Introduction: Generations of Empire in American Studies.

In a related manner, the contributors to our forum on Borders examine the malleability of lines that demarcate states, delimit citizenship, and constrain imagined solidarities by taking up diverse contexts including the US-Mexico border; Indigenous nations within what is now the United States; cultural markers that marginalize some citizens and privilege others; and the slow, albeit uneven dissolution of borders under the conditions of twenty-first-century globalization. At the (provisional) end of the Cold War, American studies scholarship operated in a larger discursive context replete with mind-numbing claims about the "end of history" and the inevitability of liberal democracy and capitalism, all in the context of expanding US state power and the culturalization of everything, to draw on Fredric Jameson's description of the postmodern.[9] Kaplan had noted the "absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism", and American studies scholars asked whether challenging exceptionalism was enough. Both then and now, to claim that the United States is an empire is not only to reject exceptionalism but also to situate the US in the world vis-à-vis histories of colonialism and imperialism. [Extracted from the article]

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