said to constitute an academic discipline at all, have circulated many times since the rapid growth of the subject in the late 1940s. This development has been well documented over the last few years. Philip Gleason has shown how the end of the Second World War led to a patriotic desire to identify certain specifically American values and characteristics; this led to various mythic idealizations of the American spirit in seminal critical works of the 1950s; and this in turn was followed by a more empiricist reaction in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists and historians of popular culture were concerned to demystify those earlier, holistic images of a “virgin land” and an “American Adam.” These are old controversies, and I do not intend to rehearse them in detail here. From the perspective of the early 1990s, what is more urgent is to consider how, or indeed if, the field of American Studies might continue to make an important contribution to our understanding of the United States, as well as a significant intervention within the world of learning more generally.

The Cold War and the Transformation of Latin American Studies in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald H. Chilcote
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Field Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The Cold War assumptions of mainstream Latin American studies in the United States were challenged in the 1960s by a new generation of academics that opened up the field to progressive thinking, including Marxism. West Coast intellectuals played a major role in this transformation. These new Latin Americanists rejected the university-government-foundation nexus in the field and emphasized field research that brought them into close relationships with Latin Americans struggling for change and engaging with radical alternatives to mainstream thinking. In the course of this work, they confronted efforts to co-opt them and to discourage and even prevent their field research. Despite this they managed to transform Latin American studies into a field that was intellectually and politically vibrant both in theory and in practice. Los supuestos de la Guerra Fría dominantes en los estudios latinoamericanos en los Estados Unidos fueron cuestionados en la década de 1960 por una nueva generación de académicos que abrió el campo al pensamiento progresista, incluso el Marxismo. Los intelectuales de la costa oeste jugaron un papel importante en esta transformación. Estos nuevos latinoamericanistas rechazaron el nexo universidad-gobierno-fundación que caracterizó el campo y enfatizaron la investigación en el terreno que los ubicó en una estrecha relación con los latinoamericanos que luchan por el cambio y se enfrentan con alternativas radicales al pensamiento dominante. En el curso de este trabajo, confrontaron esfuerzos para cooptarlos y desalentar e incluso prevenir su investigación en el terreno. A pesar de esto, lograron transformar los estudios latinoamericanos en un campo que era intelectualmente y políticamente vibrante tanto en la teoría como en la práctica.

Race and Ethnicity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amritjit Singh ◽  
Aaron Babcock
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory

Racial patterns at any given time have been intertwined with local contexts, economic and political conditions, technological change, and a growing awareness of the socially constructed nature of race and gender. Race in the modern sense of the term emerged first in the 18th century amid the transformative changes of the industrial revolution, a growing slave trade, and the spread of European settler colonialism and imperialism in Asia, Africa, and the Western hemisphere. As a means of categorizing populations, race was a useful tool in justifying both slavery and imperialism. A further solidification of racial taxonomy developed over the course of the 19th century in which peoples and nations were grouped as genetically distinct. Race was thus essentialized and difference became widely accepted as biological and measurable. In the early decades of the 20th century, the view of race as biologically determined and immutable gradually gave way to sociological and anthropological reconsiderations of previously held assumptions. Contemporaneous to this reorientation of thinking on race was the growth of ethnicity as a related but distinct form of grouping populations that reframed identity as rooted in a shared national and sociopolitical history. In the 20th century, race across scholarly disciplines began to be divested gradually of its biological and genetic aspects and a recognition of race as a legal and social construction had emerged, especially in Postcolonial Theory and Critical Race Theory (CRT). In fact, what was viewed as “race” around 1900 (e.g., the Irish race, the Jewish race) came to be defined as “ethnicity” in the 20th century. For centuries, however, race has been used as a means for exercising power and control and as a defense of a racial caste system that privileges select groups. Through their many creative uses of memory and history, writers and artists in the United States and elsewhere have long responded in multiple genres by offering their own versions and visions of individual and community, complicating in the process our understandings of race, ethnicity, gender, nation, majoritarianism, and citizenship—the tangled issues that continue to haunt Americans and many others around the globe. Historians, literary scholars, and theorists have also played an active role in challenging old orthodoxies on race and ethnicity through multiple overlapping approaches, including African American Studies, Ethnic American Studies, Black Feminism, Postcolonial Studies, and Critical Race Theory (CRT).

American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?: Recent Redefinitions and the Meaning of Theory, History, and Practical Criticism

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 53-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guenter H. Lenz
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Thinking ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Practical Criticism

Since its beginning, the American Studies community has been remarkably uneasy about the role and meaning theoretical thinking about its premises and objectives should have in its work. Even more than the individual disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, the American Studies movement has again and again felt compelled to justify its existence and its aims, to develop a “method” or “philosophy” for its pursuits. But these attempts at theory more often than not have resulted in a glorification of practical or substantive work, or in an identification of its rationale with a few books by its major scholars. In the most recent time of “crisis,” the traditional opposition of “theory” to “practice” seems to have been confirmed, in one way or another, not only on a national scale but in its international perspective. In a recent interview, Henry Nash Smith, using two articles by young German scholars as a starting point, endorsed the old view that “practice is much more important” in America and that, “almost by instinct, in this country we are less, far less theoretical than the Germans.” It should be mentioned that, ironically, contributions to a theoretical definition of American Studies became far more numerous in the United States just when the younger German scholars began to turn from theoretical debates to substantive work, which shows that Smith's “instinctual” distinction actually prevents us from realizing the fundamental historical differences in the development and the significance of the interaction of theory and practice in the two countries.

Nea Presidential Address: The Role of Race-Conscious Policies in Addressing past and Present Discrimination

1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-35
Author(s):  
Charles L. Betsey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Economy ◽  
Market Situation ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

The impact of the current recession on the labor market situation of African-Americans highlights their longer-run plight. While there have been signs of improvement, especially during the 1960s, black per capita earnings have fallen despite improvements in their relative wages and occupational standing. Public debate over the recent Civil Rights Bill, the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas, and the Supreme Court's Croson decision, has raised again the issue of using race-conscious policies to address past and present discrimination. This article reports on a study of Birmingham, Alabama as a case study. It suggests that a combination of race-neutral and race-conscious approaches may be needed to address the problems blacks continue to face in the United States economy.

The State of (Dis)Union: American Studies in Britain

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson ◽  
Will Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Proper Noun ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Size Matter

“What's in a name?” Janice A. Radway asked in her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association (1), invoking, without explicit comment, a transatlantic literary reference to explore the Americanness of the ASA's title. Such a gesture speaks to the increasingly transatlantic or comparative element apparent in studies of American culture, both in the United States and elsewhere. What's in a collective proper noun? one might also ask. (And don't those words — proper, collective — just itch to be explored themselves?) If anything, American Studies presents itself as neither collective nor proper, but as an arena for the multiple explorations of mythical Americanness and the boundaries and borders of the term. Lee E. Heller argues that the very term American Studies is “reflective of a variety of imperialist erasures and appropriations” (337), but even Radway could come up with no better term to replace it, trying out a variety of cumbersome titles before returning to the original as the inadequate but perhaps inevitable designation of what we as Americanists do.If Radway (rightly) questioned the American designation, here we might look again at the second term, for American Studies is delineated with a capital S in the United Kingdom, and often (though not always) by a lowercase s in the United States. Does size matter? Is American Studies in the United Kingdom different from American studies as written, read, produced, and enacted in the United States? The clear divisions suggested here — Americans write studies, Britons write Studies — may be as false as the old, nationally bounded constructions of French feminism versus Anglo-American feminism, and the peregrinations of academics across the globe mean that many British Americanists, like ourselves, have America hiding in our backgrounds (if you don't know us) and foregrounded in our accents (if you do).

British Film Comedy

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
William V. Costanzo
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Romantic Comedies ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Monty Python

The English reputation for dry, reserved expressions of “humour” is the starting point for an exploration of the sub-genres that typify Britain’s comic legacy. This chapter reviews the history of British comedies from the early clown-based films that sprang from vaudeville through the Ealing Studios and Carry On cycles of the 1940s and 1950s, to the Monty Python parodies and multicultural satires of the 1960s and 1970s, the regional and romantic comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, and beyond. An important focus of this chapter is how a country that shares a common language with the United States comes to distinguish its film industry from Hollywood, building on its own unique history and cultural traditions.

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