|
BOOK LINKS
BROWSE BY SUBJECT
|
Rewiring the "Nation"
The Place of Technology in American Studies
|
 |
edited by Carolyn de la Peña and Siva Vaidhyanathan
$19.95 paperback
978-0-8018-8651-5 (1 ctn qty)
2007 448 pp. 26 b&w photos
 Add paperback to shopping cart
|
|
Description
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.
Author Information
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.
|
|
Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures: A Special Issue of American Quarterly