Президент American Studies Association, участвовавший в учредительной конференции нашей Ассоциации. Этот доклад
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ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫЙ БЮЛЛЕТЕНЬ
РОССИЙСКИЕ УНИВЕРСИТЕТЫ
АССОЦИАЦИЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ СОЕДИНЕННЫХ ШТАТОВ АМЕРИКИ
№ 2 Зима 1995/96г.
К ВЫХОДУ ВТОРОГО НОМЕРА
Дорогие коллеги! Закончился 1995 год, ознаменовавшийся помимо многих радостных и тревожных событий еще и рождением нашей Ассоциации. Наивно было бы полагать, что ее деятельность успела существенно повлиять на Вашу профессиональную жизнь. В то же время мы сумели провести вдобавок к учредительной конференции представительный семинар по проблемам американского общества в период "нового курса" Ф.Д.Рузвельта. Информацию о семинаре Вы найдете в настоящем выпуске. Наша редакционная почта позволяет судить и о том, чторазобщенность российских американистов вполне преодолима, было бы желание делиться планами, идеями, впечатлениями! Бюро Ассоциации готовит новую встречу - семинар "США и внешний мир". Он запланирован на апрель 1996 г. Не пропустите программу семинара в разделе КАЛЕНДАРЬ этого выпуска бюллетеня. Спешите заявить о своем участии!
В связи с планами обмена информацией с коллегами за рубежом, редколлегия предлагает авторам по возможности присылать материалы на двух языках - русском и английском. Это позволило бы распространять электронный англоязычный вариант Бюллетеня в информационной сети Интернет.
Спасибо всем корреспондентам Бюллетеня!
Надеемся на продолжение и расширение сотрудничества!
Желаем здоровья, успехов в 1996 году!
Бюро Ассоциации,
Редколлегия "Бюллетеня"
KEY SPEAKER
В этой рубрике мы предполагаем публиковать достаточно краткие оригинальные выступления, тезисы, миниcтатьи, посвященные проблемам развития американистики, на организационном и научном уровнях. Первым получил слово Пол Лаутер, Президент American Studies Association, участвовавший в учредительной конференции нашей Ассоциации. Этот доклад Лаутера перепечатывается (с небольшими сокращениями и с любезного разрешения издателей из "American Studies Association Newsletter." (June 1995)
Просим претендентов на роль Key Speaker в нашем следующем выпуске поспешить с присылкой своих материалов!
A Call For (At Least a Little)
American Studies Chauvinism
СОДЕРЖАНИЕ
К выходу второго.номера . . . . . . . . 1
Key Speaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Знакомство с центрами по изучению США . 3
Лекционные курсы . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Конференции, Семинары, Симпозиумы . . . 6
Научные поездки, стажировки . . . . . . 11
Новые книги . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..13
Календарь . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
I've chosen a deliberately provocative title because I would like to raise the volume on the three issues I'm going to address here. In a world of diminishing resources - which is the world of higher education today - the silent are the dead. And these are issues which, I think, need more discussion, much more. So I hope my provocative call will lead to responses.
My issues aren't exactly novel, though they remain mouthfuls - ugly, latinate, bureaucratic words: inter-disciplinarity, multicultura-lism and cultural studies, internationalization. But the questions underlying these terms are clear enough: What do we mean by "American Studies"? What is the source of the energy currently driving American Studies? How has the post - Cold War moment changed American Studies - and who does it?
Before I talk about these, however, I want to say a word to reassure those of you who have heard it rumored that American Studies is in decline. On the contrary: membership in ASA is up remarkably; participation in conventions is also higher than ever. But also, while some older departments and programs have, indeed, run into problems, a fascinating variety of new programs has been emerging, some where American Studies had never existed, others at institutions where it had earlier disintegrated.
Perhaps most impor-tant, my observation is that more and more students are seeking the integrated ways of looking at the world which interdisciplinary programs like American Studies provide.
In short, American Studies as a field is a quite healthy; still, the situation for its graduate students is not. And that brings me to the first of my issues, that of interdisciplinarity.
There are at least two definition of American Studies, to some extent compatible, but also to some extent conflicting. One says that American Studies primarily emphasizes interdisciplinary ways of exploring and knowing things and subject matters that cannot easily be accommodated within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The other view is that "American Studies" represents a focus on a particular part of the world, an "area study", for work in the traditional disciplines, like history, political science, and literature. These definitions coexist within ASA, even though in much of the rest of the world, the second prevails. When, for example, I attended the founding conference of a Russian Association for American Studies, I found that the organizers were almost entirely members of the history and economics faculties at Moscow State University, and that an association devoted to studying the literature and culture of the United States had met the previous month. Some in the latter group participated in the new association, but few came to be involved in the leadership; hardly any of the historians and economists, on the other hand, showed real interest in matters cultural.
It would be an overreading to claim that this awkward set of relationships constitutes a paradigm, yet it is true that there are real tension between the groupings which loosely gather under the two definition I have sketched. These tensions emerge in disturbing ways: American Studies doctoral student is told that to obtain a job she will have to align herself either with the English department or the History department. A fellowship panel supports a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary applications, but only the traditional disciplinary proposals are ultimately founded. A disciplinary department votes to eliminate one of its basic survey courses, which just happens to serve as the introductory course for the American Studies program. The issue is not, by and large, ill will, nor even turf warfare. The problem, I believe, stems from a kind of academic inertia which leads most of us in times of stress to fall back on what is known, familiar, homey. And these are stressful times, since the pressures to cut positions, even whole departments, are often intense and always lurking about.
Such difficulties will obviously not be resolved by fostering combat between those inclined toward the disciplinary paradigm and those who hold with interdisciplinarity. That would, in fact, present serious problems for ASA and the field more generally; in any case, both paradigms pose significant questions. On the other hand, I do think that interdisciplinarity can too easily atrophy - and American Studies with it - if it is not consciously and energetically sustained. In practice, I think that means struggling to obtain university hiring lines within American Studies programs - at least enough to carry on basic courses and, no trivial matter, to open jobs for American Studies doctorates. It means insisting upon selection processes - for jobs, articles, meeting slots - that do not marginalize interdisciplinary work or degrees, simply by normalizing disciplinary paradigms. It may mean for individuals a shift, not exactly of academic loyalties, but in the distribution of time and other resources which we deploy professionally...But the issue isn't only jobs; it also has to do with making space within educational institutions for the forms of inquiry we have come to call multiculturalism and cultural studies. Some of the tensions about what defines American Studies derive from the fact that such cultural work now constitutes the forward edges of our field. About ten years ago, ASA committed itself to a policy of diversifying its intellectual compass and its cultural agenda and thereby its constituency through a self-conscious affirmative action program in the participants and subjects of our convention, in our committees, in the members of our editorial boards.
This process is hardly complete, and the need for continuing affirmative action needs to be underlined. But I think it is fair to say that the current conventions, for instance, look very different from the way they did a decade ago. During this same period, people also interested in cultural studies found in ASA meetings and in other activities a congenial home. Indeed, the American Studies Association tent now seems to be national home of choice for those committed to pursuing cultural studies in the academy...
As the culture wars of the 1980s developed, cultural studies and multiculturalism (along with deconstruction and, on occasion, American Studies) came to be portrayed as a kind of loose academic left, linked by their supposed disrespect for the "monuments of unaging intellect" and their commitment to academic reformation. Almost willy-nilly, a complex political project emerged within an academic field, American Studies, most of whose practitioners have been quite happy to embrace it. For American Studies as a discipline aims at progressive change, which cultural conservatives have worked to block; in a time of reaction, in fact, AS plays an oppositional, forward-looking role.
For my own part, I would like to emphasize the political engagement which, at its best, has always characterized what we now call "American Studies". The mixed results of sixties activism, the failure of state socialism, and postmodernist skepticism may have helped put the very idea of "politics" in bad odor. Still, it seems to me that today's vicious cost-cutting, the efforts to shift higher education toward job training, the deployment of the label "politically correct" to malign opposition - these and other features of higher education politics create a climate inimical to American Studies and other interdisciplinary programs. Self-defense, if nothing else, demands that we not simply hold still as the axe falls, as though from an inexorable law of physics.
More positively, however, this seems to me a moment peculiarly in need of the insights the historical, cultural, and political knowledge of American Studies practitioners can provide. We have been quite good in exposing how the Minuteman was commandeered for an insurance company icon; can we now understand - and contest - how it is being used to underwrite the paranoia of right-wing militia? The Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee were once posed as symbols for Native American mistrust of federal policies; how can we help comprehend and challenge how, today, they are appropriated to justify the arms build-up of racist "frontiersmen"? In these puzzled and troubling times, I cannot see how our work could, even if we wished, remain simply "academic". An intense debate is emerging over the connection, if any, between speech which, inciting suspicion, normalizes hatred and acts of terror; have scholars anything to say about such correlations? Are they modeled by the disquieting relationships between the construction of what Martin Borneol has described as an "Aryan model" of Classics in the 18th and 19th centuries, the casual anti-semitism and racism of people in our own times educated in that classical tradition, and the "Final Solution"? Is, then, the ultimate project of multiculturalism, cultural studies, and American Studies to be part of the rehabilitation of democratic, participatory polity in our country?
However one answers such questions they seem to me to point to an inescapable political dimension to our work.
I have often heard moans about the disappearance of the "public intellectual". In fact, however, I see significant numbers of my colleagues in American Studies performing such functions... We may not always agree on the issues, but in my view being engaged in debate over public issues models what a politically engaged American Studies, particularly as it has been reshaped by multiculturalism and cultural studies, should be.
And, perhaps paradoxically, can now more easily become. Despite the best efforts of some to sustain the repressive Manichean view of the world promoted by Cold War culture, things are different now. That can, I think, most clearly be seen in connection with the internationalization of knowledge...What it had too often meant in the past was (and often still) a process of sending U.S. scholars and books abroad to explain America, and to bringing foreign scholars here to study "our wisdom". That a significant number of overseas scholars understood us at least as well as "we" did was always acknowledged by those with organizational responsibilities, but seldom did that perception have many institutional consequences.
Overseas scholars...remained largely marginal to the ongoing American Studies enterprise nationally or locally. Now, however, with the dissolution of intellectual and, often, national borders and the evolution of internationalizing tools like the Internet, overseas members of ASA play active roles in the Association, not only in convention presentations but on committees and in other work of the organization, such as the American Studies Crossroads project... And more rapidly, I hope, both the publishing and the organizational work of scholars from outside the physical boundaries of the United States are coming to be appreciated here. The remarkable series of "European Contributions to American Studies", edited by Rob Kroes for VU University Press in Amsterdam, represents one instance of the first; excellent Tenerife conference on "Trans-Atlantic Passages", organized by the Collegium for African-American Research (CAAR) and the Du Bois Institute, offers an instance of the second.
Still, what is only beginning to be fully apprehended, I think, is the internationalization of what counts for knowledge in American Studies. We need to ask a series of questions: What are the borders within which the study of "America" has been conducted? Does it make sense, especially when we talk of multiculturalism and cultural study, to define these borders by nationalist geography or by language? Or does "America" have to be seen within a world system, in which the exchange of commodities, the flow of capital, and the interaction of culture know no borders?
These are obviously not new ideas, but they seem to me to take on a new dimension as American Studies as formal discipline and as academic program spreads overseas. In Russia, I not only attended the Moscow meeting I mentioned, but a conference held in Tomsk of the quite energetic Siberian Associating for American Studies. That is but one of many new scholarly associations concerned with American Studies to have emerged in the last few years. Scholars in Vietnam, for example, have asked about support in the development of an American Studies program in Ho Chi Minh City. ASA has been working toward more formal arrangements with a variety of these overseas associations and, through efforts like Crossroads and "Connections", trying to support them.
To be sure, in one sense American Studies is benefitting from the hard realities of power politics in a world in which every nation must in some degree study the one superpower, the United States.
In another sense, however, this widening activity acknowledges the mingling of economies and cultures, the dissolution of many fixed point of reference, like borders, the very unsettlement (to adopt Emerson's phrase) of all things. What American Studies will mean in this world system will, I believe, as much be determined by colleagues outside our national boundaries as by those within.
Just as we now must accommodate to the flow of information, music, money, and knowledge across borders, so I think we will have to work out new ways of engaging the exchange of scholars.
As internationalization changes the foci of American Studies, so it alters the locus of work. Some of our students already go overseas not just for a miscellaneous junior year abroad but to work in an American Studies program at, say, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. A Russian expert on Indian and Western literatures has been teaching at New Mexico State. It cannot be long before far more faculty from Odense and Seoul and Dakar come not only to pursue research projects but to teach American Studies at Trinity and Minnesota and Colorado. The implications of these development for U.S. institutions, for Fulbright exchanges, for the actual work of professional associations and journals, for the development of electronic networks like the American Crossroads Project are only slowly coming into view.
These are issues which will affect the work all of us do, but particularly the younger members of the profession. My hope in highlighting them in this way is to encourage the conversations now proceeding on the theory, I guess, that you can steer the canoe only by paddling.
ЗНАКОМСТВО С ЦЕНТРАМИ ПО ИЗУЧЕНИЮ США
Волгоградская AMERICANA
Волгоградский государственный университет, его Исторический факультет рады сообщить о создании лаборатории американистики - Центра американских исследований AMERICANA.
В задачи лаборатории входит комплексное исследование дипломатических, экономических, политических и культурных связей России и стран Американского континента в новое и новейшее время.
Основные направления исследований: поли-тические традиции США и латиноамериканских государств и становление демократии в России; историография и источниковедение русско-американских отношений; развитие политических и экономических связей России со странами Америки в 18 - начале 20 веков; внешняя политика стран американского континента и дипломатия России; университеты России и стран Америки: опыт и перспективы сотрудничества.
Состав лаборатории: д.и.н. А.И.Кубышкин, к.и.н. В.Н.Косторниченко, ст. преп. И.И.Курилла, а также около 25 студентов старших курсов, специализирующихся по различным аспектам американской истории.
О ближайших планах Центра смотрите информацию в разделе: КАЛЕНДАРЬ.
Новости из Нижнего Новгорода
Еще в августе 1995 г. поступило краткое, но тем не менее ценное сообщение о создании отделения нашей Ассоциации на базе Нижегородского государственного университета (ННГУ). Председатель - д.и.н. О.А.Колобов (декан факультета истории, социальных наук и международных отношений). Его заместитель - д.и.н. А.А.Сергунин (зав. кафедрой упомянутого факультета). Среди 20 членов отделения - историки, политологи, журналисты, экономисты, сотрудники не только ННГУ, но и Нижегородской Строительной Академии, Нижегородского коммерческого института, Института контрразвед-ки ФСБ, консультанты Законодательного собра-ния Нижегородской области, аспиранты и соискатели.
Двадцать лет плодотворной работы
Хотя официально "Ассоциация по изучению культуры США" была зарегистрирована при Отделении языка и литературы РАН в ноябре 1994 г., реально Ассоциация работает уже на протяжении 20 лет, и за эти годы сложился состав ее наиболее активных участников, ведущих исследования в области американской литературы, журналистики, театроведения, культорологии в России, на Украине, в Белоруссии, Узбекистане, Казахстане, Киргизии, Эстонии, Литве.
Ежегодными смотрами этой деятельности сделались Московские научные конференции, в работе которых время от времени принимали участие и видные литераторы США - Уильям Гэсс, Луис Окинлосс, Стадс Теркел, Норман Казинс, Гаррисон Солсбери и другие. Наряду с советстко-американскими писательскими встречами конференции в МГУ на протяжении многих лет служили важной формой научного и литературного общения творческой интеллигенции двух стран.
С начала 1980-х гг. наметились тесные связи между московским форумом американистов и Европейской ассоциацией по изучению американской культуры, опубликовавшей в 1990 г. сборник трудов специалистов по литературе США из государств Центральной и Восточной Европы. Еще один сборник на английском языке - "Русский взгляд на американскую литературу" - был выпущен издательством штата Миссисипи в 1992 г.
В последние два года состав Ассоциации пополнили члены из американских центров по изучению культуры США, гостями конференций регулярно становятся ведущие американисты из европейских центров - Великобритании, Германии, Австрии.
Тематика конференций американистов, про-веденных на факультете журналистики МГУ "Ассоциацией по изучению культуры США" были достаточно разнообразна: "Проблемы реализма в литературе США" (1979г.), "Литература, журна-листика и политическая жизнь США" (1983 .), "Поэтика литературы США и американская действительность" (1986 г.), "Традиция и эксперимент в литературе и журналистики США" (1990 г.), "Реконструкция и пересмотр истории американской литературы: канон, феминизм, этнос."(1992 г.) Последняя встреча прошла в декабре 1995 г. Ее тема: "Американская литература и Россия". В программе конференции заявлены семь секций ("Журналистика", "Романтизм в Америке и России", "Американская литература рубежа первой половины XX века в России", "Свременная литература США: проблемы перевода, издания и восприятия", "Американская драма на русской сцене", ""Энтические литературы США", "Литературное сознание Америки - России: женский аспект проблемы") и круглый стол: "Образ России в Американской литературе и журналистике. Образ США в русской литературе".
Отчет об этой конференции будет опубликован в следующем номере нашего "Бюллетеня".