AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 32 (2007) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Kongressbericht “The United States from Inside and Out”: The 2006 Convention of the American Studies Association Ludwig Deringer Perhaps more than ever, vistas of a democratic world community have currency in our age of globalism, and in view of the contested role of the United States in the fall of 2006. From an academic angle, such visions informed the annual conference of the American Studies Association, held in Oakland October 12-15, 2006. The largest ASA convention on the West Coast to date, the gathering drew scholars from all over the globe. Delineating the future orientation of the profession, the meeting opened up prospects on ‘America’ and American Studies from the perspectives of U.S. and international Americanists alike, as announced in the conference title, “The United States from Inside and Out: Transnational American Studies.” Perceptions of ‘America,’ from colonial to postcolonial times, were articulated across the disciplines organized in American Studies, as divergent as Race and Ethnicity, Middle East American Studies, Legal Studies, or Early American Studies. The convention’s theoretical frameworks for reconceptualizing the field hinged on interculturality in the broadest sense, foregrounding a number of assumptions and methodologies that appear particularly promising. The overriding line of argumentation was the perceived need to move American Studies away from a nation-based to a transnational discipline. As Emory Elliott (University of California at Riverside) emphasized in his Presidential Address, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism are values that not only benefit academia but engender “thoughtful citizenship” and a “humane future,” against the perils of American imperialism. Both from a theoretical and a practical stance, such reorientation necessitates diversified networks of academic cooperation, grounded in innovative pedagogies. The ongoing implementation of American Studies programs in former East Bloc countries, or educational settings employing transcontinental teleconference classes and webcasting, are just two cases in point. Significantly, experts called for a multilingual approach in order to facilitate not only global communication but also the study of foreign language literary texts in the original. If a turn away from the felt predominance of the Humanities to the Social Sciences, advocated by some speakers, would actually benefit American Studies in the long run remains to be seen. Kongressbericht 158 Within these wider frames, individual presentations from across the field often provided excellent insights. Thus, emphasis was given to reconsidering categorization politics and marginality: who defines who is “marginal”? or “white”? or “the enemy”? To rethink marginality, it was claimed, is to anticipate the New Histories of the future, to be written in the interest of justice. While Africanity and Latin American identity constructions were well represented in the debates, Arab American issues were particularly strong. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and CIA rendition flights figured prominently in discussions of Arab Americanness, the prison in American culture, or U.S. colonialism past and present, often evidenced in “chiastic Americas,” i.e., projections and self-perceptions of America in its representations of foreign cultures. One of the most thoughtful sessions was a literary reading by Vietnamese American authors Lan Tran, Truong Tran, and Andrew Lam, with the latter sharing his views of postwar acculturation from his memoir Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005). A complement to the discourses of margins and cultural memory is the emerging project of the ‘archive’ (both in the literal and the figurative sense), indispensable, for example, to the much-needed study of the Americas in the multinational and multilingual contexts of the colonial age. The topicality of ‘Archive Studies’ was illustrated by the timely exhibit at the nearby Berkeley Art Museum on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bancroft Library. From the vantage point of this foreign observer, American Studies continues to be the paradigmatic program which for decades has attracted students abroad toward a deeper understanding of the United States. Just as the American Studies movement of the 1960s superseded the “Old Regionalism” school of the 1930s, a globalized world scene is now embedding the discipline into ever expansive intellectual exchanges and dialogs, to the advantage of the profession worldwide and the public at large. While the 2006 convention expanded the discourses of transculturality and transdisciplinarity current for a while already, it was a wealth of new accentuations, along with a heightened sense of public responsibility, that showed American Studies at this time as vibrant and future-oriented as ever. Which is another way of saying that education remains our greatest cultural capital. Ludwig Deringer Lehr- und Forschungsgebiet Anglistik RWTH Aachen