The Politics of Postnational American Studies

The Politics of Postnational American Studies examines the debate over the reorientation of American Studies along postnationalist coordinates within the context of the responses to Janice Radway's 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association. Postnational American Studies describes an interdisciplinary formation that would change the epistemological objects and introduce an alternative politics of power and knowledge for the field. But the postnational does not operate on its own; it is a construction that is internally differentiated out of its intersection with other unfolding relations. The Politics of Postnational American Studies describes a contest between on the one hand the postnational state that serves the transnational corporations and facilitates its needs for exploitable labor and on the other hand the transnational social movements and subnational collective practices that seek to reorganize gendered and racialized capitalist relations around more equitable social and economic standards.