Matthew Charles_Contortionist,posed in studio,ca.1880

Boycotting Israel

Academia, activism and the futures of American Studies

RP 186 (Jul/Aug 2014) / Commentary

by Mandy Merck

On 4 December of last year, the annual conference of the American Studies Association resolved that ‘whereas the United States plays a significant role in enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine … whereas there is no effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation, and Israeli institutions of higher learning are party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights’, its members would support both a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and ‘the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine.’ Immediately, the American Studies Association (ASA) – a relatively obscure North American academic association – shot to prominence as, in the description of the Chronicle of Higher Education, ‘a pariah of the United States higher education establishment’. Despite its insistence that the resolution applies to Israeli institutions rather than individual scholars and students, over 100 US colleges and universities, the New York State Senate and 134 members of the US Congress have now condemned it for anti-Semitism and attempting to stifle academic freedom. The box opposite contains a timeline of the prelude to this resolution and subsequent events.

The American Studies Association is small by US standards, numbering about 5,000 mostly American members. Until now it has had little or no profile in the UK, where the study of US culture and politics has historically been spurred by ‘the special relationship’ abjectly claimed by British politicians of all parties, and by the direct sponsorship of the US government and the Fulbright and Rockefeller foundations in the continuation of Cold War cultural diplomacy. Student recruitment to UK American Studies programmes and departments has fluctuated with the fortunes of that relationship, and some commentators ascribe the closure of a few of these since 2000 to the unpopularity of George W. Bush and the second Iraq War. But there are other explanations for this apparent decline in what is often now called United States Studies. The increasing inter-, trans- or postnational understanding of the term ‘American’ means that the purview of the University of London’s Institute of American Studies, for one example, is now hemispheric, and will continue to be so as the economic and political influence of Latin America increases. At the same time UK English departments and the numerous media studies departments across the country have incorporated US literature, film and television in their curricula as the effective Californication of British culture is intensified by the Internet’s increasing dominance of all electronic media. The recent closure of the American Studies department in King’s College London may reflect this phenomenon rather than any waning interest in US culture. As it closed, a highly regarded department of film, specializing in European, Asian and North American cinema, rose in its stead. Meanwhile, the election of a young, black and ostensibly hip US president has been cited as the impetus for a post-2009 revival in national student recruitment, and at least one new department has been inaugurated in the past academic year, at the University of Northumbria.

Somewhat belatedly, and a little unevenly, these British developments participate in three widely acknowledged trends in the field: towards (1) a pluralist approach to American culture, and indeed to the many Americas themselves; (2) the interrogation of imperial fantasies of US exceptionality and indispensability; and (3) the dizzying displacements of the vernacular and the global in the field’s international turn. In recounting these I am admittedly going backward to the futures of American studies charted by scholars like Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar in the 2010 collection Globalizing American Studies and their notable predecessors as long ago as Jay Mechling in 1991 and Gene Wise twelve years before that in his much-cited essay ‘“Paradigm Dramas” in American Studies’. In their 2002 review of the field’s history, Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman further complicate any attempt at a linear chronology by stressing the temporal as well as the spatial heterogeneity of ‘the problematic of present futures and past presents’ in articulating what they title The Futures of American Studies....Continue Reading

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