Any discussion of the function of American Studies/Gender Studies in international settings should begin with an appraisal of the specific role that we, international Americanists/feminists, are called upon to play in academic environments distant, and not just geographically, from those in the US. Such an appraisal, moreover, should primarily involve the recognition that the majority of us, who work within literary studies, are facing a double challenge that defines the paradoxical and provocative nature of our work: on the one hand, like our US colleagues, we are confronted with the necessity of justifying our role as literary scholars and teachers in cultural arenas where ‘practical’ business values have demoted humanities education; on the other, we need to respond to the more specific challenge of having to justify, and even defend, ourselves as agents through whom American Studies infiltrate cultural spaces often by definition inimical to American political and cultural influences. As to the first of our concerns: I believe that nowadays, few people in literature programs can still feign unawareness of the fact that the most serious problem facing them is the ghettoization of literary studies in society at large. At the same time that literary scholarship is proliferating within the academy, in the ‘real’ world literature professors are stereotyped as self-indulgent social misfits and spoofed as users of a theoretical jargon that, as rumor has it, even they do not fully comprehend. The image of the literary scholar who speaks gibberish because he or she has nothing to communicate is becoming alarmingly widespread in a world in which the values of practicality and expediency are pushing literary studies into a position of social and hence political irrelevance.