Transnational American Research Articles

TRACING AMERICAN SPIRIT IN INDONESIA’S INDEPENDENCE: A HISTORICAL-COMPARATIVE STUDY

The US and Indonesia, two countries that fought for freedom, are fascinating subjects to delve more into, despite their great distance from one another and their distant times of conflict. This research used a Transnational American Studies perspective and comparative-historical analysis. By using comparative historical analysis, this research aimed to explore the similarities and differences that exist in the journey of American independence and Indonesian independence. The results of this research showed that even though the independence movements in the US and Indonesia occurred several centuries apart, they had the same goal, namely opposing colonialism. Both showed the same enthusiasm to fight colonial power and the desire to determine the fate of their nation without interference from other parties. Thomas Paine and Bung Tomo through their writings and speeches led the spirit of independence in the US and Indonesia. Even though they use different communication styles, both have an impact in forming the spirit of resistance and unity of their nation. Additionally, by looking at the history of the struggle of the Indonesian people, it can be seen the spirit of freedom that the US promoted.

Locating New Fields in Transnational American Studies

Locating New Fields in Transnational American Studies

American Fashion Influence in Japanese Imagination: A Study of Semiotic on Furudate’s Haikyuu!!

This research discusses the influence of American culture in Japan on Haruichi Furudate's Haikyuu!! manga. The manga was published in 2012 and ended in 2020 with 45 volumes. In the context of American influence, more precisely in the field of sports, one of them is adopted as the theme of the Haikyuu!! manga, which is volleyball. This manga tells the journey and struggle of the main character, Hinata Shoyo, to become a professional volleyball athlete. But as it turns out, apart from the volleyball sport introduced by America, there are other aspects that are also American influences. By using Transnational American Studies, this research found the influence of American culture by the characters in the Haikyuu!! manga. The influence of American culture in this research is specific to the cultural aspect, fashion, which is then examined using the semiotics of Roland Barthes. From the analysis, it was found that there is some American fashion used by some characters in Haikyuu!! manga, leather jacket and denim.

Is the media missing the point on the transnational American desalination pipe dream?

AbstractThe media plays a central role in the dissemination of information about globally significant, transboundary issues like world water policy and infrastructure projects. This discussion makes its point of departure on the topic of large‐scale seawater desalination (producing potable ocean water) in the American borderlands and Southwest region, an area that has recently been plagued by droughts, as well as being the subject of much reporting on the feasibility of expanding water infrastructure across the United States and Mexico. In particular, The New York Times has produced a series of stories on water scarcity in the state of Arizona and the “pipe dreams” of building a desalination plant in Mexico that would produce water to be pumped through a national monument, and into major Arizonan metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Tucson. This reportage has been useful in bringing water concerns amidst climate change to a broader audience, simultaneously challenging the well‐known American “growth machine” paradigm. However, when considering the recent scholarship from social scientists and water policy scholars, the media may be missing the point. In this transboundary region, when we consider existing evidence as well as the reports that have emerged in Arizona and Mexico, it becomes clear that water from desalination is a luxury good, and the industry continues to have a dubious political and economic track record when dealing with water providers, public and private. Therefore, more discussions of desalination in world water policy circles need to be asking who is served by desalination, as it increasingly represents a model of the overproduction of water in places that do not need it, therefore entrenching social inequality.

Introduction: Diagnosing Migrant Experience: Medical Humanities and Transnational American Studies

Introduction: Diagnosing Migrant Experience: Medical Humanities and Transnational American Studies

Issue Introduction: Translating and Transnational American Studies

Issue Introduction: Translating and Transnational American Studies

Doing Transnational American Studies Abroad

Doing Transnational American Studies Abroad

The Americas: A Relational or Abyssal Geography? An Interview, Barbara Gfoellner and Jonathan Pugh

This interview between Barbara Gfoellner and Jonathan Pugh explores archipelagic thinking, transnational American Studies, the concept of islandness and recent debates in Black Studies. Notably, it draws out two distinct ways, or analytical approaches, in which American Studies can be taken beyond understandings of the nation-state as a fixed and bounded object. Both seek to move beyond modern frameworks of reasoning, a linear telos of progress, fixed grids of space and time, which are widely argued to have supported American exceptionalism. The first, more common analytical approach, can be situated within the broader “relational” and “ontological” turns that have swept across the social sciences and humanities in recent decades, involving turns towards such tropes as assemblages, networks, flows, mobilities, post- and more-than-human approaches. The second analytical approach, what Pugh (in his current research with David Chandler) calls “abyssal thought,” has yet to emerge as prominently, but poses a significant challenge to the relational and ontological turns. Central for abyssal work is how, as we learn from W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, the world cannot be separated out from the violence that forged the antiblack modernist ontology of “human as subject” and “world as object.” For abyssal work, however, the task is not to rework the subject of modernity in terms of relational ontologies and epistemologies, but to problematize and to undo the human and the world. This interview explores how the abyssal project is thus nonontological and nonrelational, deconstructive rather than productive, deworlding as opposed to world-making.

Archipelagic Translation: Mobility amid Every Language in the World

This article proposes a three-way reinflection among the categories of mobility, archipelagic thought, and translation. It draws on the work of several island-oriented thinkers, including Alice Te Punga Somerville, Édouard Glissant, and Craig Santos Perez. Via Te Punga Somerville, I develop a conceptualization of archipelagic translation that is decolonizing, decontinentalizing, and reliant on interisland waters as places of being and meaning. Subsequently, via Glissant’s emphasis on translation as a crucial form of archipelagic thinking, I emphasize a translation less of betweenness (from one language to another) and more of amidness (a translation in the presence of every language of the world). Finally, and by recourse to Perez’s from unincorporated territory poetry series, I elaborate on a view of archipelagic translation as a renaming of the world in which translational equivalents break down and translation happens amid the push and pull of materiality and metaphoricity. Thus, Perez’s work offers both a conceptual template for and an example of archipelagic translation. As I navigate through the work of these three thinkers, the article’s three major preoccupations—mobility, archipelagic thinking, and translation—exist in a constant, reinflecting, and reconstituting dynamic in relation to one another. In the conclusion, I turn toward the potential for the mobilities of archipelagic translation to reroute recent work in Transnational American Studies that takes up questions of language, multilingualism, and translation. Further, the conclusion looks toward the archipelagic’s sense of amidness as key to a planetary restructuring of scholarly approaches to mobility, archipelagic spaces, and translation.

Introduction: Theorizing and Teaching Transnational American Studies Around the Globe

Introduction: Theorizing and Teaching Transnational American Studies Around the Globe

United States Aerial Archives: Teaching and Theorizing Transnational American Studies in Japan

Aeriality has emerged as one of the most defining perceptual and cognitive practices of the 20th century. This shift in perspective has changed the way one looks at the Earth, races, and species and their relationships to one another and to the environment. In this essay, I discuss the use of what I have heuristically termed “aerial archives” in teaching about American-occupied Japan (1945–1952). The operational definition of this term refers to texts, literary or otherwise, that operate as archiving systems, representing and relating a shift in the aerial imagination, and the corollary shifting ground it caused in the global imagination.

Transnational American Studies, Ecocritical Narratives, and Global Indigeneity: A Year of Teaching in Norway

Texas and Norway may appear to be worlds apart—one flat, arid, and sprawling across the vast US West, the other green, mountainous, and defined by its waters. Yet they face surprisingly similar challenges resulting from economies built on the oil industry in a world now wracked by climate change. This essay assumes that indigenous sovereignty and social justice issues are inextricable from environmental concerns, and engages the experience of teaching and researching indigenous texts and petro-fictions, from Saami novels to writings about Standing Rock, during a Fulbright year in Norway.

Otvoreni prostori književnosti nasuprot zatvorenih prostora nacije: (trans)nacionalni (kon)tekst savremene američke i bosanskohercegovačke književnosti

In their individual categories and entities, both American and Bosnian and Herzegovinian literatures are more transnational in the 21st century than ever before in the history of the literature of both countries, or even in the history of world literature. The transnationality of both has been manifested in many ways through the history of the world as seen as an open space for mobility in both literatures, being in many respects opposed to the closed spaces of the “imagined communities” of the nation-states these literatures “belong to” in the national context. In addition, transnational American and Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature has been created on both sides as a joined and mutual, permuting and open space/category in both literatures. Hence, there are individual systems and spaces of Transnational American Literature(s) and Transnational Bosnian and Herzegovinian Literature(s), and there is a mutual category and a joined entity of Transnational American and Bosnian and Herzegovinian Literature(s) as part of the generic system of both trans/national works of literature. The special aim of the article is to contribute to the field of the study of Contemporary Transnational American, Bosnian-Herzegovinian, and American-Bosnian-Herzegovinian works of literature, emphasizing how the identities of authors and/or their books and then their modes of mobility, can defamiliarize and resist conventions and canon of “imagined communities”. In that context, the article also aims to benefit contemporary trans/national literary and cultural studies in their specificity and uniqueness in the United States and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Broader the world, examining the processes through which American and Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature become members of the “World Republic of Letters” and how this process is experienced and vice versa

Launching a Culture of Middlebrow Reading

From 1946 to 1949, the publisher Rowohlt provided the German public with its first reading material after the war by printing novels in an economical newspaper format, dubbed »Rowohlts Rotations-Romane« (RO-RO-RO). Rowohlt’s explicit mission was to enable German readers to acquaint themselves with important works of German and world literature in order to intellectually and politically integrate into a democratic Europe. American novels in translation played an important role in this effort: of the twenty-five books that were published in newspaper format, seven were American novels in translation. All of the novels were accompanied by lengthy afterwords penned by German writers meant to (re-)introduce the public to authors and works that had not been available in Germany between 1933 and 1945. This essay argues that RO-RO-RO’s framing of American novels between 1946 and 1949, including their material format and the ideological work of the afterwords, can be seen as a first attempt to launch a post-war, specifically middlebrow reading culture. The essay, moreover, takes the RO-RO-RO newspaper publications as a case study to, one, newly perspectivize popular reading and its institutions in post-war Germany as an object of study, and two, to initiate a shift in scholarship that would take both transnational American and transnational German studies, as well of conceptions of world literature, into the realm of mass culture. »Die Bibliotheken sind zerstört, die Bücher vernichtet oder einst auf dem Scheiterhaufen verbrannt. Deshalb machen wir den Versuch, einen Teil der wesentlichen Werke der in- und ausländischen Literatur, die zu kennen notwendig ist, um wieder in europäischem Zusammenhang denken zu lernen, in einer hohen Auflage und zu billigem Preis an den Leser zu bringen.« [The libraries are in ruins, the books are destroyed or were burnt at the stake. This is why we are making this attempt to provide readers with the essential works of German and foreign literature in high print runs and at affordable prices. It is necessary to know these works to learn to think in a European context again.] Rowohlt Verlag, December 1946

Review: The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity, by Jessica Ordaz

Review: <i>The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity</i>, by Jessica Ordaz

Review: Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II, by Daniel James Brown

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II, by Daniel James Brown Daniel James Brown. Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II. New York: Penguin Random House, 2021. 540 pp. Paperback $18.00. Jonathan van Harmelen Jonathan van Harmelen JONATHAN VAN HARMELEN is a doctoral student in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has appeared in Southern California Quarterly, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Urban History, BC Studies, and Journal of Asian American Studies. He is a columnist for the Japanese American National Museum’s blog “Discover Nikkei” and contributes to a number of Japanese community newspapers. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (3): 83–85. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.83 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jonathan van Harmelen; Review: Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II, by Daniel James Brown. California History 1 August 2022; 99 (3): 83–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.83 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search Over the past fifty years, accounts of the World War II experiences of Japanese Americans have proliferated in popular literature. Authors like James and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Richard Reeves, Julie Otsuka, and George Takei, to name just a few, have presented mainstream accounts of the camp experience, drawing either from personal experience or from extensive research. Recently, a number of authors, both Japanese American and otherwise, have attempted to retell the story of the camp experience in new ways, with some receiving acclaim. Facing the Mountain, however, is an exception. This new work by Daniel James Brown, author of the best-selling The Boys in the Boat (2013), presents riveting accounts of four Japanese American men and their journeys from prewar tranquility in Japanese communities in Hawaii and on the West Coast to the chaos and uncertainty of the war years. Along the way, each of them confronts racial discrimination... You do not currently have access to this content.

Decentering America: Visual Intertextuality and the Quest for a Transnational American Studies

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.

Introduction. Transnational American Studies: Histories, Methodologies, Perspectives

Agnieszka Graff, Tomasz Basiuk, Karolina KrasuskaIntroduction. Transnational American Studies: Histories, Methodologies, PerspectivesPolish Journal for American Studies, vol. 12 (Spring 2018) pp. 7-20 Keywords: Transnationalism, American Studies, European perspectives, methodology DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.12/1/2018.01 Full Article

Haunting Perennial Girlhoods: Infantilization and the Transnational American Gothic from Gilman to Césaire

Haunting Perennial Girlhoods: Infantilization and the Transnational American Gothic from Gilman to Césaire

POPULARIZING AMERICAN PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING AS POPULAR CULTURE OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES

 This research is under Transnational American Studies, which focuses on the popularity of American professional wrestling outside the United States. Nowadays, as popular culture, American professional wrestling is not only mainly consumed within North America but also consumed by massive viewers around the world. For instance, in recent years, American professional wrestling has expanded in Saudi Arabia and India. However, it fails to conquer Indonesian viewers. Thus, studies of the popularity of American wrestling as popular culture outside the United States are needed due to its massive social, cultural, and economic impacts. This research studies the recent popularity of professional wrestling outside the United States by taking  the sample from Saudi Arabia, India, and Indonesia, which Glenday considers as ‘outside wrestling culture territory’. In popularizing American professional wrestling as popular culture, three crucial factors support disseminating this popular culture outside the United States: cultural attachment, media power, and government involvement. Cultural attachment relies on cultural sameness (in this case, same ‘wrestling culture’) that later creates people’s enthusiasm. Media functions as a tool to disseminate this popular culture. Then, government involvement emphasizes the openness of one country toward American professional wrestling, which consists of violent content. Those three factors become essential parts of popularizing American professional wrestling outside the United States. Cultural attachment, in this case, is the most influential factor in the rise of American professional wrestling popularity outside the United States.   Keywords: popular culture, professional wrestling, transnational.