Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies? (opens in new tab)

"Normativity, in the hands of the “non-distortionists,” smuggles into American studies assumptions that we’re told we must describe rather than prove. A key question the field has tackled, which Kahlenberg and Lin recognize, is what exactly is “American culture”? What is distinct from other cultures, in “its customs, norms, history, literature?” But what they should know—and we must remember—is that the actual error with the field is how the boundedness of the object of study (“America”) was ...