body

Critical attention to forms of material and abstract embodiment in American studies has been fostered through its interface with feminism, race and ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. The latter critical projects enable a turn to those human subjects historically associated with the discredited life of the material body and so constituted as marginal to the arenas of cultural production and political representation: women, Africans and their New World descendants, indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Asians, among other categories of “overembodied” ethnic, sexual, and classed identity. As it emerges transformed from this intellectual contact zone, American studies has addressed how collective and impersonal forms of political agency are routinely embodied in propertied, white men, whose political privilege depends on the association of other genders, races, and classes with corporealized identities. The circulation of such “overembodied” identities as public icons and spectacle has been crucial to the protection of established political privilege. At the same time, the visibility of disqualified political subjects within public culture has also generated important opportunities for contesting their disqualification.

Eva Cherniavsky, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, p. 28.

ethnicity

“[E]thnicity” has continued to be used widely as a description of and prescription for social life. Indeed, the acceptance and eventual celebration of ethnic difference was one of the most significant transitions of the twentieth century. Coincident with the increasing awareness of migration at the beginning of the century, a cosmopolitan appreciation of exotic difference arose. Writing in the days before World War I, a number of New York intellectuals embraced the rich diversity of the city, forecasting that the eclectic mix of global migrants was the future of U.S. society. Randolph Bourne’s vision of a “transnational America” (1916) and Horace Kallen’s description of “cultural pluralism” (1915) argued against the xenophobia that fueled the immigration exclusion acts of the same period, replacing it with an embrace of the different. The consumption by elite whites of the music and art of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, along with periodic fads for Oriental art and so-called primitive tribal objects, reflected an embrace of the exotic as valuable. The celebration of exoticism in theories about the cosmopolitan self laid the groundwork for two major developments concerning ethnicity. The first was the theoretical foundation for the commercialization of ethnic difference; the second was the creation of a new definition of elite, enlightened whiteness.

Henry Wu, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, p. 106.

America

Given this longstanding tendency to define America in mythic terms, we must be skeptical of the common boast that the United States is the only modern nation founded on an idea—democratic equality—rather than on a shared tribal or racial ancestry. Such a claim to exceptionalism is of course particularly appealing to intellectuals, who traffic in ideas. In the early years of American studies as an academic discipline, in the 1950s, the field’s foundational texts located the essential meaning of America variously in its history of westward movement, in religious and philosophical individualism, or in the worship of progress and modernity. As the discipline has evolved, it now attempts to show how such mythic definitions arise in response to historically specific needs and conditions. When we go in search of what is most profoundly American, scholars now insist, we blinker our sights to the ways in which the actual history of U.S. actions and policies may have diverged from those expectations. Moreover, any single response to the prompt to define “America” tends to imply that this larger idea or ideal has remained essentially unchanged over time, transcending ethnic and racial differences. “America” has generally been used as a term of consolidation, homogenization, and unification, not a term that invites recognition of difference, dissonance, and plurality—all issues of crucial import in the post–civil rights movement era.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, p. 20.

religion

To see how religion and secularism are historically and conceptually intertwined is to understand why those who are “secular” are no more necessarily progressive than those who are “religious.” Many major social justice and peace movements throughout the world—from Catholic base communities fighting poverty in Latin America, to the peaceful resistance of Tibetan Buddhism, to the civil rights movements of the United States—have religious roots. Secularism cannot save the world from colonial, racist, and sexist uses of religion because secularism is constitutive of and constituted by those very instantiations of religion. Religion has not faded away in modernity; rather, it is a constitutive category of the modern age. The question for anyone who would use “religion” as a term of analysis in American cultural studies is neither to distinguish the religious from the secular nor to ask “What is religion?” but to consider how the use of the term affects social relations and practices. Perhaps through such consideration our understanding of both the keyword “religion” and the myriad ways in which it constitutes social relations might change.

Janet R. Jakobsen, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, p. 204.

community

In the contemporary United States, the term “community” is used so pervasively it would appear to be nearly meaningless. And in fact the term is often deployed more for its performative effect of being “warmly persuasive” than for any descriptive work it accomplishes (R. Williams 1983, 76). Carrying only positive connotations—a sense of belonging, understanding, caring, cooperation, equality—“community” is deployed to mobilize support not only for a huge variety of causes but also for the speaker using the term. It functions in this way for Starbucks and McDonald’s, both of which display pamphlets in their stores proclaiming their commitment to community, as well as for the feminist scholar who seeks to legitimize her research by saying she works “in the community.” It is deployed across the political spectrum to promote everything from identity-based movements (on behalf of women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and others), to liberal and neoliberal visions of “civil society,” to movements seeking to restore or reaffirm so-called “traditional” social values and hierarchies.

Miranda Joseph, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, p. 57.

immigration

With the contemporary turn toward models of transnationalism, globalization, diaspora, and border studies that map more varied trajectories of migration, scholars have begun to rethink many of the foundational concepts of immigration scholarship, including static or place-bound ideas of culture, community, nation, race, gender, identity, and settlement. Much of this rethinking challenges concepts that are framed by trajectories of evolutionary development within the boundaries of the nation-state. Instead, newer work attends to contradiction, relationality, and back-and-forth dynamics and strives to undo conceptual binaries, theorize liminal positions, and resituate the border as a contact zone. These studies rethink immigrant agency and resistance by connecting material conditions to subject-formation processes, while also emphasizing multiple, interlocking inequalities at various scales.

Eithne Luibhéid, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, p. 129-30.

queer

The field of queer studies is relatively young, but as it has made inroads in a number of different academic fields and debates, some critics have asserted that the term is no longer useful, that it has become passé, that it has lost its ability to create productive friction. Pointing to its seeming ubiquity in popular-cultural venues such as the recent television shows Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or Queer as Folk, others criticize the ways that the greater circulation of “queer” and its appropriation by the mainstream entertainment industries have emptied out its oppositional political potential. Whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the increasingly visibility of “queer” culture remains an open question. Meanwhile, scholars continue to carefully interrogate the shortcomings and the untapped possibilities of “queer” approaches to a range of diverse issues, such as migration (Luibhéid and Cantú 2005) or temporality (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005). Whatever the future uses and contradictions of “queer,” it seems likely that the word will productively refuse to settle down, demanding critical reflection in order to be understood in its varied and specific cultural, political, and historical contexts.

Siobhan B. Somerville, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, p. 191.

Bruce Burgett

Bruce Burgett is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, and graduate faculty in the Department of English at the University of Washington Seattle. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic.

Glenn Hendler

Glenn Hendler is Associate Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Fordham University. He is the author of Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.

what is a keyword?

In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976/1983), Raymond Williams described keywords as important elements in a living vocabulary made up of "binding words in certain activities and their interpretation" and "indicative words in certain forms of thought."  Both Keywords for American Cultural Studies and this website follow Williams's lead, while emphasizing that keywords are also sites of conflict and disagreement.  Keywords invite research and reflection because debates about culture and society can be enhanced -- rather than resolved or shut down -- by an increased understanding of the multiple genealogies of their structuring terms and the diverse conflicts and disagreements embedded in differing and contradictory uses of those terms.