August 2004 Newsletter
Diplomatic History and American Studies
By Robert D. Schulzinger
Editor-in-Chief Diplomatic History
We have been grappling for at least a generation to define the limits of the
history of American foreign relations. The field encompasses far more than the
study of power and government. It is an approach to history that includes time,
change, memory, identity, language, culture, and comparisons to other nations
and other eras. Michael Hogan's 2003 SHAFR presidential address is only the
latest of many fruitful efforts to redefine our field and reach out to others
exploring similar subjects.
Seeking a practical way of translating these efforts into action, Tom Zeiler (the executive editor of Diplomatic History) and I decided to reach out to the American Studies Association. In July we invited Amy Kaplan, president of the ASA, to join the editorial board of our journal. She happily agreed.
Kaplan's work explores the language of power and resistance in the history of U.S. expansion and empire. She focuses on words, metaphors, and the social construction of meaning. Her documents are texts-novels, newspapers stories, and the speeches of the prominent. Her work is important, since it seeks to uncover the origins of the motives and outlook of people in power and of those whom power affects.
That the ASA elected her president speaks to the dramatic changes that this branch of the study of the United States has undergone in the past thirty years. Originally American Studies included history and literature, with some film thrown into the mix. The field was created before the Second World War but came into prominence in the early Cold War years as an exemplar of American exceptionalism. Then came the sixties and seventies. Practitioners of American Studies were among the first to undermine the basic assumptions of American exceptionalism. As cultural studies swept through most of the disciplines of the humanities, American Studies was transformed. It investigated all aspects of life in the United States with a skeptical and critical eye.
When Tom and I talked with Amy, she suggested that we attend the annual meeting of the ASA in October. We jumped at the opportunity. When the two of us began editing Diplomatic History, we wanted to reach out to as many other related disciplines as possible, so this seemed like an ideal way to cross disciplinary boundaries. It's one thing for an editor to read about work in progress being presented at a conference. We do that all the time, and we often ask writers to submit their work. It is far more intense actually to meet the author and hear the work presented with all the back-and-forth of commentary and questions.
We arranged to spend three days at the ASA meeting in Hartford in mid-October. The theme of the meeting was "Violence and Belonging." We went with hopes and anxieties not unlike those of a graduate student going to a professional meeting for the first time. Physically the meeting had problems. Hartford has seen better days, and it is not really equipped to handle a large convention. We stayed at the overflow hotel, which was across an interstate highway and about a third of a mile away from the meeting headquarters. Most of the sessions took place in the nearly abandoned Hartford Convention Center, which has stood without a permanent tenant since the NHL Hartford Whalers left town about fifteen years ago. The building was cold, drafty and dark. The acoustics were pretty bad, and the concrete floors the hardest I have ever walked on.
But the accommodations hardly mattered. We've all been to meetings and spoken at universities, colleges, and institutes where the facilities are not Ritz quality, and some of us have been privileged actually to meet at the Ritz. There is no relationship between the quality of the building and the quality of the ideas.
So what was the quality at the ASA? In the broadest sense, it was like every academic or other professional gathering: intense, exciting, enlightening, irritating, and boring-often all at the same time. The meeting was huge. There were over 230 sessions, and each one had at least five and sometimes as many as seven presenters. Over 1400 people were on panels. The ASA runs five concurrent one-hour-and-forty-five-minute sessions each day. They begin at 8:00 A.M. and end at 5:45.
When I chaired the SHAFR program committee, I heard concerns that three sessions per day would be too much for anyone to take in. I tended to agree at the time. Then in Hartford I spoke to a colleague in American Studies from the University of Colorado who is a regular attendee at the ASA, and she informed me that she and her fellows would not have it any other way. She had been coming to the meeting for twenty years and regularly spent at least two of the four days going to all five sessions.
Among the presenters there was quite enough pomposity and preciosity. I remember listening in rapt attention, and then irritation, and finally dismay to a magnificently tailored professor of English literature speak beautifully, articulately and passionately in complete sentences and without notes for twenty minutes. It was only after six or seven minutes that I realized I had not understood anything the man said. Perhaps he was auditioning to revive the1950s routines of Professor Irwin Corey, the World's Foremost Authority. Then there was the session entitled "Theorizing Meat." There in two words were summarized most of the old-fashioned concerns about cultural studies: its practitioners have an excessive interest in theory and pay too much attention to the physical body.
It is easy to mock, but it is not very useful. An ethnographer of SHAFR from the ASA could probably find as many trivial, self-referential, and self-important presentations at our annual meeting as we did at theirs. We did not go to Hartford to find out what American Studies did not have to say about issues of interest to historians of foreign relations. We went to learn how we could broaden the scope of our journal and what our colleagues can learn from and teach others. In that sense we were richly rewarded by our visit.
Some of the sessions we attended on subjects relevant to foreign relations were marvelous. They opened our eyes to new ways of looking at traditional subjects of interest. Some were comparative or transnational in the best sense of the terms. A session on World War II and the construction of memory included papers on the photo journalist Margaret Bourke White's rhetoric of fashion during the Second World War. Another traced the exchange between the memory of World War II and the present in the 1950s and 1960s in Kurt Vonnegut's World War II novels. Two Japanese historians used survey research to explore the transnationalization of the memory of World War II. One of the papers used interviews with Japanese and American visitors to the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor. The author discovered how Japanese and American visitors, some of them veterans of the war but most of them born after 1945, projected their school-book learning of the war onto their visits to the memorial. Another Japanese historian explored the ways in which the Japanese and American print and television media in the 1990s used their countries' nationalist narratives of the war to justify refusing to apologize for atrocities their countrymen had committed during the conflict. In Japan, the sense of victimization at Hiroshima and Nagasaki blocked apologies to Korean comfort women. In the United States, heroic narratives of the Pacific War overwhelmed the efforts of the Smithsonian to present a historically nuanced exhibit on the bombing of Hiroshima.
A session on "Civilizing Missions and U.S. Empire" also showed how cultural studies can inform rather than obscure subjects that historians of American foreign relations have wrestled with for nearly a century. A student in the Department of Cultural Studies at the Claremont Graduate University presented an excellent paper on what cigar labels said about imperial dominance in the late nineteenth century. She had found pictures in old magazines of cigar bands and boxes manufactured in Tampa and Havana. They showed a feminine Cuba, occasionally seductive, more often terrified and vulnerable at the hands of rapacious Spain, being saved by Americans. An English professor explained how the poet Wallace Stevens used and changed the language of American colonial dominance in the Caribbean. This session also included a remarkably old-fashioned paper about American Samoa. The subtitle was "The Happiest Colony of the United States." The author went on at length about how the Samoans had welcomed the arrival of the first American missionaries, then the U.S. Navy, and finally one hundred years of American rule. They rejoiced in their American status and embraced a succession of good rulers.
A session on "Race War in Twentieth-Century U.S. History" included three excellent papers on three different wars: the Philippine-American War, World War II, and the Vietnam War. The author of the first paper provided a dense description of how the racial and racist language of the war changed as the fighting intensified. He had found a large collection of letters home from American soldiers in the Philippines. When the soldiers first arrived, they spoke respectfully of the Filipinos. Once fighting erupted and the Americans came under fire, their language turned bitter and the racist epithets flew. Another paper revisited the question of American racism in the Pacific and European theaters during the war. Twenty minutes is hardly enough time to scratch the surface of this vast subject, but the author presented ideas that others can work with for years. There were profound differences in racial attitudes between American fighting men in the field and their trainers and superiors back home, but as the war went on both became increasingly racist. Finally, there was a compact paper about Asian-American opposition to the War in Vietnam. The author used interviews, poetry, films, novels, archival research in the newsletters of numerous antiwar groups, and some personal reminiscences to create a fluid portrait of Asian-American opponents of the war. Like many of the other best papers, this one described changes over time. It highlighted dilemmas of ethnic and national identity and also examined the gender conflict that arose in this segment of the antiwar movement, as it did among white and black antiwar activists in the 1960s. In addition, it had a transnational aspect, because the author wrote about the emotional turmoil afflicting Asian-American fighting men as they confronted other Asians in Vietnam and then examined the attitudes of fighters from the National Liberation Front and People's Liberation Armed Force, who did not always know what to make of Asians coming across the Pacific to fight them.
There was also a very worthwhile session on veterans. The session title could cause more traditionally minded academics some annoyance, filled as it was with references to the body and the corporation: "Veterans Bodies, Bodies of Veterans: American Veterans and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century." But the papers at the session more than fulfilled our hopes that there was much that American Studies can teach diplomatic history. One author looked at painting, cartoons, and film of the 1920s and 1930s to show how images of the wounded or disabled contributed to feelings of revulsion for the Great War. Another looked at World War II veterans' literature of wounds, disability, and neuroses to describe the crisis of postwar masculinity. Another wrote movingly of expatriate veterans in the Great Depression who questioned their identity as U.S. citizens and their status as modern men.
These papers have something real, important, and provocative to say to historians of U.S. foreign relations. We have asked their authors to submit them or related work to Diplomatic History, and we hope that our readers will see the fruits of this research. We shall also continue to attend the ASA annual meeting. We have created a panel on new trends in foreign relations for the 2004 meeting in Atlanta, where convention facilities should be more satisfactory. But that hardly matters. The members of the ASA are doing worthwhile and exciting work. It has been a pleasure to talk with and learn from them.
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