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FEATURED ARTICLES: THREE ARTICLES ON TRANSNATIONALISM AND AMERICAN STUDIES
EDITOR’S NOTE: We feature here three new articles on Transnationalism and American studies, offering complementary perspectives on this important topic: the first, by John Carlos Rowe, examines the genesis of the transnational turn and the intellectual impetus behind it; the second, by Greg Robinson, analyzes the transnational model in terms of its roots and also its institutional growth; and the third, by Alfred Hornung, looks at transnational American studies from a foreign perspective. Consider them together as a kind of isosceles triangle, sharing some common elements, but offering different angles of view. The articles will added to the EAS Online soon. M.O.
The “transnational turn” in American studies refers generally to scholarship in the past twenty years that has stressed the comparative study of the different “Americas”—Latin America, the Caribbean, the U.S.—and Canada as the appropriate objects of study for the discipline. “Transnationalism” also refers to American studies done by international scholars outside the U.S., especially scholarship that emphasizes the influence of the U.S. abroad. Scholars like Amy Kaplan, Donald Pease, and John Carlos Rowe have argued that transnationalism is closely connected with the study of European imperialism and its postcolonial effects in the nations and societies of the Western Hemisphere. Imperialism, the systematic practice of colonial domination, has itself been seen an example of transnationalism, including all of the negative aspects of imperial expansion and rule. In other contexts, scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Paul Jay have argued that transnationalism is also intellectually allied with new theories of cosmopolitanism and post-national conceptions of “global” or “planetary” citizenship.
All of these interrelated meanings of “the transnational turn” can be traced back to the criticism of “American exceptionalism” in the 1980s, when many American studies scholars challenged both the study of the United States as an “exceptional” or “unique” nation and the inherent limitations of nation-based knowledge. Critics of American exceptionalism focused on the myth-and-symbol school, whose scholars from 1950-1980 studied the uniqueness of the United States as a democratic nation, whose citizens relied on their self-reliance and talents for innovation to create a society that fostered tolerance, responsibility, and freedom. Ethnic studies, feminist, Native American, and gay/queer scholars argued that this ideal “America” masked the historical reality of slavery and racism, Chinese Exclusion, Japanese Internment, genocide against native peoples, economic and political marginalization of Chicano/as and Latino/as, exclusion of women from full civil and political rights, persecution of lesbians and gays, and the religious persecution of Catholics and Mormons and Muslims.
From the late 1960s onward, scholars in these marginalized fields worked for broader representation of their communities in American studies, often by contending as well that their heritages exceeded the narrow boundaries of the U.S. nation. African American studies pointed out affiliations with Afro-Caribbeans, Africans, and other diasporic Africans. Chicano/as and Latino/as studies considered Mexican, Cuban, and other Latin American legacies as crucial to the field. Chinese American scholars studied the Chinese cultural heritage and the historical motives for emigration, while scholars of Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Philippine Americans, and a wide range of other peoples gathered carelessly under the heading “Asian American” stressed the importance of studying specific social and political backgrounds. New scholarship revealed that the routes many immigrants took to the U.S. were by no means direct. In his path-breaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy shows how the Atlantic is crisscrossed by the multiple paths traveled by black slaves, free sailors, intellectuals, artists, political organizers, and many others heading to all the major destinations of the Atlantic world. Gilroy’s oceanic, rather than geopolitical, treatment of modern people moving transnationally inspired other studies of the “Green” (Irish) and “Red” (Communist) Atlantic, as well as new considerations of the “Pacific” as a complex transnational site composed of countless island communities and crucial to the contact between Asia and the Western Hemisphere.
The east-west geographical reorientation of “American studies” in terms of the Atlantic and Pacific rims was complemented by a new emphasis on the north-south axis in a field some termed “Western Hemispheric Studies.” Latin American studies scholars critical of the area-studies orientation of their field advocated a “critical Latin American Studies,” as Juan Poblete does in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (2003), including comparative studies of Latin American, Caribbean, and North American communities. Earlier efforts by scholars such as Gustavo Peréz Firmat in Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990) had been followed by scholars who had argued that much of the commonality in the Western Hemisphere could be found in the shared Eurocentric heritage of the British, Spanish, Portuguese, and other European imperial systems that violently reshaped the region from 1500 to the present.
Following leading Latin American historians like Enrique Dussel, Rodolfo Kusch, and Edmundo O’Gorman, Walter Mignolo argues in The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) and Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000) that European imperial violence includes epistemological and linguistic efforts to eradicate the diverse indigenous civilizations of the Hemisphere. Such arguments contributed to Native American and indigenous scholarship and activism throughout the region, which in its particular specializations and its allied interests had long rejected the “national knowledge” of modern Europeans. Whether pre-national, post-national, or transnational, Native Americans insisted on understanding their histories and cultures apart from national impositions, all of which Native Americans identified with the invasion of their sovereign territories.
The broadening of American studies in east-west and north-south axes as a consequence of the “transnational turn” caused many to argue that the field must now be considered polylingual and that proper education of its students involve training in several languages relevant to these many cultural, political, economic, and social dimensions. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors’ The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (2000) successfully made the case that British North America and the United States were fundamentally multilingual societies from the beginnings of European contact, so that the English-language specificity of traditional American studies could no longer be defended, even by those insistent that “American studies” remain solely the study of the United States and its colonial and native antecedents.
Of course, many traditional scholars in the fields of American studies and Latin American studies complained that a field encompassing the Western Hemisphere and its pertinent “rims,” such as the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, was far too large. Education in so many different specializations and languages was likely to be sketchy and amateurish. One response was that the transnational study of the Americas and Canada need not follow the Enlightenment traditions of universal and encyclopedic knowledge. Instead, scholars should consider “contact zones” or “border regions” where different societies confronted each other’s values, whether violently or diplomatically, and achieved new modes of co-existence. José Saldívar’s Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997) and Walter Mignolo’s concept of “border thinking” were both strongly influenced by the mestiza lesbian feminism of Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), the multilingual, avant-garde work that for many established “border studies.”
Others complained that this new American studies abandoned the study of the U.S. nation in the very historical moment that U.S. nationalism was powerfully reshaping public discourse and international relations. But the transnational turn did not mean that scholars ignored the U.S. nation or nationalism as it shaped the Western Hemisphere. Much of the best scholarship of the past twenty years has focused on the transnational relations among nations at the peak of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004) treats French Haitian responses to Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry, the publication in Philadelphia in 1826 of the anti-colonial novel, Jicoténcal, in Spanish, Mexican influences on Hawthorne and Hawthorne’s influence on the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, among other interconnections among nations in the Western Hemisphere at the height of nationalism. Other scholars, like Rachel Adams, have shown the profound influence of Mexico on U.S. émigré intellectuals and artists living in Mexico in the modern period, whereas still other scholars, like John Carlos Rowe, have called attention to the transnational influence of the great Mexican muralists, such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, who did some of their most important work in the U.S., influencing Mexican and Chicano/a artists.
A more troubling criticism of the transnational turn is that it occurs at just the moment late capitalism focuses on globalization as a way of expanding markets and lowering its labor costs by outsourcing jobs to poorer economies. Is our scholarly interest in globalization a mere reflection of this macroeconomic phenomenon, which in its one-way expansion generally indicates exploitation of second and third-world nations by first-world nations? The customary defense is that one-way, capitalist globalization is an undeniable reality, which must be countered by alternative global visions, including new cosmopolitanisms, global coalitions designed to defend local cultures and economies, and environmental, human, and animal rights alliances that transcend national boundaries. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) argues for a new transnational morality appropriate to our global era. Appiah’s and other neo-cosmopolitanisms have been criticized as inventions of privileged intellectuals and artists, whereas many people are forced into transnational circumstances by economic need, political repression, and ethnic conflict. Displaced migrant workers, political refugees, and stateless peoples may not view globalization with the same optimism as contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism.
The transnational turn is also characterized by an interest in international perspectives on the U.S., Canada, and the other Americas. Many post-World War II academic programs in American studies around the world followed the leads of U.S. scholarship, often because of direct support from the U.S. Information Agency and the Fulbright-Hayes Program for the International Exchange of Scholars. Although international scholarship in American studies in this period was extremely diverse and by no means exclusively tied to official U.S. national interests, it was generally assumed to be merely additive to, even derivative of, American studies produced in the U.S. The U.S. citizen-scholar was also a “native informant,” who traveled widely to exemplify American exceptionalism in his/ her scholarship, teaching, and even character. Transnational American studies includes international scholarship both for its intrinsic value and to provide special perspectives both on the Americas and on the nation in which it was produced.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies,” her Presidential Address to the American Studies Association in November 2004, appealed for much greater attention to the international work being done in the field. Specific institutional efforts have been made to bring together international and U.S.-based scholars in contexts less determined by the older “American exceptionalism.” The International American Studies Association, the International Association of Inter-American Studies, the Futures of American Studies Summer Institute led by Donald Pease at Dartmouth College, Liam Kennedy’s Clinton Institute at University College, Dublin, and new journals such as Comparative American Studies and the Journal of Transnational American Studies are just some of the formal ways transnational work has been encouraged in the past twenty years.
The terms “transnational” and “post-national” are often associated with “post-colonial” and “planetary,” suggesting some of the terminological instability in the changing field of American studies. Some American studies scholars, like Lawrence Buell, responded to the impact of postcolonial studies by contending that the U.S. was a fundamentally “post-colonial” nation, insofar as it emerged from the anti-colonial struggle against Great Britain. Other scholars, like C. Richard King and the contributors to his Post-Colonial America (2000), argued that the general project of post-colonial studies involves the critical account of the legacy of colonialism, which means the study of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. In recent years, some scholars, like Wai-Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007), have employed the term “planetary” as an alternative to “global” to suggest a progressive, cosmopolitan response to one-way globalization. Like “cosmopolitan” and “worldly,” “planetary” has its negative consequences. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt discusses how Alexander von Humboldt’s use of the term “planetary” in the nineteenth century anticipates the term “globalization.” In short, if the term “globalization” is overdetermined, then so is “planetary.” Such terminological problems indicate that the field of American studies is undergoing significant changes in response to the failure of the exceptionalist model. The new American studies is transnational in both subject matter and scholarly work, and it is multilingual, critical of the imperial legacies still shaping the Americas and Canada, including neoimperialisms originating in the Western Hemisphere and reaching globally, and concerned both with the transnational relations through which nation-states legitimated themselves and with the possible state-formations that lie beyond the relatively short history of the modern nation.
John Carlos Rowe
Bibliography
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004, American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 17-57. [An overview of the impact and future of transnationalism in the field of American studies.]
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard Univ. Press 1993). [The pioneering work on the “black Atlantic world” outside conventional geopolitical borders and a strong influence on subsequent studies of post-national and transnational subjects.]
Mignolo, Walter D., Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton Univ. Press 2000). [Crucial theorization of “border thinking” in the Western Hemisphere, with special importance for understanding the ambitions of comparative American studies as a hemispheric project.]
Pease, Donald E., and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Duke Univ. Press 2002). [A collection of essays by many of the leaders in the transnational turn in American studies that set the agenda for the next decade.]
Rowe, John Carlos, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford 2000). [A study of the U.S. as an imperial power from its national origins through modernity and how literary culture responded].
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Transnationalism in American Studies
In the wake of the communications and information revolutions, national borders have grown less relevant at the dawn of the 21st century, while the growth of multinational political and economic structures (including corporations, trading blocs, and NGOs) has reduced the centrality of nation-states as actors in world affairs. Even as such globalization has reshaped society in a more visibly transnational fashion, the study of transnationalism—often associated with the phrase the “transnational turn”—has become a growing area of concentration for scholars in the field of American studies. Put in its simplest terms, Transnational American studies explores the varieties of American culture and of American experience(s) in a larger framework that stretches beyond the national borders of the United States.
While the concept existed earlier in various forms, Robert Gross is generally credited with coining the phrase “the transnational turn” in a 2000 article in Journal of American Studies. In that article, Gross underlined the urgent importance in a globalized world of understanding and incorporating foreign perspectives on American life. “The immediate import of transnational thinking lies in the scholarly arena. For American Studies, the effect is akin to looking through the reverse lens of a telescope. What once loomed large has shrunk to insignificance. To globalize American Studies is to displace American perspectives on the subject” (Gross 384). Gross’s thesis was expanded by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association. Fishkin asserted that the proper role of American studies was to examine critically the place of the United States in the international realm. “The goal of American studies scholarship is not exporting and championing an arrogant, pro-American nationalism but understanding the multiple meanings of America and American culture in all their complexity” (20). Fishkin continued that looking at the U.S. “from vantage points beyond its borders” would not only displace the hegemony of American self-regard, but would also permit scholars to gain a more nuanced, fluid, and multicultural understanding of what was (or could be defined as) “American.” As Fishkin put it, “We are likely to focus less on the United States as a static and stable territory and population whose characteristics it is our job to divine, and more on the nation as a participant in a global flow of people, ideas, texts, and products—albeit a participant who often tries to impede those flows” (24).
The roots of the transnational turn in American studies are multiple, and its development far from linear, but a few broad influences can be identified. First is the continuing contributions of borderlands scholars, led by Gloria Anzaldua. These scholars have dissected transborder relations and influences, starting in their own complex cultural heritage as Hispanic Americans, and have traced the larger cultural mestizaje and its mark on the totality of American society. (On a lesser scale, Gerard Bouchard and other scholars in Quebec, following in the footsteps of Lewis Hanke a generation earlier, challenged nationalist models of Canadian identity by positing aspects of a common quality or spirit of Américanité that characterized peoples across the Americas.) Another source is the increasing dissatisfaction of Americanists with a historical narrative that remained resolutely based in the nation-state—and inextricably entangled with nationalist politics—even as developments rendered the nation-state increasingly less important. In 1997, Thomas Bender organized a set of conferences at La Pietra, Italy, under the joint sponsorship of New York University and the Organization of American History, to figure out ways to reshape the historical scholarship and teaching of the past to reflect the new understanding of America’s essential interconnectedness with the world. These conferences ultimately resulted in the 2002 anthology Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Similarly, transnationalism takes off from the increased focus within American studies on global connections, and especially the cultural implications of American power in the world. Donald Pease proposed during the 1990s a “postnational” narrative, even as he and Amy Kaplan championed the study of imperialism in American studies. Their work encouraged scholars to examine ways in which American institutions and styles resonated outside the nation’s borders, and how its military dominion was translated into art and literature. A final factor, and arguably the most important, has been the growing importance of the field outside the United States. The exponential growth since the 1990s of American studies programs in other countries, notably China and the former Soviet bloc, has translated into an outpouring of work by scholars intimately familiar with other cultures, and informed by an international perspective. The proliferation of works that revolve around comparative study of American culture has in turn encouraged scholars in the United States to accept the need for discussion of American culture in an international setting—even if U.S.-based scholars have generally been slow to adopt source material or read texts in languages other than English.
Although the University of Kent in England inaugurated an MA program in Transnational American studies in 2010, transnationalism has remained for the most part an approach and a trope within the larger field of American studies, rather than establishing itself as a distinct category. Special editions of journals have appeared on the theme of transnationalism, beginning with American Quarterly’s September 1998 issue, devoted to investigating “the multivalent entangled connections between and among events and cultural phenomena across the world.” A significant institutional expression of the “transnational turn” was the establishment in 2008 of the Journal of Transnational American Studies, on online journal based at Stanford University and directed by an international team of scholars under the leadership of Shelley Fishkin and of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. In addition to publishing original articles with a transnational focus, JTAS includes a “Forward” section that features excerpts from newly published and forthcoming publications and a “Reprise” section for older essays. It thereby acts as a publicist for other works in the field.
The label of transnationalism covers several approaches. Among them, first and most obviously, there is the theme of border crossings. Scholars pursuing this approach have traced the work of American creative artists, religious figures, and political activists within larger international networks and conversations, and have shown the multiple circles within which they interacted and from which they drew ideas and inspiration. Anna Brickhouse’s study of transamerican literary relations is a distinguished example, in which she examines connections and exchanges between canonical American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Phillis Wheatley with precursors, commentators, and translators in Latin America. A related field is that of diasporic studies, of which Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic has served as the ur-text. Works in this category trace pan-ethnic cultural exchange across borders in such forms as congresses, collective action, or feelings of identity. Penny von Eschen’s 1997 Race against Empire and Marc S. Gallicchio’s 2000 work The African American Encounter with China and Japan are two excellent examples. They each trace how African Americans looked outside the United States in order to transcend the limited role they were permitted to occupy in domestic affairs. Not only did they raise funds for African independence movements and associate themselves with struggles against white European domination, but they developed a cosmopolitan style in their communities that included elements adapted from foreign cultures.
One compelling aspect of Transnational American studies, especially for historians, is its comparative dimension. With few exceptions, the historical literature on the United States has failed to treat major aspects of national life, such as immigration, the Welfare State, or official treatment of native peoples with reference to parallel movements elsewhere. A view of state policy across borders, particularly to the north and south, can be extremely revealing in terms of fleshing out popular attitudes. Greg Robinson’s A Tragedy of Democracy, for instance, recounts the official removal and internment of ethnic Japanese throughout North America (and including Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry) during World War II, and demonstrates the implications for understanding the U.S. government’s actions. Other studies have revealed the complex interface between national identity, domestic interests, and foreign relations. In addition to providing a context for diplomatic choices, scholars have broadened the scope of foreign policy actors from government and elites to artists, foreign travelers, and members of ethnic, racial, and religious groups. For example, Mary L. Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights (2002) examines how American government policy on civil rights was shaped by international considerations during the Cold War era. She reveals that national leaders, anxious to secure the support of nonwhite nations to the cause of the “free world” and counter Soviet propaganda, put a priority on securing civil rights for Black Americans at home because discrimination was an embarrassment internationally. The result was an unprecedented level of executive branch leadership, and intervention by State Department officials, in arguments before the courts and Congress.
In sum, the “transnational turn” is a reaffirmation of the reality of American life and identity in a global age, and a rediscovery of the heritage of such connections. A transnational model provides tools to tie together these different strands—historical, ideological, and operational—and shed new light on the relevance of the larger field of American studies.
Greg Robinson
Bibliography
Brickhouse, Anna, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge 2004).
Dudziak, Mary L., Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton Univ. Press 2002).
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004, American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 17-57.
Gallicchio, Marc S., The African American Encounter with China and Japan: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945 (Univ. of N.C. Press 2000).
Gross, Robert, The Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World, Journal of American Studies 34, no. 3 (Dec. 2000): 373-393.
Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard Univ. Press 2005).
Okihiro, Gary Y., Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (Univ. of Calif. Press 2008).
Pease, Donald E., and Amy Kaplan, eds., Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (Duke Univ. Press 1993).
Robinson, Greg, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia Univ. Press 2009).
Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Univ. of Calif. Press 2002).
Von Eschen, Penny M., Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937-1957 (Cornell Univ. Press 1997).
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Transnationalism and American Studies: The View from Abroad
The presence of American soldiers in Europe, especially in postwar Germany, marked the beginning of a transatlantic alliance in economics, politics, and culture. The same held true for the American presence in the Pacific and the ensuing bilateral relations between Japan and the United States. Both the transatlantic and the transpacific relations eventually developed into international networks in which the products of American culture play a preeminent role. In the ideological battle of the Cold War, the defeated nations of Germany and Japan, subject to political programs of re-education administered by the American forces, eventually became most receptive to the manifold influences from the former enemy turned ally. Under these auspices concepts of American studies developed; national American studies associations arose and determined the academic engagement with the U.S.A.
Individual initiatives of non-U.S. scholars in the American Studies Association (ASA) resulted, during the 1970s, in bilateral communications and exchange programs. The common concern of Americanists was a critical engagement with the politics of the U.S., especially the Vietnam War and Reaganomics, often guided by the perspective of minority cultures. Two major historical events seem to be responsible for more systematic organizational changes in the cooperation of different national American studies associations. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the alleged “end of history” (Francis Fukuyama) in 1989 positioned the United States in the role of the only superpower, “the indispensable nation” (Bill Clinton). The international alliance in the first Iraq War (Operation Desert Storm, 1991) seems to have called forth efforts to internationalize American studies, channeled first by the ASA, then coordinated independently by the newly founded International American Studies Association (IASA) since 2003. The effects and the political climate after 9/11, as the second major event, called for a multilateral initiative concretized in the concept of Transnational American studies (TAS) as formulated in Shelley Fisher-Fishkin’s Presidential Address in 2004 and supported by a number of national associations from abroad.
The gradual move from individual representations in the ASA to the cooperation of national associations was also a process of mutual learning and exchange in which U.S. American studies scholars were initially felt to represent the state of the art to which non-American scholars from abroad contributed, even if their achievements were not always recognized. The push for an internationalization of American studies from the late 90s on meant to integrate the value of scholarship from abroad in a global academic community. While the founders and members of IASA argued for and promoted American studies as a global enterprise independent of U.S. associations and sponsors, the proponents of the concept of Transnational American studies affirmed the platform of the ASA as a basis of equality and exchange among all Americanists worldwide.
Following the debates about internationalization and globalization, Günter Lenz proposed a “Dialogics of International American Culture Studies,” which transcended earlier border studies and argued for a comparative American studies concept, which from 2003 on served as the title of a new journal, Comparative American Studies, based in Europe and associated with IASA. Berndt Ostendorf, in turn, maintained that “transnationalism presupposes anti-essentialism, favors plurality, mobility, hybridity and favors margins or spaces in-between” (19). The isolated and partially disparate attempts at locating and demarcating the transnational led to more systematic approaches after 9/11. Leaving behind the earlier conflation of the term with the international, the multinational, the global, and the diasporic, Transnational American studies was increasingly recognized as a discipline in academic institutions both in the U.S. and abroad. It built on and expanded regional concepts, such as European American studies or Asian American studies, and transcended these principally dialogical interrelations multilaterally. The underlying common denominator was the direct or indirect presence of aspects of Americanness, embraced, critiqued, or rejected in different parts of the world. Methodologically, Transnational American studies opened up new approaches to correlate local and national to American phenomena in a process of mutual enhancement.
To what extent this global partnership of American studies scholars, which opens up new fields of research wherever American influence is manifest, can also be seen as an aspect of U.S. cultural imperialism reflects the ideological divide between practitioners and critics of TAS. Early examples in this dual line of transnational cooperation and cultural imperialism were the foundations of Disneyland theme parks in Japan (Tokyo 1983), Europe (Paris 1992), and the People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong 2005). While they represented cultural and political interventions of the U.S., they also marked stages of transcultural approximations of cultural taste shared transnationally. From this ambivalent position, critics of TAS see it as a new version of American exceptionalism which perpetuates the political, economic, and cultural dominance of the United States in the academy. While this critique is shared by many practitioners of American studies, scholars worldwide also recognize the possibilities of counterbalancing the U.S. American influence by pointing to non-American input and contributions, especially at times of U.S. unilateral actions. Simultaneously, TAS creates a closer cooperation of American scholars with their colleagues abroad, which often leads to a revision of former assumptions of a potentially exceptionalist American stance. For this sake, collaborative conferences have been organized both in Europe and Asia, resulting in important publications on the topic (Fluck et al., Roberts). For European critics, who experienced the formation of a new political union, evident in the new currency of the Euro, the move beyond the boundaries of the nation state, which such concepts as “New American Studies” (Fisher), “post-nationalist American Studies” (Rowe) and their critique of a global capitalism imply, coincided with the practice of TAS. The simultaneous circulation of familiar and newly popularized terms with the prefix “trans,” such as transculturation (Ortiz), translation, transit, translocalities (Appadurai), or transmigration as migrant transnationalism (Vertovec), indicate transformations in the political, economic, and cultural arena marking the 21st century. It is no surprise that at the end of the American century critics envision a world and critical practice in which the national reference to “American” recedes into the background and loses its dominant position. Thus the Indian American journalist Fareed Zakaria prefigures The Post-American World (2008), in which new global players arise in the emergent nations of China and India. Likewise, the study of American literature, which due to transmigrations has become a transnational subject (Giles, Hebel), leads to a new interest in what the German poet Goethe once romantically considered “world literature” (David Damrosch, Wai Chee Dimock, Lawrence Buell). The final stage, which seems to emerge from TAS, is the concept of planetarity—a worldwide academic consideration of the dangers to Planet Earth—determined by an ecological concern and the acceptance of alterity in a mode of conviviality (Spivak, Heise).
Alfred Hornung
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Univ. of Minn. Press 1996). [Cultural study of globalization in the wake of postcolonialism with notes for a transnational anthropology.]
Damrosch, David, What Is World Literature? (Princeton Univ. Press 2003). [Contribution to the series “Translation - Transnation” featuring interpretations of Indian, European, American, and Latin American literature.]
Dimock, Wai Chee, and Lawrence Buell, eds., Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton Univ. Press 2007). [Global perspective of American literature, influencing and being influenced by world literature with ecological concern for the planet earth.]
Fisher, Philip, ed., The New American Studies: Essays from Representations (Univ. of Calif. Press 1991). [Revisionist rhetoric of reading major works of American literature and culture.]
Fluck, Winfried, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler, eds., Transnational American Studies, vol. 23 of REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (Gunter Narr Verlag 2007). [Articles by European and American critics theorizing transatlantic relations in terms of politically engaged American studies and exemplary interpretations of 19th- and 20th-century American literature.]
Giles, Paul, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Duke Univ. Press 2002). [Focus on transatlantic interrelations of American literature from the American Renaissance to postmodernism.]
Hebel, Udo J, Transnational American Memories (Walter de Gruyter 2009). [European and North American historians and literary scholars analyze the transnational constructions of memory across the Atlantic.]
Heise, Ursula, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford 2008). [Using theories of globalization and transnationalism, Heise develops the concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” and analyzes contemporary literature and culture in North America and Europe.]
Lenz, Günter, Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Border Discourses, and Public Culture(s), in The Futures of American Studies, ed. by Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Duke Univ. Press 2002), 461-485. [Comprehensive description of several discourses in the context of postcolonial studies, including transnational aspects of American studies. Plea for a dialogical network of international American studies scholars.]
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, et al., eds., Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Temple Univ. Press 2006). [Lucid interpretations of prose and poetry by Asian American writers. The emphasis is on the construction of transnational identities challenging the boundaries of the nation state.]
Ortiz, Fernando, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1947; Duke Univ. Press 1995). [Classic study on the evolution of colonialism in the Caribbean. The term ‘transculturation’ stands for the cultural interaction of Natives and Europeans.]
Ostendorf, Berndt, ed., Transnational America: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere (Winter Verlag 2002). [Examination of transnationalism from the perspectives of political science, economics, cultural studies, history, sociology, and literature. Bharati Mukherjee critiques the theoretical positions from the perspective of her fictional representations of transnational experience.]
Roberts, Priscilla, ed., Bridging the Sino-American Divide: American Studies with Chinese Characteristics (Cambridge Scholars Pub. 2007). [Based on a conference sponsored by the US-China Education Trust, an account by Chinese scholars of American studies activities in different disciplines at Chinese universities with interpretations of Chinese American writers.]
Rowe, John Carlos, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Univ. of Calif. Press 2000). [Revision of a cultural nationalism and American exceptionalism from a transnational and comparative perspective.]
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of a Discipline (Columbia Univ. Press 2003). [Transcends the common privileging of Euro-American authors in the discipline of comparative literature to include third world writers.]
Vertovec, Steven, Transnationalism (Routledge 2009). [Useful definitions of the term as used in the social sciences, focus on migrant transnationalism.]
Zakaria, Fareed, The Post-American World (Norton 2008).
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