Transnational American Studies: Response to the Presidential Address

Abstract

Entering experience this time. An atmosphere of rigid control surrounded the procedure of passing through immigration and customs in the era of digital fingerprints and instant photographs. The official representative of the United States, who enforced these new requirements of the Homeland Security Office, asked the usual question about the purpose of my visit. My answer, attend the convention of the Studies Association, triggered the further question about the nature of this association and its purpose: What is studies? To which I replied, American studies is you. On the flight from New York to Atlanta, I sat next to a businessman who read the Wall Street Journal. A similar conversation led to the same question, What is studies? and my perplexed answer: American studies is you. The amazing discovery of Americans turned into an object of study by a foreigner sojourning in the United States directly relates to Shelley Fisher Fishkins presidential address and her concept of transnational At the same time, it raises questions about the reception and recognition of studies in public. From the 1990s on, there have been a number of isolated attempts to launch a campaign of internationalizing studies. It accompanied the process of (economic) globalization spearheaded by the Clinton administration and a world linked by the internet. In the same way in which the ASA responded to a changed situation in which globalization was often conflated with Americanization, national studies associations worldwide took up issues and topics of a changed presence of the United States abroad. The branching out of studies from the United States to bordering areas and cultures in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans was reciprocated by studies outposts in the rest of the world. In this spirit, Bernard Mergen, the editor of Studies International organized two workshops of studies journal editors (in Washington, D.C., in 1997 and in Montreal in 1999), and ASA presidents made ef-