Cultural Translation and the Discourse of Transnationalism in American Studies

Abstract

Published in Rodica Mihaila and Irina Grigorescu Pana, eds., Transatlantic Connections: Essays in Cultural Relocation (Bucharest: Editura Integral, 2000), 13–25. Cultural Translation and the Discourse of Transnationalism in American Studies RODICA MIHĂILĂ On the threshold of a new millennium, the redefinition of America in the post–Cold War, globalized and computerized world of this last decade has increasingly been done at the level of a transnational system grounded in the new permeability of borders and in the seemingly declining power of the nation‐state. Reflecting the growing consciousness of globalization especially after the collapse of communism, transnationalism marks a new orientation in American Studies scholarship, which places cultural analysis and identity making in a global context. Yet, given its mobility and apparent resistance to theory, American Studies hasn’t fully and systematically explored this new orientation. Many eyes are already scrutinizing the horizon of the post‐national, post‐ethnic and cosmopolitan world of the future, but, as the revival of nationalism in ex‐communist countries has recently demonstrated, nation‐state is not likely to demise soon. This makes transnationalism an extremely challenging area of investigation. My inquiry into the discourse of transnationalism in American Studies attempts to identify a transnational paradigm in the evolution of the field over the past decade and to posit transnationalism as a model of cultural analysis to be successfully applied to the investigation of “transatlantic connections.” The transnational paradigm may prove particularly relevant when transatlantic connections involve the post‐communist Other, generally neglected by the US American Studies theorists. The discourse of transnationalism, which has marked the new orientation of American Studies scholarship in the 1990s, emerged in American intellectual history in relation with issues of national identity raised by World War I and the outburst of nativism and European nationalism associated with it. Among them, definitions of the