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
ByAlfred Hornung, Nina Morgan

chapter 1|20 pages

Collaboration in Transnational American Studies

ByShelley Fisher Fishkin

part I|54 pages

Theorizing Transnational American Studies

chapter 2|10 pages

Reorienting the transnational

Transatlantic, transpacific, and antipodean
ByPaul Giles

chapter 3|10 pages

Worlding America and Transnational American Studies

ByOliver Scheiding

chapter 4|10 pages

Archipelagic American studies

An open and comparative insularity
ByBrian Russell Roberts

chapter 5|10 pages

The transnational poetics of Edward Said

Dangerous affiliations and impossible comparisons
ByMina Karavanta

chapter 6|12 pages

The Pacific turn

Transnational Asian American Studies
ByWilliam Nessly

part II|54 pages

Culture and performance

chapter 7|11 pages

Cultural performance and Transnational American Studies

ByBirgit M. Bauridl, Pia Wiegmink

chapter 8|10 pages

The Barbary frontier and transnational allegories of freedom

ByKarim Bejjit

chapter 9|10 pages

Stages of crossing

Transnational Indigenous futures 1
ByBirgit Däwes

chapter 11|11 pages

Traveling sounds

Haitian vodou, Michael Jackson, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers
BySabine Kim

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
ByEmron Esplin

chapter 13|16 pages

Confucius and America

The moral constitution of statecraft
ByAlfred Hornung

chapter 15|10 pages

A mixed legacy

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

chapter 16|10 pages

Gender and Transnational American Studies

BySarah Ruffing Robbins

chapter 18|13 pages

Transnationalism, autobiography, and criticism

The spaces of women’s imagination
ByIsabel Durán

part IV|90 pages

Political imaginaries and transnational images of the political

chapter 19|15 pages

Iconography, interpictoriality, and Transnational American Studies

ByUdo J. Hebel

chapter 21|12 pages

Lincoln in Africa 1

ByKevin Gaines

chapter 22|16 pages

Laws of Forgiveness

Obama, Mandela, Derrida
ByNina Morgan

chapter 23|6 pages

Visual intertextuality and Transnational American Studies

Revisiting American exceptionalism
ByRob Kroes

chapter 24|9 pages

Post-truth = Post-narrative?

Reading the narrative liminality of transnational right-wing populism
BySebastian M. Herrmann

chapter 25|8 pages

American realities

A European perspective on Trump’s America 1
ByLiam Kennedy

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
ByBoris Vejdovsky

chapter 27|11 pages

Border encounters

Theorizing the US–Mexico border as transa
ByJennifer A. Reimer

chapter 28|11 pages

Transnational and intersectional implications of the intifada

ByDenijal Jegić

chapter 30|10 pages

Post-apocalyptic geographies and structural appropriation

ByHsuan L. Hsu, Bryan Yazell

chapter 31|13 pages

Thinking after the hemispheric

The planetary expanse of transnational American writing
ByTakayuki Tatsumi