Introduction—Alternative/Mainstream

Abstract

Association for American Studies Conference held in the fall of 2018; the Call for Papers lured and confronted participants with a range of potential definitions, deployments, instances, convergences, contestations, and juxtapositions of the alternative and the mainstream in all branches of US culture. At the most general, practical level, the theme itself offered a mainstream platform for multidisciplinary discussions. What could be more habitual to scholars in American Studies than the critical assessment of alternatives, real or imagined, under diverse topical or methodological headings? In one form or another, the antithetical categories we designate as alternative and mainstream have figured centrally in American Studies from the field’s institutional beginnings in the late 1950s onwards. At a more specific, timely level, as Elizabeth Jameson details helpfully in an auto-historical reflection based on her memorable conference plenary, the CFP found its immediate provocation in the phrase “alternative facts,” which reverberated symptomatically (however absurdly) for many months after Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway uttered it to defend misleading statements by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in January 2017.