ABSTRACT
internationalization of American Studies belongs among the less conspicuous global phenomena of the past generation. An inter-disciplinary experiment, we might say, tried out first in one or two prominent elite universities on the northeast coast of the United States just before and just after World War II, American Studies rapidly caught on across the United States itself, and scoring the boundaries of its veritable subject-matter, leaped oceans and mountain ranges, knocked down barriers of language and culture, and is now fully certified almost everywhere in the known world. A fascinating process in its own right, linked of course to the thickening network of communication and transport which has shrunk the world to the size of a TV screen and the range of jet clipper-ships, the proliferation of American Studies has no doubt been aided, abetted, and very often instigated by State Department policies. But whatever the role of external agencies, to study the United States - the first and most successful "modern" society, in the eyes of most of the world - seems a universally genuine wish: perhaps a wish enfolding an anxiety about the future, about the consequences of "modernity" or "mass culture" or "media politics," but an active, positive desire nonetheless. The world-wide interest in American Studies represents, then, no merely innocent curiosity or expansion of horizons; it implicates great cultural changes manifest everywhere, changes that have been known by the convenient metaphorizing term "Americanization." Does the spread of American Studies in the form of university courses and programs, symposia, regional associations and annual conferences, prefigure even further "Americanization" of the world?
