GEOGRAPHIES OF AMERICAN STUDIES

Sheila Hones and Julia Leyda

This paper’s argument develops from the premise that American studies is a discipline that performs and generates shared and normative geographies in two main ways: in the spatial definition of its subject matter, and in the spatialized hierarchies of its disciplinary practices. For this reason, we will argue, it is not only possible but also productive to approach the academic practices of American studies as geographical issues, subjecting them to spatial analysis and critique. In setting out this argument, we will first outline the basic concept of a critical geography of American studies and then, in order to provide a concrete example of this method at work, discuss some of the ways in which geographical theories of place can facilitate the productive analysis of located practices of international American studies scholarship. Interpreting various sites of international academic exchange—for example, classrooms and conferences—as places produced through particular narratives and practices, we will discuss the implications of the fact that any one of these places is always, in a sense, multiple places – that any such place can always be located in more than one contextual spatial network or normative geography. We will argue that by paying close attention to specific performances of disciplinary practice as they come into being within spatialized networks, Americanists can gain valuable insight into the ways in which assumptions about American studies subject matter and disciplinary practice are produced and maintained.