by Bruce Burgett
about Bruce Burgett
Bruce Burgett is Dean and Professor emeritus in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at University of Washington Bothell. He is author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic, and a co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies.
Sex
In common usage, the keyword “sex” names either an identity or a practice, something an individual is or does. It refers to both the material foundation (male or female) of binary gender difference (masculine or feminine) and the real and imagined acts that ground various sexual identities (homosexual, heterosexual, fetishist, sadomasochist, and so on). The _Oxford English Dictionary_ (_OED_) dates the first sense of “sex” as male or female from the fourteenth century, though it also notes a more pluralized (and again relevant today) usage from the sixteenth century (“so are all sexes and sorts of people called upon”), a singular usage from the same period (“I am called The Squire of Dames, or the Servant of the Sex”), and a further revision in the early nineteenth century (“the third sex”). In contrast, the _OED_ dates the second sense of the term from the mid- to late nineteenth century, when “sexual” (“Berlin is outbidding Paris in its sexual immorality”) and “sexuality” (“Precocious sexuality... interferes with normal mental growth”) began to reference a discrete domain of physical and mental acts isolated from other corporeal appetites, imaginative practices, and forms of social relation. Coincident with these developments was the emergence of terms...
Introduction to Keywords Now: What happened on January 6, 2021?
What should we call what happened in and around the Capitol building on Wednesday, January 6? A coup or an attempted coup? An insurrection? A white supremacist riot? Vigilante antidemocratic paramilitary violence? Did those who tried to overturn the election results commit acts of sedition? Treason? There are solid arguments for any of these terms. The reason any or all of them can seem right is not a sign of intellectual sloppiness or lack of specificity, even as media commentators go to great lengths to come up with specific definitions of the terms they’re arguing for and against in order to make their cases. But no amount of defining can resolve the debate, because other thinkers and writers can come along and define their terms in ways that make their argument plausible. Language is social, not indexical. That the definitions of these terms are contested across time and space means that they are what the scholar Raymond Williams called “keywords.” That means more than that they are rich and complex and important. It also means that the stakes of contestation over their meaning can advance our understanding of our culture and our society. The different ways we talk about the...
Syllabi and Assignments
Since the publication of the first edition in 2007, thousands of students have read Keywords for American Cultural Studies in courses across a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, and at every level from first-year writing courses to advanced graduate seminars. The materials on this page supplement our “Note on Classroom Use” by providing examples of how instructors have used Keywords for American Cultural Studies. If you have found a way to use the publication in your courses, please send your syllabus or assignment to keywords@fordham.edu, along with the information included in other sample syllabi and sample assignments on this site. Course Planning: Questions and Considerations New! Asynchronous Online Syllabus and Assignment “American Studies Principles and Methods”, Kennesaw State University, Rebecca Hill “Keyword Assignment Appendix”, Kennesaw State University, Rebecca Hill Sample Syllabi and Assignments Undergraduate “Major Developments in American Culture,” Fordham University, Glenn Hendler “Reading Fiction (Survey Literature Course),” University of Washington Seattle, Deborah Kimmey “Diversity and Power; Gender, Race, and Class in the United States,” University of Iowa, Naomi Greyser, Aniruddha Dutta, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe Graduate “Formations of Cultural Studies,” University of Washington Bothell, Bruce Burgett and Ron Krabill *** Special thanks to Deborah Kimmey who developed...
Note on Classroom Use
Please be aware that some of the essays that are part of Keywords for American Cultural Studies are available in the print volume and e-book, while others are on the web at http://keywords.nyupress.org. If you are reading this note on the web site, please look at the sixty-plus essays in print. If you are reading this in either the paper or electronic version of the book, please know that there are as many provocative and useful keyword essays available on the web site as there are where you are reading now. There are many brand-new essays, and many of the essays in print and in pixels have been newly revised for this 2020 edition. In constructing a syllabus or assignment, a list of recommended readings for your students, a qualifying exam list, or using keyword essays in any other way, please do take into consideration all 120-plus essays that make up Keywords for American Cultural Studies. * * * One way to teach with Keywords for American Cultural Studies is to assign print and online essays either as central readings for your course or as supplementary texts that will help students understand the vocabulary of your course’s field of study....
Keywords: An Introduction
**I. What Is a Keyword?** Why are you reading _Keywords for American Cultural Studies_? You may have been assigned some of the print or digital essays in this volume as part of a class. You may be seeking help making your way through some challenging works of scholarship, and hope _Keywords_ will help you develop the vocabulary you need to understand them. You may be reading around in the essays to help you enter into one of the many scholarly conversations going on in interdisciplinary American studies, cultural studies, or some related field. Or you may be reading _Keywords_ simply because it looks interesting. These are all good reasons. But for your reading to be useful for any of these purposes, it will be important that you understand what a keyword essay is and what it can and can’t do. For _Keywords for American Studies_ is not what it at first appears to be. Though its table of contents is a list of words in alphabetical order, it is not a dictionary. It will not give you simple, stable definitions for the words in that list. Though many of the essays make reference to the etymologies or usage histories in...
Acknowledgments
A project that spans fourteen years accrues a lot of debts. As we did in previous editions, we want to start out by thanking all of our contributors. We rushed them, then we delayed, then we rushed again, and brought new contributors on board with very little lead time. The intellectual and pedagogical work this volume does is due to their brilliance, but also to their patience with us as we requested revision after revision. Whether you joined the volume in the month before it was completed or have been in it since the 2007 first edition, we thank you. The idea for this publication emerged, developed, and was tested through interactions with a series of collaborators, interlocutors, and audiences, including the American Cultures workshop at the University of Chicago; the Americanist Workshop at the University of Notre Dame; the Columbia American Studies Seminar; the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington; the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin; the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College; the Cultural Studies Now Conference at the University of East London; the Mobility Shifts Learning Summit at the New School for Social Research; the Graduate Center at the City...
Introduction to Keywords Now: Critical Race Theory
In the latest skirmish in a decades-long [culture](/american-cultural-studies/essay/culture/) [war](/american-cultural-studies/essay/war/), the right-wing indignation industry in the United States has identified something it calls "Critical Race Theory" as an existential threat to the nation and its youth. Often abbreviating it as "CRT," legislatures have passed ordinances against teaching various forms of critical race pedagogy, and teachers in universities, colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools have been pressured to commit to banning them from their classrooms. The impact has been, at best, a heightened nervousness among educators about teaching critical theories and histories of race and racism or, at worst, a turning away from critical pedagogy altogether. We intend this *Keywords Now* cluster to support educators as they teach critical theories of race and racism, and to enable students to encounter that teaching openly. As we explain in [our introduction to *Keywords for American Cultural Studies*](/american-cultural-studies/keywords-an-introduction/), we believe that attention to the usage history of words that structure contemporary debates can help to unpack and reframe the stakes of those debates. In this case, we have asked scholars of American studies and cultural studies to provide short commentaries on the three keywords in play here: "Critical," "Race," and "Theory." We asked them...
Introduction to Keywords Now: Pandemic
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Keywords
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Pandemic
How has the COVID pandemic altered our use of key terms that shape our understanding of that event and its aftermath? Raymond Williams famously wrote that his *Keywords* project emerged from his almost visceral sense upon returning from fighting in World War II that the meaning of the word "culture" had changed in his absence. From that gut feeling came decades of research and rumination on the meaning of "culture," its shifting relation to the term "society," and then a developing understanding of "keywords" as terms that register and participate in broad semantic and political shifts. The cluster of keywords linked here is grounded in our visceral sense that the global pandemic that began in late 2019 has generated significant semantic and political shifts, and that those shifts can be traced in changes in the meanings of certain keywords. As a result, we asked contributors to *Keywords for American Cultural Studies*, along with writers for then forthcoming *Keywords for Health Humanities*, if they would be interested in helping us to think through these changes. One response was a lively discussion on a roundtable at the 2022 American Studies Association conference; another is this creation of this cluster, which also marks...