An Untitled Essay on Transnational American Studies by John Carlos Rowe & My Excretory Comments

I found this and two other useful essays on this topic here, if you want to jump ahead or read Rowe's without my annoying comments interspersed, have at it (there is also a bibliography at the link for this and the other articles). In what follows, Rowe's original is the inset quote and my commentary is always prefaced by an ellipsis. 

This is Rowe, in case you wondered.

An Untitled Essay on Transnational American Studies 

by 

John Carlos Rowe

The “transnational turn” in American studies refers generally to scholarship in the past twenty years that has stressed the comparative study of the different “Americas”—Latin America, the Caribbean, the U.S.—and Canada as the appropriate objects of study for the discipline. “Transnationalism” also refers to American studies done by international scholars outside the U.S., especially scholarship that emphasizes the influence of the U.S. abroad. Scholars like Amy Kaplan, Donald Pease, and John Carlos Rowe have argued that transnationalism is closely connected with the study of European imperialism and its postcolonial effects in the nations and societies of the Western Hemisphere. Imperialism, the systematic practice of colonial domination, has itself been seen an example of transnationalism, including all of the negative aspects of imperial expansion and rule. In other contexts, scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Paul Jay have argued that transnationalism is also intellectually allied with new theories of cosmopolitanism and post-national conceptions of “global” or “planetary” citizenship.

. . . So this is in some respects a nomination after the fact of a shift in approach. "Transnationalism" can of course mean many things, but here we might think of it as a "floating signifier" ala Laclau which a portion (seemingly sizeable) of those academics engaged with American Studies is attempting to tie down as a new Master Signifier of sorts. & the concluding comparisons of that term to others, cosmopolitanism, etc situates it with "allies" on a broader discursive front. 

All of these interrelated meanings of “the transnational turn” can be traced back to the criticism of “American exceptionalism” in the 1980s, when many American studies scholars challenged both the study of the United States as an “exceptional” or “unique” nation and the inherent limitations of nation-based knowledge. Critics of American exceptionalism focused on the myth-and-symbol school, whose scholars from 1950-1980 studied the uniqueness of the United States as a democratic nation, whose citizens relied on their self-reliance and talents for innovation to create a society that fostered tolerance, responsibility, and freedom.  Ethnic studies, feminist, Native American, and gay/queer scholars argued that this ideal “America” masked the historical reality of slavery and racism, Chinese Exclusion, Japanese Internment, genocide against native peoples, economic and political marginalization of Chicano/as and Latino/as, exclusion of women from full civil and political rights, persecution of lesbians and gays, and the religious persecution of Catholics and Mormons and Muslims.

. . . If this gloss for the underlying stance of preceding scholarship is accurate, "the uniqueness of the United States as a democratic nation, whose citizens relied on their self-reliance and talents for innovation to create a society that fostered tolerance, responsibility, and freedom" then it barely passes muster as scholarship as I understand that notion. And it is hard not to see this with red blinking lights spelling out Ideology adjacent to it. Of course, some of this myth & symbol stuff probably does contain worthwhile scholarship, it is simply vulnerable to criticism about its assumptions. It makes me think of High School classes I snored through like "Civics" or "American Government."   

From the late 1960s onward, scholars in these marginalized fields worked for broader representation of their communities in American studies, often by contending as well that their heritages exceeded the narrow boundaries of the U.S. nation. African American studies pointed out affiliations with Afro-Caribbeans, Africans, and other diasporic Africans. Chicano/as and Latino/as studies considered Mexican, Cuban, and other Latin American legacies as crucial to the field. Chinese American scholars studied the Chinese cultural heritage and the historical motives for emigration, while scholars of Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Philippine Americans, and a wide range of other peoples gathered carelessly under the heading “Asian American” stressed the importance of studying specific social and political backgrounds. New scholarship revealed that the routes many immigrants took to the U.S. were by no means direct. In his path-breaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy shows how the Atlantic is crisscrossed by the multiple paths traveled by black slaves, free sailors, intellectuals, artists, political organizers, and many others heading to all the major destinations of the Atlantic world. Gilroy’s oceanic, rather than geopolitical, treatment of modern people moving transnationally inspired other studies of the “Green” (Irish) and “Red” (Communist) Atlantic, as well as new considerations of the “Pacific” as a complex transnational site composed of countless island communities and crucial to the contact between Asia and the Western Hemisphere.

… This paragraph paints this development as parallel to the rise of identity-politics, or so it reads to me, even if that specific descriptor of such concerns arose in the 80s. I notice two potential examples not included here. What of Arab-Americans? I'm not faulting Rowe for not mentioning every possible national or ethnic origin and adding a hyphenated "-American" to it, just thinking of the exponential growth of the Arabic population in the States in the last decades (I'm unaware if there is a parallel population growth of Arab-Mexicans or Arab-Brazillians). The other absence that strikes me of a different character. Are there studies, broadly corollary to these, of Irish-Americans or German-Americans? Ought there to be, or are they in some sense exempted from this as they've largely been assimilated to "white America" via the proverbial "melting pot"? The racial component of adequate "melting" has surely discussed by someone already.

. . . I should probably get around to reading Gilroy's book. It's one of those texts that one hears about so much that it almost obtains the character of one of Calvino's types of books, the ones that everyone has read so that it is as if you had too, thus making the actual reading of it unnecessary. I wonder whether the means of its working this "oceanic, rather than geopolitical" needs to stop at the coast. If the mode of analysis concerns traversing space geographically, then it would seem not to require stopping at the coast, though I suppose that pragmatically it would have to function rather differently just as travel on land functions differently (not least as it allows "dwelling", which the ocean does not forbid but neither does it invite). 

The east-west geographical reorientation of “American studies” in terms of the Atlantic and Pacific rims was complemented by a new emphasis on the north-south axis in a field some termed “Western Hemispheric Studies.” Latin American studies scholars critical of the area-studies orientation of their field advocated a “critical Latin American Studies,” as Juan Poblete does in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (2003), including comparative studies of Latin American, Caribbean, and North American communities. Earlier efforts by scholars such as Gustavo Peréz Firmat in Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990) had been followed by scholars who had argued that much of the commonality in the Western Hemisphere could be found in the shared Eurocentric heritage of the British, Spanish, Portuguese, and other European imperial systems that violently reshaped the region from 1500 to the present.

. . . What is really at issue here? Is it the problem of discovering that the criticism of certain discrete objects, say, this particular WalMart store, only goes so far and that critique requires thinking of the set of all WalMarts and then, all its suppliers, and then all those businesses it displaced or drove out of business, and then about its position in commodity culture generally and then with capitalism as world system of which it might be read as instructively (even brutally) pertinent as a symptom of? Seemingly so (if not in the terms that occur to me) as the claim that the commonalities exhibited in the western hemisphere are a product of European imperialist imposition would seem to be an attempt at a basic (if limited, by its exclusion of native peoples) social ontology.  

Following leading Latin American historians like Enrique Dussel, Rodolfo Kusch, and Edmundo O’Gorman, Walter Mignolo argues in The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) and Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000) that European imperial violence includes epistemological and linguistic efforts to eradicate the diverse indigenous civilizations of the Hemisphere. Such arguments contributed to Native American and indigenous scholarship and activism throughout the region, which in its particular specializations and its allied interests had long rejected the “national knowledge” of modern Europeans. Whether pre-national, post-national, or transnational, Native Americans insisted on understanding their histories and cultures apart from national impositions, all of which Native Americans identified with the invasion of their sovereign territories.

. . . & here we have (in light of my last comments) the split in the object posed by indigenous peoples. 

The broadening of American studies in east-west and north-south axes as a consequence of the “transnational turn” caused many to argue that the field must now be considered polylingual and that proper education of its students involve training in several languages relevant to these many cultural, political, economic, and social dimensions. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors’ The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (2000) successfully made the case that British North America and the United States were fundamentally multilingual societies from the beginnings of European contact, so that the English-language specificity of traditional American studies could no longer be defended, even by those insistent that “American studies” remain solely the study of the United States and its colonial and native antecedents.

. . . Though it seriously delimits my own ability to fully participate in such scholarship, the avatars of "English-only" attitudes deserve to be trounced wherever they appear. And while it is certainly true that a scholar who aims to study the "Western Hemisphere" would seem to need a number of languages, I have this lurking uncertainty about this proposal nonetheless. I do not refer to doubts about whether students would truly become fluent and functional in the languages required, surely some would, and others would not. Neither am I troubled overmuch by how the lack of this linguistic facility would create academic others within the field of "American Studies" though that could have certain troubling consequences, political infighting, etc. There is no way to go back an "English is good enough" position if this is really the object one wishes to study. What troubles me is how well this fits into Lacan's "University Discourse" wherein the agent of the discourse (S2) "knowledge" addresses an other (a) "the student" with the guarantee of its utterance being the truth (S1) of the polylingual immensity of the western hemisphere. This address put the student (the other) to work, but the excessive product of this discourse is ($) the split subject, as we are all already split subjects, to produce this is in effect to broaden or deepen the split. Facing the injunction subtending any specific demand of the agent in this example is the ghostly injunction "to keep on knowing more" which is infinite and ultimately unsatisfiable. Put in a different way, as laudable as this project is in theory, the realization of it in the theoretical imagination smacks overmuch of the academic wet dream of total knowledge.

Of course, many traditional scholars in the fields of American studies and Latin American studies complained that a field encompassing the Western Hemisphere and its pertinent “rims,” such as the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, was far too large. Education in so many different specializations and languages was likely to be sketchy and amateurish. One response was that the transnational study of the Americas and Canada need not follow the Enlightenment traditions of universal and encyclopedic knowledge. Instead, scholars should consider “contact zones” or “border regions” where different societies confronted each other’s values, whether violently or diplomatically, and achieved new modes of co-existence. José Saldívar’s Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997) and Walter Mignolo’s concept of “border thinking” were both strongly influenced by the mestiza lesbian feminism of Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), the multilingual, avant-garde work that for many established “border studies.”

. . . Amusingly (?) my last complaint is not restated here, but the response to the criticism that is given here might well be offered as a counter-argument to my own. Still though, can we not wonder at the contrast between an educational program imagined to equip scholars with the ability to read a number of the key languages of the hemisphere, so as to do work which demonstrates the potential, or perhaps notional, unity of the object (if internally fractured of course) with a different desire that disputes the "Enlightenment traditions of universal and encyclopedic knowledge" and suggesting studies at the internal borders of this notional unity? It's as if there are competing desires at work here, one that is totalizing and recognizes the interdependence of the myriad parts of the western hemisphere, and another which immediately shies away from such goals and delimits its focus to the points of fracture that obtain within the unity of the object of study? 

. . . Like Gilroy, Anzaldúa is someone I had heard so much about without knowing her work. Though I must admit some curiosity about the designation of her book as "avant-garde." My curiosity is provoked by having looked at so many articles titles and at lists of novels and memoirs assigned in courses that cover border zones and so forth - these books are seemingly never in any way avant garde - at least as I understand that term. Rather they're closer to works of socialist realism, minus the ideological imperative of those works, in that there is a guiding assumption that because the author of this or that text is or was poor, disenfranchised, exploited, etc, that this insures the worth of the text itself. That is, so much of my (admittedly limited) experience of this sort of literary scholarship is that it proceeds as a a sort of sociological analysis which assumes itself as politically important for no other reason than that the author of the text in question suffered the violence of systemic inequality. I'll get back to the politics elsewhere I am sure, but to be as clear as possible, I am not arguing that such works are unimportant, or that they should not be studied, or anything of the sort. What troubles me is that the picture which I get of such works if that what makes them valuable is precisely their ability to be read not as creative linguistic literary objects in their own right, but as realist documents of the voices of the oppressed. Why not both, whether together or apart? It seems that one devalued aspect of this broader project is aesthetics which is not excluded, but secondary to what is really at issue - providing academic recognition of the voices of the oppressed. We might also wonder, other than the possibility of increased book sales, what positive net effects the author feels from being studied and written about in this way.

Others complained that this new American studies abandoned the study of the U.S. nation in the very historical moment that U.S. nationalism was powerfully reshaping public discourse and international relations. But the transnational turn did not mean that scholars ignored the U.S. nation or nationalism as it shaped the Western Hemisphere. Much of the best scholarship of the past twenty years has focused on the transnational relations among nations at the peak of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004) treats French Haitian responses to Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry, the publication in Philadelphia in 1826 of the anti-colonial novel, Jicoténcal, in Spanish, Mexican influences on Hawthorne and Hawthorne’s influence on the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, among other interconnections among nations in the Western Hemisphere at the height of nationalism. Other scholars, like Rachel Adams, have shown the profound influence of Mexico on U.S. émigré intellectuals and artists living in Mexico in the modern period, whereas still other scholars, like John Carlos Rowe, have called attention to the transnational influence of the great Mexican muralists, such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, who did some of their most important work in the U.S., influencing Mexican and Chicano/a artists.

. . . Here I do not find the response as compelling as Rowe seems to. Surely there are scholars of whatever sort attending very closely to what is happening in the now. But this is not what Rowe brings up. Rather, he mentions studies of imperialism in the 19th century and early 20th. If I am concerned, even outraged by laws being enacted right now which are changing things in ways that I oppose, to say that someone is busily studying and publishing about the situations of people who were getting screwed by similar laws in 1890 does not really help, if it even applies. The nationalism of the 1800s may have much in common with the nationalism of 2011, but seeing it as in any way a meaningful critical response to the situation now is less than credible. 

A more troubling criticism of the transnational turn is that it occurs at just the moment late capitalism focuses on globalization as a way of expanding markets and lowering its labor costs by outsourcing jobs to poorer economies. Is our scholarly interest in globalization a mere reflection of this macroeconomic phenomenon, which in its one-way expansion generally indicates exploitation of second and third-world nations by first-world nations? The customary defense is that one-way, capitalist globalization is an undeniable reality, which must be countered by alternative global visions, including new cosmopolitanisms, global coalitions designed to defend local cultures and economies, and environmental, human, and animal rights alliances that transcend national boundaries. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) argues for a new transnational morality appropriate to our global era. Appiah’s and other neo-cosmopolitanisms have been criticized as inventions of privileged intellectuals and artists, whereas many people are forced into transnational circumstances by economic need, political repression, and ethnic conflict. Displaced migrant workers, political refugees, and stateless peoples may not view globalization with the same optimism as contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism. 

. . . Here my thoughts run in a bunch of directions.

1st, If an academic field's object of study was conceptualized in vastly different circumstances and far in advance of the changes in the world system we commonly call globalization, this notion of the object will be the victim of ever diminishing returns. One can still diagnose illness using a theory of the humors, but that few if any do so is surely not a surprise. As such, to adequately study, as an example, the "Americanization" of higher education in Europe without also being able to take into account the Neoliberal market economy that has also been established there and elsewhere would be a significant instance of shooting one's analyses in the foot. Whether "Transnational American Studies" also would entail the exploitation of second and third world scholars is another matter entirely, and not one that the change in the object would seem to require. 

2nd, I cannot help but to wonder about this phrasing "capitalist globalization is an undeniable reality, which must be countered by alternative global visions" - specially the term "countered" which, to me, connotes that these alternative visions change something in some way. But that does not seem likely to me somehow. Should a new analytic method emerge that allows a much better grasp of, let us say, the exploitive 'edge' of corporate outsourcing to the third world, that gives us a much clearly understanding of this process or even that allows us to predict which places will be abandoned as other places where even cheaper labor will be soon be found, etc. Initially, one might quip that this analytic tool would be very handy for corporations themselves. But if we imaginarily bar that possibility and see it as a purely academic project unsullied by market imperatives (can we even do that?) then how can we at the same time see this as in any sense meaningful politically? We could travel to the next likely country or region to be over-run by western corporations and do what exactly? Tell them, "You're about to get screwed"? That is to say, a vision of how things might be that really counters something, at least in my view, would be one where there is how things are now and there is how thing could be per the alternative vision and these two things cannot exist simultaneously. Wealth, property and power are on the side of the current trajectory, the alternative vision would seem to need not a bunch of scholars espousing it but a popular movement, a party, a revolution. 

3rd, Yet again, Appiah's book is not known to me save by name. This paragraph has a somewhat of sequencing, on the one hand, it attempts to counter the charge that transnationalism in scholarship is "just" a reflection of economic globalization by stressing the need for alternative visions, but then it criticizes the exponents of cosmopolitanism saying that "Displaced migrant workers, political refugees, and stateless peoples may not view globalization with the same optimism as contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism." But if Appiah's point that we could all just decide to see things this way such that a mere decisionist act would remake globalization with a happy face? I do not know, but somehow I doubt that. It would seem that the cosmopolitanism proposed would have to run very much counter to the status quo of globalization and so whether, in advance of any experience of it, migrant works or refugees might not be "optimistic" seems a non-issue. & I, in advance of a reading of Appiah, lack optimism about it as well, but I do not see that having anything directly to do with the propositions of Appiah's book.

The transnational turn is also characterized by an interest in international perspectives on the U.S., Canada, and the other Americas. Many post-World War II academic programs in American studies around the world followed the leads of U.S. scholarship, often because of direct support from the U.S. Information Agency and the Fulbright-Hayes Program for the International Exchange of Scholars. Although international scholarship in American studies in this period was extremely diverse and by no means exclusively tied to official U.S. national interests, it was generally assumed to be merely additive to, even derivative of, American studies produced in the U.S. The U.S. citizen-scholar was also a “native informant,” who traveled widely to exemplify American exceptionalism in his/ her scholarship, teaching, and even character. Transnational American studies includes international scholarship both for its intrinsic value and to provide special perspectives both on the Americas and on the nation in which it was produced.

. . . It strikes me as fascinating that any "American scholars" could so comfortably assume that they had "special perspectives" or some sort of privileged insight. My default assumption would be that outsider would have a potentially less overdetermined view and, if not necessarily fewer blind spots, then at least different ones. This assumption has been brought home to me many times when spending social time with foreign nations in the States. They ask questions I would never think to ask. They see things I am habituated to to not see and are able raise the strangeness of certain practices and beliefs such that I can see what is actually strange in them. With luck, a similar quality might also emerge from scholars looking in at "America" however conceived. But I would make a shitty "native informant" in many ways, as I am palpably aware of how little I understand the workings or rationale of many social practices that I am nonetheless subjected to. 

. . . Also of interest to me in that paragraph is the phrase "by no means exclusively" which I cannot help but to hear with an analyst's ear as instructively imprecise and as seeming to wish to admit while not admitting. Exactly how "tied to official US national interests" was the scholarship funded by these agencies in this time period? By what mechanism or mechanisms was this focus instilled? Is there a critical history of how this took place? How much of the scholarship in question was exclusively so tied? etc. At Uni Mainz, during the colloquium I attended on the topic of "transnational american studies" one of the professors (Hornung) was very insistent that he had never had any trouble getting grant money and he effectively poo-poo'd claims implicit in the stance of a journal (whose name I wish I knew) which refused any money from U.S. institutions for fear that it would curtail their freedom to write about whatever they wished. The somewhat knee jerk response that I have to this is to assume that nothing in Hornung's scholarship was in any way troubling to the granting institutions, rather than an utter lack of ideological slant to who they do and do not choose to fund. But, this is perhaps as much a consequence of my general suspicion of claims that ideology plays no part or is absent entirely (especially in  scenario involving money and prestige and so forth). 

Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies,” her Presidential Address to the American Studies Association in November 2004, appealed for much greater attention to the international work being done in the field. Specific institutional efforts have been made to bring together international and U.S.-based scholars in contexts less determined by the older “American exceptionalism.” The International American Studies Association, the International Association of Inter-American Studies, the Futures of American Studies Summer Institute led by Donald Pease at Dartmouth College, Liam Kennedy’s Clinton Institute at University College, Dublin, and new journals such as Comparative American Studies and the Journal of Transnational American Studies are just some of the formal ways transnational work has been encouraged in the past twenty years.

. . . Ok. 

The terms “transnational” and “post-national” are often associated with “post-colonial” and “planetary,” suggesting some of the terminological instability in the changing field of American studies.  Some American studies scholars, like Lawrence Buell, responded to the impact of postcolonial studies by contending that the U.S. was a fundamentally “post-colonial” nation, insofar as it emerged from the anti-colonial struggle against Great Britain. Other scholars, like C. Richard King and the contributors to his Post-Colonial America (2000), argued that the general project of post-colonial studies involves the critical account of the legacy of colonialism, which means the study of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. In recent years, some scholars, like Wai-Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007), have employed the term “planetary” as an alternative to “global” to suggest a progressive, cosmopolitan response to one-way globalization. Like “cosmopolitan” and “worldly,” “planetary” has its negative consequences. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt discusses how Alexander von Humboldt’s use of the term “planetary” in the nineteenth century anticipates the term “globalization.” In short, if the term “globalization” is overdetermined, then so is “planetary.” Such terminological problems indicate that the field of American studies is undergoing significant changes in response to the failure of the exceptionalist model. The new American studies is transnational in both subject matter and scholarly work, and it is multilingual, critical of the imperial legacies still shaping the Americas and Canada, including neoimperialisms originating in the Western Hemisphere and reaching globally, and concerned both with the transnational relations through which nation-states legitimated themselves and with the possible state-formations that lie beyond the relatively short history of the modern nation.

. . . Here then we get some of the other terms floating around and vying for hegemony in this field. I am often left rather underwhelmed by postcolonial scholarship in large part, but I'll not get into that here. I do think that which term is ultimately successful in hegemonizing these various sorts of work is a matter of some importance for how it continues to develop. I am not familiar with theoretical elaborations of "post-national" but one hears a great deal about how in this global world blah blah, the nation state is weakened etc. And while that is perhaps true, I think it is true only to a point, and over-estimating where that point lies is fool-hardy. Or perhaps I would like to see nation states cease to exist before using a term like "post-national". I am though intrigued by the suggestion of "possible state-forms" that appears at the end. What state forms are these? Who is proposing them? Is anyone making a case that they are already extant? All questions I have no answer for.    

. . . I also have some uncertainties about the phrase "the failure of the exceptionalist model" - basically as I am far from sure that it has failed. Certainly in High Schools in the States, "American History" seems to be taught largely on this model still, and the blatantly ideological portrait that is attributed to the "exceptionalists" early on in this text would, if my teaching experience is at all reliable as a guide, be found to be judged "true" by many college students. I've made students quite angry at me for doubting this rosy picture of the "Land of the Free" on many occasions, though it still sometimes surprises me in its vehemence. Similar views are also not hard to find amongst working people outside the influence of the university and I have encountered them many times in my life. In short, while it may be that "American Exceptionalism" is a mere relic in the field of American Studies in recent decades, it still seems part and parcel of many U.S. citizen's understanding of their nation, its history and its place in the world.