A Cultural History of the Emergence of American Exceptionalism after World War II

我提出的项目涉及“美国例外论”的起源和发展的文化史——在二战后的几年里，美国是一个独特的国家，有特殊的命运来领导世界——在美国大众的想象中。我希望展示例外论是如何在战后美国崛起为大国的过程中发挥作用的，更重要的是，我希望理解并将例外论根植于美国人集体想象的确切过程历史化。这项研究将基于对流行文化资源的分析，主要是漫画书和电影，大致从20世纪30年代到70年代。原因是双重的。首先，尽管例外论已经成为美国民族认同的一个组成部分，但我认为，许多关于其起源和发展的学术文献都没有充分地历史化，这使得它成为一个从新的方法论角度重新审视的成熟话题。其次，我相信这种大众文化来源在研究思想史方面具有强大的解释潜力。将叙事从精选的少数上流社会知识分子的作品中分离出来，对流行文化来源的分析揭示了这些话语的存在、流通和运作，远远超出了精英圈子的严格限制，并更有力地展示了它们广泛的、不可预测的和变革的潜力。

My proposed project entails a cultural history of the origins and growth of 'American exceptionalism'-the notion theUnited States is somehow a unique nation with a special destiny to lead the world-in the American popular imaginationin the years after the Second World War. I hope to demonstrate how exceptionalism is explicitly a function of theAmerican rise to great power status in the post-war settlement and, crucially, to understand and historicise the exactprocess whereby it subsequently became embedded in the collective American imagination. The research will be basedon analysis of popular cultural sources, primarily comic books and films, and roughly spanning chronologically from the1930s to the 1970s. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, though exceptionalism has become an integral facet ofAmerican national identity, I contend much academic literature on its origins and development is insufficientlyhistoricised, making it a topic ripe for re-examination from a new methodological perspective. Secondly, I am convincedof the powerful explanatory potential of such popular cultural sources in studying the history of ideas. Decentring thenarrative away from the works of a select few, high-society intellectuals, the analysis of popular cultural sources revealsthe existence, circulation, and operation of such discourses far beyond the tight confines of elite circles anddemonstrates more powerfully their widespread, unpredictable, and transformative potential.