American Studies as Area Studies Foil

Critics of midcentury American Studies have often implied that the field, dedicated to the study of American culture, functioned as an area studies field–another product of the Cold War effort to maintain global dominance through the scholarly understanding of a population. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of the field is a distortion: American Studies established a decade before the area studies of Russia, China, and elsewhere; it leaned humanistic, where they skewed toward the social sciences; and it never aspired to national security (to use an anachronism) or control.

But to say that American Studies was not itself an area studies field is not to say that it was wholly uninvolved in the latter project. Instead, midcentury American Studies helped to create the image of the US as a sort of cultural and political neutral, a baseline from which other cultures–especially those with communist inclinations–deviated. Scholars in the field did this by embracing their right and ability to criticize the US. In the hands of American Studies scholars, the US’s tolerance of internal critique became its defining characteristic, the quality that made the U.S. a free, healthy society, the quality that set it apart from the Soviet Union. They thus contributed to the efforts to establish the US as the standard for free and fair governance, as the neutral baseline by which to analyze all other nations’ cultures and politics.

This paper explores American Studies’ complex relationship to area studies in order to gain a clearer understanding not only of the field itself but also of the dynamics that shaped the academic study of cultures during the early Cold War.