Keywords for American Cultural Studies

Welcome to the discussion forums for Keywords for American Cultural Studies. They are a part of the Keywords Collaboratory website, jointly sponsored by NYU Press and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and an extension of the ideas contained in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, a book published by NYU Press in October 2007. There are four categories of discussion forums, each open to participation like any blog. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, October 17, 2008 (12:00 pm) Keywords editor Glenn Hendler and program coordinator Deborah Kimmey will participate in the “American Studies at the Digital Crossroads” panel at the 2008 ASA Annual Convention. They will join Randy Bass and Tim Powell of the ASA’s Crossroads website and Tara McPherson and Sharon Daniels from the online journal Vectors, along with American Quarterly editor Curtis Marez as commentator and Keywords editor Bruce Burgett as moderator. The panel will explore how digital forms of pedagogy and publication challenge existing hierarchies and forms of American Studies scholarship and engagement. Read the rest of this entry »

Four instructors who used the Keywords Collaboratory during the 2007-2008 school term recently signed online to chat about the unique benefits and challenges of using a wiki in the classroom. Read their transcript, and then post comments and questions here in the Keywords Blog by clicking on “join the discussion.”

In the chat room are Glenn Hendler (glennhendler), Jentery Sayers (jentery), Steven Tobias (tobiasucla), and Deborah Kimmey (dkimmey).

James Bowman’s review of Keywords for American Cultural Studies published in The Wall Street Journal is sure to provoke some debate among contributors, instructors, and students. Bowman criticizes the collection as an “intellectual house of cards” that has “nothing but contempt for the ‘discourse of expertise,’ i.e., traditional language scholarship.” Keywords-based methodologies within American Cultural Studies are, in Bowman’s words, a “politicization of language.”

Read the review online, and post your responses here.

Eric Lott, Siobhan Somerville, and Karim Murji will join co-editors of Keywords for American Cultural Studies Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler for a panel discussion on “Between Cultural Studies and American Studies: Keywords” at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.) at New York University. Whether you’re attending the talk or not, read the entries on Class, Queer, Race, Sex, and Society, and then respond to them here.

Anyone who attends the conference–or anyone who’s read the cluster of five keyword entries and is interesting on commenting on them together–can continue the conversation in this forum.

Join a discussion of Vijay Prashad’s entry on “Orientalism.” Prashad will be speaking at Fordham University on Thursday, March 27, 2008 as part of a series of events related to Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake. Whether you’re attending the talk or not, read the entry, and respond to it here. Prashad himself will occasionally check in and reply to comments that appear in the discussion forum.

Join a discussion of Brent Hayes Edwards’s entry on “Diaspora.” Edwards will be speaking at Fordham University on Monday, March 3, 2008 in an event sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies, the Program in American Studies, and other programs [more info]. Whether you’re attending the talk or not, read the entry, and respond to it in the blog.

Planning on using Keywords for American Cultural Studies–the book or the website–in a course? Thinking about organizing a course or working group around a keyword project? Have some advice to share? Post it in this forum.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” begins the main body of the Declaration of Independence, and the definition of “America” may likewise seem utterly self-evident: the short form of the nation’s official name. Read the rest of this entry »

Were we to imagine an earlier iteration of this keywords project—one published around, say, 1989— “border” would most likely have been left off the list entirely, though “margin” or maybe “minor” might well have been included. Read the rest of this entry »