Drawing on the traditions of critical pedagogy from Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux to recent critical research developed in the Journal of Pedagogy, this study explores how a particular case of curriculum reform in the US is entangled with racial neoliberalism and paranoia.
Until recently, American Studies Programs in Europe have privileged Politics, Diplomacy, Economics, and Literary Studies. In the last two decades, however, demographic changes, in consequence of increased migrations from the Third World, particularly Africa, and the attendant 'Blackening of Europe' have compelled the revising of American Studies curricula. Across Europe, American Studies Programs are being revised to include and interrogate hitherto neglected themes about minority ethnic experiences (race, ethnicity, diversity, multiculturalism and nationality). Increased attention to ethnic minority experiences in American Studies has in turn bolstered European scholarly interests in American minority ethnic experiences, especially the black American. The paper examines the challenges and implications of the revisionist phase in American Studies across Europe. It also analyzes how the problematic character of American Studies in the United States relative to Ethnic Studies fields, such as Black Studies, would impact the reconfiguration of the discipline in Europe.
The article concentrates on metalinguistic uses of the notion of 'culture' in contemporary debates on collective identity. The author claims that metacultural consciousness shapes the horizon of contemporary social imagery, in the sense given to this notion by Charles Taylor. The way of using the word and concept of culture in the context of the metaculture of modernity and the metaculture of difference is then contrasted with the phenomenon of a self-referential and self-interpreting unity which the author entitles the metaculture of newness or simultaneity. A slogan provided by an advertising campaign of the clothing company Esprit, 'The World Is Our Culture', describes accurately the global sense of its ambitions.
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