George Lipsitz

"I close this brief discussion of Lipsitz’s work by returning to the argument with which I started — that is, to admit that it may not matter at all to the state whether I am right to suggest that Lipsitz’s treatment of the state is consistent only in its hostility to the state. The state is a complex and conflicted sets of institutions and practices, and I am not going to try to predict what kinds of knowledges in American studies will someday be of use to it and why; all I will say is that the potential uses and misuses or our work are not entirely ours to control. At the moment, surely, there is no real danger that the State Department will make any attempt to make George Lipsitz’s work the centerpiece of a new propaganda offensive intended to show our European and Middle Eastern critics that the United States is an open and pluralistic society that fosters critical knowledge about the Knights of Labor, the musicians of Miami, and the Movimiento Chicano; the state that finds Lipsitz’s work congenial to its domestic or international politics is a state I do not currently live in and cannot currently envision."