Americanists in Unexpected Places

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”

Introduction

As “American dream” became a cliché in the twentieth century, the contrary refrain of American nightmare was probably inevitable. This book adopts the phrase “nightmare envy” to capture an atmosphere of transatlantic disparity, projection, recrimination, and longing. But the phrase’s ambiguity is deliberate: it isn’t always clear who is envying whom, or for what reason. Examples from Margaret Mead, David Potter, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, and William Faulkner offer variations on the theme. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories proposes an “Americanist century” that stands in curious tension with the American Century heralded by Henry Luce in 1941. The protagonists are the Americanists who negotiated the imperatives of military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe, as well as Japan. The introduction closes with one of the paradigmatic figures of the Americanist century, Ralph Ellison, and offers an interpretation of his European fictions, as well as previously unpublished manuscripts.