Intro to American Studies Final Paper

This is my final paper for last semester’s intro class. I had a death in the family and took an incomplete, and now I just can’t seem to get it done. All I need is something deliverable and to get it off my plate. Thanks in advance.

I have to use sources from the semester’s assigned readings, so I have attached links to the relevant chapters/articles I’ve chosen below.

Prompt:

Option 2: What is American Studies?

(Recommended for MA students)

As weve discussed this semester, American Studies, like the nation it studies, is sprawling, complicated, and messy.

Looking back at the readings weve done for this class, how would you characterize American Studies as a scholarly discipline? Using multiple readings from the class (approximately 4-6), define what you see as important questions or methods in the field. In this paper, you can discuss how the discipline has changed over time. Or, you could approach it by identifying key threads or themes that you see as operative to the field and that you find particularly compelling.

An A paper will do the following

• Reference specific authors and readings from the semester
• Make an argument about American Studies as a scholarly discipline following from those readings
• Use and analyze quotes from the texts to support your assertions
• Uses parenthetical citations for all material from class. E.g Gone with the Wind is racist. (CLR James, On Gone with the Wind, p. #) or, As CLR James argues, Gone with the Wind is racist. (On Gone with the Wind, p. #)

I have written an introduction and thesis as follows:

As a field of study, American Studies is best concisely summarized as interdisciplinary. One could interpret that to mean scholars are given the space to study subjects in as broad a range as from nineteenth century American landscape paintings to mid-twentieth century sports leagues as a phenomenological site for integration, for example. Interdisciplinary, however, also means that scholars may approach their studies from a variety of background practices, such as anthropology, music theory analysis, or conceptual cybernetics, to name a few. With such a definition as sprawling as one might gather from the above, the question of What is American Studies? has still not been answered, and it is through an exploration of a variety of sources from the Introduction to American Studies course that I will attempt to characterize the field in a reasonably categorized and concise manner.

The discipline is focused not only on content, but also on the application of methodology, theory, and historiography. In this essay, I will use the books Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature by Janice Radway, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, by Nicole R. Fleetwood, and Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture by George Lipsitz, as well as essays by Benjamin Wiggins and by Theodor Adorno and Maxwell Horkheimer, You Talkin Revolution, Sweetback? and Concept of Cultural Hegemony, respectively. The works by Radway, Fleetwood, and Wiggins will function as the site of investigation for methodology and content analysis, while in pitting Lipsitz opposite Adorno and Horkheimer, I will frame the boundaries of the scope of the field. In doing so, I posit that the contrasting ideologies of Lipsitz (that all aspects of cultural expression are inherently resistant) and Adorno and Horkheimer (that cultural expression is informed by and contained within dominant hegemonic systems) ultimately support one another in the added nuance that there may not be one definitive answer.

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For structure, you could explicate the ideas of Lipsitz and Adorno/Horkheimer to begin. Then compare each of the Radway, Fleetwood, and Wiggins pieces with the perspectives of Lipsitz and Adorno/Horkheimer, or even argue why one falls into the other better. Personally, I tend to align more with Lipsitz’s view, but Adorno and Horkheimer provide an important counter argument. You could also spend time with methodology (Radway surveying women readers, Wiggins textual analysis of film and distribution/reception, Fleetwood production circumstances of art)

For quotes I can recommend a few examples for each source, and you don’t have to use all of them:

Lipsitz:

• “Popular culture has no fixed foms: the historical circumstances of reception and appropriation determine whether novels or motion pictures or videos belong to a sphere called popular culture.” (p. 13)
• “Cultural forms create conditions of possibility, they expand the present by informing it with memories of the past and hopes for the future… Politics and culture maintain a paradoxical relationship in which only effective political action can win breathing room for a new culture, but only a revolution in culture can make people capable of political action.” (p. 16)
• “Much of the power of the Mardi Gras Indian ritual stems from its force as a counter-narrative challenging the hegemony of New Orleans’ social elite.” (p. 247) + acknowledgement that degree of challenge is open to dispute (248)

Adorno and Horkheimer:

• “The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it.” (p. 96)
• “The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly misrepresented as natural… Mass culture thereby reveals the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throughout the bourgeois era and is wrong only in priding itself on this murky harmony between universal and particular.” (p. 125)

Radway:

• “Not only do the chains make books easier for American women to obtain, but they also set up their stores so that the experience of buying a book in a bookstore seems no more threatening or out-of-the-ordinary than that of picking up a paperback while waiting for groceries to move down the conveyor at the market.” (p. 38)
• “… By participating in a fantasy that they are willing to admit is unrealistic, the Smithton women are permitting themselves the luxury of self-indulgence while simultaneously providing themselves with the opportunity to experience the kind of care and attention they commonly give to others.” (p. 100)

Fleetwood:

• “Carceral aesthetics is the production of art under the conditions of unfreedom; it involves the creative use of penal space, time, and matter… Immobility, invisibility, stigmatization, lack of access, and premature death govern the lives of the imprisoned and their expressive capacities.” (p. 25)
• “Vernacular prison portraits provide an important counterpoint to a long history of photographing imprisoned people as part of carceral indexes… Prison studio photos are crucial modes of self-representation that serve as shadow archives to governmental indexes of criminalized peoples. They wrestle against the public removal and punitive isolation of the state.” (p. 236)

Wiggins:

• “Smooth space stands in contradistinction to striated space. Striated space is the space of capital and order. Striation divides space, parcels it out, measures it, and quantifies it. Smooth space resists all these traits. It is nomadic space… Sweetback uses these smooth passageways to escape the city. He travels through the undefined spaces of the urban environment…” (p. 35).
• “Although Van Peebles flouted the conventions of production, signification, and distribution, he failed to challenge the norms of exhibition. By ignoring this aspect of the cinematic experience, he exposed his film to misunderstanding as well as cooptation.” (p. 43) (Sweetback leads to the rise of Blaxploitation films)