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Article Excerpt
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002. xxi & 337 pp.
Paul Giles proposes a rethinking of the field of American Studies, suggesting that old conceptions, shaped and sustained by Cold War politics, the myth of American exceptionalism, and essentialist assumptions about national identity, are no longer useful or valid, if indeed they ever were. He proposes instead a transnational, comparative approach that examines how and why imaginative representations (or virtualizations) of America are formed, what is invested in them, and how they interact with contemporary culture. The first chapter lays the theoretical groundwork, defining "virtualization," discussing transnationalism and national identity, and making a strong case for a comparative approach. He is not suggesting that nation-states no longer have meaning, as some theorists of globalization claim. Rather, he is interested in "the implications of this process of displacement [i.e., virtualization] for the construction of fictional forms of nationalism" (1) and in "what happens when...
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