Me and American Studies

Why did I pursue a graduate degree in American Studies?  When did I know I wanted to teach American Studies?  When did I even discover that I had a knack for American Studies?  Someone recently asked me these questions.  I’m used to getting the common “What the heck is American Studies?” question, but these inquiries were more personal.  I confess I had not thought deeply about them beyond my usual rote response, “Well, I always liked literature and history.”  I applied to graduate programs in American Studies when I was 27 years old, but surely I was developing some kind of disposition for American Studies years before that.  This post is my initial attempt to pinpoint stepping stones, the episodes that guided me in the direction of American Studies before I even knew what it was.  An American Studies mini-autobiography, if you will.

When I was a teenager I wrote several songs for my high school garage band about my two primary interests (fears?) at the time: romantic love and nuclear holocaust.  The songs typically involved me falling in love just as the world ended.  This may in part explain why I am still single, but my bigger point is this: as a songwriter, my instinct was always to integrate larger social and political issues into my lyrics and have them merge with the personal, to examine how the broader world could shape and impact everyday people.  Possible stage 1: The skinny, nerdy American Studies composer, synthesizing with his synthesizer.

In college I was an English major and I wrote my senior thesis on the influence of blues music on African American literature.  I didn’t really know about American Studies back then, but it just seemed natural to me to study literature by intersecting literary works with other cultural forms, contexts, and concerns.  I couldn’t read Ralph Ellison or Jean Toomer without turning my attention to the writings of Albert Murray, David Evans’s fantastic book Big Road Blues, and the musical recordings of blues and jazz artists.  Possible stage 2: The undergraduate American Studies bluesman, ever drawn to the crossroads.

In my mid-twenties, when I was a high school teacher, I read the book Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean and also saw the film several times.  I discussed both with friends, and wrote about both in my journal.  Ultimately the book and film caused me to change my position on the death penalty, from pro to anti.  The process of engaging with this material helped me better understand the power of culture, the ways in which culture and ideas can affect our worldview and shape our identity.  Possible stage 3: The politically evolving young man influenced by the cultural work of Sean Penn and a nun.

And one last touchstone, the likely precondition for all of the above stages: I am adopted.  My adopted parents, whom I love dearly, have no information about my biological parents.  The adoption was arranged through lawyers before I was even born.  I have no knowledge of my biological family tree, my ethnicity, my roots and long generational history.  Perhaps as a consequence of this I have always considered myself simply American, born into and of this culture from the very beginning.  A blank slate.  If American Studies seeks to understand identity—how it is constructed and inscribed, negotiated and redefined—then I suspect my love of the field is not unrelated to my own personal story and journey.

So how did I end up in American Studies?  I guess I can credit love, nuclear war, Ralph Ellison, the blues, Sean Penn, and an adoption in a Philadelphia hospital in 1970.