Open Call for individual articles and special fora

The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) is an open-access, peer-reviewed forum for
Americanists in the global academic community.

If you would like to submit an individual article or offer a proposal for a "Special Forum," see
submission guidelines here. Download this invitation to submit papers here. Deadline: open call.

Moving beyond disciplinary and geographic boundaries that might confine the field of American Studies asdlfkjslkj
Studies, JTAS is an established critical conduit that publishes innovative transnational work in order to
facilitate the broadest possible cultural conversation about Transnational American Studies. The journal
is available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

JTAS Special Forum: Call for Contributions

Thinking with and beyond "Vietnam": Lessons 50 Years after the United States's Wars in Southeast Asia
Deadline: November 1, 2024

This Special Forum aims to destabilize and re-establish what it means to think with and beyond “Vietnam” by bringing Critical Refugee Studies and Transnational American Studies into deeper conversation. By “Vietnam” we are signaling, first and foremost, the War and its many afterlives at this moment of fifty-year anniversary commemoration. 2025 marks the semicentennial of what has been varying referred to as either the “Fall of Saigon” by those in the United States and former South Vietnam or by its official name, “Day of the Liberation of the South and National Reunification,” by the present-day Socialist Republic of Vietnam. That these names chosen to refer to the “end” of the conflict that stood in as proxy for the twentieth century struggle between the “First” and “Third” Worlds over the fate of global racial colonial capitalism diverge suggests––as this Special Forum asserts––how these material contradictions remain in actuality unresolved and enduringly relevant into the twenty-first century. By creating a site for transnational approaches to this war and its many afterlives, this Special Forum will feature scholarship that recognizes the multifold and enduring consequences of war across the board while at the same time elaborating upon some of the infinite number of Southeast Asian/American perspectives that make the Vietnam War relevant to contemporary political concerns. 

       Foundational to the provocations of this Special Forum are two broad assumptions. First, “Vietnam” signals both the War and much more—it is also an era; a culture and a counter-culture; and a diverse community of people. As a reference to the War, “Vietnam” bleeds through and around boundaries of nation, particularly as the war waged in Vietnam also conscripted a number of nearby states, territories, peoples, and postcolonial realities into its imperial machinery. As a “people,” “Vietnam” represents a contingent geo-political-historical formation whose subjects across time have shared kinship, intimacy, and intergenerational bonds spanning imperial-state demarcations. Second, while transnational in method, this Special Forum does not disdain or reject aspects of scholarship rooted in Critical Refugee Studies or Critical Ethnic Studies, particularly those that over the past fifty years have been frequently distorted, usurped, or silenced. We intend to center “Indigenous,” “minority,” and “refugee” discourses in this Special Forum even as we make an effort to disavow the state apparatuses that define and construct these categories precisely for the purposes of surveillance, exclusion, and extraction. How both Critical Refugee Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies’ theoretical and political contributions might speak (back) to Transnational American Studies is an additional provocation that drives this Special Forum.

        We invite article-length contributions on the following thematic areas:

·       Transnational legacies of the Vietnam War and Secret War

·       Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as sites of inquiry into global racial colonial capitalism

·       Southeast Asia as part of the geography of US militarism and carcerality 

·       Critical Refugee Studies and diasporic perspectives on the wars and their many afterlives

·       Movement-building and anti-war activism in the past and present

·       Revolutionary struggle and the complex legacy of its articulation via attendant nationalisms

·       Entangled histories and comparative perspectives on the wars in Southeast Asia 

·       Cultural and countercultural legacies and lessons from the Vietnam Era

·       Hmong, Lao, and Cambodian perspectives and interventions into dominant discourses and politics surrounding the wars in Southeast Asia

·       Decolonization and land-based perspectives on solidarities from Southeast Asia, its diaspora, and beyond
Boundaries and borders as they are troubled by "Southeast Asia" as a geographic formation 

 Please send a 500-word abstract and a CV to Prof. Karín Aguilar-San Juan, American Studies (sanjuan@macalester.edu) and Prof. Christina Hughes, Sociology (chughes3@macalester.edu) by Nov. 1, 2024.

Apply for the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize

Next competition will be in Spring 2025. Watch for details here, at the American Studies Association website.

Call now closed:
Asian American Racialization and the Circulation of Asian Religio-Philosophy
JTAS Special Forum

This special forum links processes of Asian American racialization with the reception and circulation of Asian religio-philosophy in the US. In doing so, this forum builds on the foundation laid by a previous special forum titled Redefining the American in Asian American Studies, published in JTAS in 2012. That issue was part of a shift toward transnational perspectives in Asian American Studies that, in turn, influenced the development of the concept of “global Asias.” Meanwhile, scholars of comparative philosophy and comparative religion have begun to draw attention to how Asian American philosophical and religious practices in the United States are often obscured by the imprint of a binary racial politics upon religious discourse in the US. Transnational Circuits of Asian Religio-Philosophy: Reception and Racialization in the US brings together these two academic trends in order to consider how the reception of Asian religio-philosophy, broadly construed as religious and/or philosophical, in the US has shaped the meaning of both “Asian” and “American” as racial, cultural, political, and economic signifiers. 

Tracing Asian thought over American cultural movements reveals apparent contradictions between the status of Asian religio-philosophy as countercultural and the racialization of Asian subjects as docile and assimilable. These contradictions demand critical investigation into a larger question of how Asian religio-philosophy and its reception can reveal points of imbrication between “global Asias” and transnational American studies. Relatedly, how and under what circumstances do Asian ideas and bodies travel to and in the Americas? How are ideas and bodies abstracted from one another and reified into American ideals of non/conformism, and what are the political stakes of restoring their relations?

We understand “Asian religio-philosophy” expansively as ontoepistemology, thereby allowing us to consider not only traditional schools of thought (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism) but also more recent Asian intellectual and political movements such as Maoism, Gandhian non-violence, or the work of Byung-Chul Han.

We invite contributions that further scholarship on the transpacific and transimperial contexts in which Asian thought circulates. Submissions might consider a variety of critical topics, including, but not limited to:

• Asian religio-philosophy and American civil rights movements (e.g., Gandhi & Black American movements, Asian American antiwar efforts, Buddhist monks as protest figures)
• Asian religio-philosophy in or contra American political theory (e.g., Benjamin Franklin and Confucianism, Confucius Institutes and foreign relations)
• The links between Asian religio-philosophy, imperialism(s), and political economies (e.g., critiques of/participation in capitalism, state religion and nationalist paradigms)
• Asian American and BIPOC literary and artistic engagements with Asian ontoepistemologies (e.g., Ruth Ozeki, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Agha Shahid Ali, Wu-Tang Clan, Alice Coltrane)
• The commodification and abstraction of Asian religio-philosophy in global circulation (e.g., martial arts/qi/chakra, fengshui, popular science and philosophy)
• The deracination and/or racialization of sound in American music and spiritualism (e.g., yoga, gongs, Hindustani and Carnatic music, John Cage, The Beatles)
• The transnational investments of American literary movements (e.g., Transcendentalists, Beats, Golden Age Science Fiction)
• The reinscription of disciplinary boundaries and the role of Asian religio-philosophy in shaping the definitions of “religion,” “philosophy,” and “thought”

Thank you to everyone who submitted abstracts by June 1, 2024.
Bowen Du (bwndu@ucdavis.edu) and Varun Rangaswamy (varunrangaswamy26@gmail.com). 

[call now closed] Call for Papers: Special Forum on Diagnosing Migrant Experience: Medical Humanities and Transnational American Studies

This special forum of the Journal of Transnational American Studies explores how Transnational American Studies and Medical Humanities can be mutually complementary. At their core, both disciplines work on, with, and beyond phenomena of multiple crossings of geographic, cultural, linguistic, epistemological, material, and physical borders.In doing so Transnational American Studies and Medical Humanities perpetually transgress their disciplinary borders. Hence, this special issue focuses on the crossroads of the two disciplines where each of these can fruitfully enhance the other.

In Medical Humanities approaches such as Narrative Medicine, the focus has been on the individual illness experience; migration-related questions such as racialization or trauma have only recently been coming to the fore. Here, migration is inextricably linked to questions of social justice. Seen from this perspective, Medical Humanities have been enriched through the perspective on migration studies. Similarly, issues of migration have also loomed large in Transnational American Studies. Work in this field has stressed the ways in which, through migrants’ perspectives, the US nation-state was seen from the outside and the inside simultaneously. At the same time, migrant experience has often been characterized by processes of racialized exclusion, economic poverty, and personal and collective trauma. These latter concerns have also centrally been investigated by the field of Medical Humanities. The current Covid-19 pandemic has once again shown that, in epidemiological terms, national boundaries cannot be policed. More than ever, there is a need for concepts and methodologies which enable us to think the medical and the transnational at one and the same time and ask for the role of literature and art within this process.

This special forum proposes that Transnational American Studies and Medical Humanities may fruitfully converge in reconfiguring different concepts of life. Through the lens of Transnational American Studies, this forum looks at how lives have been excluded by immigration bans and national border policing. In this context, Transnational American Studies emerges as a framework to make these lives visible by mapping them not only in a literal, but also in a figurative sense. Moreover, these border crossings often come at a price for those who cross the line in both a metaphorical and an actual sense: Migration and cultural invisibility can be accompanied by trauma and displacement. In this context, exhibitions and artworks on undocumented migration have emphasized the ways in which art and performance can go beyond narrative depictions of the traumas that can accompany forced migration and undocumented lives. At the intersection between migration and trauma, the borders that are being crossed are both land borders and waterways.

The experience of migration can also, quite literally, be combined with a lack of access to health care especially for undocumented migrants and unaccompanied minors. Seen from this perspective, migrant lives are in a form of double jeopardy as dramatically demonstrated, e.g., by the current distribution crisis of Covid-19 vaccines. In this context, literary narratives––novels, poems, short stories, biographies, and autobiographies––emerge as an alternative form of representation: First, they may resist both national policies of exclusion by literally writing migrant lives into the script of the nation. Second, they may defy a mere focus on medical diagnosis, especially where this diagnosis is divorced from cultural context. Defying these categories, these narratives may revolve around “unruly” subjects who refuse to be contained.

Linking illness, mental health, and trauma, such representations can also serve as a critique of health care systems. Nation-states can draw a line between those who are eligible for health care and those who are seen as “undeserving” of such care. Recent investigation as well as historical research has revealed that medical care and adequate nutrition can be withheld by state institutions. As forms of medical negligence or health injustice, such practices have been documented regarding residential schools for Native American children as well as vis-à-vis inmates of state prisons. In all these different contexts, Medical Humanities are closely connected to considerations of social justice and health equity. Instances of an absence of medical care, in turn, can be tied to the crossing of national or internal borders with which Transnational American Studies has also been concerned.

For this special forum, we seek contributions that explore the intricate connections between medical and migrant experiences and their cultural impact in past and present, such as

- Migration and mental health/trauma

- Migration and somatic manifestations

- Migration and challenges for health care systems

- Migration of medical knowledge

- Migration of medical professionals

- Migration and narrative medicine

- Migration and epi-/pandemics

- Migration and disability

- Migration and age

- Migration and global health/one health

- Migration and medical ethics

Call now closed. Thanks to all who sent proposals. Please submit a 250-word abstract by November 1, 2021. The editors will review abstracts and invite full-length essays of 5,000–8,000 words. Please email abstracts and questions to Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (mita.banerjee@uni-mainz.de) and Dr. Davina Höll (davina.hoell@uni-tuebingen.de).

Call for Papers: Teaching and Theorizing Transnational American Studies Across the Globe (abstracts due Oct. 31) [call now closed]

JTAS Special Forum coedited by Yuan Shu and Selina Lai-Henderson

What would American Studies look like if the transnational rather than the national were at its center? Since Shelley Fisher Fishkin first challenged us with this question in 2004, scholars in the US and around the globe have redefined the field imaginary, object of study, and methodology of TAS. As transatlantic studies have reshaped the spatially configured Atlantic World, Transpacific Studies have likewise transformed the temporally constructed Pacific from "the Asia Pacific Era" to "America's Pacific Century." While theorizing US empire-building, military intervention, and economic expansion as an extension of the conquest of the Americas, transpacific studies have also promoted decolonization and advocated Indigenous epistemologies in the South Pacific and the Asia Pacific.

Now it is time we shift our attention to how such critical articulations and innovations have played out in our pedagogy and teaching practices around the globe. How do we theorize our teaching i its different forms, modes, and moments mediated by technology? How do we, scholars and instructors in both "the West" and "the Rest," teach and theorize transnational American studies beyond the US? If American Studies was a Cold War product of the 1950s, vis-a-vis Comparative Literature and Area Studies, how have US government-funded programs, centers, and journals worldwide impacted and continued to impact our teaching? How do we relate critical issues in American Studies such as race, gender, class, citizenship, migration and border-crossing to colleagues and students around the world? What does it mean when Asian Americans approach American history the "wrong way," from the Far East of the Asia Pacific to teh Far West of North America, from the West Coast to the East Coast of the US? How do we teach social movements in North America, such as Black Lives Matter, in the Global South? In what ways do transnational American studies continue to matter critically in the era of trump and a Cold War 2.0 between the US and China?

We welcome essays that explore the theoreticl dimensions of teaching transnational American studies, which involve resistance, negotiation, and appropriation for both US and non-US academics. We also look for essays that share personal and empirical experiences based on teaching and theorizing the specific aspects of American studies from thematic focuses such as post-9/11 literature, ethnic American literature, and environmental literature to genre specifics like the graphic novel, video games, Hollywood cinema, and visual and performing arts. Finally, we are interested in special topics ranging from teaching nineteenth-entury Anglo-American representation of the South Pacific to theorizing the Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific, from rereading Vietnam War literature to remapping the current war on terror with special attention to refugee and ecological crises.

Please submit a 250-word abstract by October 31, 2020. The editors will review abstracts and invite full-length essays of 3,500 to 6,000 words including notes and bibliography. Please email abstracts and questions to Dr. Yuan Shu at yuanshu@ttu.edu and Dr. Selina Lai-Henderson at slai.henderson@dukekunshan.edu.cn.

Call for Papers: Short Essays on the Global Pandemic
CFP now closed (publication Winter 2020) (download CFP)

We invite commentaries of 1,000 to 1,250 words on the pandemic's impact, whether implicit or explicit, on your work as a scholar of transnational American studies. Possible topics include:

-- How are changes in immigration, travel, education, and trade policies in response to the pandemic reshaping transnational perspectives on the US and on American political power?

-- How is US transnational 'leadership' in this global moment of truth arising from the pandemic impacting your research/fieldwork as a teach and scholar?

-- How do US representations of the crisis compare with those in your research territory (Europe, Africa, Austro-Asia, the Americas, and/or Asia) and what do these differences suggest about changes in your research/field/nation and US twenty first-century relations?

-- How are US planning and policies regarding the pandemic viewed in your research/field territory and shaping attitudes toward the US or toward future relationships and expectations?

-- How have US pandemic social and political narratives illuminated fault lines in American society and culture for the scholars in your research field?

-- How has the current pandemic crisis illuminated previously neglected areas of analysis and understanding in transnational American studies, e.g., the significance of the absence of women in US presidential politics?

Please email proposals of one paragraph to Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (aiko.t.demirci@gmail.com). Full commentaries due end of August for publication in JTAS Winter 2020. The Editors of JTAS hope you will contribute your thoughts and welcome a range of forms, from open-ended questions and comments to poems and short fiction.

Call for Papers: Molecular Intimacies of Empire (abstracts due 1 Aug. 2020) download [call now closed]

This special forum on The Molecular Intimacies of Empire seeks to deepen intellectual connections between New Materialist scholarship (including in environmental humanities, Science and Technology Studies, and material feminism) and transnational American studies by attending to US neo/imperialism's reliance on racialized and uneven molecular intimacies. The concept of the "intimacies of empire" (Ann Laura Stoler) has been tremendously generative in transnational American studies, orienting groundbreaking studies that interrogate such topics as "metroimperial intimacies," "stranger intimacy," "the intimacies of four continents," "the racialization of intimacy," "intimate migrations" and hemispheric "institutions of intimacy" (Victor Mendoza, Nayan Shah, Lisa Lowe, David Eng, Deborah Boehm, Rodrigo Lazo). The Molecular Intimacies of Empire shifts the scale of analysis to empire's mutually constitutive relation with chemical bonds through the simultaneously transnational and "trans-corporeal" (Stacey Alaimo) circulation of foods, flavors, scents, dyes, toxins, plants, pathogens, drugs, chemical processes, and other biological and synthetic materials.

We seek essays and creative works that engage and build on scholarship on the transnational scale of food production and capitalist metabolics (Sidney Mintz, Rachel Lee, Allison Carruth, Alyshia Galvez); the racialization of flavors, scents, and food/scent chemicals such as curry, sucrose, musk, lactose, and monosodium glutamate (Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Erica Fretwell, Sarah Tracy, Robert Ku); the transnational/colonial sourcing, testing, and circulation of pharmaceuticals (Alexa Dietrich, Michael Brown); the uneven geographies of risk that sustain industrial and postindustrial society (Alaimo, Rob Nixon, Michelle Murphy, Vanessa Agard-Jones, Macarena Gomez-Barris); the supposedly unintended biological and ecological effects of chemical and radioactive weapons (Kristen Simmons, Marjin Nieuwenhuis, Edwin Martini, Elizabeth DeLoughrey), and projects of resistance, coalition, and/or futurity grounded in these shifting and frequently toxic molecular intimacies (Jina Kim, Robin Wall Kimmerer). How might we rethink the conditions and/or possibilities of intimacy amidst these "chemical regimes of living" (Murphy)?

Submissions might consider the historical, material, and/or cultural processes that extend US empire and capital accumulation not only across geographic space, but throughout the biochemical constituents to human and nonhuman bodies, minds, and moods; the aesthetic challenges posed by efforts to trace increasing capitalist and military investments in chemosensory processes; and patterns of intersection or divergence between molecular and interpersonal "intimacies."

The editors, David Vázquez and Hsuan Hsu, invite 250-word abstracts due by August 1, 2020. The editors will review abstracts and invite full-length essays and creative works of between 5,000 to 8,000 words in length. Draft full-length essays and creative works will be due no later than February 28, 2021, and should not exceed 8,000 words including endnotes and bibliography.

Please email abstracts to molecularintimacies@gmail.com by August 1, 2020. -- Call now closed. Thanks to all who responded.