America at the crossroads: An introduction

The present moment of social and cultural transformation requires us to develop trans-national and post-national ways of knowing. We now see in retrospect that industrialization, nationalism, and the Cold War were not just historical events, but also epistemologies and ontologies. They directed our attention toward investigations of national identities and national cultures. They encouraged us to define politics in terms of citizenship and the state. They led us to look for universality, uniformity, and sameness as preconditions for social justice. Yet our experiences in the post-industrial, post-nationalist, and post-Cold War eras confront us continuously with cultural practices that cannot be pinned down to any one place, with political projects that go beyond demands by citizens on states, and by struggles for social justice that rely on partial, perspectival, and differential consciousness. We encounter unexpected allies and enemies; our political and cultural projects proceed through principles of identification and affiliation, rather than through identicality and coalition. This special issue of Cultural Values brings together scholars from the U. S. and the U. K. to explore the nature of national identity in the U. S. at the start of a new century. They present a composite picture of intercultural conflict and creativity, of the seeming compression of time and space, of the rapid emergence of new identities and the ghostly return of old ones. Contemporary cultural production in the U. S. does not erase older narratives of national identity, citizenship, and subjectivity, but rather recontextualizes them in light of emerging understandings, ideas, and identities. They underscore the contradictory processes at the present time that make it equally impossible for us to either embrace or to evade the national identities that we inhabit, but instead make it necessary for us to fashion new ways of knowing. The rapid movement across the globe of people and products that characterizes the present era influences nearly every aspect of contemporary culture and politics. Traditional assumptions linking culture to place have been disrupted by the emergence of new modes of production and distribution, new communications technologies, and new alignments of private and public power. In the United States today, emerging patterns of migration, trade, investment, and military intervention affect everything from the national origins of babies