Transnational American Studies?

My next pressing and long overdue project is to produce a seminar paper that critically assesses something called the "transnational turn" in American Studies. So, what the fuck is that exactly? I am still sussing out the details of an answer to this question myself, and burdened by the fact that I am not an Americanist in any of my academic work. But as that is the assignment, here is an attempt to say what the "transnational turn" amounts to in this field of study.

Work in American Studies has for many years tended to be dominated by scholars who are themselves American citizens and has been rife with what is referred to as "American Exceptionalism" - a tendency to see the U.S. as somehow special which masks a naive triumphalism about the American values' uniqueness and exemplary role in the world. That all of this is also undoubtedly liable to criticism for its overwhelming focus upon white male doings and writings is also clearly at issue. To make matters worse, scholars and journals located outside the States are often ignored in native scholarship, their books and articles rarely cited, their journals disproportionally overlooked by research libraries in the States. Add to all of this a something between a default and marked tendency toward both scholarship and source material which is effectively English-only and you have laid the ground work for the general sense of dissatisfaction with the American Studies as was, and the seeds for a new conceptual articulation of what it might become.

The attempt to articulate a "transnational turn" (itself already a reflection of a shift in scholarship actively taking place) is intent on a number of different shifts of focus meant to combat the issues raised above. Probably too many differences for me to detail them all here, but I'll take a crack at providing the jist of these developments. First though, here is a bit of blurbage from a book called "Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies" which has not yet been released.

The "transnational turn" in American studies has brought about the most significant re-imagining of the field since its inception. The "transnational" has subsumed competing spatial and temporal orientations to the subject and has dismantled the foundational tenets and premises informing the methodology, periodization, pedagogy, and geographical locations of U.S. American studies, but transnational American studies scholars have not yet provided a coherent portrait of their field. This volume constitutes an effort to produce this needed portrait. The editors have gathered work from a host of senior and up-and-coming Americanists to compile a field-defining project that will influence both scholars and students of American studies.

Ok, that gives something of an idea. My own take on it is that these scholars are all looking for ways to reconceptualize "America" so as to escape the narratives in place and in particular to avoid the dominance of the nation as concept. Some of the forms this takes are an interest in diasporas and how they have reached the States, issues of minority languages and the associated literatures of these, a focus on border-areas and the imprecision of inside and outside that they entail. This often results, at least in the literary realm with a privileging of memoirs and life-write by America's internal "others" - those who are "Americans" but who persist in being excluded from the focus of what counts as "real" for "American literature" and "culture."

Part of what poses a problem for me in this (other than it not being, in any sense of the word, my field of study and which is, honestly, not one that I am interested in) is that I am being asked to bring my critical skills to bear upon this when, in its basics, I have no real critical complaint about any of it. I would wager, and in fact y paper will have to wager, that there are political and ideological issues which are not being addressed as such in this shift of "paradigm" and further than this change, along with the welcome shifts of emphasis that it has brought in tow, is also wrapped up in fantasy and is surely also symptomatic to some degree. But as I know quite well from my time at Uni Mainz in a colloquium on precisely this topic, the minute I begin to deploy theory that is in any overt way Marxist or psychoanalytic, the disinterest is palpable. As such, I feel as if I am pissing into the wind before I even begin.

I know that my blog has few readers and thus far, not a single comment has been lodged there. But, that said, I need help. There is so much material out there and I have little idea where to even begin.