Henry G. Schwarz

EXTENDING AMERICAN HEGEMONY

This special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies addresses the two related yet distinct challenges confronting what we term ‘postcolonial American studies’. As a term, it may be read in two possible ways. In one reading, postcolonial American studies refers to a more politically aware and responsible kind of American studies, in which American colonial history and its current neocolonial endeavors are recognized and centralized as an integral part of what America has been and is. As Donald Pease (2000) and others have pointed out, American studies as a discipline has been mostly silent on, if not oblivious of, the imperial nature of American foreign policies and domestic culture. Theoreticians and historians argue that such silence has much to do with the myth of American exceptionalism that fetishizes the ideals of freedom and democracy and claims them as their own national property. We will not belabor the irony of the situation in which all around the world ‘America’ (which now stands for the United States, unfortunately and imprecisely) is regarded as the biggest challenge to peace, justice and freedom. Thus, postcolonial American studies would refer to the much needed intellectual ................