American Studies Lecture Vocabulary Flashcards

Exactly $$100$$ vocabulary flashcards covering the American Studies lecture notes, including key theories, historical events, and economic concepts.

Interdisciplinary Inquiry

The practice of combining multiple academic fields such as history, sociology, and literature to study a single subject.

The Canon

Traditionally a list of required Great Books or authors; Lipsitz argues American Studies prefers democratic inquiry over a fixed version of this.

Research Paradigm

A distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field.

Pedagogy

The method and practice of teaching; American Studies is noted for using an eclectic array of practices in this area.

Culture of Unity

A reference to the New Deal era ($1930s$) where American culture was shaped by labor movements and national efforts to survive the Great Depression.

Neoliberalism

An economic philosophy prominent since the $1970s$ emphasizing privatization, free-market capitalism, and reduced government spending on social services.

Poststructural

Analyzing how truth and meaning are created through language and power structures.

Postcolonial

Studying the legacy of colonial rule and the struggle for independence and identity in colonized societies.

Necropolitics

A theory regarding the power of the state to dictate who may live and who must die, often used to study marginalized populations.

Manifest Destiny

The historical $19^{th} ext{-century}$ belief that the United States was destined by God to expand across North America through conquest.

Latent Destiny

A term from Toni Cade Bambara referring to the hidden potential of the American people to build a truly egalitarian society.

Fine Adjustment

A quote from W.E.B. Du Bois describing higher education's role in balancing academic knowledge with the realities of real life.

Living Sculpture

A metaphor for American Studies suggesting it is a work-in-progress constantly reshaped by current people and events.

Informal Education

The after-school curriculum used by communities to educate each other on Black history when the formal school system ignored it.

Knowledge as Resistance

The engagement of everyday people with high-level feminist and political theory to subvert the order of time imposed by labor.

Settler Colonialism

A system where a colonizing power seeks to replace the indigenous population with a new society of settlers for permanent occupation.

Heathen Ground

A term representing the othering of the rural South as a place lacking civilization that needs saving by outsiders.

Heterogeneous Temporalities

The existence of different times or histories in the same space, such as the nearness of slavery in the rural South.

Hypodescent

The social and legal practice of assigning a person of mixed-race ancestry to the subordinate group, also known as the one-drop rule.

Proletarian Nights

The idea of workers stealing back time from their bosses at night to read, write, and think.

Village Literature

Art and scholarship created specifically for a local community or tribe rather than a mainstream white audience.

Black Radical Traditions

The history of resistance involving the collision of Nationalist, Queer, and Feminist currents.

Knowledge Production

The mass of collective contributions to humanity’s common stock of knowledge involving data, methods, and epistemology.

Epistemology

The study of how we find truth.

Methodenstreit

A late $19^{th} ext{-century}$ economic controversy between the theoretical Austrian School and the empirical German Historical School over research methodology.

Quantitative Revolution

A paradigm shift in human geography asserting that only statistical data provides truth.

Behavioralism

A paradigm shift in geography that suggests truth must take into account human behaviors and feelings.

Structuralism

A shift in focus from individual choice to the underlying, unconscious systems that shape human culture.

Post-structuralism

The rejection of fixed structures and binary oppositions in favor of instability and subjectivity in knowledge.

Universalism

The elitist view of culture as a singular path toward European-style progress and refinement.

Relativism

The belief that diverse cultures have their own unique and incomparable values.

Cultural Capitalism

A $21^{st} ext{-century}$ shift where heritage, creativity, and symbolic goods are commodified for economic growth.

Cultural Hegemony

A concept from Antonio Gramsci where the ruling class uses culture to make their values seem like common sense to maintain power.

Hybrid Identities

A concept from Stuart Hall stating culture is a mix of different backgrounds and histories rather than a single solid thing.

American (as Keyword)

A term often functioning as a set of shared values like freedom or individualism rather than just a legal status.

Colonia

Moving from military settlements in conquered lands, this term was sanitized by the $18^{th}$ century to mean a simple farm or estate.

American Exceptionalism

The mythology suggesting the United States was founded on noble democratic principles while ignoring the disposal of others.

Logic of Elimination

The organizing grammar of settler colonialism where violence is used to remove Indigenous peoples permanently.

John Locke’s Labor Theory of Property

The theory that ownership of property comes through using land productively, justifying the appropriation of empty land.

Terra Nullius

A legal fiction meaning empty land, used to legitimize the seizure of Indigenous territories for settler ownership.

Racialization

An active, historically specific ideological process that assigns racial meaning to previously unclassified relationships or groups.

Commodity Fetishism

A culture where individuals view themselves as equal market agents despite structural inequalities.

Capitalocentrism

The mistaken belief that capitalism is an all-encompassing system, hiding non-capitalist forms like bartering.

Geographical Determinism

The belief in correlations between the natural environment and social or political forms.

Racialization of Space

The process by which physical locations are imbued with racial meanings, sorting people into specific areas.

Redlining

Government maps rating lending risks that wrote racial discrimination into the urban landscape and created wealth gaps.

Capitalism

An economic system based on private ownership of means of production where profit-driven exchange determines prices.

Substantive Economics

A concept from Karl Polanyi derived from man's dependence on nature and an interchange with his social environment.

Formal Economics

A concept from Karl Polanyi derived from the logical nature of the means-ends relationship in economizing.

Enclosure Movement

A process from the $1500s$ to the $1800s$ that converted communally managed open fields into privately owned, fenced-off farms.

Fictitious Commodities

A term from Karl Polanyi for the three factors of production: land, labor, and capital.

Democracy (Fred Moten)

A radical dream of collective wealth and common ownership currently deferred by a reality of state-managed crisis.

Economic Democracy

A system where communities own and decide together how to manage collective needs like housing, food, and energy.

Possessive Individual

The only subject fully acknowledged and protected by the legal system in property-based social systems.

Primitive Accumulation

The initial process of enclosure that sparked the transition from feudalism to capitalism by expelling subsistence inhabitants.

Proletarianization

The process of converting people from subsistence lifestyle to waged labor.

Doctrine of Discovery

A $1452$ authorization by Pope Nicholas V for Portuguese discoverers to invade non-Christian lands and reduce inhabitants to slavery.

Restrictive Covenant

A legally binding clause in a property deed that limits how a landowner can use or sell their land.

Settler Nativism

Attempting to claim Indigenous identity through a distant or imagined ancestor to deflect from being a settler.

Colonial Equivocation

Comparing different types of oppression to avoid acknowledging the unique position of settler-colonialism.

Conscientization

Focusing only on awareness of a problem as a substitute for taking actual disruptive action.

Mighty Whitey Trope

A story where a white protagonist enters a foreign culture and becomes their most skilled leader or savior.

Frontier Narrative

The idea that American identity is defined by constantly conquering new frontiers from the West to space.

Insular Cases

Early $20^{th} ext{-century}$ Supreme Court cases ruling that the U.S. Constitution does not automatically apply to people living in territories.

Tax Imperialism

An economic state where it is cheaper for mainland companies to do business on an island like Puerto Rico than for locals to live there.

Scrip

Fake money or tokens paid to workers in company towns that could only be spent at company-owned stores.

Paternalism

A system where a company or authority acts like a strict parent, making all decisions for workers and leaving them with no independence.

Dillon’s Rule

The principle that local governments only exercise powers expressly granted or necessarily implied by the state.

Georgism

The economic theory that people own value they create, but land value should be taxed 100_{ ext{%}} to benefit the community.

Tolstoy’s Hushing Theory

The idea that systems marginalize simple people of high integrity because they threaten the illusions of coercive structures.

Sewer Socialists

Municipal socialists in Milwaukee focused on public health, sanitation, and honest government rather than radical revolution.

Taylorism

The scientific management of industrial workflow aimed at maximizing worker movement efficiency.

Fordism (Production)

A set of factory innovations such as the assembly line aimed at maximal production at minimal cost.

Fordism (Capitalism Phase)

A period from $1945$ to $1970$ defined by a balance between mass production and mass consumption.

Forditis

The anxiety and mental exhaustion felt by workers due to the repetitive nature of the factory assembly line.

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

A $1935$ New Deal agency that employed over $8.5 imes 10^6$ people to build public infrastructure.

The New Deal

A series of domestic programs and financial reforms by Franklin D. Roosevelt aimed at economic relief during the Great Depression.

Keynesianism

The economic theory suggesting federal governments should intervene in capitalist markets to stabilize them.

The Great Migration

The mass movement of over $6 imes 10^6$ Black Americans from the rural South to the North and West between $1910$ and $1970$.

Territorial Stigmatization

A form of symbolic violence where specific neighborhoods are disparaged, assigning negative reputations based on location.

Urban Underclass (Myrdal)

A $1962$ concept describing persistent unemployment and poverty amidst wealth, linked to structural conditions.

Modernism

A global movement seeking new alignment with industrial life using new imagery and techniques in art and urban planning.

Urban Renewal

A government-led land redevelopment program designed to revitalize decaying or blighted urban areas, often through demolition.

Eminent Domain

The legal power allowing a government to force a citizen to sell property for public use.

Housing Act of 1949

A U.S. federal law that intensified urban renewal through federal slum clearance.

Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956

Legislation that authorized the construction of a $41,000 ext{-mile}$ national system of interstate highways.

Levittown

An architectural application of Fordism building standardized homes which institutionalized segregation through restrictive covenants.

1928 City Plan (Austin)

A policy designed to force Black residents into a single segregated Negro District in East Austin by closing schools and parks.

Interest Convergence Theory

The theory that public policies are driven by the white power structure and harm to Black communities is a byproduct of white interest.

Vagrancy Laws

Post-Emancipation laws designed to control the Black population and funnel them into forced labor projects.

White Flight

The massive migration of white residents from cities to suburbs starting in the $1950s$, leading to disinvestment in urban centers.

Unincorporated Black Towns

Communities lacking official municipal status and omitted from maps, giving them no legal power over nearby developments.

Environmental Racism

The disproportionate exposure of racialized, low-income communities to toxic waste, pollution, and industrial hazards.

Drowned Black Towns

Historically Black communities intentionally submerged under man-made reservoirs through unfair eminent domain between the $1920s$ and $1970s$.

Gentrification

Where increased investment and influx of wealthier residents into lower-income neighborhoods causes taxes and rents to rise.

Waawiyatanong

The indigenous name for the area now known as Detroit, meaning where the water bends.

1833 Detroit Blackburn Riot

Detroit’s first racial riot sparked by the attempt to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act against Thornton and Lucie Blackburn.

Detroit Electronic Music (DEM)

A creative hustle and innovative response by long-time residents to the city's post-industrial crisis.

Submerge

A global hub founded in $1992$ in Detroit that centralizes business needs for small independent music labels.

1967 Detroit Rebellion

A five-day civil disturbance ignited by a police raid on a blind pig, driven by systemic racism and brutality.