American studies in Singapore

• Main Author: Clark, Justin Tyler
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: American Studies; Singapore; Humanities::History::Asia::Singapore
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/107591; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/50343
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Is a “Pacific turn” imminent or in progress in American Studies? Inasmuch as the Pacific serves as a site both of and for scholarship, the question might be interpreted in one of two ways. First, has the international community of American Studies scholars shifted in its approach to the Pacific? And second, have conditions evolved for American Studies scholarship conducted in the Pacific? Together, the two questions speak at once to the globalization of American Studies scholarship in the wake of the transnational turn, and to the persistence and growth outside the boundaries of the U.S. of the “new intellectual regionalisms” in American Studies that John Carlos Rowe has identified within it.1 From my brief and localized perspective—two years working in Singapore as a cultural historian of the U.S.—I will address the second question—how has American Studies been resituated in Singapore—hoping to shed incidental light on the first.