22 RüdigerKunow
"outbreak narratives" (Priscilla Wald), the "spectacles of accident" (Bill
Albertini), and more recently the emergence of "expendable
populations" (Henry A. Giroux) generated in the wake of natural
catastrophes, the "medicalized nativism" and the "immigrant menace"
(Alan Kraut) and of course also of the "biocybernetics" (W. J. T.
Mitchell)whichplaysabigroleintheongoing"WaronTerror."
These conceptualizations and the theoretical interests that sustain
them,variedastheyare,nonethelesspointtolacunaewithintheresearch
imaginationofAmericanStudiesand,hereespecially,theforeclosureof
thelongue duréeof the human life and its attendant contingencies. To
cite just one example: in much traditional American Studies work, not
only of the Myth-and-Symbol School, it is virtually taken for granted
that the "American Adam" is hardly ever ill or frail, even as one of his
archetypal incarnations, Cooper's Natty Bumppo (a.k.a.
Leatherstocking) enters the stage as a very old, even dying man (The
Prairie, 1827). The abiding fascination with an ideal, male-ist and
ableist American body which is always "better than well" (C. Elliott),
constitutes in my view yet another form of "American exceptionalism."
Just as in other exceptionalist fantasies (Pease, "Exceptionalism" 108-
12) which populate the discipline of American Studies, "America" is
routinely represented as being free from the encumbrances of "old
Europe"—i.e., aristocratic prerogatives, class conflicts, or socialist
ideologies, it is also, equally routinely, perceived as free also from the
encumbrancesofthephysicalityofthehumanbody.Thiswasespecially
so during the early years of the discipline, when paradigms such as the
"errand into the wilderness" or the "virgin land" rested on this at best
implicit, otherwise mostly unreflected presupposition. That U.S.-
Americans were gifted with physically inviolate bodies—that the
American Adam was never ill and would never age—is in my view an
integral but often neglected component of the discipline's abiding
"romancewithAmerica"(Fluck)—forwhichamaterialistcritiqueofthe
biosector can serve as a much-needed corrective.^15 In those relatively
(^15) This neglect registers even in the otherwise excellent discussion of the
romance with America and the exceptionalist leanings of American Studies in
Fluck's "American Studies and the Romance with America: Approaching
America through Its Ideals" (2008). The author summarizes a disciplinary
consensus when he argues: "The field was constituted by a romance with