From Columbine to Red Lake: Tragic Provocatoins for Advocacy (original) (raw)

Serving for the past five years on the MAASA Board has given me an opportunity to develop relationships with colleagues in American studies throughout the Midwest, learn more about the challenges and responsibilities of organizational life, and reflect on the relationship between our organizational practices and material conditions within our region. Like all organizations, MAASA is rooted in particular institutions, structures, and relationships, while its future demands ongoing commitment, revitalization, and revision. If we wish to contribute to the progress of American studies in our region, we must reflect on the same questions that confront the discipline nationally, namely, on the question of what constitutes our field, our goals, our perspectives, and our constituencies. As a field, we are challenging our colonial, nationalist, and imperialist origins by reaching assiduously toward critical, transnational, comparative approaches to American studies and American hegemony. 1 As public servants, we are working at a time when support for public institutions and the services they provide for ordinary people has been shamefully and systematically withdrawn in favor of increasing the profit margins of corporate interests operating on a global scale. In my remarks today, I want to propose a direction for the future of MAASA, so that we might become better informed about our region and better able to work collectively to formulate and respond to our problems and needs. At a