Transnational American Research Articles

Mapping a Transnational American Art History

Mapping a Transnational American Art History

Trump Today

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again” by way of a new isolationism of the US. In the first 100 days of his presidency, he has restricted immigration, pursued aggressively the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and drastically reduced the US State Department. Judged in terms of transnational American Studies, his policies have employed a new nationalism to disguise a one-way global agenda. Trump’s withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership has reconfigured economic relations across the Pacific and in East Asia. His approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline project has enriched a Canadian corporation. Even his appointment of Elizabeth Devos as Secretary of Education has obscured his close relations with her brother, Erik Prince, the infamous founder of Blackwater Security, an international corporation that supplies mercenaries to governments around the world. Transnational American Studies has an ethical obligation to continue its work of understanding US politics, economics, and culture in terms of its global consequences.

Introduction to the Forums

Introduction to the Forums Chih-ming Wang (bio) and Yu-Fang Cho (bio) Contributors to these forums come from a wide range of positions and concerns, but all attempt to engage and reorient American studies through the intertwined vectors of the Chinese factor and the transpacific. Though the first forum is oriented toward the question of transpacific methodology and the second forum focuses more on the historical and contemporary US–China dynamics, they do intersect and complement each other to consider how to reframe the global in American studies: by linking sites seemingly detached and far away from each other, undoing the diplomatic discourses of friendship and partnership, deconstructing our ways of knowing and desiring, and building a transpacific perspective into the remaking of America and the world. As a whole, they articulate American studies into transpacific alliances of knowledge and politics, and urge us to carry on antiimperialist and anticapitalist work from spaces of solidarity. [End Page 469] Chih-ming Wang Chih-ming Wang Chihming Wang is visiting research fellow at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, and associate research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He is the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013); coeditor of Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017); and guest editor of the “Asian American Studies in Asia” special issue for InterAsia Cultural Studies (June 2012). His research focuses on Asian American literature and cultural studies in transpacific and inter-Asian contexts. His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Cultural Studies, positions, and Chinese America: History and Perspectives. Yu-Fang Cho Yu-Fang Cho Yu-Fang Cho is associate professor of English and a core faculty member of the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University. She is the author of Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890–1910 (State University of New York Press, 2013) and articles in American Quarterly, Transnational American Studies, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, among others. She has received fellowships from the Bancroft Library, the Huntington Library, the Pacific Rim Research Program at the University of California, the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, and the National Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Taiwan. Her current book project investigates the relationship between race, reproductive justice, and nuclearism in America’s Asia Pacific. Copyright © 2017 The American Studies Association

Introduction: Transnational American Studies in the "Age of Trump"

Author(s): Kim, Sabine; Robinson, Greg | Abstract: Introduction by issue editors.This issue represents our journal’s first appearance after the onset of what multiple Americanists have referred to, and not in overly positive fashion, as the “Age of Trump.” A central theme of Trump administration discourse is its strident defense of physical borders manifested in harshly exclusionary policies, most notably the administration’s abandoning of the existing DACA program, as well as fostering increased visibility of white nationalist groups and openly racist discourse. At the same time, the White House, led by the president, has distinguished itself by its nationalist attacks on international trade and multilateral diplomacy. As scholars of American Studies based outside the United States, we both feel a special responsibility to make use of our position to investigate and discuss the larger forces at play here. One thing that larger transnational approaches can help reveal is the complex interface between national identity, domestic politics, and state policy, especially in regard to international relations.

Transnational American Literary Studies in the Time of Trump

Transnational American Literary Studies in the Time of Trump

"Introduction: The Transnational Turn, " in the <em> Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature </em>

Yogita Goyal, Introduction: The Transnational Turn, in the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal, 1–17 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

National, Transnational, International

National, Transnational, International Russ Castronovo (bio) In the wake of the US presidential election of 2016, it is worth pondering the fate and future of the transnational turn in literary studies. The slogan to "Make America Great Again" does not acknowledge the extent to which this nativist nostalgia is wrapped around larger global developments and crises from Brexit to the rise of ISIS and the flood of refugees from the Syrian conflict zone. Still, President Donald Trump's captious take on everything from NATO agreements to the Paris climate accords invites us to ask: has the aesthetic and political potential of transnationalism already passed us by? We might be tempted to pose this question in spite of the evidence gleaned from a quick sampling of conference themes, edited collections such as the one that first brought together the contributors to this special forum in College Literature, and academic journals, including one expressly devoted to transnational American studies. If a transnational turn has influenced the directions of literary studies, it can also seem like the rest of the world has not veered away from nationalism, especially its popular manifestations. For many observers, 2016 was a year in which the horizon and promise of the transnationalism with respect to the movement of people and ideas had been scaled back, often it seems, out of fear and resentment. [End Page 515] The anxiety over the porousness of national borders that stoked support for Brexit, the resurgence of European nationalisms that rallied voters to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, and, perhaps most spectacularly, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States have all cast a gloom over transnational imaginaries. Time magazine recently provided the Cassandra-like prediction that "an even larger crisis is coming. The popular fury convulsing Europe and the U.S. may well spill over into the rest of the world" (May 11, 2017). The global sensibilities associated with transnational aesthetics seem diminished by the insistent rhetoric of national crisis. In the United States alone, talk of a border wall and executive orders banning travel from predominantly Muslim countries, even if these plans never come to fruition, indicate that this drumbeat will likely continue for years to come. Still, it would be a mistake to think of returning to a simpler map of bounded nation-states like the finite game board of Risk inspired by the Napoleonic Wars. Transnationalism has not burnt itself out nor has it been eclipsed by the talk of making America great again. After all, nowhere was this presidential campaign slogan echoed by sympathetic curricular cries to make American literature, painting, or film great again. Perhaps, as a cynic might point out, the steady hold of canonical thinking makes such a gesture unnecessary in fields that, whatever their openness to new approaches and texts, by and large remain organized around national traditions. From this vantage, the election of a Republican businessman as US president is hardly exceptional in a country that has long been inventing some version of "America first" every generation. Then again, a more sanguine observer might seek to reassure us that American literature and art, precisely because each is aesthetic, are already hardwired with non-national sensibilities. Each perspective is just true enough to indicate the extent to which the nation as a juridical, administrative, moral, even sports-related term (think of the importance of national units to global competitions such as World Cup soccer or the Olympics) persists as a meaningful formation within transnationalism. As Yogita Goyal writes in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, "Because transnational frames do not argue for the demise of nations, but for a rethinking of them, they can help counteract triumphalist discourses of globalism" (2017, 7). At a moment of nationalist resurgence, we might also insist on a converse formulation: "Just because a race-baiting nationalist has been elected president does not mean [End Page 516] that transnationalism is suddenly obsolescent or irrelevant. Instead, the present conjuncture provides an opportunity for rethinking transnationalism and for considering why it might be an ever more crucial resource for progressive politics and cultural transformation at a moment...

Before Nation, Beyond Nation: The Place of "Early" in Transnational American Studies

Kristina Bross and Laura M. Stevens, “Before Nation, Beyond Nation: The Place of ‘Early’ in Transnational American Studies,” in Obama and Transnational American Studies, ed. Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016), 313–34.

Transnationalism and Anti-Globalism

Transnationalism and Anti-Globalism Johannes Voelz (bio) The recent resurgence of nationalism in the United States finds expression in a whole vocabulary, made up of slogans, rallying cries, and buzzwords. Most prominent among them may be "Make America Great Again" and "America First," but there is another buzzword—anti-globalism—which is particularly suggestive of the conundrum transnationalism faces in the Age of Trump. The term anti-globalism results from an act of rhetorical appropriation and resignification, and as I want to suggest, the idea of transnationalism plays an important role in this repackaging effort. Anti-globalism recalls the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, but this resonance brings out the differences rather than similarities between the two: where anti-globalization was concerned with a critique of the economic system, anti-globalism attacks what is perceived as a larger ideology of globalism that allegedly promotes free trade as well as cultural and racial mixing. From the view of the leftist anti-globalization movement, globalization was driven by the institutions that backed the Washington Consensus (such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury), global corporations that exploited the waning sovereignty of nation-states, and national governments that colluded with the forces of global capital, for instance by entering into international free trade agreements, such as the North American Free [End Page 521] Trade Agreement. The targets of that earlier movement were therefore the profiteers and structures of economic globalization. This economic understanding of globalization opened up a space for alternative conceptions of globalization that could compete with the economic version. It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was also in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the academic field of American Studies turned to the transnational as an emerging paradigm. American Studies entered its transnational phase by engaging in profound soul-searching about the possibilities of altering the object of study seemingly prescribed by the field's name (see, for instance, Janice Radway's 1998 Presidential Address at the American Studies Association, titled "What's in a Name?"). Although rather diverse manifestos appeared in quick succession, there emerged a consensus that sticking to the nation form was a sign of ideological backwardness, whereas transcending the nation held out the potential for progressive change. From the get-go, transnational American Studies aimed to transcend the nation on two different conceptual planes: first, on the level of methodology, where transnationalism in essence meant adopting a particular perspective; second, on the level of the object of study, where transnationalism referred to phenomena that went beyond the limits of the nation. This blending of method and object of study meant in effect that the transnational wasn't something one could neutrally observe, describe, and chart. Rather, studying the transnational meant affirming the transnational. This is because the approval for the new method jumped over, as it were, to an approval of the phenomena studied. If, in other words, the transnational perspective of scholars was greeted as the successful overcoming of critical parochialism, then phenomena embodying the transnational were themselves to be commended. This valuation guided the choice of what was to be studied: Preferred objects included oppositional social movements that traversed national boundaries, aesthetic forms that traveled beyond the confines of the nation, and ideas that circulated in similarly unbounded ways (clearly, this list is not meant to be comprehensive). In short, transnational American Studies provided the opportunity to salvage a "globalization from below" (to use a phrase popular with the anti-globalization movement), and to favorably contrast it to both nationalism and economic globalization (or "globalization from above"). One of the problems faced—but rarely addressed—by proponents of transnationalism emerged from this differentiation of economic and cultural globalization. Did the idea that these two forms of globalization are principally different really hold up? Didn't both [End Page 522] visions of globalization rely on some of the very same images: flows (of goods, people, ideas) as something natural, borders and boundaries as artificial? Wasn't there, in fact, a deep affinity between the longing for cultural transnationalism and the ideology of economic globalization, despite the political differences that seemed to keep them both neatly...

U.S. Jewish Community Studies: Eight Response Arguments

In response to the main papers in this volume eight main arguments are presented: 1. National vs. global perspectives underlying the quantitative and qualitative fundamentals; 2. Problems in assessing Jewish populations; 3. Queries about local survey quality and comparability; 4. Socio-cultural drivers; 5. Socialstructural drivers; 6. A more transnational American Jewry; 7. Let's look forward: the missing longitudinal approach; 8. Some policy implications.

The Formulation of Taste and Value in American Action-Spy Movies: an Analysis of The Bourne Saga

Intisari Popularitas film aksi Hollywood terutama yang menunjukkan aktivitas spionase tidak diragukan lagi. Beberapa film aksi mata-mata seperti 007 dan Mission: Impossible selalu menjadi blockbuster. Selain itu, ada kecenderungan bahwa film dibuat di bawah genre action-mata-mata menunjukkan gambaran serupa dan rumus sebagai film menjadi populer. Namun, rilis The Bourne film yang pertama dirilis pada tahun 2002 menunjukkan gambaran yang berbeda dari film aksi mata-mata. Ini pengembangan formula aksi mata-mata serta nilai-nilai yang tersirat dalam film ini terkait dengan penerimaan penonton'. Refleksi dari nilai-nilai Amerika tertentu di film tidak hanya ditonton oleh penonton Amerika tetapi juga penonton global, itu sebabnya popularitas film yang berhubungan dengan penggambaran nilai-nilai di dalamnya dan rasa sebagai penerimaan penonton 'penting untuk dianalisis. Riset ini dilakukan dibawah disiplin Pengkajian Amerika, studi transnasional yang fokus kepada pertukaran kebudayaan baik antar masyarakat Amerika maupun dari masyarakat Amerika ke masyarakat dunia. Selanjutnya, penelitian ini menggunakan teori genre dan representasi untuk menginterpretasikan adegan-adegan dan gambar-gambar yang ada dalam film yang menjadi data utama yaitu film laga The Bourne. Selebihnya, data pendukung berupa jurnal, film, dan artikel yang terkait dengan topik riset ini. Temuan dari riset ini menunjukan bahwa ada kaitan antara selera dan nilai yang ditampakan difilm dengan masyarakat. Untuk menyenangkan penonton dengan berbagai selera terhadap film laga, para produser mengkombinasikan beberapa elemen dari genre tertentu kedalam film The Bourne. Disamping itu, film ini juga menunjukan adanya perubahan pada nilai budaya dan selera masyarakat Amerika. Penggambaran ini merupakan kontrol kepada penontonnya. Nilai individualism, kebebasan, dan keacuhan masyarakat Amerika disatukan kedalam tokoh Jason Bourne yang merupakan pahlawan di film ini. Selebihnya, dramatisasi nilai-nilai Amerika tercermin melalui tindakan sang pahlawan. Produser membuat film ini berbeda dibandingkan film spy pada umumnya dengan memasukan nilai-nilai Amerika demi menarik penonton sebanyak mungkin supaya menghasilkan angka penghasilan yang tinggi dalam tangga box-office. ABSTRACT The popularity of Hollywood action movies especially that show the espionage activity is undoubted. Some action-spy movies such as 007 and Mission: Impossible are always being blockbuster. Furthermore, there is a tendency that movies created under the action-spy genre are showing similar depiction and formula as the movies become popular. However, the release of The Bourne movies that is firstly released in 2002 show different depiction of action-spy movie. Audiences accept the reflection of certain American values in the movies, that is why the popularity of the movies related to the depiction of values in it and the taste as the audiences’ reception is important to be analyzed. This research is written under American Studies discipline, particularly employing the transnational American studies. Thus, this research also employs the genre theory and representation in order to interpret the scenes and images shown in the movies that are the primary data, The Bourne movies. In addition, the supporting data taken from articles, books, films, and any related to the research. The finding of this research shows that: First, in order to please the audiences who have various tastes toward the ideal action film, filmmakers combines some elements of certain genres such as; action, thriller, and mystery into The Bourne movies. Second, the embodiment of individualism, freedom, and innocence values of American society in the figure of Jason Bourne is created not only to celebrate and to gain the audiences’ attention but it is also created to control the society. In addition, the acts of the hero that dramatize the values are stressing those values as the driving force of society. The different depiction in the movies are created to appeal more audiences that bring more commercial revenue in the box office chart through the presence of American values.

Subaltern Knowledge and Transnational American Studies: Postwar Japan and Okinawa under US Rule

Subaltern Knowledge and Transnational American Studies: Postwar Japan and Okinawa under US Rule

Making Space: The Caribbean in Transnational American Studies

Making Space: The Caribbean in Transnational American Studies

A Community of Thought: Connecting with Transnational American Studies

Editor's Note for JTAS 7.1 Copyright Information: Copyright 2016 by the article author(s). This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution4.0 license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

"This Land Is Holy!" Intersections of Politics and Spirituality in Luis Alberto Urrea’s <em>The Hummingbird’s Daughter</em>

This essay discusses the intersections of politics and spirituality during the Porfiriato era in Mexico, an oppressive period that initiated northward migration into the United States; specifically, Lopez examines Luis Alberto Urrea’s 2005 novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which blends narrative, history, and biography. Merging a historical focus on the political impulses of northward migration with attention to spiritual and religious epistemologies, Urrea’s narrative of "Teresita," a regional folk saint of northern Mexico, highlights a critical time that would significantly determine the intertwined futures of both nations. As the author brings Teresita and her community to life for readers, he simultaneously describes the Porfiriato era’s relationship with US interests, the state’s violent push towards modernization, and power struggles over indigenous land rights, all of which would eventually culminate in the Mexican Revolution and mass migration into the United States. Ultimately, Lopez argues that, in its narrative representation of political conflicts over land rights during the Porfiriato, The Hummingbird’s Daughter functions as a form of witnessing to state violence and, further, highlights a complex, embodied spirituality through which indigenous and mestizo peoples responded to state violence with contestation and counterdiscourse. This essay highlights Urrea’s work as a substantial contribution to the further development of Border Studies, Chicano/a Studies, and Transnational American Studies.

Between Orientalism and Westernization: Belly Dance as a Transnational American Studies Case

In the last decade, American women’s rising interest in belly dance has drawn the critical attention of American studies scholars. Americanists have traced the transnational development of the dance complex and skilfully critiqued the imperialist politics that are manifest in Western belly dance practice alongside the rhetoric of feminist liberation. With its apparently feminine, mysterious, and exotic qualities, belly dance seems to make a casebook study for Orientalism. Therefore, scholars have tended to view belly dance through this scholarly frame. Yet, if considering only US contexts, utilizing only English-language resources, and only wielding the Western theoretical cannon, even transnational American studies scholarship risks replicating the Orientalist knowledge practices it identifies and condemns in Western women’s belly dance practice and commentary. This essay argues that, despite the conspicuousness of its impact, Orientalism has not been the only civilizational logic operating in the transnational construction of belly dance. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dance and its meanings were modified also by the East’s perceptions of the West and official attempts to counter the exotic through Westernization. Utilizing Turkish and English sources and participant observation in the United States and Turkey, I compare the contemporary American meanings of the dance complex to its uses in Turkey. I foreground the predominant role played by the male belly, marginalized in American studies of the dance complex, and show how the complex local category of Westernization operates in an uneasy dialectic with Orientalism. This research suggests that the transnational, with its attention to the movement of people, products, and ideas across nation-state borders, must be balanced with the comparative, with attention to cultural formations that do not translate easily across cultures.

On Demand and Relevance: Transnational American Studies in the Middle East and North Africa

‘Anniversary’ is both an awkward and an inevitable term to use when marking the time that has passed since the January 25 Revolution in Egypt, which began five years ago in 2011. As we write, many ...

Transnational perspectives in Simon J. Ortiz’s short fiction

Abstract Contemporary American short stories from Simon J. Ortiz’s Men of the Moon (1999) can be considered a testing ground for conceptualizations of (trans)-national identities from Randolph Bourne’s ‘Transnational America’ (1916) to David Hollinger’s Postethnic America (1995). In these stories the aesthetic concretization of contingent experiences by Native Americans both confirms and critiques the theoretical concepts of postcolonial studies and transnational American Studies. Both Ortiz’s ‘The Way You See Horses’ and ‘Crossing’ unfold the relativity and observer-dependence of individual perception as well as the epistemological awareness and cultural dialectics of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Themselves (1991). Actual intercultural and transnational encounters in Ortiz’s stories often spell disaster much more radically than promise. Only three of the stories in Ortiz’s collection, ‘Pennstuwehniyaahtse: Quuti’s Story’, ‘Hiding West of Here’ and ‘To Change Life in a Good Way’, suggest interethnic solidarity. These stories help develop a humanism which expresses itself in the dissociation of foreignness and familiarity in postcolonial and transnational contexts. Ortiz’s short fiction thus functions as a liminal third space which exposes both the fragmentation and potential of time-honoured Native American spiritual convictions. That such spiritualism has partially sunk into oblivion does not spell irrelevance and obsolescence. Paradoxically it turns into the precondition of mutual rapprochements of cultural difference and both intercultural and transnational acceptance. What renders Ortiz’s reassertion of Native American spiritualism humanist is the caution and tolerant awareness of the other that accompanies it.

Burger King and Transnational American Studies: Lessons from the 2013 Nordic Association for American Studies Conference

This article explores the incongruities between transnational American studies as theorized and practiced. Inspired by our experience at the 2013 Nordic Association of American Studies (NAAS) conference, we discuss the challenges of practicing “transnational” American studies within specific nation- and regionbased communities. U.S. scholars tend to conceptualize “transnational” American Studies as an attempt to destabilize U.S. nation—a broadening of the geopolitical frames of reference to promote a variety of heuristics such as hemispheric, Atlantic, circum-Caribbean, borderlands, and transpacific. Scholars at the NAAS conference foregrounded emergent trends and lines of exchange that are sometimes elided in a transnational American studies conceived largely from the vantage point of the U.S. While many themes emerged at the NAAS conference, we examine how the focus on Scandinavian-American relations, Asia, and transnational families help us rethink the transnational turn in American Studies and the borders that bind its practice. In this context, we discuss the paradox of transnational American Studies – that, despite its aim to expand toward an all-encompassing “transnational” paradigm, it remains defined by our geopolitical positions. This paradox presents opportunities for theorizing the divide between American studies and its varying scholarly terrains, especially through international scholarly practice.

“Ancestors We Didn’t Even Know We Had”: Alice Walker, Asian Religion, and Ethnic Authenticity

Author(s): Garton-Gundling, Kyle | Abstract: Recent debates about the ethics of identity in a global age have dealt with how to prioritize conflicting local and global allegiances. Guided by these concerns, the fiction of Alice Walker develops a distinctive view of how local cultures and global movements can fruitfully interact. This vision depends on concepts from Asian religions, a major influence that critics of Walker have largely overlooked. Walker promotes Hindu and Buddhist meditation in a context of widespread African American skepticism toward Asian religions. According to widespread notions of cultural authenticity, Asian religions cannot nourish an African American connection to ethnic roots. In response to this challenge, Alice Walker’s fiction portrays Hindu and Buddhist mystics as African Americans’ ancestors, thus positioning these faiths as authentically black.By creatively enfolding Asian religions into her sense of African American heritage, Walker builds a spiritual cosmopolitanism that relies on claims of ancestral affiliation even when these claims are not literal. This strategy is Walker’s effort to create a new paradigm of cultural authenticity, one that allows individuals and groups to choose their ancestors. Walker’s approach seeks to incorporate disparate global influences while still valorizing the figure of the ancestor. This innovative approach places Walker at the forefront of a growing number of African American artists and intellectuals who promote Asian religions to American minorities. Walker’s work vividly dramatizes larger concerns in transnational American Studies: Eastern philosophy’s relevance to identity politics, the tensions between universal ideals and cultural specifics, and the ethics of cross-cultural appropriation.