Transnational American Studies in the Digital Age

Abstract

Transnational American Studies in the Digital Age YANOULA K. ATHANASSAKIS and ERIC LARS MARTINSEN Technology is moving at lightning speed, and as editors of an online journal we find ourselves trying to keep up with the pace and scope of both life and work, all of which hold so much more than we had imagined. Near the end of a talk on robotics and warfare at the University of California at Santa Barbara in January 2010, international relations scholar Peter W. Singer motioned to the stream of images behind him that displayed machines and robots resembling those of the Star Wars movies (old and new). 1 Cognizant of the audience’s awestruck reaction, he commented that, while we might assume he was speaking of the future, he was actually referencing the past. We, too, seek to use the past, and the ever‐changing present, to illuminate the future. The second issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies, or JTAS, comes in the wake of worldwide outbreaks of natural and manmade devastation and economic depression. These events are global in scope, yet hit close to home, thereby crystallizing what the editors of JTAS are working hard to illuminate: the multivalent entangled connections between and among events and cultural phenomena across the world—or what Shelley Fisher Fishkin points to as the “transnational turn” in American Studies. 2 We write this at a critical time in American Studies, when warring ideologies seem to be drowning out reasoned public policy, and purveyors of divisive rhetoric from around the world are outshouting voices of reason and compromise. We write this at a time when it has become increasingly obvious that American bodies, American borders, and American policy are all being submerged in acts of violence both perpetrated against the US and stemming from it. 3 This turbulent epoch calls ever more for an examination and reflection of the seismic shocks that remain and have manifested themselves in the stories of our times. Theorist Judith Butler suggests in her 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence that most Americans “have probably experienced something