The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies

Description

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice. In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the "transnational" and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico's border crossings to the intifada's contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Michael Jackson, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump.　 The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as the emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures List of contributors Preface Introduction: Recognizing Transnational American Studies Note Bibliography 1. Collaboration in Transnational American Studies Introduction Coda Notes Bibliography PART I: Theorizing Transnational American Studies 2. Reorienting the transnational: Transatlantic, transpacific, and antipodean Introduction Notes Bibliography 3. Worlding America and Transnational American Studies Introduction Transnational American Studies as relational studies Transnational connectivity and the early Americas Conclusion Notes Bibliography 4. Archipelagic American Studies: An open and comparative insularity Introduction Notes Bibliography 5. The transnational poetics of Edward Said: Dangerous affiliations and impossible comparisons Introduction Notes Bibliography 6. The Pacific turn: Transnational Asian American Studies Boundaries, history, and debates The transnational turn, the immigrant, and US imperialism US-centric approaches and Japanese imperialism The polycentric transpacific Notes Bibliography PART II: Culture and performance: Histories and reciprocities 7. Cultural performance and Transnational American Studies Concepts and crossroads Antebellum African American performances of August 1 German-American encounters and epistemologies of embodied performance Conclusion Notes Bibliography 8. The Barbary frontier and transnational allegories of freedom Introduction Refashioning Barbary The Barbary frontier in American drama Conclusion Notes Bibliography 9. Stages of crossing: Transnational Indigenous futures Acts of mapping: Cambodia/Kassel “We put the earth back together”: Geopolitical borders and transnational Indigenous trajectories “Intergenerational continuity and community”: Borders of time Stages of involvement: Indigenous knowledges and border-crossing aesthetics Staging trans/national futures Notes Bibliography 10. The assembling of trans-indigènitude through international circuits of poetry Introduction Abiayala (Latin American) background Building blocks and the role of poetry The Medellín poetry festival Trans-indigènitude in praxis Trans-indigènitude The poets Trans-indigènitude poetry in the making Notes Bibliography 11. Traveling sounds: Haitian vodou, Michael Jackson, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers Introduction: Traveling sounds They Don’t Care About Us as a Filipino cultural product Haitian vodou: Maintaining the bonds of religious community in the diaspora Vodou as transnational technological medium The transatlantic tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers Notes Bibliography PART III: Translating texts and transnationalizing contexts 12. Translating Poe in New York in the 1880s: Or, Poe’s other transnationalism Introduction Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo” Martí’s Poe fragments Notes Bibliography 13. Confucius and America: The moral constitution of statecraft Ezra Pound and Confucius Confucius and the Founding Fathers Confucius Institutes in the twenty-first century Notes Bibliography 14. Translations of American cultural politics into the context of post-war Japan Introduction Promotion of American literature through translation Presentation of Kawabata as a Cold War modernist: Translation of Japanese literature Note Bibliography 15. A mixed legacy: Chinoiserie and Japonisme in Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale Introduction Willow pattern scenery Japonisme à la mode Retelling Urashima Notes Bibliography 16. Gender and Transnational American Studies Introduction Bibliography 17. Ethiopianism, gender, and transnationalism in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood Introduction Blueprint for transcontinental black identity: Ethiopianism in early black America Ethiopianism and transnational blackness in Of One Blood Gender, transnational spaces, and the black woman in Of One Blood Notes Bibliography 18. Transnationalism, autobiography, and criticism: The spaces of women’s imagination Introduction: The transnational turn in American studies Autobiography and criticism Conclusion Notes Bibliography PART IV: Political imaginaries and transnational images of the political 19. Iconography, interpictoriality, and Transnational American Studies Bibliography 20. The visual aesthetics of privacy in American presidential politics and its transatlantic influence Introduction The president as national symbol The president “in private” The First Family From farmer to cowboy: The American president as common man Sexual integrity as moral integrity A view from abroad: The Americanization of the private sphere in European politics Conclusion Notes Bibliography 21. Lincoln in Africa Introduction Notes 22. Laws of Forgiveness: Obama, Mandela, Derrida Organizing amnesia Exceptionalist poetics Imaginative amnesty: Forgiving and forgetting Forgotten but not gone: Hauntology Notes Bibliography 23. Visual intertextuality and Transnational American Studies: Revisiting American exceptionalism Introduction Intertextuality and transnationalism Cultural and transnational turns Note Bibliography 24. Post-truth = post-narrative?: Reading the narrative liminality of transnational right-wing populism Introduction Narrative in politics Post-narrative politics Symbolic forms and liminality Political speech as play and database Conclusion Notes Bibliography 25. American realities: A European perspective on Trump’s America Introduction Something happened A celebrity enters the White House Reality inertia Conclusions Notes Bibliography PART V: Remapping geographies and genres 26. The performance of American popular culture: Rhetoric and symbolic forms in American Western movies Notes Bibliography 27. Border encounters: Theorizing the US–Mexico border as transa Introduction Tijuanologies How a border orders disorder ¡Americano! Conclusion Notes Bibliography 28. Transnational and intersectional implications of the intifada Introduction The contemporary transnational colonization of Palestine Palestine and American studies Transnational perspectives Intifada as resistance Intersectionality Bibliography 29. Guam, Un-Inc.; or Craig Santos Perez’s transterritorial challenge to American Studies as usual Introduction The deep strata of Guam’s archipelagic history Remapping the “new” in American literary studies Locating a moving island: Craig Santos Perez’s “poemaps” of Guam Unmapping into the Préterrain: Guam’s (sub)aerial roots Notes Bibliography 30. Post-apocalyptic geographies and structural appropriation Introduction Structural appropriation The third-worlding of the West Post-apocalyptic geographies Notes Bibliography 31. Thinking after the hemispheric: The planetary expanse of transnational American writing Introduction Metamorphoses of the Monroe Doctrine: From Jefferson through George W. Bush On the Planet of Mississippi: William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms Fabricating ethnicity, displacing hemispheres: Faulkner, Komatsu, Yamashita Notes Bibliography Index