Geographies of American Studies

Sheila Hones and Julia Leyda

A paradoxically conservative aspect of recent moves to "internationalize" the practice of American studies has been the way in which this turn toward the international has taken the national for granted. At the very moment that Americanists have been striving to disentangle disciplinary subject matter from the constraints of a static and border-oriented view of world space, calls to internationalize disciplinary practice have been reifying national boundaries and sorting scholarly activity by physical locations and national academies. In this article, we engage with this paradox by focusing on the ways in which dominant geographies of American studies practice are produced and sustained discursively. Our argument is that much U.S.-based writing about "international" or "global" American studies not only essentializes existing borders and subject positions, but also works to naturalize the idea that the U.S.-based Americanist position is simultaneously domestic and universal, while American studies as practiced elsewhere is by contrast foreign and located.1

Our aim is to destabilize the dominant geography that naturalizes the existing organizational forms and spatialized hierarchies of the field worldwide and limits the ways in which its futures can be imagined and debated. On the basis of our premise that different conceptualizations of global geography recognize and validate different kinds of scholarly interaction, we argue that a more self-conscious and theoretically informed geography of American studies practice would not only make it possible to acknowledge a greater variety of currently existing but practically invisible flows of work, ideas, and knowledge, but would also open up new opportunities for future collaborations of currently unimagined kinds across different kinds of distance.2

Our argument is made in the tradition of the critical geography of academic knowledge production and directed toward embedded space-producing practices current within the interdisciplinary work of American studies.3 As geographer Lawrence Berg has argued, "given the radically changing geographies of 'America'. . . there is no better time than the present moment to interrogate the relationships between the production of 'American' space and the spatialized cultural politics of knowledge production in American Studies."4 [End Page 1019] We offer this essay as a contribution to what Berg calls "the hard work of developing an explicit analysis and re-imagining of the spatialities of American Studies." Following Berg and other critical geographers, we believe that the hard work has to be done in this order: theory and analysis first, reimagining and reconstructing second, because only by rendering visible the everyday practices that currently reproduce and naturalize the dominant geography of American studies will we become able to identify that geography and generate alternatives.

The geography of American studies practice is far more than a matter of location: most crucially, it is a matter of the ways in which space is produced through routine scholarly activities. The spatialization of American studies practice is different from, and separable from, the spatialization of American studies subject matter, and it is equally open to reconceptualization. Even when the subject matter of American studies remains organized in terms of a center/margin model, the practice of American studies does not have to be spatialized in the same way, with U.S.-located concerns and institutions normatively positioned at the center. In fact, it is the disciplining power of this center/margin model to shape and limit the agenda for American studies worldwide that we most want to question here. Our goal is to render visible a taken-for-granted scholarly geography predicated on bordered national identities that enables the Americanist tendency to conflate subject matter with practice, a conflation that renders the U.S. academy the domestic "home" of the discipline. This geography facilitates the division of the world of American studies into two halves, separating U.S.-based (domestic) practice from American studies as practiced everywhere else (foreign). "International American studies," in this configuration, all too often becomes either another way of saying "American studies abroad" or a term used to refer to interactions linking the domestic center to the foreign margins.5

In our understanding, this is a geographical problem: a U.S.-centered domestic/foreign geography of disciplinary practice in American studies restricts the potential of the international turn by heightening the significance of national location and then privileging the priorities and interests of a perceived core. This center/margin geography is strikingly evident in the discursive convention that renders unexceptional the use of an unspecified collective Americanist "we" voice that is by default U.S.-based. This convention, by which an unlocated Americanist "we" can mean both "we Americanists" and "we U.S.-based Americanists," both results from and feeds back into a nation-based, U.S.-centered geography for global American studies. It firmly locates scholars who self-identify as non-U.S.-based on the wrong side of a conflated national/disciplinary border, rendering them doubly foreign. It also arranges [End Page 1020] American studies practice worldwide around the hub of U.S.-based academic, institutional, and political issues.

We identify this as a geographical problem because it arises out of a particular way of understanding (and producing) space. And because we identify the issue as a conceptual problem, we believe that it requires a conceptual solution. Defining "geography" not as a fixed and neutral physical context but as a form of knowledge, we assume that the practice of sorting academic collectivity by reference to borders, locations, and nation-states is not so much the recognition of an existing geography as it is the performance of a geography, and hence is open to reconsideration and renegotiation. Further, we do not mean to propose a conceptual initiative in opposition to a practical or material program, for while it is obvious that practical rearrangements can revise commonsense geographies, our assumption is that a rethinking of disciplinary geographies will have material effects.

Yet, in calling for a rethinking of the geography of American studies practice, we are not using the terms geography and space metaphorically. As geographers Cindi Katz and Neil Smith have made clear, "spatial metaphors are problematic in so far as they presume that space is not."6 When we talk about ways in which the taken-for-granted geography of U.S.-based American studies could be rethought, we mean this quite literally. We want to challenge the dominant understanding of academic space by insisting that alternative geographies of American studies are imaginable. Specifically, we want to propose a conceptual shift away from a territorial geography and toward a relational geography, which is to say, a shift away from the practice of viewing space as a kind of container, within which Americanists act and across the distances of which they relate to each other, and toward the idea that it is the acting and the relating that literally produce the space. For example, Shelley Fisher Fishkin has questioned the significance of national borders in the geography of American studies scholarship, asking how "if national borders no longer delimit the subject of our study" we can "allow them to delimit the scholarship that demands our attention?"7 Shifting the ground slightly, we can usefully rephrase this question to ask not how national borders limit scholarly attention, but how the habitual limits of scholarly attention reinforce national borders in the scholarly world. In this reversal, it is not that Americanists do American studies in particular ways at specific locations, within contained spaces, and across fixed distances, but rather that Americanists make locations, produce space, and define distance in their doing of American studies.8

Borders, locations, distance, proximity, and space are constantly being produced in the mundane practices of American studies. The announcement of [End Page 1021] the ASA's International Initiative in 2004, for example, argues that "facilitating ongoing conversations between international scholars of American Studies and Americanists in the U.S. can help both groups achieve a better understanding of both the multiple cultures that have shaped U.S. culture from the start, and the impact that American culture has had on other countries around the globe."9 This statement carries with it a range of spatializing effects, the most obvious being its inscription of a border dividing American studies scholars into two groups, the "international" group and the group working "in the U.S." When the term "international" is used as it is here to locate a place or a practice (as beyond the borders of the United States), rather than to describe a process of relations or interactions between different places and practices, it reinforces a strongly territorial geography.

An alternative, relational geography is rendered imaginable by geographer Doreen Massey when, in her call for "a fuller recognition of the simultaneous coexistence of others with their own trajectories," she defines space as the dimension of "coexisting heterogeneity." As Massey argues, "the very possibility of any serious recognition of multiplicity and heterogeneity itself depends on a recognition of spatiality."10 A relational view of space thus provides an alternative to the currently dominant conceptualization of the worldwide Americanist academy as a centered arrangement of fixed national positions, some "ahead" of the others, which exist separately and then interact with each other. It allows for an Americanist geography in which individual and group identities (even national positions) are produced through interaction, in turn generating a decentered and flexible scholarly space in which distance and proximity are as relative as they are physical. In the next section, we theorize the need for a turn toward a geography of scholarly identity and practice that is relational rather than territorial, a disciplinary space defined by multiplicity and always under construction.11 In the last section, we support this call for a reimagining of the field with an analysis of one everyday example of the material effects of this nation-centered disciplinary geography on the practice of American studies around the world.
A Relational Geography of American Studies

Despite the fact that spatial conceptualization in American studies currently relies on a conventional cartographic projection of the global surface in which distance is fixed and national location prioritized, most scholars are already familiar with the practice of living and working in relational space, a space in which national location is only one aspect of scholarly positionality. Actual [End Page 1022] spatial practice and spatial conceptualization are in fact quite frequently at odds. As the geographer Ash Amin has pointed out, in our "relationally constituted modern world . . . it has become normal to conduct business—economic, cultural, political—through everyday trans-territorial organization and flow." This daily reality, familiar to most Americanists around the world, whether consciously recognized as a transterritorial practice or not, is the already-lived alternative to the territorial geography of a discrete and bordered national academy surrounded by an international margin. Amin argues that a politics of space that prioritizes the physically proximate over the physically distant elides the habitual connections that exist between places and people who are physically distant but relationally close:

Increasingly, daily life is constituted through attachments and influences that are distanciated, as revealed by the workings of diaspora communities, corporate networks, consumption patterns, travel networks, microworlds of communication and the many public spheres that stretch across space.12

This kind of translocal everyday geography—of distant relations, temporary communities, mundane long-distance communications, and mutable networks—offers a workable alternative to the current border-focused conception of the international in American studies. An openness to this version of Americanist space could push discussions of the geography of American studies away from the comparative analysis of located practices (most often sorted by national academy) and toward what John Urry calls a "social physics," the analysis of network "systems that are simultaneously robust and fragile, that exhibit order on the edge of chaos, that restructure time and space, that reorder what is present and what is absent."13

Scholarship on the geography of translocal networks and relational space that emphasizes the ways in which a relational geography is a real-world lived experience can help us to understand the ways in which the daily life of an academic in a globalized world involves equally different kinds of relations of proximity. It can also help us to understand the point that physical proximity is not an inherently "closer" kind of proximity than relational proximity. This is particularly important in a field, such as American studies, that has frequently been defined with an emphasis on nation-defining territorial borders. A nationally oriented view of distance can easily generate the commonsense idea that Honolulu and New York are located "in the same place," the United States, thereby making Honolulu appear literally closer to New York than it is to Tokyo. This kind of radically simplified spatial sorting minimizes intranational variety and maximizes international difference. [End Page 1023]

Our point here is that although each of us has an individual network of constantly shifting links to colleagues, mentors, students, families, and friends—not to mention books, Web sites, journals, conferences, and discussion lists—in all their disparate locations, we currently have no commonsense way of conceptualizing this network geography, of building it into our ways of being Americanists. Our academic institutions, nationally defined American studies organizations, and discursive practices continue to sustain a geography of national borders and physical proximities. But in practice we live within flexibly intersecting networks that generate a space that has to be imagined in a different way: a geography not of contiguous territories separated by borders but of a ripped and folded space, a multicentered geography of network relations.14

One simple way to destabilize the conventional territorial geography would be to turn the idea of the international on its head and look at it in terms not so much of how international interactions connect separated places but in terms of how they produce separate places. This turn would envision the national as a result (not a precondition) of worldwide relations and networks. This is not a reversal that would seem particularly strange at the level of individual identity. As Doreen Massey has demonstrated, places, regions, and nations—as well as individuals—come into being through practices of interaction and engagement, "forged in and through relations (which include non-relations, absences and hiatuses)." Massey's comparison of individuals with spatial identities can be applied directly to the conceptualization of the global space of American studies:

An understanding of the relational nature of space has been accompanied by arguments about the relational construction of the identity of place. If space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if we make space through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local to the (so-called) global, then those spatial identities such as places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable in any absolute sense, and inevitably historically changing.15

A relational geography of this kind would enable a productive understanding of global American studies as a network of interactions. This is not a geography that erases or invalidates local or national specificity, but one that allows other specificities to become visible: as Massey explains, a relational geography can generate both "an appreciation of the internal multiplicities, the decentrings, perhaps the fragmentations" of place and an appreciation of the ways in which "any nation, region, city, as well as being internally multiple, is also a product of relations which spread out way beyond it."16 [End Page 1024]

The spaces of American studies could be productively reenvisioned in this way, with a recognition of the relations that already stretch across the globe, reworking distances and creating proximities, generating in their network interactions nodes of social, political, and research-oriented common ground. In this alternative disciplinary geography, the concepts of "place" and "location" are differently and much more flexibly defined than in the territorial nation-state model. And in this model, crucially, place and community do not precede interaction and exchange; they are generated by interaction and are produced out of exchange. Reinterpreting a geography of discrete places and separate scales (local, regional, and national) as a geography of networks, we might be able to reimagine those places and scales as "circulatory sites" rather than as "islands."17 The recognition that transnational networks are already generating Americanist spaces across global distances would help us to move on from privileging any one location as original or authentic, while at the same time not eliding the very real dominance of the United States in the field, evident in its wealth of academic resources as well as its gatekeeping functions in publishing and conference contexts. Critically, such a recognition would break out of the (paradoxical) confines of the rhetoric of center-to-margin expansion currently evident in so many calls for the "internationalizing" of American studies.

The nationally oriented geography of the current international turn generates a form of spatial fetishism in which people are reductively identified with particular locations, and relations between people are articulated as relations between places. Something of this tendency seems evident, for example, in the articulation of the ASA's international initiative as a project "facilitating ongoing conversations between [two] groups," "international scholars," and "Americanists in the U.S."18 The addition of a relational geography would bring to our attention the world of American studies that is currently hidden beneath the surface of this U.S.-centered domestic/international map. Such a shift would enable us to see American studies globally, not as something that needs to be organized or produced, but as something that already exists and needs only to be recognized and rendered visible. New initiatives that connect existing places and communities are only one way to move scholarly work forward; just as urgently, we need new ways of envisioning space capable first of revealing the connections and interactions that already animate the far-reaching scholarly worlds of American studies and second of rendering imaginable new kinds of scholarly networks and locations. [End Page 1025]
Who Are "We"?

We have been arguing so far for an American studies geography that understands locations and bordered territories not so much as fixed entities that precede and initiate relations and interactions across distance but, rather, as unstable entities that come into existence as the result of sociospatial relations. Doreen Massey defines social and spatial relations as "embedded practices" within particular geographies: in other words, social practices produce geographies at the same time that geographies are the medium in which practices are embedded. To make more concrete the point that Americanist practices are as productive of disciplinary geography as they are produced by it, we would like to look more closely at just one of the everyday, unquestioned discursive practices in American studies currently embedded in and productive of the dominant geography of the discipline: the "we" voice in writings about American studies, those texts that talk about what "we" Americanists do, have done, or should do. What we are particularly interested in here are the ways that these texts position the non-U.S. Americanist as both reader and writer.19

While the U.S.-based specificity of the "we" voice in much mainstream Americanist discourse seems to us to be inescapably obvious, experience has taught us that for many Americanists, it is either not obvious, not unnatural, or not worth contesting.20 Under these circumstances it is a challenge to demonstrate in a short paper our conviction that this "we" voice is practically ubiquitous. However, we can at least offer a few representative examples to simply point out the geographical effects of a discourse that many Americanists unquestioningly participate in and reproduce. We hope that by making this practice visible we will be able to enlist support for our call for attention to be paid to the impact of scholarly discourse on the power geometries of global academic practice.

Our critique is directed toward the conventional use of a specifically U.S.-based "we" voice that assumes U.S.-based American studies to be unlocated and normative, and (as a result) implicitly positions non-U.S.-based Americanist practice as located and different. Even U.S.-based metadisciplinary writings intended to validate international scholarship routinely conflate scholarly identity and nationality, with the first-person pronoun taking up an embedded position within a spatialized hierarchy that privileges the United States as the center of authority. Take, for example, John Carlos Rowe's assertion that "U.S. and other western hemispheric scholars have as much to learn from international colleagues as they have to learn from us."21 [End Page 1026]

A scholar writing from outside the United States would not be able to produce a sentence like this. First of all, given the uneven power relations between the U.S. academy and "the rest of the world," it would be unthinkable for a scholar working outside the United States to assert that she and her (national) academy had "as much to learn from our U.S.-based colleagues as they have from us." Second, the scholar writing from outside the United States would be forced to choose either to erase her own "foreignness" and write as if inhabiting the unlocated center, or to mark her work as located, as from the outside.

The convention that allows U.S.-based Americanists to assume a specifically U.S.-based audience for their writing even when they are discussing "American studies" in general and including no locating modifier ("U.S.-based," for example) is so completely naturalized that Americanists who do not work in the U.S. academy are constantly confronted with puzzling references to local (U.S.) particularities. The author of the metadisciplinary essay "ConsterNation," for example, takes it for granted that the nation in question must be the United States. "Our students need politicalness, perhaps even more than we do," she writes, because they "face, for the most part, a brave new world without TIAA-CREF."22 The "we" here needs no footnote for this acronym, which refers to a U.S.-based pension program. Of course, experienced readers would probably have assumed from the start that the essay was about U.S. American studies, the convention that the default academic location of Americanist texts is the United States being so widespread and so "natural." But even for less socialized "foreign" readers, the identity of the projected audience addressed by the author's "we" has certainly become clear by the last few pages, where she writes that she feels "comfortable asserting that, in general, we are as a nation and as a profession in need of some better resources when it comes to tolerating and thinking past the political disagreements of our own moment."23 But the unmarked conflation of nation and profession here works only for U.S.-based readers; although the author writes as if unlocated and universal, she is in fact writing from a U.S. location using U.S.-specific references that will immediately exclude non-U.S. readers from the first-person plural "we" voice.

The spatial coding of the U.S. scholarly position as "unlocated" and non-U.S. scholarly positions as "located" thus produces complex doubled reader and writer positions for Americanists who do not fit comfortably into the unlocated and normative, specifically U.S.-based, "we."24 As long as the conventional Americanist "we" speaks from an assumed but unmarked U.S. position, non-U.S.-based or non-American Americanists have no choice but to [End Page 1027] develop the skill of reading as if they are someone or somewhere else to make sense of texts that are vital to their own professional position and identity. When the unlocated normative position is American, then Americanists reading from a location are forced to adapt to its unstated specificity if they are, first, to understand the arguments and, second, to protect themselves from experiencing their own position as tangential. Americanist scholars who do not take for granted the assumptions about American studies that are normative within the U.S. academy currently therefore have no choice but to develop the ability to disentangle, as they read, commentary that relates to American studies in general from commentary that relates specifically to U.S. American studies.

Critically, at that point, and given the uneven distribution of power and resources within the world of American studies, many confront the question: if American studies is understood to be most authentically performed by U.S.-based scholars, what does that imply about the writing of "foreign" Americanists? The anthology that closes with "ConsterNation" also contains two essays by scholars who list European affiliations. In one, the pronoun "we" is significantly absent throughout. In the other, the effect of the discipline's normative U.S.-oriented "we" is clearly visible when the author, who is based in Germany, refers to "foreign scholars who work outside the United States," thereby naming his own domestic context as foreign in alignment with the norms of an assumed U.S.-based readership.25

Within the most conventional U.S.-centered view of American studies, as these examples imply, there exist two main routes open for "foreign" scholarship. In the first, non-U.S. scholars are encouraged to deal with their positioning as foreign within the norms of U.S.-based American studies practice by imitating or even coming to inhabit and internalize U.S. practices. For example, many Americanists outside the United States have had to internalize U.S.-based norms not only in speaking and writing academic English, but in culture-specific conventions of academic interaction such as dealing with hierarchy, turn taking, and the role of silence in group discussion. Lawrence Berg and Robin Kearns identify a similar dilemma in the discipline of geography: a naturalized but unacknowledged Anglo-American center wherein "banal disciplinary practices such as editorial decision-making or peer review" routinely take place, with effects on the discipline of geography worldwide, whose "unlimited and unmarked geographies . . . mark out, constitute, and limit the geographies of the [non-U.S./U.K.] Other."26 Our argument here is not that the existence of a U.S. "we" within the global discipline of American studies is in itself problematic; we acknowledge the importance of recognizing [End Page 1028] that different national associations and located communities of Americanists possess unique disciplinary histories.27

We do not identify the problem, then, with the idea that there is a recognizable "U.S. point of view" but with the reproduction of the idea that U.S. American studies writings about Americanist practice are universally applicable while "foreign" discussions contribute implicitly comparative case studies. Within the framework of these assumptions, non-U.S. Americanists may feel that to speak and be heard internationally they need to produce a self-reflective narrative in the manner of a native informant, or take up an allegedly objective "outside perspective."28 Non-U.S. scholars may also feel pressure to imitate the U.S. norm of self-reflection by applying what is learned about the United States to the country in which they live and work, a location usually assumed to be "their own country."

The use, in discussions of American studies, of a "we" voice that at first sight appears to refer to Americanists in general but that on closer inspection turns out to refer specifically to U.S.-based Americanists in particular is one of the most fundamental practices producing the currently dominant version of Americanist academic space. Even if authors using this U.S.-based "we" have no intention of universalizing the U.S. position or marginalizing non-U.S. or non-U.S.-based scholars, considerable confusion results. The unquestioned use of a collective first-person plural voice that conflates nationality and scholarly identity and privileges U.S. locations and political contexts is a key practice embedded in and productive of the geography of the field.

Conscious reflection on the geographical impact of the conventional use of the universal, Americanist "we" voice would provide Americanists with the opportunity for a simple but radical change in habitual embedded practice that would have broad implications for the geography of American studies. It would be an extremely practical step toward a newly international academic collective. An increase in attention to the spatializing implications of the inclusive/exclusive "we" in writings about American studies would, for example, liberate scholars currently marked as "international" from the expectation that they can (and should) compensate for their inability to speak from the normative scholar-citizen position by contributing a non-U.S. and comparativist point of view to American studies, an essentialized point of view derived from their knowledge of and embodiment of "other," off-center citizen positions, languages, and locations.29

The normative positionality of the collective first-person plural voice in American studies is as practical and as geographical a matter, we want to argue, as the formation of new committees and networking projects. As the [End Page 1029] geographer Michael Curry points out in an essay on "hereness" and ethics, the normative power of the "we" voice to claim a context as its own is a discursive act with material consequences: to say "that's how we do things here" is to make a claim about (to define and take possession of) the context within which particular activities are carried out and within which they make sense.30

Finally, one of the reasons U.S.-located positions are so often taken as normative—at least by scholars who themselves fulfill those conditions—is that this scholar-citizen position is grounded in a territorial disciplinary geography incapable of recognizing the ways in which the defining characteristics of the U.S. academy as well as those of the U.S. nation-state are themselves relationally produced. Those characteristics have been and still are constituted not out of an inherent uniqueness but out of relations with the rest of the (scholarly) world. In other words, when Americanists take it for granted that they are speaking primarily to a U.S.-based scholarly community, (unintentionally) relegating everybody else to the position of "other" and thereby generating a closed and nationally limited U.S.-based "we," they are naturalizing a static, territorial, and location-based geography. But this is a geography, not geography itself, and alternative geographies can be thought into existence and put into practice.
Sheila Hones is an associate professor in the Area Studies Department of the University of Tokyo.
Julia Leyda is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo.
Endnotes

This essay is a revision of two conference presentations we made in the summer of 2004: "Geographies of American Studies" at the Japanese Association for American Studies in Tokyo on June 5, and "Location and American Studies" at the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, in Auckland on July 16. We would like to extend our thanks to all the participants involved in the discussions following these two presentations. For their comments on earlier versions of this essay we also thank Manuel Aalbers, Lawrence Berg, Richard Ellis, Paul Giles, Patrick Imbert, Amy Kaplan, Scott Lucas, Fumiko Nishizaki, Hiroshi Okayama, Marita Sturken, Robyn Wiegman, and Yujin Yaguchi.

1. In focusing our discussion in this paper on U.S.-located practice, we are consciously bracketing our concern with the often assumed connection of U.S. citizenship with authority and authenticity in American studies. While we use only the terms "U.S.-located" or "U.S.-based" in this essay, we are of course aware that not all U.S.-based Americanists are American citizens and that many U.S. citizens teach American studies outside the United States. We also note that the location/citizenship distinction is at times fundamental to the practice of international American studies as, for example, in the rules that allow only ASA members who are also U.S. citizens to apply for selection as ASA delegates to the annual conference of the Japanese Association for American Studies.

2. By "distance" here we do not simply mean physical distance. We would also include the relational distance that juxtaposes physically distant institutions or scholars, such as communications networks or collaborative projects. Similarly, a relational distance inhibiting communication or interaction often separates institutions or scholars physically located in close proximity to each other.

3. A growing field of research within the field of geography investigates the social and spatial practices that make up academic knowledge production. See Lawrence Berg, "Masculinism, Emplacement, and [End Page 1030] Positionality in Peer Review," The Professional Geographer 53.4 (2001): 511–21; Lawrence Berg, "Scaling Knowledge: Towards a Critical Geography of Critical Geography," Geoforum 35.5 (2004): 553–58; Nicky Gregson, Dina Viaou, and Kirsten Simonsen, "On Writing (Across) Europe: Writing Spaces, Writing Practices, and Representations of Europe," European Journal of Urban and Regional Studies 3.1 (2003): 5–22; Javier Gutiérrez and Pedro López-Nieva, "Are International Journals of Human Geography Really International?" Progress in Human Geography 25.1 (2001): 53–69; Sheila Hones, "Sharing Academic Space," Geoforum 35.5 (2004): 549–52; Claudio Minca, "Venetian Geographical Praxis," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 285–89.

4. Lawrence Berg, "Spacing Knowledge," paper presented at the Second World Congress of the International American Studies Association, Ottawa, Canada, July 18, 2005.

5. In our experience, the term international is widely used as a synonym for "involving foreigners," or even simply to mean "foreign." At national conferences "international" most commonly just means "from abroad," even though, presumably, the presence of participants from abroad renders the whole conference and all the participants, in some sense, equally international. See also Sheila Hones and Julia Leyda, "Towards a Critical Geography of American Studies," Comparative American Studies 2.2 (2004): 185–203.

6. Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, "Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics," in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge, 1993), 75.

7. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004," American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57.

8. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, Thinking Space (New York: Routledge, 2000). For a helpful and concise summary of recent work on the ontology of space, see also Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, "Code and the Transduction of Space," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95.1 (2005): 171–72.

9. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Announcing the ASA's International Initiative," ASA Newsletter September 2004, http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/AmericanStudiesAssn/newsletter/archive/articles/iiarticle.htm (accessed September 26, 2005).

10. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 11.

11. Massey, For Space, 9. Massey proposes three key points for an alternative approach to space: first, "that we recognise space as the production of interrelations," second, "that we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity," and third, "that we recognise space as always under construction . . . as a simultaneity of stories-so-far."

12. Ash Amin, "Regions Unbound: Towards a New Politics of Place," Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 86.1 (2004): 36, 39.

13. John Urry, "Small Worlds and the New 'Social Physics'," Global Networks 4.2 (2004): 127.

14. The regional associations, such as the EAAS, also reproduce the territorial model by enlarging the boundaries of scholarly attention. Yet the regional associations and the relatively new International Association of American Studies also offer a context for experimenting with more decentered networks, some of which do not involve the United States as a center of scholarship in a bilateral relation with a foreign outside.

15. Massey, "Geographies of Responsibility," Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 86.1 (2004): 5; see also Amin, "Regions Unbound." For a discussion of this idea in relation to the teaching of American literature outside the United States, see Sheila Hones, "Reading a Foreign Place," in Crossing Oceans: Reconfiguring American Literary Studies in the Pacific Rim, ed. Noelle Brada-Williams and Karen Chow (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 41–50.

16. Massey, "Geographies of Responsibility," 6.

17. Ash Amin, "Spatialities of Globalisation," Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 395, quoted in Neil Coe and Timothy Bunnell, "Spatializing Knowledge Communities: Towards a Conceptualization of Transnational Innovation Networks," Global Networks 3.4, (2003): 454.

18. J. Anderson, "Ideology in Geography: An Introduction," Antipode 5.3 (1973):1–6, cited in Chris Collinge, "The Différance between Society and Space: Nested Scales and the Returns of Spatial Fetishism," unpublished paper, 2004.

19. This follows from our previous work on the geographies of discursive conventions in two examples of practical metadisciplinary Americanist texts—a call for papers and a journal's mission statement; see [End Page 1031] Hones and Leyda, "Towards a Critical Geography of American Studies." We are committed to this kind of analysis of everyday language as a politically relevant material practice; indeed, as John Carlos Rowe argues, "we should be as attentive to the political consequences of frequently used terminologies as activists in the civil, gay, women's, and international labor rights movements have been"; see John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies , Critical American Studies series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xvi.

20. Our thinking about authorial voice, audience, and identity has been strongly influenced by feminist and antiracist work that has critiqued the universalizing "we" as the male and/or white and/or middle-class and/or heterosexual authorial voice; poststructuralist critique further problematizes any essentialist, unitary speaking voice. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Women's Press, 1979; rprt. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Lourdes Torres, and Ann Russo, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

21. Rowe, The New American Studies, 56.

22. Dana Nelson, "ConsterNation," in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 572.

23. Ibid., 575.

24. Similar reading strategies are commonly acknowledged in the context of other power imbalances, such as those experienced by African American and women readers of white- and/or male-authored texts.

25. Günter H. Lenz, "Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Border Discourses, and Public Culture(s)," in The Futures of American Studies, 477.

26. Lawrence Berg and Robin Kearns, "America Unlimited," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 129. Geographers are actively interrogating the Anglo-American hegemony in their discipline in ways that we find very useful—see Manuel Aalbers and Ugo Rossi, "Beyond the Anglo-American Hegemony: Building a Postnational Space of Writing and Research in Human Geography," unpublished paper, 2005; see also Aalbers, "Creative Destruction through the Anglo-American Hegemony: A Non-Anglo-American View on Publications, Referees, and Language," Area 36.3 (2004): 319–22.

27. Doreen Massey's arguments about the specificity of place are useful in this context: "The specificity of place is continually reproduced, but is not a specificity which results from some long, internalized history." Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 155. Similarly, the specificity of national associations comes not from their internalized histories but from their positions as nodes in global scholarly networks. A national association, like Massey's global place, is always therefore "the focus of a mixture of wider and more local social relations" (156). See Hones and Leyda, "Towards a Critical Geography," 195; also Alfred Hornung, "Transnational American Studies: Response to the Presidential Address," American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 67–73.

28. Although we are both based in the Japanese academy, we chose not to conspicuously locate ourselves in this essay in order to challenge the convention that non-U.S.-based scholars working on metadisciplinary topics should speak from a located, non-U.S. position, either to justify their work as a form of "comparative" analysis or to legitimate their authenticity as privileged "outsider." Although our daily working lives have provoked much thought and discussion on the issues raised in this essay, we also wanted to present our argument simply as Americanists, not as Americanists based "abroad," "in Asia," or "in Japan."

29. On the other hand, Sonia Torres argues that every "non-U.S. Americanist working in the humanities or social sciences" has an "at least implicitly comparative" gaze; Torres, "U.S. Americans and 'Us' Americans: South American Perspectives on Comparative American Studies," Comparative American Studies 1.1 (2003): 13. We simply point out that this position need not be the default position for "international" Americanists.

30. Michael Curry, "'Hereness' and the Normativity of Place," in Geography and Ethics, ed. James Proctor and David Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 95–105.

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American Quarterly 57.4 (2005) 19-32