Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies

Scholars working among an array of "technologies" and "Americas" were invited to contribute to this special bound issue of American Quarterly to interrogate why one might study technology in a post-Eurocentric, post-national American Studies. This volume offers a re-reading of the narrative of U.S. technologies as we move beyond celebrations of exceptional tinkerers and a deterministic machine-driven sense of progress to a more complex understanding of the opportunities and responsibilities that befall a nation that interweaves its identities, labors, and creative cultures with its machines. This volume puts a variety of conversations in dialogue, including the present and historical, the national and international, the material and theoretical, and the critical and celebratory.