Journal of Transnational American Studies

Issue Introduction by the journal's Editor in Chief

Critical approaches to teaching and theorizing transnational American studies after the post-American turn.

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.

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.

In this paper, I share my experience in teaching and theorizing American studies in Singapore and Southeast Asia as a Fulbright scholar from 2017 to 2018. Through my own teaching at the National University of Singapore and lectures at universities in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, I examine what it means by American studies in the Asia Pacific in what critics call the post-American era. Drawing examples from literary studies themes such as post-9/11 literature, ethnic American literature, and environmental literature and genre specifics like graphic novel, video games, Hollywood cinema, visual and performance arts, I also call attention to special topics, which may vary from the Black Pacific to Vietnam War and the War on Terror. I argue that American studies have been taught differently in countries in Southeast Asia with Singapore showing its own interest and position in the region. There is a high demand on American studies in terms of theory, method, and diversity of genres and forms if we adapt our teaching to the local needs. In fact, we have arrived at a new critical moment in American studies, whether we call it “the transnational turn in American studies,” “transpacific American studies,” or “archipelagic American studies.”

In this essay I first draw upon selected cases to briefly map out crucial issues relevant to teaching Asian American studies in East Asia. I then use my own teaching experience to illustrate how graphic narratives can help non-native students cultivate needed cultural and historical literacy in order for them to review and challenge the dominant ideologies that have informed their imagined vision of the United States. I argue that the graphic form can make visible the systematic operations of racial, class, and gender inequality inside and outside the United States, an understanding that is essential to the practice of transnational American studies.

This article explores my experiences as a Black American professor teaching American Studies at Wuhan University during the summer of 2019. It focuses on the various lessons I learned about China as both a teacher and scholar of Black social and political movements. In many ways, my experiences defied what my American colleagues told me it would be like being Black in China. Given the Chinese governments’ reputation for harsh treatment of intellectuals who criticize the government, this article also offers my impressions of the anxiety White professors I met in China felt about teaching particular topics. Ultimately, the article examines how my experiences teaching American Studies in Wuhan forced me to rethink my own motivations for coming to China, as well as the motivations of the Black radicals I teach about, who came to China because of US governmental repression.

Introduction from Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II (University of North Carolina Press)

From  Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures , by Erin Suzuki, pages 1-5. Used by permission of Temple University Press. © 2021 by Temple University. All Rights Reserved. Publisher website: https://tupress.temple.edu/books/ocean-passages

From Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational edited by Jude V. Nixon and Maria Concetta Constantini. © 2022 by Vernon Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Publisher website: https://vernonpress.com/book/1365

From Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920: An Anthology edited by Linda K. Hughes, Sarah Ruffing Robbins, and Andrew Taylor (with associate editors Heidi Hakimi-Hood and Adam Nemmers). © 2022 by Edinburgh University Press. Used by permission. Publisher website: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-transatlantic-anglophone-literatures-1776-1920.html

Editors' introduction from Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos D. Kalogeras and Theodora Patrona, eds.

Chapter by Jim Cocola from Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos D. Kalogeras and Theodora Patrona, eds.

© 2022 by Fordham University Press. Used with permission of the Publisher.  Publisher website: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823299713/redirecting-ethnic-singularity/

From James Theodore Holly: Black Nationalist and Religious Writings, edited by Greg Robinson. © 2020, Montreal by Le Centre International de Documentation et d'Information Haïtienne, Caribéenne et Afro-canadienne. Used with permission of the publisher. Publisher website: https://www.amazon.com/James-Theodore-Holly-Nationalist-Religious/dp/1643825348

In the nineteenth century, cholera made a deep impression on the collective memory of entire generations. As a human-medical borderline experience, it was a scientific driving force, a political destabilizing factor, and a challenge to poetics. At the interface of literary studies and medical history and by using nineteenth-century literary texts from North American, British, and German authors as examples, this transnational study shows for the first time comprehensively, that despite a supposed “impossibility of narration”, the traumatic pandemic experience of cholera found its way into contemporary literature, particularly in the model of the specter. Through culturally and historically framed textual analyses of literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, George Eliot, H.G. Wells, Heinrich Heine, Ricarda Huch, and others as well as a variety of contemporary life writing documents, the study explores the multifarious intersections of lifeworld and literature. Within the methodological and theoretical framework of the Medical Humanities and Gothic Studies, it thus reveals genuine strategies for making the unspeakable speakable. By the use of epi- and pandemic experience as an example of a state of emergency, the study shows how closely scientific, political, social, and cultural discourses are interwoven, how they influence each other, and what role art and literature play in these processes of exchange. The Spectre of the Pandemic thus raises awareness of the interdependence of most diverse knowledge formations and is a plea for inter- and transdisciplinary thinking and research, especially in times of crisis. The present excerpt is a translated, abridged and slightly adapted version of the introduction of the study Das Gespenst der Pandemie: Politik und Poetik der Cholera in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts , originally published by frommann-holzboog publishing house.

From Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion by Elizabeth L. Block. Copyright © 2022 by MIT Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Publisher website: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045841/dressing-up/

An excerpt from The Quickening of Albizu Campos: How Fenianism Galvanized the Last American Liberator , by Aoife Rivera Serrano , New York: Ausubo Press, 2022.

© 2022 by Aoife Rivera Serrano. Used by permission of the publisher. Publisher website: https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781932982008/the-quickening-of-albizu-campos-how-fenianism-galvanized-the-last-american-liberator.aspx

From The Beats in Mexico by David Stephen Calonne. © 2022 by Rutgers University Press. Used with permission of the Publisher. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-beats-in-mexico/9781978828728

From Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education by Kelly Hankin. © 2021 by Rutgers University Press. Used with permission of the Publisher. Publisher website: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/documenting-the-american-student-abroad/9781978807686

From Forms of Migration: Global Perspectives on Im/migrant Art & Literature , edited by Stefan Maneval and Jennifer A. Reimer. © 2022 by Falschrum Books. Used with permission of the Publisher. Publisher website: https://www.falschrum.org/forms-of-migration.html

Reprise Editor's Introduction

Originally published in The Sewanee Review 18, no. 1 (January 1910): 67-72.

Chapter 10 of Tiffany Tsao’s The More Known World is republished with permission from the copyright holder, Tiffany Tsao.

Renisa Mawani, “Insects, War, Plastic Life,” in Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, 159–87. Copyright 2015, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder and the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu

Originally published in Early American Literature , Volume 52, Number 2. Copyright © 2017 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.org