*DRAFT* Towards a Critical Geography of American Studies *DRAFT*

Abstract
Our argument in this article is based on the premise that ‘geography’ refers not simply to location within a spatial frame but also to geographical knowledge as it is variously produced, taken for granted, contested, and negotiated. As taken-for-granted geographical knowledge is central to the discipline of American studies not only in the framing of subject matter but also in the spatialization of its disciplinary practices, we propose the development of a critical geography of American studies. We argue that geographies of subject and practice are actively produced by Americanists not only in academic argument but also in the discourse of practical disciplinary texts. Performing close critical readings of two such routine texts in order to bring to attention some of the ways in which they produce at times contradictory geographies, we end with a call for wider recognition of the contingent nature of the contested geographies of international American studies.

American studies is a field of inquiry self-defined in geographical terms. What, for example, should the ‘America’ of American studies refer to: a nation, a state, a continent, a hemisphere, an empire, or an omnipresent global superpower? Geographical issues of territory, location, and place, of distance and proximity, of networks and spatialized power relationships, are at the heart of contemporary American studies. But as current debate over these issues suggests, the geography of American studies, like any geography, is as much produced as it is described: it has as much to do, in other words, with contested common sense as with existing reality. And geographical common sense is generated not only through theoretical discussion and analysis but also through everyday, unmarked discourse. It is thus a much more complicated matter than a simple question of ‘what’s where and why’. It doesn’t even come down to debates about or descriptions of what’s where and why. Instead, because geography is as much performed as it is found or described, it also includes the routine discursive production of the what, the where, and the why. In other words, while American studies conventionally takes its identity from large, apparently stable, commonsense geographical frameworks, those frameworks themselves are always at the same time actively being generated, reinscribed, or reinvented through the very mundane disciplinary practices and discourses to which they appear to lend order. Geography, in this sense, does not come before American studies. It is constantly being produced, maintained, and revised by Americanists at work, not just explicitly in academic papers, but also implicitly in the discourse of practical disciplinary texts such as calls for papers or descriptions of conference themes. Just as powerfully as scholarly articles, these mundane texts participate in the establishment and negotiation of the very geographies that naturalize the practices of American studies: not only the spatialization of its subject matter but also the spatialization of its hierarchies of disciplinary practice.

The geography of American studies thus includes not just the question of what American studies deals with, but also where American studies is performed and by whom. This means that there are two distinct and equally controversial kinds of spatialization going on, two geographical strands. The two strands are routinely and confusingly braided together in the common assumption that American studies is not only most commonly and most influentially but also most naturally produced in the United States. Nonetheless, one strand has to do with the geography of subject material and the other strand has to do with the geography of scholarly practice. In this paper, accordingly, we will propose a critical geography of mundane textual practices in American studies not just as they produce subject material but also as they spatialize practice.

American studies is not at all unique, of course, in its current concern with the geography of its own disciplinary practices and assumed centers of authority and innovation. Many other fields of study which have been built up around geographically-defined subjects are also demonstrating a heightened awareness of the significance of taken-for-granted geographies in their disciplinary practices and rhetoric. At the same time, and from a slightly different angle, disciplines which have grown up around the idea of geography as subject matter have also been paying increasing attention to the spatializations woven into their definitions of subject matter and their international disciplinary practices. Critical geographers, for example, who have developed specific methods and vocabularies for the spatial analysis of subjects such as global corporations or development aid, are now also turning their analytical gaze to the power-geographies of their own discipline, thereby producing an energetic critical geography of critical geography.[1]

In proposing a critical geography of American studies we intend to bring these two traditions in disciplinary self-criticism into productive cooperation, emphasizing that while critical geography and American studies are usually separate, institutionally at least, with different concerns, histories, and spatialized hierarchies, the kind of geographically-informed critique of American studies we are proposing would be an interdisciplinary project able to function simultaneously as a case study in the critical geography of knowledge production and as an argument for the practical value of geographical theory within disciplinary critique in American studies. Our belief in the value for Americanists of geographical methods and concepts does not spring from any idea that geographical theory is something that needs to be imported or applied from the outside; rather, we are convinced that much current debate about subject and practice within international American studies already is geographical and in practical terms shares considerable common ground with debates going on within critical geography. The value for American studies of bringing these two traditions in critical disciplinary reflection together lies in the fact that geographers have created a way of conceptualizing and articulating spatial critique that Americanists can use to more sharply formulate, communicate, and debate the spatial aspects of their own disciplinary debates.[2]

Our belief that it is fruitful to focus disciplinary attention on the co-productive interaction of commonsense geographies and American studies at the routine textual level is based on the idea that the radical geospatial critiques of framing assumptions made in theoretical discussions need to be backed up by equally radical critiques of texts that fly under the radar. For this reason, our discussion in this paper focuses not on the discourse of scholarly argument but on some of the taken-for-granted geographies we see embodied in practical disciplinary metadiscourse—functional texts, such as conference calls for proposals and journal position statements. We aim to demonstrate how, in their use of geographical terms and concepts, these texts participate in the production of normative American studies geographies in two distinct ways, producing common sense geographies not only in their content and arguments, but also discursively through their terminologies and rhetoric. We are not, of course, suggesting that these texts should only be read in terms of their production of commonsense disciplinary geographies: institutional texts of the kind we discuss in this paper also clearly need to be located in, and understood in terms of, disciplinary history. While we hope to open up new dimensions in metadisciplinary reflection we do not intend to disregard the long tradition of useful work on the histories of the discipline.[3] Furthermore, we are explicitly not attempting in this essay to reveal and critique the geographical assumptions of the authors of these American studies meta-texts; rather, we want to focus on these texts as public statements that have particular geographical effects. We feel that the fact that they are not ‘pure’ conceptual statements should not distract attention from the impact that these texts have on the ways in which Americanists perceive and imagine the discipline.

We are especially motivated in this critical engagement with the mundane by the ways in which moves towards a new form of ‘international’ American studies are now being articulated. Our analysis in this paper is most specifically directed towards the ways in which mundane American studies texts perform binary geographies of home/abroad or center/periphery, not only in the area of subject matter but also in relation to disciplinary practice. Hence, a major part of our purpose here is to analyze the ways in which a center/margin geographical model of subject material in the discipline spills over into, or generates by analogy, a center/margin geographical model of located practice, a model which effectively naturalizes the association of particular kinds of practice, as well as particular kinds of material, with particular authenticating locations.

Geographies of Subject Matter: The Call for Proposals for the 2003 ASA in Hartford
The first practical text we would like to address is the Call for Proposals for the 2003 American Studies Association (US) conference. While our assumption is that almost any text of practical metadisciplinary discourse would reward geographical analysis, we think that this text provides a revealing example of a statement in which radical geospatial intentions are inhibited by conventional geographical language. In this text, in other words, we feel that the argument has its foot on the accelerator while the terminology has its foot on the brake. Hence the main focus of our analysis is a contradiction we see running through the text: that while it explicitly calls for the geographically unconventional and critical in American studies, it does so in conventional geospatial terms. The Call for Proposals as a result actually pulls in two different directions, producing two contradictory geographies, one innovative and the other conservative.

The text’s innovative American studies geography is immediately apparent in its encouragement of papers which demonstrate the possibility of imagining ‘new kinds of identities and connections beyond prescribed notions of a people, community, or nation’. Its more conservative geography, less immediately apparent but equally powerful, is embedded in its sustained use of commonsense spatial binaries such as ‘national’ and ‘international’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, ‘public’ and ‘domestic’. Our point is that although these binaries may appear completely unremarkable, if not inevitable, they cannot be read in any simple way as the expression of the geographically obvious. Rather, the binaries need to be understood as aspects of a particular and powerfully normative geography, precisely the conventional geography, in fact, that the Call itself is challenging.

This crucial disjunction between purpose and phrasing is evident, for example, in the way in which the Call carefully delineates the contradictions and complexities of the nation as an object of study while at the same time using the concept nation as if the term were unproblematic. In other words, while the Call explicitly encourages conference sessions that ‘look critically at traditional notions of the nation-state’, the concept of the nation is employed throughout the text in ways that reinforce precisely those traditional notions. The first paragraph of the printed version of the Call, for example, invites participants ‘to examine the pervasiveness of violence within the United States and in its relations to the outside world’.[4] The rhetoric here reinforces rather than questions the conventional inside/outside dichotomy that produces the nation as a bordered and unified entity. A similar reinforcement of the home/abroad dualism occurs slightly further on, in the second paragraph, in the question ‘what are the relations . . . between citizenship . . . and the exercise of violence at home and abroad?’

Although the creation of separate spaces—national and ‘the outside world’, for instance—is certainly a useful heuristic for defining the field of an analytic project, we are concerned that this kind of taken-for-granted separation of a national inside from a foreign outside is misleading, and does not actually encourage critical reflection on ‘traditional notions of the nation-state’ at all. As Amy Kaplan has argued, as useful as this kind of sphere separation may be, scholars have more to lose than to gain by creating the mutually defining pairs of public and private, domestic and foreign. This kind of inside/outside domestic/foreign dichotomy, as Kaplan points out, easily reproduces a problematic notion of ‘the nation as a fixed, monolithic, and self-enclosed geographic and cultural whole’ (1998: 112).

The Call’s separation of life ‘inside’ the United States from its relationship with an ‘outside’ paradoxically reinscribes precisely the kind of conventional domestic/foreign border which the text itself is asking scholars in the discipline to challenge. With its reference to ‘the exercise of violence at home and abroad’ the Call creates two separate locations of violence, a separation which obscures the ways in which—for example—US cultures of militarism and hypermasculinity occupy a differently bordered space that includes both combat zones and the home front, both occupied territories and the homeland.[5] The Call’s geography, we might say, prioritizes physical distance over relational proximity; but we feel that it is important to recognize that this prioritization only seems obvious or naturally geographical within the framework of a particular kind of geographical knowledge. The convergence of these allegedly separate spheres of violence has been powerfully demonstrated, to take only one instance, in studies that have found that ‘the norms currently prevalent within [US] military organizations include … hypermasculinity, adversarial sexual beliefs, promiscuity, rape myth acceptance, hostility toward women, and possibly also acceptance of violence against women’ and that ‘reports of “severe aggression” against spouses [runs] more than three times higher among Army families than among civilian ones’ (Elliston and Lutz, 2003). And as Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002) points out, it often seems willfully unaware to consider instances of violence within the US in isolation, removed from the wider context of US militarism and interventionism in other countries. If we disrupt the binary of domestic violence—meaning US-based or even familial—versus military intervention, it also becomes easier to recognize the fact that military action abroad takes place in somebody else’s home or domestic space, often literally; it’s somebody’s kitchen in Kabul or Baghdad that blows up. The definition of abroad, in other words, depends on an assumed location; what’s ‘abroad’ in one geography is always ‘home’ in another.

This is in one sense an entirely banal critique. The text is a Call for Proposals issued by the US American Studies Association. ‘Home’ is where the text speaks from. But our discomfort with this terminology is not simply caused by the fact that although we are both ASA members neither of us is US-based. Our concern actually springs from a contradictory fact: that US-based American studies is positioning itself more and more not as located in a home academic territory but as an internationalized practice. Under these particular circumstances, located terms such as home and abroad easily start to lose their specificity and spin out of control. For while it is clearly the case that the home referred to in the text would, indeed, be home for many of the participants at the conference, neither the ASA conference nor the US American Studies Association membership is limited to US-based or American scholars. So there is an awkward textual situation here in which the implied collective audience for the Call is articulated as US-based while the actual audience is not. But we feel that it is worth looking at the ways in which the textual performance of the ASA as national and US-based relate to the association’s actual membership and its current push towards internationalization.

There is in fact considerable tension in the text between the concepts of national and international. Powerful conventions in the definition of ‘the nation’ function at the discursive level even as the text itself calls for these conventions to be reconsidered. The topics include, for example, ‘international militarism, the dislocations of colonization, migration, and empire, the dynamics of globalization, the environment’. As we have suggested above, the Call creates through its language a discrete, bordered space—the nation—and thereby also generates outside spaces beyond the space of the nation. In the first paragraph, it explicitly encourages work on topics that ‘reach beyond the nation’. The phrase ‘reach beyond’ seems to suggest that these topics are understood to have their origin within the nation, from which point they reach out to impact foreign territories (and reach in to impact ‘the intimate recesses of domestic life’). The implication here is that there are some other topics that can be studied purely within the nation, without necessitating consideration of anything beyond its borders. It is very awkward, however, to identify what those might be.[6] The grounding assumption here seems to be that the nation is an entity equally separable from the domestic/intimate and the foreign/global. In this taken-for-granted geography, only certain topics reach beyond those borders. We would argue in contrast that the critical reconsideration of the concept of the nation that the Call itself demands must include in its starting position the idea that the nation is always already international, and that it is precisely in its interaction with other spaces and places that an entity recognizable as a nation comes into being.

The presence of 9/11 rhetoric as a subtext to the Call actually underscores the futility of any kind of separation of foreign and domestic; as anyone aware that they live in places that have a history of terrorist attacks (or colonization) already knows, the idea that home is a space safe from random violence or foreign aggression is an illusion. Doreen Massey reminds us of this in her critique of the unacknowledged positionality in writing about globalization and the new postcolonial world: ‘much, if not all, of what has been written has seen this new world from the point of view of a (relative) elite. Those who today worry about a sense of disorientation and a loss of control must once have felt they knew exactly where they were, and that they had control’ (1994: 165). As Massey points out elsewhere, place is partly defined precisely by its complex links to other places, the way in which it emerges or comes into being within a network of flows and interactions. This kind of geographical knowledge significantly destabilizes the idea that American studies practitioners need encouragement to ‘reach beyond’ the nation and ‘place American Studies concerns in international contexts’. Indeed, as many Americanists would argue, and as the authors of the Call might well agree, American studies is always already international, both in the sense of its object of study and in its real life practice as an academic discipline.[7] As Massey has convincingly argued, in the understanding of place, ‘definition does not have to be through simple counterposition to the outside: it can come, in part, precisely through the particularity of linkage to that ‘outside’ which is therefore part of what constitutes the place’ (1994: 239).[8] American studies has to reach beyond the nation; otherwise it is playing in the dark. And this, paradoxically, is part of what the Call for Proposals is directly arguing.

In the next section, we will turn from the geography of subject matter to the geography of practice, looking at the textual production of a geography of inside/outside not in terms of the what of American studies but the where and the by whom. As we have already suggested, while we believe that it’s important to consider these two geographies separately, in practice they often appear in the same texts. In the practical texts produced for the ASA 2003 meeting in Hartford, for example, a sharp distinction between ‘national’ and ‘foreign’ (or ‘international’) is reproduced in reference to practice as well as subject matter. So in making our transition to the next section we want to point to an even more mundane textual example and consider for a moment the taken-for-granted geography produced by the information about ticket prices for the conference reception for international scholars, where ‘regular’ members were asked to pay more than ‘international’ members. The problem of interpretation here lies in the definition of the term ‘regular’, as the binary division regular/international does not in practice always work. In fact, it produces a geographical dilemma for scholars (whether they are US citizens or not) who are members of the ASA and pay regular ASA dues, but who are not based in the US and may well also be regular members of other national associations. The somewhat ridiculous problem the international reception organizers are faced with in dealing with the geographically border-busting membership of a nonetheless supposedly national association thus connects in interesting ways to the problem of subject matter that the Call confronts in dealing with the concept of topics that (like the ASA membership) ‘reach beyond the nation’.

Geographies of Disciplinary Practice: The Announcement of Comparative American Studies: An International Journal
The second practical text we would like to address to demonstrate the importance of the commonsense geographies generated at the practical discursive level in American studies is the description of this publication, Comparative American Studies: An International Journal.[9] We enthusiastically support the initiative this journal is making to facilitate the sharing of academic space. Our analysis of the text of the journal’s announcement, as was the case with our discussion of the ASA Call, is intended simply to show how contradictory geographical rhetorical conventions inhibit even the most radical or innovative of practical texts. The central point to our analysis of the geography of the CAS announcement is that it is at odds with its overt move towards geographical inclusiveness in its unmarked rhetorical performance of a geography of centered internationalism. As with the Hartford ASA Call for Proposals, in other words, our reading of the announcement suggests that there is a ‘hidden geography’ in the text which considerably complicates its explicitly stated intentions (Duncan and Ley, 1993).[10] Specifically, our reading of the statement is that despite its effort to transcend the national it generates a hierarchical center/margin geography that reinforces the assumption that American studies is a discipline with a natural ‘home’ centering around US institutions.[11]

This hierarchical scaling comes across most clearly in the particular phrasing of the CAS statement’s essentially reasonable and convincing argument that ‘[t]he special need for developing international comparison is acknowledged in the USA itself as well as throughout Europe and worldwide’. This sentence creates a center/periphery hierarchy of geographical scales that spatializes scholarly intensity or significance. Our critique of this scaling is not that it is inaccurate. We accept that American studies in all practical senses is currently US-centered, has been and still is heavily funded in many parts of the world by US state and private institutions,[12] and is currently organized into a geography whose networks of power and influence create their most impressive and influential clusters around US locations. Rather, our critique of the geography being discursively performed here is that it naturalizes a particular spatialized disciplinary hierarchy, perpetuating a geography of uneven significance. It suggests, in fact, that in American studies what happens ‘in the USA itself’ comes first, then what happens in ‘Europe’, and then lastly what happens ‘worldwide’. This may, in brutal practice, be true of contemporary American studies. But in our view an important step toward making the practice of worldwide American studies more international, more decentered, and more comparative—in other words, if we are right in interpreting the goals of CAS, more the kind of discipline CAS is hoping to promote—would be the revision of mundane rhetorical geographies to challenge the inside-out hierarchy reproduced here.

At the 2002 International Conference of Critical Geography, held in Békéscsaba, Hungary, the issue of margin/center geographies in international scholarship was addressed in a plenary session on Anglo-American hegemony in geography.[13] In that session Lawrie Berg made the point that the definition of the term ‘international’ in a journal title or in its publicity needs to be understood in very particular and limited terms.[14] Berg drew our attention to Claudio Minca’s point that international does not, usually, in any sense mean decentered: ‘the boundaries as well as the rules/coordinates of what passes for “international” debate within our discipline are determined from within the Anglo-American universe’, Minca argues (2001: 287). Our experiences at the ICCG had therefore made us very curious about the ‘international’ in the title of the new American studies journal. We also wondered about the ‘comparative’. What was going to be compared? America with elsewhere? US American studies with other kinds of American studies? Absolutely supportive of the drive towards creating a forum for American studies that did not assume any particular national authoritative geographical center for scholarship, we read with interest the CAS mission statement.

The point which struck us most immediately in the Comparative American Studies announcement/call for papers was how difficult we found it to interpret many of the text’s key phrases and terms. Obviously, in any theoretical discussion that extends across years, and takes place in print as well as in person, complex theoretical concepts will become reduced to keywords or metaphors. At the outset, everybody at the core of the discussion will understand that the meanings of these terms are contingent, but the more they are used, and the more they start to circulate beyond the original core, the more their contingency falls away and their meanings solidify. So what were once ambivalent or ambiguous terms take on a life of their own. And eventually, people start to use them as if their meanings were self-evident, even intrinsic. This causes serious problems of comprehension for readers beyond the core. It is important to note here that we are not defining ‘the core’ in any literal sense of physical location. We are referring to a much less literally bordered US-centered ‘core’ generated by US-centered power networks.

Whatever the reason for the problem—whether we were reading a text generated from the center from our own location at the periphery, or being confused by the conflation of practice with subject matter—we found the CAS announcement difficult to read:

Comparative American Studies: an International Journal is an exciting new journal that will extend scholarly debates about American Studies beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States, repositioning discussions about American culture explicitly within an international, comparative framework.

Our first problem in interpretation here comes in the opening sentence with the verb ‘extend’. The question raised for us here is how this new journal will extend debates about American studies ‘beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States’ when American studies has been a hotly-debated discipline in various regions outside the US for quite a long time. The first Japanese Association for American Studies was founded, for instance, in the 1930s. The Center for American Studies at the University of Tokyo (now the Center for Pacific and American Studies) was founded in 1967.[15] And Japan is not exceptional in its history of engagement with a discipline conceived of as American studies. The announcement could not mean that by placing its ‘discussions about American culture’ in an international, comparative framework it would be repositioning them, because American studies has been in position as an international and comparative discipline in Japan, for example, for at least fifty years.

An alternative way to make sense of the introductory paragraph’s use of the verbs extend and reposition would be to work from the hypothesis that the ‘scholarly debates about American Studies’ and ‘discussions about American Culture’ in this introduction refer primarily to the debates and discussions which have been taking place in US-centered networks of American studies. If the introduction is read in this way, then the main point of the new journal can be understood as the repositioning and extension of the US-centered version of the discipline. It seems obvious that American studies as practiced in the US would benefit from a stronger sense that the US should be viewed in an international context. The problem here may in a sense simply be rhetorical; the authors of this announcement are taking it for granted that everybody will understand that American studies in this text means American studies in the US or within the reach of an unstated but understood US/European network. But rhetorical or not, this slippage runs directly counter to the idea that the journal could really be a journal of international American studies. The question of whether the journal is intended to be a journal of American studies as it is practiced internationally, or a journal of US-style American studies which considers its subject in an international context, is left ambiguous.

The ‘comparative’ in the title, then, it seems to us, does not refer to comparative work which connects and learns from a range of different but equal disciplinary practices. Any mapping of the discipline that used the idea of a comparative American studies to reinforce the idea that there is, for example, a characteristic and uniform Japanese style of American studies to which all scholars based in Japan adhere would, in any case, clearly be problematic. The real academic world, as everyone knows from practical experience, is more complicated than that. At any point, a large number of primarily or originally Japan-based Americanists are studying, researching, and teaching in the US and elsewhere. A considerable number of Americanists studying, researching, and teaching in Japan were not trained in the Japanese tradition and may not even read Japanese. The apparently simple boundaries separating located disciplinary traditions have thus perhaps always been more permeable than the ‘we’ and ‘us’ rhetoric of national associations suggests.

What, then, does the comparative in the journal title imply? Perhaps it is a shorthand reference to the idea that, in rejecting the assumption of American exceptionalism, topics in American studies need always to be considered by comparison with related topics in studies of other regions. If so, there is a potential problem here if the rhetoric generates a naturalized equivalence of comparison with internationalism. Put too closely together, comparison and internationalism easily generate as a pair the idea that the most useful contribution Americanists ‘beyond the nation’ can make is to provide the necessary comparative perspective, assessing American studies topics and themes in relation to some kind of inherent natural knowledge they possess of the histories and cultures of the places in which they live. This idea would naturalize the association of citizenship, location, and disciplinary knowledge, and erase the fact that academics of any nationality who have years of formal training and research as Americanists most likely do not also identify as experts in the academic discipline that takes their ‘home’ country or region as its subject matter.

Relating its call for American studies to be ‘rearticulated in a comparative manner’ to the idea that this is a time of ‘increasing globalization’, the announcement glosses the word comparative in terms of a recognition of American interaction with ‘other parts of the world’:

At this time of increasing globalization there is a growing need for American Studies to be rearticulated in a comparative manner: that is to say, first and foremost taking account of interactions between the USA and other parts of the world, whilst also fully attending to multi-ethnic comparisons within the USA.

This passage performs an interesting double geography. On the one hand, the emphasis on comparison seems to us to suggest the idea that things (places, cultures, ethnicities) are fixed and separate and hence comparable as essentially different. On the other hand, the emphasis on geographies of interaction runs for us in quite the opposite direction, suggesting the ways in which places come into being as unique locations precisely because of their positions at nodal points in interwoven spatial networks. There is a vital geographical question for American studies subject matter buried in this paragraph; there is also a vital question for scholarly practice. For while the concept of the comparative might suggest the comparison of equals, the next sentence generates the hierarchy of disciplinary scale we mentioned earlier. It seems to us that the concept of comparison is not in any way here challenging the assumption that there is a center-to-margin hierarchy naturalized within global American studies:

The special need for developing international comparison is acknowledged in the USA itself as well as throughout Europe and worldwide. . .

It is perhaps unfair to connect this scaling to the practical information at the end of the call for papers which instructs authors to ‘submit contributions from North America’ to an editor in the US, while explaining that ‘contributions from Rest of the World’ should be sent to an editor in the UK.[16] The use of the term ‘rest of the world’ is, after all, in this kind of context relatively conventional. Nonetheless, coming as it does after the division of the world of American Studies into ‘the USA itself’, ‘Europe’, and ‘worldwide’, the division of contributing locations into North America and ‘Rest of the World’ could easily have the effect not only of reproducing a center/margin geography but also of suggesting that the majority of contributions are anticipated from the USA. It is all too easy to slip from a commonsense recognition of who now has most voice, power, access, and mobility to an assumption that this scaling also reflects the reality of production and potential in terms of stimulating, useful, critical, thought-provoking scholarship and debate.

The journal announcement does nonetheless recognize the potential of a non-US-based scholarship in American studies. It continues:

. . . indeed, there is increasing academic interest within the American Studies community in the United States in the development of perspectives on this area of study from outside the USA’s borders.

But while skipping over the association of scholarly perspective with physical location (or even nationality) implied here, we bump into the implications of the term ‘development’. The close connection here of the term ‘globalization’ with the term ‘development’ produces for us an echo of other kinds of spatialized hierarchies: while it must be an unfortunate coincidence, the language nonetheless reminds us of Ella Shohat’s point that ‘[t]erms such as “underdeveloped” and “developing” project an infantilization trope on a global scale’ (2002: 77). This coincidence of language aside, however, it seems to us that there are two main possibilities for interpretation here, either that these ‘outside’ perspectives are relatively new (now developing), or that they can or should in some sense be developed by the US-centered American studies community. The second possibility seems less likely, but for the first to make sense we would have to ignore the fact that explicitly comparative forms of American studies have long been the norm in at least some non-US disciplinary traditions.

The final sentence of the announcement relates this turn towards the international and the comparative to recent US history:

The events of September 2001 in New York City and Washington DC have brought home even more sharply how the destiny of the USA must now be understood in relation to global networks rather than simply domestic politics.

What occurs to us here first is the apparent irony of the reference: the announcement has been emphasizing throughout the necessity of seeing the US in international and comparative terms, but the moment in recent US history referred to as the most vital recent impetus behind this new vision is described in extremely localized terms. ‘The events of September 2001’, in this formulation, occurred specifically in New York City and Washington, D.C. The fact that these events also happened, in different ways, to a huge number of people in a range of places worldwide, is erased; the global networks the announcement itself insists upon are just not there. In fact, the use of the commonplace ‘brought home’ only underscores our point that taken-for-granted language matters; it produces normative geographies that can run counter to the explicit aims of the text itself.

As Doreen Massey has pointed out, the ability to sense something new in the ‘penetrability of boundaries’ depends upon a particular point of view. For some people, in some places, the dissolution of ‘barriers of distance’ is nothing new at all: it is only when in ‘a kind of reverse invasion, the periphery has infiltrated the colonial core’, that previously ‘central’ societies begin to experience the disappearance of ‘protective filters of time and space’, as their ‘encounter with the “alien” and the “exotic” [becomes] instantaneous and immediate’ (1994: 165). In a related way, perhaps, the turn towards the international and the comparative articulated in the announcement and call for papers for Comparative American Studies can only seem fully new from the perspective of an American studies community that has not yet fully understood that while the subject of American studies is naturally enough generally understood to be the US in the world, the doing of American studies has no natural, obvious, or authoritative center. In practice, there may well be less of a need for the ‘development of perspectives on this area of study from outside the US’s borders’ than there is a need for the scholarship being done outside those geographical and institutional borders—outside in terms of location, disciplinary tradition, language, and the terms of debate and discussion—to be recognized. Perhaps recognition, and not development, should be taken up as one of the guiding goals of an international American studies.

Conclusion: Towards a New Spatialized American Studies
We are not suggesting that ‘fixing’ the geographical rhetoric of mundane practical texts like Calls for Papers will effect a magical reorientation of taken-for-granted core American studies geographies. The point is not to ‘fix’ the rhetoric, but to defamiliarize it, to bring to attention the powerfully normative function of unmarked spatial rhetoric, and by so doing to make it a possible subject for cooperative and productive discussion, investigation, and negotiation. It seems to us that one of the simplest ways to become aware of the existence of naturalized geographies in American studies is to pay attention to the spatializing functions of its routine texts. We recognize, of course, that the kinds of texts we have been discussing here are the products of real-world compromise, and that the kinds of contradictions we point out in this paper were probably already apparent at the time of publication to many of the people responsible for producing these texts. But whether these contradictions appear as the result of negotiations between, say, scholars and publishers, or as the result of the inevitable compromises that any writer has to make when trying to express radical or innovative ideas in ways that will appeal to a broad audience, they do appear, and (once apparent) they function as useful points of least resistance where geographical critique can identify and analyze important problems in disciplinary spatialization.

Analysis of routine American studies texts that uncovers the tensions and contradictions inherent in the geospatial terms of their expression is useful because it highlights the critical importance of language in the production, maintenance, and subversion of established, commonsense, unmarked, and conventional disciplinary geographies. One’s own taken-for-granted disciplinary geographies—one’s own ways of marking centers and edges, for example, and of understanding distance and proximity—are extremely difficult to see. But our point is not that we should somehow rise above these knowledge frames, as if that were possible. What we are proposing as a crucial first step towards a critical geography of American studies is a general acceptance of the importance of recognizing the existence of these knowledge frames, and of admitting that even the most apparently ‘obvious’ forms of geographical knowledge or spatial organization are probably not obvious to everybody who might want to join the conversation. A newly truly international American studies, for this reason, will have to involve, if not the negotiation of basic spatial terms and concepts, at least the recognition that terms and concepts do not simply reflect disciplinary geographies but actively produce them.



Acknowledgments
This essay is an expansion and revision of two presentations we made in 2003: ‘Geographies of American Studies’ at the North American Studies Colloquium of the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, on 19 May 2003, and ‘Call and Response: A Geographical Reading of the ASA Hartford 2003 CFP’ at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, on 18 October 2003. We want to extend our thanks to the participants involved in the discussions following these two presentations, as well as the University of Tokyo graduate students who participated in an informal workshop on these issues in April 2003. We would also like to thank the colleagues whose feedback and support made this article possible, particularly Khadija El Alaoui-Fritsch, Yasuo Endo, Michael Eng, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Paul Giles, Amy Kaplan, Rob Kitchin, Kimberly Lamm, Scott Lucas, Fumiko Nishizaki, Masako Notoji, Udoka Ogbue, Hiroshi Okayama, Barbara Ryan, Bernd Voss, and Yujin Yaguchi.

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[1] See Berg (forthcoming); Gregson, Simonsen, and Viaou (2001); Gutiérrez and López-Nieva (2001); Hones (forthcoming); Kitchin (in press); and Minca (2000 and 2001).

[2] Indeed Americanists today often cite geographers whose work theorizes the relations of space and power, for example, David Harvey (1996), Henri Lefebrvre (1991), Doreen Massey (1994), and Gillian Rose (1999).

[3] See for example, Cowan, Horwitz, Limerick, Lipsitz, Mowitt, Rowe, and a number of the essays in Pease and Wiegman, especially their introduction as well as Castronovo, Denning, Lenz, and Radway.

[4] The online version we accessed started with the 2nd paragraph of the version as printed in the ASA newsletter. We will be using the fuller printed version.

[5] Current debate around the term ‘homeland’ is an excellent example of how geotheory occasionally surfaces into American studies discourses yet also shows how much more rewarding a more sustained engagement between American studies and critical geography could be. In another promising direction, Amy Kaplan’s 2003 ASA Presidential Address in Hartford pointed out the complications inherent in trying to define a ‘place’ like Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

[6] For a more polemic argument, see Lipsitz, ‘Scholars may still have the luxury of thinking in exclusively national terms, but workers, citizens, migrants, artists, and activists do not. They have become transnational as a matter of necessity. They can no longer assume isomorphism of culture and place or of citizenship and the state’ (2001: 19).

[7] Our own thinking through this issue continues a line of inquiry raised in Jane Desmond and Virginia Dominguez’s 1996 essay ‘Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism’ and Jan Radway’s 1998 ASA Presidential Address ‘What’s in a Name?’, both of which make practical and productive suggestions for the future of the discipline and the ASA itself. See also Giles (2003), Kadir (2003), Mowitt (2001), and Muthyala (2001).

[8] Lipsitz makes a similar point in his discussion of ‘place’: ‘People who are displaced might not “know their place”, but they might be precisely the people we need to help us discover exactly what time it is’ (2001: 29).

[9] The text we analyze here is the promotional flyer distributed by Sage to announce the new journal and provide practical information about how to subscribe and submit manuscripts. This flyer was sent out in early 2003 to academics on American studies-related mailing lists and it was available at conferences such as the International American Studies Association conference in Leiden, the Netherlands, in May 2003.

[10] Duncan and Ley explain that ‘[w]ritten texts contain an often hidden geography and an examination of that geography may clarify the unreflected ideologies of the text’. Speaking particularly here of ‘dominant cultural representations of the “other”’ Duncan and Ley argue that geographical analysis is able to reveal how such representations are ‘less regularities of nature than conventions of a situated—geographic—imagination’ (1993: 188).

[11] This assumption has been challenged before in the disciplinary debates since the 1990s. Desmond and Dominguez argue for an ‘internationalized’ American studies that would ‘accord non-US scholars full engagement in the production of scholarship focusing on the United States’ (1996: 477). Rowe similarly points out that ‘there has been a nativist bias in American Studies’ that results in ‘appeals for an authochthonous American Studies . . . [that] ignore[s] the diverse and very different work done by international scholars in the field’ (2002: xviii).

[12] See Lucas and Fisher (2002) on the funding of UK-based American studies during the Cold War.

[13] See Bialasiewicz (2003) for a discussion of the conference as an international undertaking; see also Painter (2003).

[14] See also Gutiérrez and López-Nieva (2001); Gregson, Viaou, and Simonsen (2001).

[15] See Endo and Abe (1997) for a history of the Center and its origins in a series of University of Tokyo and Stanford University joint seminars in the 1950s.

[16] These submission instructions appear on the flyer distributed by Sage Publications announcing the new journal and soliciting subscriptions and submissions. In the first issue of the journal itself, dated March 2003, the submission instructions have changed to one editor for ‘UK/European authors’ and one editor for ‘authors from North and South America and the rest of the world’. Does this change reflect merely a logistical adjustment, or did the journal’s editors realize the hierarchy of scales created by the original division of editorial labor? In any case, the effect of the change is that the geography of the journal’s submissions no longer echoes the US-centric lines of power that so often spatialize academic power relations.