ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Recognizing Transnational American Studies

part I|54 pages

Theorizing Transnational American Studies

chapter 2|10 pages

Reorienting the transnational

Transatlantic, transpacific, and antipodean

chapter 4|10 pages

Archipelagic American studies

An open and comparative insularity

chapter 5|10 pages

The transnational poetics of Edward Said

Dangerous affiliations and impossible comparisons

chapter 6|12 pages

The Pacific turn

Transnational Asian American Studies

part II|54 pages

Culture and performance

chapter 9|10 pages

Stages of crossing

Transnational Indigenous futures 1

chapter 11|11 pages

Traveling sounds

Haitian vodou, Michael Jackson, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers

part III|78 pages

Translating texts and transnationalizing contexts

chapter 12|9 pages

Translating Poe in New York in the 1880s

Or, Poe’s other transnationalism

chapter 13|16 pages

Confucius and America

The moral constitution of statecraft

chapter 15|10 pages

A mixed legacy

Chinoiserie and Japonisme in Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale *

chapter 18|13 pages

Transnationalism, autobiography, and criticism

The spaces of women’s imagination

part IV|90 pages

Political imaginaries and transnational images of the political

chapter 21|12 pages

Lincoln in Africa 1

chapter 22|16 pages

Laws of Forgiveness

Obama, Mandela, Derrida

chapter 23|6 pages

Visual intertextuality and Transnational American Studies

Revisiting American exceptionalism

chapter 24|9 pages

Post-truth = Post-narrative?

Reading the narrative liminality of transnational right-wing populism

chapter 25|8 pages

American realities

A European perspective on Trump’s America 1

part V|65 pages

Remapping geographies and genres

chapter 26|9 pages

The performance of American popular culture

Rhetoric and symbolic forms in American Western movies

chapter 27|11 pages

Border encounters

Theorizing the US–Mexico border as transa

chapter 31|13 pages

Thinking after the hemispheric

The planetary expanse of transnational American writing