Decentering America: the Quest for a Transnational American Studies

Rob Kroes

doi:10.1007/s12115-018-0285-3

Abstract

The planned removal of a Civil War monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the pretext for a white supremacist rally there in August 2017. It brought American fascists back into the streets, marching under the banner of a virulent nativism, of a vicious fear of being removed from the pedestal of their proper place in society. It also brought to the minds of people watching these images on TV older visual repertoires dating back to Nazi-Germany, fascist Italy, and similar racist clashes elsewhere. In such a stream of consciousness, such a chain of visual recollections, national settings—American or otherwise—are transcended. The wandering—and wondering—mind of the observer moves in a space naturally trans-national. The following essay considers the implications of such mental processes for the established forms of discourse among historians.

Highlights

The planned removal of a Civil War monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the pretext for a white supremacist rally there in August 2017
What came to my mind as a possible angle for the following discussion of transnationalism is based on an epiphany that I experienced while writing the last chapter of my recent book— Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture (2015)
The chapter revisits the concept of exceptionalism and argues on behalf of a version of methodological transnationalism

Summary

Introduction

The planned removal of a Civil War monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the pretext for a white supremacist rally there in August 2017. What came to my mind as a possible angle for the following discussion of transnationalism is based on an epiphany that I experienced while writing the last chapter of my recent book— Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture (2015).

Results

Conclusion