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American Quarterly 56.2 (2004) 223-233



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The Loyalties of American Studies

Pennsylvania State University

In the America of George Bush and John Ashcroft, Fox News television and Clear Channel radio, political dissent has not been criminalized, but it has been widely stigmatized. The master trope of the Bush administration is that of loyalty: criticism and dissent, for this White House, are simply forms of disloyalty and must be punished. This trope governs the Bush administration's approach to governance regardless of whether its critics are former cabinet members and counterterrorism experts like Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke, political independents like Vermont senator Jim Jeffords, or popular entertainers like the Dixie Chicks. In the Bush lexicon, it would appear, the phrase "loyal opposition" is filed under "oxymorons," as if the interests of the Bush-Cheney White House were coextensive with the parameters of patriotic political speech in the United States. Accordingly, some dissenters in the United States have given up on the language of patriotism altogether, on the grounds that it is owned by the political right and articulated to discourses of American exceptionalism, religious fundamentalism, and frenetic public flag-waving. As an academic field, American studies has long had a productively ambivalent relation to discourses of patriotism. In the current political climate, however, ambivalent relations to discourses of American patriotism, no matter how productive, risk being construed by the state as disloyalty to the state. The question of loyalty has thus taken on a new urgency in American studies. [End Page 223]

For the past quarter century or more, American studies has been closely identified with the political left in the United States. And for the past quarter century or more, Republican administrations and conservative intellectuals in American civil society have made a point of disparaging and harassing scholarly fields associated with the political left. I need not rehearse that history here, but I do want to note that the harassment of scholarly fields and organizations has taken a variety of forms—for instance, the Reagan State Department's refusal to allow Wole Soyinka to attend the 1986 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention (invoking the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act) and its subsequent refusal to recommend MLA members for United States Information Agency fellowships abroad after the MLA awarded Soyinka an honorary membership; Lynne Cheney's 1994-95 crusade against the National History Standards and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both of which she herself had overseen prior to 1993; and, most recently, the October 2003 passage by the House of Representatives of the International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003 (H.R. 3077), one crucial provision of which would establish an "advisory board" that would have the power to investigate individual faculty members and specific classes on campus, and, in the language of proposed section 633(d)(2), to "annually monitor, apprise, and evaluate the activities of grant recipients" under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1958.

As I write, it is unclear whether H.R. 3077 will pass the Senate. But regardless of what happens to Title VI programs in the next year, it does not take much to imagine that Congress—and freelance right-wing culture warriors like Stanley Kurtz and Daniel Pipes, who have been instrumental in generating Congressional opposition to the work of the Middle Eastern Studies Association and its leadership—might take a similar interest in the "activities" of American studies should the Bush administration return for a second term. We are not yet in the realm of loyalty oaths and mass firings of dissident faculty; at the moment we are not even close. But there is no question that, over the past few years, conservatives in government and in civil society have fostered new initiatives in the academic culture wars. In the case of the attacks on Middle Eastern studies, and in David Horowitz's recent calls for the hiring of conservative scholars in order to foster "diversity" among college faculties, such initiatives seek openly to deploy the legislative power of the state in the service of a conservative political...

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