Social movements pressing for justice, including the antiwar movement and the movements of people of color working both outside and inside the academy, helped to make U.S. empire an issue in revisionist scholarly work of the Vietnam War era and after. We could go back even further, of course, and find critical work on U.S. imperialism, often linked to the collective endeavors of social movements and to interdisciplinary concerns, in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Americo Paredes, C. L. R. James, Ricardo Flores Magón, Lucy Parsons, and many others. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the literatures and theories of decolonization, work on internal colonialism in U.S. ethnic studies (especially Native American studies and Chicano studies), as well as the impact of postcolonial studies, all helped to make U.S. empire visible as a problem. When we define American studies in terms of programs and institutions, we need to recognize how it emerged as a post–World War II form of area studies that had ties on some campuses to the CIA, the Cold War national security state, and the imperatives of U.S. empire. But we should also attend to what George Lipsitz (2001, 27) has called “the other American studies, the organic grassroots theorizing about culture and power that has informed cultural practice, social movements, and academic work for many years.”

This is an excerpt from Shelley Streeby’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (pp 99-100).