Journal of Transnational American Studies

Issue Introduction.

By taking seriously interimperialist contexts, this article reinterprets Briton Hammon’s Narrative (1760), contesting, especially due to Hammon’s presence in Havana, Cuba, commonly accepted notions of canonicity across literary genres in the Americas. I argue that one must read this short piece against the grain of the US literary canon in which Hammon’s Narrative has been canonized as “the first slave narrative,” almost exclusively in an anglophone setting. I offer the term “abolitionist traces” as literary method to address how Hammon’s multilinguistic and interimperial contexts become suppressed due to the conditions of the text’s publication by Green and Russell and advertisement in pro-British and proslavery periodical Boston Post-Boy. Rather than concede that this New England colonial context determines the text’s ultimate scope, I read a revolutionary Caribbean context alongside Hammon by way of the Hispanophone Havana, where Hammon spends eight and a half years in bondage and in service. Putting forth the Cuban context uncovers how Hammon’s Narrative does not subscribe to the common tropes of anglophone slave narratives, particularly “writing into being” and freedom as teleological finale. I stress the limitations of imposing national and monolinguistic frameworks for interpreting texts, such as prison writing and slave narratives, that take up bondage as key themes. Using Hammon’s Narrative as example, this analysis forwards the notion that every singular context must be multiplied into plural contexts to account for overlapping geographies, politics, and lived experiences. Moving across and against US exceptionalism is vital to an abolitionist method of interpretation, especially in making sense of how past bondage carries into our present, offering traces for resisting captivity when such resistance seems sparse. 

In recent decades, the American journalist Lawrence Weschler—a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney’s—established himself as one of the most prolific and imaginative writers on the “post-totalitarian” turn: that is, on the startling revival or persistence of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes around the globe. This essay explores his engagement with the rise and fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose rule Weschler filtered through successive treatments of two exile architects—Kanan Makiya, one of the most prominent and controversial critics of Hussein’s regime, and his father, Mohamed, who returned to Iraq to work for the dictator. Weschler’s portraits of these figures—a collaboration which helped him construct a cultural, transnational account of their journeys from Baghdad to London and to the US—became fundamental to the increasingly experimental ways Weschler began to track authoritarianism’s global resurgence, including back to the American scene.

This article explores the history of Dutch Indonesian grocery stores in Southern California. Following World War II and the Indonesian War of Independence, thousands of Dutch and Dutch Indonesians migrated to the United States and established themselves throughout Southern California. Among the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, immigrants opened dozens of Dutch Indonesian supermarkets that catered to both communities. This article unpacks the complex relationship between Dutch and Dutch Indonesian immigrants in the postcolonial era and the legacies of Dutch colonialism in the US context. I argue that these stores not only serve as the main cultural connection between immigrants and their homeland but also are sites of cultural discussion over Dutch Indonesian connections. Additionally, this article also situates Dutch Indonesian cuisine within the rising popularity of Indonesian cuisine in Los Angeles and examines the status of Dutch Indonesian stores in Southern California.

This special forum analyzes how different modes of cultural production circulate elements of Asian religio-philosophy and how "America" becomes transnationalized in the context of that circulation. 

This article investigates the cultural politics of the yoga pant to show how a popular US fashion item has recalibrated new meanings for a South Asian religo-philosophical practice. In twenty first–century US discourse, the yoga pant appears in cultural spaces as diverse as textile design, mom fiction, and music video. Drawing on feminist materialisms, I analyze representations of the yoga pant to track its journey through transnational circuits of power. I propose the dialectical concept of surfacing, understood as a drive towards flatness that also exposes depth, to analyze the contradictory work that the yoga pant can perform. The yoga pant enmshes the postural practice of yoga within industrial textile engineering, contributes to gendered body discipline, and often occludes yoga's South Asian dimensions. Yet the yoga pant can also support visions of radical freedom from gendered and racialized hierarchies. The active materiality of this fashion item sheds new light on how the practice of yoga participates in twenty first–century projects of constraint and liberation. 

This article explores and compares the transnational ontologies, rhetorical strategies, and literary forms of political activism in the work of Allen Ginsberg and Maxine Hong Kingston, focusing on Ginsberg’s poems “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and “Iron Horse” and Kingston’s 2003 novel, The Fifth Book of Peace. It traces their critiques of Cold War / Vietnam War US foreign policies and their attempts at fostering transnational communities and solidarity to their respective understandings of Buddhist philosophy and its practical applications, more specifically, the concept of dependent origination or “interbeing.” After situating both authors’ works within the framework of transnational relations during the Cold War period, I analyze their respective approaches to undoing difference across borders, political alliances, and cultural groups and demonstrate how their interpretations of Buddhist ethics translate into forms of discourse and activism.

This article examines the impact of Neo-Vedanta philosophy on Black jazz musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, with a special focus on Alice Coltrane. By using what I have come to understand as a decolonial analysis, I situate the artists whose works I discuss in the context of a wider decolonial turn in the late twentieth century. In addition to tracing the transmission of Neo-Vedanta philosophy, guru-sisya (guru-disciple) relationships, and ideas about universal religion into the US, this article also traces how various Black artistic and political figures rethought religion and spirituality in terms of radical liberation. Amid this convergence of new religious movements and Black activism, artists like Alice Coltrane became more open to Eastern spiritual transformation, and her own work ultimately made no distinction between spirtual and music practice. While this is a historical essay, I bookend my historical analysis with personal reflections on how I have received this lineage in my own artistic practice. 

This interview with Amirtha Kidambi focuses on how Kidambi turns South Asian religio-philosophy toward her transnational activist aims through diasporic musical practice. Throughout the course of our conversation, Kidambi traces the development of her political consciousness in relation to both her experience as part of a transnational South Asian diaspora and her musical practice as an improviser. This development often exceeds the institutional norms that seek to keep research, composition, and improvisation as bounded, separate disciplines. By considering improvisation itself as a form of social practice, Kidambi brings into relation musical performance and activism in concrete ways. Furthermore, our conversation touches on the links between pedagogy and reception. Kidambi elaborates on this link by connecting the pedagogical principles she has developed through in-class teaching to the way she collaborates with her band Elder Ones and the way she performs on stage. Finally, we examine ideas about futurity in Kidambi's musical practice and how concepts of time from Hindu cosmology influence how Kidambi moves her musical and activist practices forward.

This conversation with saxophonist and composer Aakash Mittal examines musical practice as a form of spirituality. Mittal discusses some of the environmental and structural forces—such as transnational movement and cross-racial family dynamics—that shaped his childhood access to Indian culture and religio-philosophy. In coming to terms with those forces, Mittal developed musical performance and listening as personal rituals that comprised the spiritual component of a larger process of cultural, diasporic healing. Within that process, reception, for Mittal, became not a passive transmission but an active construction of relations. In the course of this interview, Mittal connects his active construction of relations to his training and participation in both Black American and South Asian musical cultures. In addition to his training, Mittal discusses his recent participation in composer Du Yun's work with an Asian indigenous community, the Jino. Importantly, Mittal emphasizes the historical specificity of South Asian spirituality, Black American music, and Asian indigenous traditions, while also finding ways to connect those histories. Thus our conversation focuses on how reception as the act of building relations between people, histories, and environments moves beyond traditional modes of inheriting religio-philosophical practices.

Bridget Bennett's work in transatlantic abolitionist organizing was recognized by the American Studies Association's International Committee with the awarding of the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies in 2025. We're pleased to present an excerpt from the winning monograph, Antislavery in the Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776-1865, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2025, preceded by a short framing text here, written for JTAS readers.

An excerpt from the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize-winning publication for 2025. 

Editors' introduction to a curated selection of excerpts from recent thought-provoking work in the field of transnational American studies.

We're pleased to present an excerpt from Lina-Maria Murillo's book, Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US–Mexico Borderlands (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Republished with permission.

Until recently, scholars of the cotton South tended to focus their attention on the antebellum years, when “King Cotton” lay at the center of the nation’s economy and politics. What this narrative of postbellum decline conceals is that the port of New Orleans continued its domination of the cotton trade, both domestic and international, after the end of the Civil War. Not only did New Orleans serve as a central market for transpacific commerce, but its port was directly integrated into a global Japanese trade network that included exchanges with Africa and South America, all served by Japanese shipping. This article looks at New Orleans as a center of growing networks of commerce with Japan, a position that also helped lead to the establishment of a Japanese presence in the Crescent City, fortified by the development of official and semiofficial Japanese institutions. 

We are honored to present an excerpt from Gesa Mackenthun's Embattled Excavations: Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past (Waxmann Verlag, 2021). 

Alyssa A. Hunziker reviews Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space by Bayley J. Marquez (University of California Press)  

Catherine R. Peters reviews Maggie M. Cao's Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press).

Bios