美国文化研究关键词指南

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"《美国文化研究关键词》是一本专为大学二年级学生设计的英文写作教材，由Bruce Burgett和Glenn Hendler共同编纂。这本书旨在帮助读者更好地理解和掌握美国文化研究领域的核心词汇和概念，以便于在学术论文和讨论中精确表达思想。它涵盖了广泛的议题，包括但不限于美国文明、社会结构术语以及文化术语，旨在提供一个清晰而简明的指导框架。该书结构严谨，不仅提供了丰富的关键词列表，还包含了详尽的注释和背景信息，使得非专业读者也能轻松理解复杂的学术概念。例如，书中可能讨论了如何区分和定义“主流文化”与“边缘文化”，“文化同质性”与“文化多元性”，或者“权力关系”在社会结构中的作用等关键概念。此外，书中可能会引用Anselm Kiefer的作品《Book with Wings》作为跨文化的视角示例，强调理论与实践的结合。作者 Bruce Burgett 和 Glenn Hendler，作为纽约大学的学者，他们的学术背景无疑为本书的专业性和深度提供了保障。书中还包含了图书馆学信息，如美国国会图书馆的分类号和版权信息，以及关于纸张质量和印刷标准的说明，体现了出版社对质量的重视。通过阅读这本书，学生不仅可以提升英文写作技巧，还能加深对美国文化深层次的理解，培养批判性思维和研究能力。对于想要进入或正在美国文化研究领域学习的学生来说，这是一本不可或缺的参考工具。"

Abolition

Robert Fanuzzi

“Children are taught that ‘AB’ stands for ‘Abolition,’”

fumed the mayor of Boston in 1835, who correctly

grasped that abolition meant more than the end of

slaveholding (“Mr. Otis’s Speech” 1835). In the popu-

lar imagination of the early nineteenth century, abo-

lition named a utopian program of mass reeducation

that would indoctrinate its white listeners and readers

into a new set of moral beliefs. The fact that even chil-

dren were addressed by this pedagogy means that abo-

litionists considered it necessary to alienate future

citizens from their allegiance to their government,

and to remake the nation from the ground up. The

concept of abolition that shaped the antislavery strug-

gle of the nineteenth century thus challenged noth-

ing less than the legitimacy of the entire U.S. political

system.

The most radical arguments and implications of

abolition had many precedents. One of the most

inﬂuential was the early-nineteenth-century Christian

evangelical movement, which pointedly refused to

recognize secular institutions such as the nation-state

as sources of moral norms and identities. From this

movement, advocates of abolition adopted the psy-

chic and ethical structure of the conversion experi-

ence, with its urgent demands for personal moral

accountability and a direct encounter with truth. Abo-

lition, thought of during the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries as a gradual process, was by the

1830s deﬁned as something that could and should

happen immediately.

And yet the concept of abolition that inspired anti-

slavery activists also contained a set of possibilities

that were designed to perpetuate and sustain U.S. citi-

zens’ faith in their political system: that the most cor-

rupt government or social order might be repaired by

a challenge from outside it; that the vehemence of this

challenge bore witness to the original intent and prin-

ciples of the political system; and that a single, deci-

sive act therefore could restore continuity to a

ruptured narrative of national history (Sundquist

1985; Fanuzzi 2003). The imperative of abolition, in

other words, betrays a fundamental anxiety about the

validity of the U.S. political system and promotes pe-

riodic tests of that system by forcing it to measure up

to a speciﬁc policy priority: the abolition of slavery,

the abolition of the death penalty, or the abolition of

legalized abortion. The call made by a late-twentieth-

century scholar for the “abolition of whiteness” sug-

gests that the special status of abolition as ﬁnal arbiter

and ultimatum has given the ﬁeld of American cul-

tural studies not just one of its keywords, but also a

moral vocation (Roediger 1994).

The concept of abolition has played an equally

important role in the construction of a progressive

national history. Several generations of American

studies scholars have used the concept to chart a pro-

gressive history of the United States in which the end

of chattel slavery serves as the climax and marker of

an ongoing commitment to civil rights. In the early

twentieth century, the civil rights leader W. E .B. Du

Bois (1995) invoked the prospect of an “abolition

democracy” in order to hold a still racially segregated

United States accountable to this history. However, the

wide range of conﬂicting initiatives that have been ad-

vanced under the rubric of abolition suggests that the

concept cannot reveal a single historical trend or even

denote a categorically progressive political actor. The

unique feature of abolition is that it forces a disruption

in the ﬂow of political power in each of its iterations

and deployments and helps to instigate a debate over

the legitimacy of political means and ends in each of

its historical contexts. By extending the title “aboli-

tionist” to the advocates of abolition, we in fact imply

that such a commitment is so all-consuming and in-

congruous that it cannot be reconciled with any other

political afﬁliation or identity and that it easily sup-

plants alternative designations such as “citizen.”

The intensity and complexity of abolitionist resist-

ance so frustrated its nineteenth-century opponents

that they coined the term “ultraism” as a synonym for

abolition. The scholarship of American cultural stud-

ies, on the other hand, has embraced the most trans-

gressive examples of abolitionist politics—William

Lloyd Garrison’s campaign to disband the Union and

neutralize the advantages of white citizenship (Cas-

tiglia 2002), the mobilization of white middle-class

and African American women (Yellin 1989), the politi-

cization of popular ﬁction (S. Samuels 1996)—and

used them as creative sites for rethinking civic identity

and political action.

The signature “abolitionist” in this sense of the

word might well be John Brown, whose paramilitary

assault on a munitions arsenal continues to compel

scholars to wonder not just whether his violent meth-

ods were consistent with moral standards of political

action but whether such an abolitionist commitment

was rational (Reynolds 2005). His contemporary

Henry David Thoreau (1973) helped to square the rad-

icalism of abolition with a national tradition of civil

disobedience when he eulogized Brown, executed as a

traitor and terrorist, as a martyr to freedom. Of course,

Thoreau had previously invented this tradition in or-

der to rationalize his own idiosyncratic act of aboli-

tionist deﬁance in the essay “Resistance to Civil

Government.”

Thoreau’s efforts notwithstanding, Brown’s aboli-

tionism poses its most difﬁcult questions when we

widen our view to include his comrades in arms, the

enslaved and free African Americans who opposed

slavery. Can they be considered abolitionists too?

Judgments about who and what is abolitionist in-

evitably reveal the racial construction that inheres

within the concept. Indeed, abolition often identiﬁes

a special capacity or attribute of white people that

compels them to discharge their moral responsibility

(Wiegman 2002). Although fugitive slaves such as

Frederick Douglass claimed leading roles as abolition-

ists and sought to align slave insurrections with the

Abolition Robert Fanuzzi

goals of the abolition movement, these exceptions

continue to prove the rule of common usage. Aboli-

tion remained (and remains) understood as something

that others do on behalf of inert, aggrieved parties; as

such, it can seem opposed to the prospect of self-liber-

ation.

However, historical research concerned with the

enslaved and free black communities of the antebel-

lum era promises to change this meaning of abolition.

As Robert Levine (1997) and Paul Goodman (1998)

have shown, the ﬁrst abolitionists in the early-nine-

teenth-century antislavery struggle were the free black

members of an anti-colonization movement, which

sought to debunk the colonization policy champi-

oned by so-called liberal whites as the best answer to

the slavery question. Colonizationists promoted the

new African colony of Liberia as the best and, in fact,

the only homeland for African Americans, while its

opponents called it a racist scheme for the removal of

free blacks from the United States. For African Ameri-

can civic leaders such as William Watkins and Samuel

Cornish, abolition was an express alternative to colo-

nization that entailed not just the liberation of the

enslaved but also the coexistence of whites and

blacks.

The egalitarian politics that black activists inscribed

in this concept of abolition distinguish it so markedly

from the original British meaning of the word that it is

fair to say that they helped to Americanize the term.

Abolition originated in the lexicon of eighteenth-cen-

tury British anti-mercantilism as an argument for free

trade, signifying the freedom of markets, not of en-

slaved people. Such arguments speciﬁcally stipulated

the abolition of the infamous transatlantic slave trade,

in large part because it proﬁted from mercantilist poli-

cies of protectionism and monopoly (Smith 1776). Of

course, this concept of abolition left Britain’s capitalist

middle class secure in its virtue, while the enslaved re-

mained safely ensconced in West Indian plantations.

The “humanitarian sensibility” ascribed by the histo-

rian Thomas Haskell (1985) to the supporters of aboli-

tion in fact stipulated that white people maintain a

distant, hypothetical identiﬁcation with the sufferings

of black people that put off the prospect of social co-

existence.

The American concept of abolition allows for no

such distance, either in the United States or elsewhere.

On the contrary, it makes geographical, social, and

even personal proximity a condition for morally

justiﬁed race relations. In the nineteenth-century an-

tislavery struggle, the ever-present possibility of phys-

ical contact between the races so haunted the

discussion of slavery and emancipation that many

U.S. Americans believed abolition to be just another

word for “amalgamism,” or racial mixture. That same

possibility, however, also helped abolition to become

a powerful force for, and expression of, cross-racial sol-

idarity, one that has continued to resonate within

many ﬁelds of anti-racist scholarly inquiry. Even to-

day, the prospect of what Karen Sánchez-Eppler (1992)

refers to as a nineteenth-century “feminist-abolitionist

politics” governed by “bodily bonds” remains a pow-

erful language for describing both the intimacies of

racial politics and the politics of racial intimacy.

Abolition Robert Fanuzzi

Aesthetics

Russ Castronovo

At once universal and speciﬁc, transcendent as well as

deeply historical, property of individual feeling but

also affecting the mass subject, “aesthetics” have been

notoriously difﬁcult to deﬁne. This imprecision ex-

plains why aesthetics have often been invoked as a

progressive force that opens new conceptual horizons

and just as often derided as a tired elitist dodge that

preserves the status quo. The divided and shifting

ground upon which matters of beauty, perception,

taste, and the sublime stand stems from elemental

ﬁssures between art and politics. Such ﬁssures may be

more fantasy than actuality, however; when aesthetics

are historicized in terms of social practice, philosophy,

and cultural criticism, they appear as profoundly ma-

terial engagements with embodiment, collectivity, and

social life.

In their narrowest sense, aesthetics are purely about

the discernment of formal criteria such as unity, pro-

portion, and balance within the domain of art. If we

trace the term’s origins back to the German Romantic

tradition of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller,

aesthetics appear as a philosophical topic rather than

a cultural conjuncture. Yet even this narrow sense re-

sounds with expansive political and social possibility.

Schiller (1954, 25) correlates aesthetic education with

“true political freedom,” and Kant (1952) orients aes-

thetic judgment around a shared sensibility that

would hold true for all individuals, engendering feel-

ings of the universal. Historically, this utopian poten-

tial found practical application in the reformist

energies of the “City Beautiful” movement of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which at-

tempted to unify, uplift, and, perhaps most crucially,

“Americanize” the heterogeneous populations of ur-

ban masses teeming with immigrants. Theoretically,

this emphasis on universality and transformation

found its expression in the work of John Dewey

(1980), who construed aesthetic experience as a vital

encounter that challenged the ﬁxity of custom and

precedent. These historical and theoretical currents

merged in the efforts of pragmatists such as Jane Ad-

dams who, like Dewey, sought to make beauty and art

a common feature of the modern social landscape. By

linking magic lantern shows, art exhibitions, drama

clubs, poetry readings, and ﬁlm screenings to the cul-

tivation of social ethics, reformers hoped that aesthet-

ics could play a generative role in the democratization

of culture. A central question for the political and cul-

tural projects of both American studies and cultural

studies is whether aesthetics can continue to play that

role.

The narrow sense of aesthetics as a discourse on art

thus leads almost inevitably to broader usages that un-

derstand the term to denote the entire “corporeal sen-

sorium,” including affect and emotion, pain and

pleasure, feeling and sensibility (Buck-Morss 1992, 5).

This emphasis on broad human reactions and re-

sponses suggests the potential force of commonality as

a universal feeling that collides with and energizes po-

litical positions. One brief way of understanding this

emergence of the political within the aesthetic is to

say that Kant’s idea of

sensus communis (Kant 1952), a

common standard of aesthetic judgment in which in-

dividual perception tallies with general taste, recalls

Thomas Paine’s notion of “common sense” (Paine

1953), which marshals public sentiment for the pur-

poses of revolution. Structured by familiar responses

and shared stimuli, aesthetics represent the possibility

of mass mobilization. It is a possibility that echoes

with political ambivalence; even as collective feeling

resounds with democratic energy, the hum of a mass

uniﬁed—and manipulated—by emotion also echoes

with more ominous overtones of totalitarian control,

as Walter Benjamin (1968) predicted in his famous es-

say on mechanical reproduction.

In the nineteenth-century United States, the poten-

tially transformative effects of aesthetic feeling in gal-

vanizing political opinion appeared in literary

sentimentalism. Animating a host of reforms from

temperance to women’s rights, sentimentalism ﬁgured

prominently in the antislavery crusade, culminating

in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s directive that individuals

confronted with the awesome task of defeating the

monster of slavery begin by making sure that “

they feel

right

” (1852/1981, 624). Individual by individual, citi-

zens could build a

sensus communis that would change

how the world acts and thinks. The problem, of

course, was that individual feeling could remain indi-

vidualized, forever private and never connected to

shared action or thought. Indeed, Ralph Waldo Emer-

son, in the poem that introduces his essay “Art,”

seemed to imply that when art touches us, it recon-

ciles and adjusts the individual to the social world as it

is, instead of reshaping the world in accordance with a

common regard for justice or fairness. The duty of art,

according to Emerson’s couplet, is “Man in Earth to

acclimate, / And bend the exile to his fate” (1983,

429). Here, the politics that aesthetics produce come

in the mode of resignation.

Identifying Emerson with this one-dimensional po-

sition ignores his belief that beauty could reinvent the

ordinary forms of social life. Aesthetics for much of

the twentieth century were prone to distortions and

simpliﬁcations that cast beauty and art as the conser-

vative guarantors of the social world as it is and not

how it might be reimagined and reformed. Twentieth-

century proponents of New Criticism often stressed

aesthetics as a means of giving order and stability to

sexual passion and political affect. “Aesthetic forms

are a technique of restraint,” announced John Crowe

Ransom (1965, 31), advancing the position that the

human rush to action, overﬂow of emotion, and un-

predictable stir of social life could all be reined in by

using art to formalize beauty and our responses to it.

These lingering effects of social governance and po-

litical containment are what motivate some American

studies and cultural studies scholars to critique aes-

thetics as a conservative strategy of retrenchment that

justiﬁes art’s putative evasion of political matters,

mystiﬁes class privilege as disinterestedness, and uses

ideas of harmony and unity to excuse the status quo.

As Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen framed the is-

sue in their landmark collection

Ideology and Classic

Aesthetics Russ Castronovo

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