Defending America against its devotees Presidential Address, First World Congress of the International American Studies Association, Leiden, The Netherlands, 22-4 May 2003

This presidential address at the International American Studies Association's first world congress was composed while the invasion of Iraq was under way. Like the Vietnam War that was launched through an historic act of mendacity called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the current pre-emptive war may be based on claims and ideological agendas equally suspect in their veracity that may well prove a watershed for American culture and paradigm-altering for American Studies. This first IASA presidential address traces the historical precedents of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America of September 2002, since called the Bush Doctrine, and reads it as a Monroe Doctrine writ globally and as a new US Martial Plan that displaces the Marshall Plan on which the current American Studies field was founded. The portentous changes implicit in this displacement bode a transformation in the foundation of American Studies similar to the changes precipitated by the Vietnam War, with the difference that the global scope of American Studies as an international field today will resist the re-absorption of these changes into a national and nationalist project of US Americanism

American studies · Doctrine · Economic history · Humanities · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Presidential system · Reinterpretation · Sociology · Writ · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• American Studies in the Shadow of Orientalism

  Mounira Soliman•Comparative American Studies An…•2015

  Add to list

• Inter-American studies or Imperial American studies

  Sophia A Mcclennen•Comparative American Studies An…•2005

  Add to list