The Journal of American Studies presents a new roundtable: ‘Scholarly Perspectives on the American Right’. It is published on the BAAS website under the journal’s Green Open Access policy. You can read the full roundtable here.
Below is the JAS Editors’ Introduction from the journal’s Editors & Associate Editors, Katie McGettigan, Will Norman, Nicole Gipson, & Ahmed Honeini.
In the run up to the 2024 election, we are delighted to be publishing this roundtable on Scholarly Perspectives on the American Right, edited by Josephine Harmon and Richard Johnson, with contributions from members of the American Politics Group. We are also delighted to join the APG in celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. A sister organisation of BAAS, the APG has done much to promote and expand the study of US politics in Britain and beyond, as the geographic span of the roundtable’s contributors demonstrates.
The contributors provide accessible and incisive interventions into a key question raised by both the campaign and the contemporary United States: what models, methods, and contexts allow us to best understand the rise of the American right, and to predict its future course? As such, they are of interest both specialists and non-specialists and are also ideal classroom aids for university and schoolteachers of American culture, history and politics.
The roundtable also acts a prologue to a special issue of JAS on the 2024 Election scheduled for Spring 2025. In that issue, scholars – including some contributors to this roundtable – address questions that resonate with both the current presidential campaign and the wider concerns of American Studies, including the experiences and practices of voters of colour, the place of populism in democracy, and politics in the Anthropocene. Alongside these articles we will publish conversations between leading scholars from across American Studies, that examine the campaign and result through key lenses for the discipline today. Broad-ranging and interdisciplinary explorations of the 2024 election will continue in the Reader’s Room, which will offer two roundtables on literary elections and presidential assassinations in popular culture, a special edition of “The Talk,” with Princeton’s James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor Eddie Glaude reflecting on the election and the January 6th insurrection 4 years on, and a series of specially commissioned book reviews.
Whatever the outcome in November, our hope is that the special issue will illuminate the complex histories and imaginaries that laid the groundwork for this “unprecedented” election, and demonstrating the insights that Americanists from across our diverse field can bring to the challenges facing the United States and its democracy.
Katie McGettigan, Will Norman, Nicole Gipson, and Ahmed Honeini
Editors and Associate Editors
