Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (review)
Spanos emphasizes "the oblivion to which the dominant culture in America has, in the thirty-year aftermath of that disclosive disaster" relegated the Vietnam War (34). His strategy is to confront the architects of American exceptionalist policy head-on, to force an encounter between what he repeatedly calls "the Ahabian monomania" of American imperialism informing the contemporary War on Terror and the indelible specter of Vietnam. This is certainly effective, but where Spanos deals considerably less with a domestic critique of the "dominant culture" from within American subor counter-cultures, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization ultimately enables future projects along these lines. The work, although certainly focused on the Vietnam War and its aftermath in American history, is distinct from the genre of critical history; it is in his detailed treatment of the imperial logos that precipitated the invasion of Vietnam that Spanos invites further investigations of critical intellectual movements, particularly since the 1960s but ultimately beyond the immediate context of Vietnam.