Rewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies

Front Cover
Carolyn de la Peña, Siva Vaidhyanathan
Johns Hopkins University Press, Apr 30, 2007 - Social Science - 448 pages

This special issue of American Quarterly asks powerful and poignant questions about technology and its effects on our bodies, minds, families, economies, armies, and academies. Technology is an entry point for American studies scholars to find new and creative ways to think through social and cultural problems. The essays in this collection provide an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways scholars of culture use the study of technology to examine the flows, conflicts, tensions, and hazards of American culture.

Re-reading the narrative of U.S. technology, the contributors move beyond celebrations of exceptional tinkerers and a deterministic machine-driven sense of progress and form a more comprehensive understanding of opportunities and responsibilities that befall a nation that interweaves its identities, labors, and creative cultures with its machines. Discussing technologies of transcendence; the cultural work of technological systems; technology and knowledge systems; and technology, mobility, and the body; they consider the place of American technologies in an increasingly globalized, multi-polar, high-tech world and illuminate the relationship between technological positivism and the dynamics of imperialism and war.

From inside the book

 

Contents

Technologies of Transcendence
4
Hurricane Katrina and
8
On the Verge of the Posthuman
15
Copyright

16 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

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About the author (2007)

Carolyn de la Peña is an associate professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University.

Bibliographic information

TitleRewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies
A Special Issue of American Quarterly
EditorsCarolyn de la Peña, Siva Vaidhyanathan
Editionillustrated
PublisherJohns Hopkins University Press, 2007
ISBN0801886511, 9780801886515
Length448 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies)
Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Technology & Engineering / History
  
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