I'm So Bored With The USA/Career Opportunities

I'm grappling with the label Americanist and the discipline of American Studies. This, of course, after i've already applied to American Studies graduate programs. Katie has jokingly referred to me by the aforementioned moniker, while i have, more or less by a sort of linguistic default and a desire to take as many classes with Michael Denning as was humanly possible, chosen to affiliate myself with the also aforementioned discipline. These things are, i would argue, not the same. The term "americanist" conjures, for me, perhaps unfairly, images of old white men bent over arcane biographies of dead white capitalists and rulers, and evokes the particular historiographic trajectory of American Exceptionalism, Frederick Jackson Turner-style. Perhaps this is a general dissatisfaction with the paradigm of "Area Studies," perhaps i'm uncomfortable with the proprietary and constituent subtexts of the -ist suffix, not to mention its connotations of subscription, of belief, though this never seems to apply when discussing, say, South Asianists, or those wacky Latin Americanists.

I'm uncomfortable with the notion that American Studies should confine itself to the political boundaries of the US, and yes, i'm aware of all the problematics involved in the very important questions of whether and how theory can travel and the particular political stakes of American academics in American Studies Departments in the US talking about a hemispheric american studies and/or fetishizing hybridity and transnationalism without understanding the politics and consequences of the ways in which race and class and gender and place and citizenship and access to funding and publication and academic job security act upon its articulation. I want to do work that challenges the hegemony of the nation, wrestles with the many questions concerning empire, colonialism, and the production of subjectivity extant in American Studies, and i'm not sure how to do this yet. Or whether i should drop everything, learn Urdu or arabic, shift focus to another corner of the globe, and not be "an Americanist" any more. Though i'd be a little behind the 8-ball on that one. And i should probably learn Urdu and Arabic anyway, because the histories of South Asia and the Middle East weigh on what American Studies should be. I'm not happy with these last two sentences. They're very problematic. I apologize.

And meanwhile, every job they offer me's to keep me on the docks. Which is to say they offer me no jobs.

Match up i would pay to see: Larry Summers vs. Buffy Summers. Not because Larry Summers would ever stand a chance in hell, if Buffy Summers were real and not a film and television character, but more because of all the juicy feminist irony involved and because Larry Summers kind of reminds me of the really ugly demon in the sewers that Buffy electrocutes in season 3. I'm shutting up. Now.

By the way, Alek, you are so wrong that you have no kneecaps. I am wondering how you can live with no kneecaps.

This entry has been brought to you by the letter B, The Clash's The Clash (like you needed help figuring that one out,) Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem, Phoebe's excellent entry on the Summers controversy, and the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode where the love spell misfires and she gets turned into a rat.