American Studies 101: Please Check your Nihilism at the DoorJoanna Colangelo

A couple of months ago, I attended the 50th birthday celebration of the American Studies department at my old college, a small, liberal arts school in upstate New York. The department had always been a unique one—one of the first of its kind to be its own entity, made up of its own professors and its own core courses. For an interdisciplinary field, these perks of "departmental solidarity" were almost unheard of fifty years ago, certainly for a college as small as mine had been—and, in fact, still is today. But, the program pushed along in the typical American Studies style: inadvertently angering the long-standing English and History departments with its subjectively cultural approaches to their traditional disciplines, but pulling more and more interested students into its ranks through the process. I had stumbled upon this intimate department during my freshman year of college in 1998, and I was hooked fairly quickly. The subject matter was fascinating, but more important was the allure that I could study anthropology, art history, literature, film, government, history, environmental science—even physics—all under the title of "American Studies." I was seventeen years old and had never heard of something so academically liberating as this strange discipline that I had somehow been thrown into by way of a fortuitous liberal arts freshman elective.

When I received the invitation in the mail this summer to attend a weekend-long celebration for the department and to honor the retirement of my old advisor after thirty years of teaching, I could hardly send my RSVP (and departmental donation) in the mail fast enough. After all, I owed that small group of four professors the entire uniqueness of my undergraduate academic experience. Our professors were an eclectic mix of Harvard American Civilization Ph.D.s and disgruntled sociologists in their late sixties who had all but given up on their own field and found some sense of renewal in the cluttered makeshift American Studies office. Lodged awkwardly in between the English offices on the fifth floor and the History offices on the third floor was the academic delinquency of American Studies. We cherished every bit of under-funded, under-represented and overall, underdog standing at the college. The entire department took up no more than a half-corridor of an otherwise large brick building on the north end of our rural campus. Decorated with various versions of the American flag, snippets of newspaper cartoons, an illustration of Teddy Roosevelt and his beloved Rough Riders, a giant black and white photo of Woody Guthrie wielding his guitar-as-weapon that read, "this machine kills fascists," and a framed Happy Days (1974) photograph, sat the actual departmental office. The small space operated in a constant state of chaos, with Mark Twain books falling off of overcrowded shelves and students' theses housed in their very own bookcase for visitors to browse through. In any given corner of the office were stacks of articles from the old American Studies writers—those now ancient professors who had defined the discipline a million years ago: Vernon Lewis Parrington, Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx and RWB Lewis.

I suppose that my undergraduate experience was much like that of anyone else's in American Studies. I took the basic popular culture or regional culture courses. Yet, looming dauntingly for every American Studies major, minor, even concentrator, was the infamously required "American Studies: Methods and Approaches" core course. Even the sound of it was pure terror to us as nineteen-year old students. We knew what to expect with "The West," "Entertainment in America" and "The 1960s," but, "Methods and Approaches"? What the hell were we to make of that? The whole idea of culture itself was abstract enough; the thought of throwing a saddle on it and trying to funnel it through a method or an approach was beyond abstract. It was nonsensical and I can remember that when the dreaded semester arrived for me to finally enroll in this course, I was terribly intimidated as I walked into the classroom on that first day of spring classes during my sophomore year.

Now, truth be told, the semester went along just fine and as it turned out, I found myself enjoying those nonsensical methods and approaches, perhaps because, there really were not any. We "read" culture, as it were, through those old standby cultural lenses—politics, literature, film and so on, yet we never really compromised our discussion of the actual culture in order to focus more intently on the methodologies employed by those who were writing our scholarly texts. We read through Virgin Land (1950) and The Machine in the Garden (1964) and spent a good amount of time with Lawrence Levine and his Unpredictable Past (1993), but really, we simply explored our own methodologies and tried to apply them to whatever it was that each of us had chosen to study for the semester. The whole petrifying facade of taking a methodological approach to cultural studies, thankfully, had been sufficiently shattered by the end of my sophomore year and I marched on in American Studies with a refreshed confidence in my understanding of the field.

By the time I had one foot out of college, I had applied to a handful of graduate programs in American Studies, but I was not quite sure that I wanted to continue in that direction, at least not right away. I had graduated nine months after September 11th and was faced with one of the most dire job markets in years. There was little opportunity out there for students who were not on the specific career path of a banker or a lawyer but always the American Studies student, I refused to fall into jobless cynicism and instead, took some advice from the writers whom I had just spent four years reading, and decided to set out to discover America. There was a recurrent theme present during my four years as an undergraduate in American Studies and that was the mythic Great American Adventure. The vivacity of the great unknown existed out there somewhere and the journey to find it almost always promised to lead way not only to cultural exploration, but to the mightier triumph of self-discovery. History and literature had suggested it time and again: the adventure may not have always been an uplifting one, but it was sure to affect the traveler's life in some significant way. I also felt that this particularly tragic moment in history presented the strangest type of liberty. Having absolutely no expectations put on me to start a career, I realized that I had been given the rare opportunity to explore the country, as long as I could support myself along the way. The summer after graduation, I set off for the first of three trips across the United States—all in different capacities (one by car, another by bus and the greatest, by train), all of which provided opportunities that fell under the umbrella of a job, regardless of how obscure of those positions may have been. After three years of working in the most unrelated of fields—a literary agency, Country Music Television and a non-profit in New York—I was ready to return to that pile of graduate school applications that I had submitted three years earlier.

For my master's degree, I left my native New York and headed to the Midwest for one specific purpose: if I were going to study this culture of ours in greater depth, then I should certainly situate myself in the middle of it. During those trips around the country, I had always felt like the greatest cultural outsider in the middle of the country and in very simple terms, I had assumed that that was, therefore, enough reason to relocate. Clearly, there was some sort of subculture that I had not understood in the Midwest. I had assumed that spending a couple of years there, would, at the very least, enlighten me to this foreign land. As it would turn out, the actual culture of the Midwest would be the least of my problems in graduate school. Of course, I missed the subway, and I missed walking out of my building to an array of movie theaters, and the absence of decent Italian food could nearly cause one to begin twitching. As Sundays approached, you knew that somewhere beyond Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania people were cooking meatballs, sausages and pounds and pounds of pasta in a crammed kitchen. But all of these adjustments were ephemeral and certainly, manageable. What was a bit more difficult to adjust to was the tragically theoretical shift in that once horrifying-turned-tamed topic of "methods and approaches" in American Studies. Had those three years outside of academia made me that much more sensitive to the purely academic babble of intellectuals or had something actually shifted in the discipline American Studies?

For months, I sat through graduate classes where the professors made little sense, often getting confused by their own Byzantine verbal mazes. They were only to be outdone by the eager graduate students, who it would seem, subscribed to the logic that the more esoteric your sentences were, the greater genius-in-hiding one must be. At one point, I quoted Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's drivel-dialog about moral imperatives in Love and Death (1975) just so that I would have something completely incoherent to add to a class discussion on German émigré filmmakers during the Second World War. Sadly, but somewhat predictably, no one caught my oral plagiarism. I suppose that on some level I may have accepted this amount of self-importance; perhaps that is graduate school and really, what is a little innocent self-righteousness for a bunch of students who are convinced that they are breaking down cultural barriers and forging ingenious new approaches to understanding our cultural identities? I could have completely accepted that for what it was. However, one evening during my second semester while I was having dinner with a group of friends, I made an assertion so foolish, so completely ridiculous, so astronomically hilarious in nature that it followed me like a comical scarlet letter in every course that I took afterwards: I was not a socialist.

It was true that I did not pin silk-screened images of Che Guevara on an army shoulder bag and wear it like a radical's shield. I honestly did not think that drinking Starbucks was destroying mankind as we knew it and I did not hum along to The Internationale in my shower at night. Now, had I just simply disagreed with the majority of my friends and classmates on the whole socialism scene, I most certainly would not be writing this today. However, it was that somewhere in between my verbal recognition of not being a socialist, and my inability to spew out the praises of Karl Marx on any given Saturday night, that I became a Republican. Was there truly no in-between? I should probably make mention here that it was not actually I who deemed myself as Republican. It was just assumed that I must be a Republican, because what else could I possibly be if I weren't a self-proclaimed Marxist? Personally, I was fairly confident that I could be just who I was: an independent voter, who could never see herself voting along party lines, but who took a bit of extra time to do her research on the issues and refused to subscribe to either one political party—or, as it were, any specific "ism."

The strange byproduct of this seemingly political division between my classmates and myself was that our fundamental ideological differences were almost always present within the classroom, though at the time I hadn't noticed the inherent connection between politics and the direction of American Studies "methodologies." It was not until I had taken my second methods and approaches course in five years (which, this time around was called, "Methods and Theories"), that I realized the hopelessly dismal direction that American Studies was taking. Quickly replacing John Steinbeck's notes on American identities (notes written while he was actually exploring America and Americans), were the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and somewhere amid the nothingness of being and descending into discourse, it seemed that we also lost the very identities which American Studies once aimed to unearth. By the end of this particular course, the only dire conclusion that one could possibly draw about American culture—or any culture, for that matter—was that with national and international cultural deconstruction we can only celebrate in our universal sameness and if everything that could possibly distinguish our differences can be deconstructed to the point of non-existence, then in what ways could we (we being all nations) possibly celebrate our individual, national and international uniqueness? The emperor had some mighty powerful clothes and this time, he was wearing a Mod suit and smoking Gauloises cigarettes.

Time and again, I found myself clashing in similar ways (and with the same people) over my aversion to these philosophers as I had due to my indifference towards the Marxist push. It was not so much, however, that I did not appreciate a theoretical framework in which to analyze culture, but just that this framework was the only device which we were using to understand an otherwise very complex culture and set of subcultures. On one particular classroom occasion, we had been discussing Nan Enstad's Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (1999). Enstad constructively used her work as a corrective study to the ways in which labor studies had previously relied on men's labor struggle narratives to understand labor strife. Yet, Enstad used women's popular culture of the early twentieth century to discover "new political narratives to help us perceive languages of class, gender and race that we may not other recognize as such." Central to Enstad's approach towards the women in labor politics were two themes, one methodological and one theoretical. Methodologically, Enstad, almost immediately, confronted the ongoing debate of popular culture's role in cultural studies as she referred to a presenter's caution at an American Studies Association conference. She commented, "the presenter warned that cultural studies threaten to remove us from the materialist mud, as scholars lose touch with the suffering of workers in favor of the fun of popular culture studies." However, Enstad did not abandon the suffering of her women laborers for the suggested frivolity of popular culture. Instead, Enstad used the popular culture of the women laborers—fashion, dime store novels and cinema—to construct her own theory of female labor politics in the early twentieth century and as part of this study, she focused to a large extent on female Italian factory workers.

As our class engaged in pulling every bit of meat off of Enstad's intriguing argument, we finally reached the not-so-surprising Marxist conclusion that everyone was sure to be the last remaining bit of flesh left in Enstad's scholarship: that had these women not been tricked into submission by the corporations (i.e., movie studios or publishing houses), then they surely would have staged a communist revolt against the factories. Instead, they were fooled into mulling through the mud of their daily lives. Never once did they realize that they were, in fact, the repressed. The great issue that I took, however, with this reading was not merely the reading itself, but that the scholars had made the terrible assumption that the poor, uneducated, factory workers were too blind to notice what was surrounding them. The whole concept reeked of pretension and arrogance: we know how you should have really reacted, if only you had been so enlightened as we are today. Was this type of dismissal of the individual will of the worker, not the very same ideology against which the communist workers did eventually rebel? And yet, here were the Nihilists and the Marxists sitting in their stone classrooms in the cozy Midwest, where you could go an entire year without ever really running into an immigrant, pontificating about the rights of the unknowing worker—the worker for whom the academic would speak, but with whom the academic had never actually had a full conversation.

The class had become so engaged in what should have been, what actions should have taken place in those factories, that our discussion missed an entire point of Enstad's book—the rich subculture that evolved as a result of the factory workers' outings. We had deconstructed Enstad's points to such despair that there was nothing left to celebrate for the achievements of the female factory workers. The achievement, it would seem, was only having the 35 cents to take in an evening movie at the local theater. The sadness, however, was that in our mighty quest to speak on behalf of the disempowered worker, we never actually listened to what was right in front of us in those handy primary source citations. Perhaps the worker consciously chose to escape into the movies, not because she was naively fooled by the studios or propaganda, but because she saw a glimmer of hope of what may exist outside of the factory. Of course so many scholars today are embracing post-modernism and nihilism. By inserting their own voices for those who they deem voiceless, they can make all of the speeches the same, with all of the lines being read off of the same grand script of universality. The great irony, of course, is that the voiceless workers still remain voiceless. Yet this time around, it is not the corporations taking the voices, but the academics who are sure that they must be able to speak for the masses, because after all, aren't we to believe we are all merely the same anyway? The dim result, therefore, is that to recognize that "collective American mind" which Henry Nash Smith wrote about over fifty years ago is rightfully still considered an enormous academic blunder today, yet today's American Studies scholar can create a his own type of "selective universal voice": that which is made up of his own and of the underprivileged on whose behalf he has so righteously christened himself the power to speak.

I had come to know of American Studies nine years ago as a realm of academia, invigorating in its boundless research and writing opportunities. Much like the cultural myths that initially defined the discipline, the field was for the tackling and with this freedom came a great sense of opportunity and excitement for students—at least for me, as a young student. I will be the first person to support that the study of American exceptionalism fuels the dangerous fire of nationalism, but I certainly think that there is something worthy in investing in the vast subcultures and identities that exist in this country. It was simply the mystery of the land that lured me away from New York after college: to see the good, the bad and the ugly of America. I knew that there was a bad and an ugly, but I wanted to find it for myself. Studying American culture on the undergraduate level unleashed a spirit of adventure within me and I fantasized romantically about riding the railroads, driving through the deserts and climbing the mountains in the West—all because there existed the promise of an untamed life that I had never known of before. I was emphatic about experiencing America, certain that there was so much of it which I could not possibly ever truly understand and yet, within two years of graduate school, that flame of optimism, energy and hunger was silenced by the despair and cynicism of those around me. Has it become too naïve, too terribly ingenuous, too American to still believe in the hope of the country—in the hope that there could be adventure, promise and renewal out there, somewhere, in our future?

Joanna Colangelo works in External Affairs and Policy at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. She holds an M.A. in American Studies from Bowling Green State University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in American Studies from Skidmore College.