[2] Subjects studied within the field are varied, but often examine the literary themes, histories of American communities, ideologies, or cultural productions.
Examples might include topics in American social movements, literature, media, tourism, folklore, and intellectual history.
In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic.
Later scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Alan Trachtenberg re-imagined the myth and symbol approach in light of multicultural studies.
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, these earlier approaches were criticized for continuing to promote the idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the US has had a special mission and virtue that makes it unique among nations.
Several generations of American studies scholars moved away from purely ethnocentric views, emphasizing transnational issues surrounding race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, among other topics.
Environmental perspectives, in ascendance in related fields, such as literature and history, have not penetrated the mainstream of American studies scholarship.
[7] A major theme of the field in recent years has been internationalization[citation needed]—the recognition that much vital scholarship about the US and its relations to the wider global community has been and is being produced outside the United States.
In 1998, Janice Radway argued, "Does the perpetuation of the particular name, American, in the title of the field ... support the notion that such a whole exists even in the face of powerful work that tends to question its presumed coherence?
"In consideration of the limitations of conventional terms," Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera argued in 2018, instead of American, terms like "spaces claimed by the political body" and "residents of spaces claimed by the political body" would offer a "more sensitive and attuned description ... of the regions, critical artifacts, communities, and individuals in question, one that is less charged with the ambiguities and colonial ties that weigh down the traditional disciplinary nomenclatures.
"[12] In "the interests of justice and along the lines most suitable to our emergent age," argued Markha Valenta in 2017, scholars should consider "abandoning America as the field identifier.
Amy Kaplan maintained that "an imperial unconscious of national identity" lead to "overseas expansion, conquest, conflict, and resistance which have shaped the cultures of the United States.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera described the phenomenon as an attempt to transition the "cultural symbols of the invading communities from 'foreign' to 'natural,' 'domestic,'" through three discrete and sequential phases: Also termed "explorers" e.g., Lewis and Clark E.g., minerals, trade routes, spices, furs, communities to tax or conscript, fertile agricultural zones, strategic geography, etc.
Establish laws and norms that promote the metropolitan (invading system) as dominant culture and prohibit or criminalize other systems; offer citizenship to conquered peoples in exchange for submission to metropolitan cultural norms and abandonment of original or other (in the case of immigrants) social tendencies.
In the Netherlands the University of Groningen and the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen offer a complete undergraduate and graduate program in American studies.
[38] Founded at Bellagio, Italy, in 2000, the International American Studies Association[39] has held World Congresses at Leyden (2003), Ottawa (2005), Lisbon (2007), Beijing (2009), Rio de Janeiro (2011), The Sixth World Congress of IASA[40] at Szczecin, Poland, August 3–6, 2013, and Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (2019).