Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association, “What's in a Name,” Janice Radway invited the disparate international and transnational, as well as sub-national research communities out of which the American Studies Association was comprised to reconceptualize the nature of their undertakings. The interrogative “What's in a Name?” gave expression to the discontent of the members of the American Studies Association who either felt their work had been misrepresented within that categorization, or who found it too restrictive, or insufficiently accommodating. If “American” would not secure for the association a name to which all of its members would want to answer, perhaps a crisis in the name could. Insofar as Radway's question “What's in a Name?” undermined “America's” power to totalize the field and unify the membership, it also brought into visibility and invited collective reflection upon the differences in the “studies” to which the organization's disparate members had devoted themselves. After citing the impact of a wide range of discourse formations and emergent sub-fields – British Cultural Studies, the discourse of the borderlands and the critique of US imperialism – on the field of American Studies, Radway articulated her question to the challenges posed to a monolitihic conceptualization of the field by Americanist scholars whose projects intersected ... log in or subscribe to read full text