Empire as Province: On Teaching American Studies in Amsterdam
The strategy, counterintuitive though it may seem, is to cultivate an America-fatigue in the classroom.
OCTOBER 17, 2024
The American Studies program in which I teach can trace its lineage back, in some form, to 1947. My office at the University of Amsterdam is in the 17th-century building that once housed the Dutch East India Company (red brick, white stone, old-Dutch-looking), though after many renovations the inside of it feels less like the headquarters of a global empire and more like a Victorian insane asylum (high ceilings, antiseptic white walls, labyrinthine, echoey). Students have pursued American Studies for various reasons, from the profound to the pragmatic. Some associate the United States with power and modernity. Some maintain a sharp criticism of America that dates to the presidency of George W. Bush and the depths of the War on Terror. Some maintain a liberal idealism about America (not yet disillusioned) revived in the presidency of Barack Obama. Some, having grown up with a mass culture than seems more “American” than anything else, find their own national culture provincial. Some are attracted not to American Studies per se, but to American academic discourses that seem more advanced than European discourses, especially about race, immigration, post-coloniality, gender and sexuality.
Teaching American Studies is a strange exercise — especially abroad — and it is made stranger whenever an election looms. As a field, its academic foundations are lively but wobbly, and we’re tethered to an object of study — “America” — that calls out for constant demystification. Elections only compound the burden. But the burdens are different abroad, as are the liberties one can take.
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What is, or was, American Studies? A normal academic discipline can be defined by its history as a profession, its object of study and its epistemological crises. Consider history, for instance: the American Historical Association was founded in 1884; historians study the past; and the impossible imperative of objectivity has been the history profession’s signature epistemological crisis. This is reductive, to be sure, but it is at least possible to narrate the history of the historical discipline this way.
The late-blooming American Studies is not a discipline in the usual sense. It is an unnatural formulation. It used to be more natural, or at least to seem more natural. In the American context, American Studies had emerged in the 1930s as an “interdisciplinary” provocation (when the idea of threading academic disciplines still had the spark of newness) across literature, history, anthropology, sociology and any other shelf that could hold Moby-Dick. After the war, American Studies programs (like mine) proliferated abroad. In some corners, American Studies was “a Marshall Plan of the mind” (as more than one American Studies overture would be dubbed, in earnest or in jest), an academic layer of the broader liberal or Cold War-inflected project of “telling America’s story to the world” (as the mantra of the United States Information Agency had it). Or American Studies was a more self-consciously critical interrogation of precisely that project.
In both cases, the field’s justification was self-evident. Whatever “America” was, it needed studying, and studying it was a calling. All these energies, meanwhile — ideological, aesthetic, methodological — could be internalized or inverted abroad. “The world” tells other stories, and American Studies has been an outsider’s game as much as an insider’s game. There’s an academic in-joke in Paul Beatty’s novel Slumberland (2008), in which the narrator — a black American DJ in Berlin — learns that “seventy percent of scholarship on African-Americans is in German.” Seventy!
Contemporary American Studies has long since escaped the gravitational pull of “Americanness.” Decades of canon-broadening, canon-busting, revisionism and re-revisionism, have changed the object of study many times over.
All this and we have not even gotten to the field’s object of study, which is … what? the United States? The mythology of “America”? The American empire? The Americas? The original search — now quaint-seeming — was for the “Americanness” of American literature, music, philosophy, architecture, machines, gardens, science, death, democracy and whatever else. “What’s ‘American’ About America?”, the American scholar John A. Kouwenhoven asked in 1956, in a classic-but-rarely-read essay. His answer was abstract yet refreshing: a logic of the “open form” was the common thread he saw running through a catalog of paradigmatically “American” things:
The Manhattan skyline
The gridiron town plan
The skyscraper
The Model-T Ford
Jazz
The Constitution
Mark Twain’s writing
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
Comic strips
Soap operas
Assembly-line production
Chewing gum.
These varied American synecdoches, Kouwenhoven suggested, are open-form rather than closed-form. They are “composed of simple and infinitely repeatable units.” None is rooted; their principle is motion rather than stasis, process more than substance. Chewing gum was Kouwenhoven’s punchline: modern chewing gum, he was happy to discover, was patented by an American in 1869. And what is chewing gum? A “non-consumable confection, its sole appeal is the process of chewing it.” It is a performance of food without any actual nourishment.
I can imagine being, say, an uneasy European intellectual in the 1950s and finding this account of America at once amusing, slippery and reassuring. What Kouwenhoven found in chewing gum was a potentially humanizing orientation to modernity. I read Kouwenhoven’s American Studies as an effort to soothe, for instance, the dyspepsia of Frankfurt Schoolers. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had taken chewing gum as a symbol of “the cult of cheapness.” Gum was like Hollywood, a cheap product behind which lay enormous capital: “For a few coins you can see the film which cost millions, for even less you can buy the chewing gum behind which stand the entire riches of the world.” In Kouwenhoven’s account, such apprehensions derived “from old habit and the persistence of values and tastes which were indigenous to a very different social and economic system.” But the new, open system would unlock and inexorably erode the “closed systems” that “Western man” had created “in his tragic search for permanence and perfection.”
I still assign Kouwenhoven’s essay, to give students a glimpse of “classic” American Studies scholarship, and then to illuminate our distance from that era’s defaults. The essay still charms, and even if several items on Kouwenhoven’s list have lost their luster. (Who, today, would associate the American Constitution with openness?)
Trump’s election threw another wrench into “American Studies” as an academic enterprise. In one way, it narrowed the field, or rather focused it, the way a magnet will pull scattered iron filings into an arbitrary shape. The election was something like an absolute event, that could absolutely confirm or absolutely disconfirm a person’s understanding of America.
Contemporary American Studies has long since escaped the gravitational pull of “Americanness.” Decades of canon-broadening, canon-busting, revisionism and re-revisionism, have changed the object of study many times over. The Vietnam War occasioned magisterial excavations of American imperialism, which tracked generational dramas and cleavages within the field. I came of age as an Americanist early in the present century, when the imperative of “transnationalism” — a research agenda that decenters the nation as the default container of an inquiry — had eroded the “American exceptionalism” that had been, for better or worse, the field’s rudder. Through the abysmal ongoingness of the war on terror, transnationalism — at least for scholars in the U.S. — would, as a justification for the field, take on a moral imperative: not merely a research agenda but a corrective to the blind spots of scholars past and a righteous lever against the American present.
That transnationalism vs. exceptionalism debate (if debate is the right word) has itself come to feel old — as if we all realized, eventually, that the “American” of American Studies was a can of worms best left closed.
Trump’s election threw another wrench into “American Studies” as an academic enterprise. In one way, it narrowed the field, or rather focused it, the way a magnet will pull scattered iron filings into an arbitrary shape. The election was something like an absolute event, that could absolutely confirm or absolutely disconfirm a person’s understanding of America. All roads — historical, cultural, ideological — could lead to it. “American history” now had something like an ending (a shitty one), negating the generically-optimistic liberal ending (or, more precisely, the refusal to consider the possibility of an ending) that had long framed the national narrative. If Trump was the return of the repressed, it seemed there was no choice but to scour the national past for Trump-precedent, for Trump-analogy, for Trump-genealogy — for a satisfying explanation, either in a mode of grief or I-told-you-so. If anything, it was too easy to Trumpify American history, to see the whole thing as poisoned and stupid, to point out that, say, George Washington was also an odious real estate speculator, as if that were a revelation. This did little to deflate the bubble, but rather pinned Trump like a tweet, ever more stubbornly, to the top of the “American” timeline.
It did not shock a European student to ponder Trump … as a Europeanization of American politics: half pseudo-fascist and half pseudo-aristocrat, in Italian suits and French cuffs.
Was it weirder outside the U.S.? In places (like the Netherlands) that are historic beneficiaries of American hegemony rather than casualties of it, I suppose it was. On the night of November 8, 2016, I had reluctantly agreed (as an “America-expert”) to join one of the panels at all-night verkiezingsnacht (election night) party at a big concert venue in Amsterdam. This was the kind of event I didn’t know existed before living abroad: American politics as European sporting event, as gladiatorial spectacle, with stakes both enormous and vaporous. (I went home at about 1 a.m. and missed the morning-after “American” pancakes served to those who made it through.) In my morning-after seminar, by coincidence, the text on the syllabus was “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) — a story I’ve always included in my general course (“American History, Beginning to End”), because it is about sleeping through the American Revolution.
I feared it would take a force of will to prevent American Studies from devolving into a kind of Trump Studies: locked in a claustrophobic present, debating whether Trump was the disease to cure or the symptom from which to diagnose. But here in Europe, at least, the field did not flatten. In the years that followed I would glean from students a readier desensitization, a capacity for ironic distance, an openness to seeing Trumpism as part of broader phenomena rather than a particularly American scourge. The contradictions were more legible from outside. Trump could represent, as the Dutch Americanist Rob Kroes put it in 2019, the late stage of an American process wherein reality-TV simulacra had reached a hideous autonomy. But it did not shock a European student to ponder Trump, on some frequencies at least, as a Europeanization of American politics: half pseudo-fascist and half pseudo-aristocrat, in Italian suits and French cuffs.
At the same time, aspiring Americanists on this side of the Atlantic have absorbed American politics with an ever-accelerating immediacy. To the extent that American Studies inside the U.S. assumed the burdens of “resistance,” students abroad also became more likely to absorb “American” scripts of righteousness. I found newly resonant certain works of critical theory from earlier decades — theory that served, in effect, to critique the critique. In 1999, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquaint suggested that alongside the American empire that scholars are accustomed to criticizing, there runs a subtler discursive empire of American scholarly vocabularies. These vocabularies ostensibly challenge the empire but end up making scholars abroad see the world in American terms, a process they dubbed “the cunning of imperialist reason.”
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Election years are dreadful for teaching, in my selfish experience, because elections tend to calcify American Studies into melodrama. Perhaps the escape, pedagogically at least, is from one “America” (and its attendant national melodrama) into another: the outsider’s utterly imaginary America, be it farce or fancy. For years I’ve taught a sprawling course on international perspectives of the United States; it has become an outlet for pedagogical experiments. It includes classics — Harriet Martineau, Tocqueville, Marx, Gramsci — but also curiosities.
Take, for instance, an Egyptian satire from 1993, from the playwright Ali Salem, which opens with a deadpan confession: “I was going to keep my marriage to Ivana Trump a secret forever,” the Egyptian narrator admits.
But because of the gossip and all the lies that were published about me in the Western press — lies that were meant to smear my reputation — I had no choice but to speak out, especially when it was rumored that it was I who spoiled the relationship between Ivana and her ex, the millionaire Mr. Trump who, I must say, is a fine man for he never said a bad word about me or her.
I happened upon this satire in an out-of-print anthology of translated Arabic travel writing about the U.S. There follows a string of jokes I don’t quite get — a flirtatious Ivana willing to bankroll theaters in the Middle East, a joke about American debt forgiveness. Our narrator is cautioned about Trump’s first wife by a friend: “She’s no ordinary American. If you cross her, this may reflect on America’s behavior in the whole Middle East region. Before you allow yourself to cross her, think about the fate of millions of people in the region.” Not getting the jokes from an earlier era’s satire of Trump-world is itself an instructive disorientation. It takes us out of the claustrophobic present, at least for a moment.
Or another approach. Since a yes-or-no “fascism debate” swirls once again around Trump, it’s an eerie change of scenery to inhabit (at least for the length of a seminar) Berthold Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written in 1941, which created a cartoonishly American allegory for Hitler’s rise. Brecht called it a “parable play.” It tracks the ascent of the gangster Arturo (Adolf) — a “Son of the Bronx” — and his conquest of Chicago (Germany), of the Cauliflower Trust (Prussian Junkers), of the nearby town of Cicero (Austria). He’s aided by henchmen Giri (Göring), Givola (Goebbels) and Ernesto Roma (Ernst Röhm), the latter purged in the play’s version of a night of the long knives. It is, among other things, a play about celebrity and stagecraft: In the sixth scene, an “Actor” teaches Ui how to fold his arms and coaches him to sound Shakespearean, after which Ui merely bellows: “Murder! Extortion! Highway robbery! Machine-guns sputtering on our city streets!”
Or yet another approach. If the world is forced, as we apparently are, into ceaseless armchair psychoanalyses of American presidents (as if there is anything like a there there), why not go to the Freudian fountain’s source? I am tempted to assign Sigmund Freud’s confession, written in the late 1930s, not long before his death, “that the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, was from the beginning unsympathetic to me, and that this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.” Freud was talking about Woodrow Wilson, whose megalomania he likened to Kaiser Wilhelm’s. (Also tempting: Freud calling America “a gigantic mistake.”)
There are countless other texts like these, outsider travelogues and outsider fictions that rhyme, in a slanted way, with our own moment — each text a crack in, or a detour from, the usual melodrama, each one a lesson in complication or particularization. Simone de Beauvoir’s L'Amérique au jour le jour (1948), which marvels at Manhattan (“What a field day a bomber would have!”) and seeks hipster authenticity in Harlem jazz. Or Kafka’s unfinished novel Der Verschollene (“The Missing Person” or “The Man Who Disappeared,” written in the early 1910s, and published posthumously as Amerika), an American immigration story from a writer who never crossed the Atlantic. Kafka has the Statue of Liberty hold not a torch but a sword, and he strands his protagonist in a misspelled “Oklahama.”
Anything, that is, to break students out of the present — to break them out of American time itself, to show them other pasts, other futures and other ways to chew chewing gum. In “Ur-Fascism,” an oft-cited essay about fascism, published in 1995, Umberto Eco recalls being 12 or 13 years old in 1945, when the war ended in Italy. The first American soldiers he met were African American, and it was a black officer, he wrote, who “gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long.” This officer spoke enough French to converse with Italian ladies in a garden. What the young Eco does with the gum would be so strange to us now: “At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.” It is a child’s small act of preservation in the wake of war. What Kouwenhoven cast as a mere performance of food was for Eco a deeper allegory of nourishment.
The strategy, then, counterintuitive though it may seem, is to cultivate an America-fatigue in the American Studies classroom. (I have in mind Der Amerika-Müde — The America-Weary — a wry German novel from 1855, as yet untranslated, which deflated European associations of America with natural grandeur, with immigrant wonderlands and with Franklinian pursuits of happiness.) Amerika-Müdigkeit is not “anti-Americanism” (a mostly useless term), so much as a pause, allowing the Americanist abroad to de-center and de-mystify their oversaturated, ostensible object of study. “America” can then be contemplated not as, say, the paradigmatic promised land, nor as an irresistible future, nor as an inevitably decadent Rome, but rather as a place (or a non-place) that one visits and, more importantly, leaves — or never even goes to. It can be clarifying to make the empire a province.
✺ Published in “Issue 21: America” of The Dial
