A clarion call for a more theoretically and politically informed approach to American Studies

John Carlos Rowe, a leading American Studies scholar, has examined his field of study and declared it not ready for the twenty-first century. In The New American Studies, Rowe demands a reinvention of the discipline that includes a commitment to making it more theoretically informed, and he draws on the work of cultural critics, postmodernist theorists, and scholars in ethnic, gender, gay, and media studies. Rowe asserts that with American Studies’s strong history of social criticism and practical pedagogy it is an easy leap to the type ... Read moreof progressive commitments characteristic of these areas of scholarship.