The article presents a brief history of the Review of International American Studies since its inception until today,

Since its inception, International American Studies (IAS) had to define itself against the larger backdrop of global or world studies. However, as Paul Giles notes in his contribution to this special issue of RIAS marking the 10th anniversary of the journal and devoted to “International American Studies and the Question of World literature,” “World Literature in its current institutional manifestation is a much more recent phenomenon” than IAS, and may have “accumulated academic prestige more rapidly and securely than International American Studies has so far managed.”  Whatever their different temporal and institutional trajectories, however, both IAS and World literature may be seen as efforts to come to terms with the momentous historical, political, social, and technological changes of the past few decades. Put simply, both can be considered attempts to fashion new epistemological tools better suited to making sense of a globalized world, so that, no matter how (relatively?) different their objects of study might be, a set of theoretical concerns would appear to be shared by both fields. Both students of IAS and World Literature, for example, need to venture beyond the traditional categories of the nation and of national cultures, by coming to terms with the social, historical, and linguistic complexities that such a move entails. Both have to do so in a way that “opens” one’s field and yet preserves its raison d’être, especially at a time when the humanities are under attack and the defense of academic positions and credentials—all calls for “interdisciplinarity” notwithstanding—is of paramount importance. Both need to rethink the parameters of their disciplinary specializations, that is, without pulling the institutional rugs from under their feet—a precarious balancing act which, in the age of the corporate university, with its rage for classifying, evaluating, and ranking, is far from easy to perform.

Paul Giles
Department of English
US Studies Centre's International Academic Advisory Committee
University of Sidney

World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest

Abstract: This paper considers the relation between the institutional formations of World Literature and International American Studies. It compares and contrasts the association between World Literature and Comparative Literature to that between International American Studies and the American Studies movement emerging out of the United States. It goes on to argue that World Literature is anchored to a universalist teleology, one linked historically to an idealist intellectual genealogy. By contrast, International American Studies involves a more materialist, multidirectional emphasis that differentiates it from the U.S. appropriation of globalization to further its own strategic interests.

Keywords: World Literature, Comparative Literature, International American Studies, Globalization

Cristina Giorcelli
Facolta' di Lettere e Filosofia
Università degli Studi Roma Tre

The Difference that Language Makes: A Response to Paul Giles’ “World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest”

A Response to Paul Giles’ “World Literature and International American Studies: Convergence, Divergence, and Contest.” (in the present issue).

Keywords: formation of International American Studies, World Literatures, academic politics

Ulfried Reichardt
Amerikanistik,
Universität Mannheim

Theories of the Global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age

Abstract: The paper discusses theories of the global and approaches to the concept of the world, presents definitions of literature in a globalizing age, and examines proposals how to approach world literature in literary scholarship, including ones that regard world literature as a system and ones that focus on individual texts. Finally, the essay argues that in our digitally restructured knowledge world, contemporary novels reflecting on the transformations of media and of knowledge formation have to be considered as versions of world literature as well.

Keywords: World Literature, globalization and literature, theories of the global, concepts of the “world,” digitalization

Marina Camboni
Dipartimento di Lingue Mediazione Lettere Filosofia
Studi Umanistici
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MACERATA

The Limitations of Theory: A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age”

A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: Limitations of theory, globalization, global literature, American literature

Cristina Iuli
Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale,
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories

Abstract: This paper considers how neo- or trans- Atlantic studies conceives of the Atlantic and its legacies in relation to the idea of the archive, that is, of a body of works related to traces of a trans-Atlantic American past, to its principle of organization and analysis for literary studies, and to the critical descriptions of American Cultures in the context of a long trans-Atlantic network. It addresses how recent works on critical race studies and decoloniality, on performativity and memory and on comparative circum-Atlantic spectrality frame an original way to address how the literary imagination challenges the historical voids produced by modern Western amnesia.

Keywords: trans-Atlantic; archive; critical memory; American literature

Ugo Rubeo
Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali
Università "Sapienza" di Roma
 
Building a Counterarchive: A Response to Cristina Iuli’s “Trans-Atlantic American Studies and the Transatlantic Pedagogies: Some Methodological Perspectives and Questions”

A Response to Cristina Iuli’s “Trans-Atlantic American Studies and the Transatlantic Pedagogies: Some Methodological Perspectives and Questions.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: archive, counterarchive, memory, Trans-Atlantic Studies, Cristina Iuli

Mena Mitrano
Loyola University Chicago
JFRC

American Studies as Italian Theory

Considering Roberto Esposito's narrative of Italian Theory, according to which Italian Theory first started as a US-based phenomenon and only later irradiated in other parts of the world, this paper explores the consequences of that narrative and the questions that it might raise for American Studies: Might Italian Theory rightfully belong to the Americanist's domain of inquiry? If so, what impact might it have on the identity of the Americanist? What is an Americanist?  The paper argues that this new wave of theory illuminates the confluence of American Studies and critical thought, both involved in a simultaneous movement of deterritorialization that pushes them outside their established boundaries.

Keywords: American Studies, literary and cultural theory, Italian American Studies, Italian Theory

Carlo Martinez
Università "Gabriele d'Annunzio,"

Dispersing the Field as “Reciprocal Healing”: A Response to Mena Mitrano “American Studies as Italian Theory”

A Response to Mena Mitrano “American Studies as Italian Theory.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: reflexivity, American studies as Italian Theory, literary theory, cultural theory, American Studies, the New Americanists

Belligerent ignorance has always proved strategic in the hegemonic goals of empire. The imperial history of the present is no exception. The Know-Nothing Party was founded in the USA in 1843, a pivotal year in America’s history of territorial expansion. It was disbanded as a national political party in the no-less pivotal year of 1860, a year in which patriotic gore would turn on itself as the grossly misnamed Civil War. Nonetheless, the political and ideological tenets of the Know-Nothing Party endure with global repercussions in the twenty-first century. The literary and historiographic diagnoses of this deliberate bellicosity founded on the cultivation of ignorance have ranged from poetic to critical discourse starting in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, in the twenty-first century, what the Germans termed schrecklichkeit (“ruthless terror”) to describe the horrors of World War I continues to be visited on peoples and nations targeted by imperial hubris and economic rapacity through a cynical strategy of expediently manufactured ignorance.

Keywords: agnotology, doublespeak, empire, epistemology, hegemony, media, realpolitik, xenophobia.

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez
Texas A&M International University 

The Long History of “Doublethink”: A Response to Djelal Kadir’s “Agnotology and the Know-Nothing Party: Then and Now”

A Response to Djelal Kadir’s “Agnotology and the Know-Nothing Party: Then and Now.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: humanities, state control, ignorance, American Literature, World Literature, world culture, American Studies, Comparative Studies

Markha Valenta
Radboud University Nijmegen

Abandoning America the Better to Save American Studies: A Proposal

Abstract: This paper argues that the most fruitful future for American Studies is one that subsumes it to global projects, critical sensibilities, political, intellectual and aesthetic fields greater than itself. Correspondingly, the prime referent of American Studies ought not to be a reified “America” but rather the paradoxes, tensions and contestations between democratic and inhumanely extractive relations that gave birth to and continue to shape the US/Americas, even as their reach and flow far exceed “America.” The US – as icon, social field and political actor – is as much the effect as the source of global forces. The most important of these today are ones that qualify, selectively dissolve, concentrate and reconfigure constitutive elements of the nation-state and political geography. Taking this seriously – as the US follows in the footsteps of other countries that have been producing one chauvinist strongman leader after another – means making American Studies not about either “America” or the US but about the world. One particularly promising avenue entails scholarship engaging and contributing to a radical, globalizing democratic culture that is, in fact, deeply aligned with some of the most important traditions and sensibilities in American Studies itself.

Keywords: Globalization, Democracy, Politics, America, American Studies

Giorgio Mariani
Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali
Università "Sapienza" di Roma

Subsuming “America” to the “Global.” A Response to Markha Valenta’s “Abandoning America the Better to Save America”

A Response to Markha Valenta’s “Abandoning America the Better to Save America.” (In the present issue of RIAS).

Keywords: transnational turn, American Studies, democracy, internationalization of American Studies, refocusing American studies, globalization

Abstracts and notes on the Authors of feature texts of the issue.

Information for potential contributors.