Giorgio Mariani on Sabine Broeck

This essay is a response to Sabine Broeck’s essay in this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. Mariani concurs with Broeck that the teaching and studying of U.S. culture and history is more complicated these days than some decades ago, but he differs with her assessment that this is new throughout Europe. In fact, he argues that “subversive Americanization” had become operative in Italy by the late 1960s, and he wonders about Broeck’s example of the German response to the U.S. Civil Rights movement. In this Second Look, he argues that to operate within a transnational framework is not ipso facto to have gained a liberating perspective that grants scholars access to necessarily pleasant, edifying truths. Instead, he argues that a transnational perspective just as much as an arguably global perspective is a perspective that deserves to be mobilized precisely because of its contradictory status, and certainly not despite it.