Distributed for Dartmouth College Press
Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies
This volume is the outcome of a transatlantic conversation on the topic “Transnational America,” in which more than sixty scholars from universities in the United States and Germany gathered to assess the historical significance of and examine the academic prospects for the “transnational turn” in American studies. This development has brought about the most significant re-imagining of the field since its inception. The “transnational” has subsumed competing spatial and temporal orientations to the subject and has dismantled the foundational tenets and premises informing the methodology, periodization, pedagogy, and geographical locations of U.S. American studies, but transnational American studies scholars have not yet provided a coherent portrait of their field. This volume constitutes an effort to produce this needed portrait. The editors have gathered work from a host of senior and up-and-coming Americanists to compile a field-defining project that will influence both scholars and students of American studies for many years to come.
Table of Contents
Preface – Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe • Introduction: Re-mapping the Transnational Turn – Donald E. Pease • A POLITICS OF TRANSNATIONAL MELANCHOLIA • Diasporic Doubles: Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock – Ulla Haselstein • “Death Is So Permanent. Drive Carefully.”: European Ruins and American Studies circa 1948 – Andrew S. Gross • Landscapes of Trauma: The Transnational Dislocation of Vietnam’s War Trauma in Alfredo Vea’s Gods Go Begging – William Arce • The Racial State and the Transatlantic Famine Irish – Peter D. O’Neill • RE-DISCIPLINIZING TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES • Men in Boats and Flaming Skies: American Painting and National Self-Recognition – Winfried Fluck • Portraying Transnational America: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions in Winold Reiss’s “Plea for Color” – Frank Mehring • Liberty: A Transnational Icon – Sieglinde Lemke • Belonging and Transnational American Studies: Reflections on a Critical Approach and a Reading of Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker – Laura Bieger • TRANSNATIONAL PEDAGOGIES • American Studies as Mobility Studies: Some Terms and Constellations – Rüdiger Kunow • Resistance without Borders: Shifting Cultural Politics in Chicana/o Narratives – Marc Priewe • Transnational Configurations in New Media: Identity Performance and Community on the Social Web – Reinhard Isensee • Protocols from the Playing Field: (Digital) Stories of Commitment and Intervention – Matthias Oppermann • TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNMENTALITIES • Areas of Concern: Area Studies and the New American Studies – John Carlos Rowe • Andean Gateways: Transnational Healing and Spiritual Tourism in the Sacred Valley, Peru – Macarena Gómez-Barris • Utopias of Transnationalism and the Neoliberal State – Johannes Voelz • Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History – Nancy Fraser • Toward a Politics of American Transcultural Studies: Discourses of Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism – Günter H. Lenz • Contributors • Index