There’s been endless babble about inter- / cross- / trans- / pan-disciplinary thinking for the better part of a century now, but I’m still left scratching my head at basic problems, like this: For decades the US has debated the impact of French thought and France has debated the impact of American thought (cf. the improbably named French cultural minister Jack Lang and his denunciation of America’s “cultural imperialism”). So what academic field(s) can ‘natively’ identify that strange terrain: nearly half century of two national intellectual cultures fetishizing and denouncing one another? I can see all kinds of departments having a go at it: sociology, history, comp lit, communications, international studies… But it takes way too much effort just to explain it, even though this kind of problem is everywhere. It’s a generic object that can be described formally: just change change US/France to some arbitrary permutation of China, USSR/Russia, the UK, Commonwealth countries, Israel, Japan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Brazil, KSA, DPRK…
(NYT)