Outside Where? Comparing Notes on Comparative American Studies and American Comparative Studies

This essay offers a critique of some of the assumptions and implications of the New American Studies in their ongoing transnational reconfiguration. By confronting them from the "outside" point of view of Italian American Studies in the 1930s and 1960s, it attempts to decenter the teleological, developmental narrative of US American Studies, underlying the field even at the moment of its alleged "opening," and to contrast it with the less territorialized, more open narrative of comparative literary studies.