The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies

Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, Takayuki Tatsumi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351672627
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

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.

1

COLLABORATION IN TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Introduction

I embarked on my first collaborative venture in Transnational American Studies in response to being verbally attacked in public in Southwestern China in 2005 by a US government official who had helped bring me there. In retrospect, I ought to thank him. The success of the project that this unexpected event ended up setting in motion prompted me to develop a stimulating and exciting research agenda over the next decade and beyond in which transnational collaboration has been front and center. I’ve never looked back.

But looking back right now strikes me as a fruitful thing to do. This chapter describes the genesis of that first transnational collaboration, and of three subsequent collaborative ventures in Transnational American Studies that I was prompted to propose as a result of that positive experience: a distinctive journal, a unique anthology, and an ambitious research project that now involves over 100 scholars across North America and Asia. I will close by considering some of the challenges collaboration can present, by sharing some current transnational collaborations other scholars are developing, and by reflecting on why collaboration is so central to Transnational American Studies.

June, 2005. George W. Bush was president, the Iraq War was raging, and the administration was in the habit of charging anyone who criticized it with being a “traitor.” As President of the American Studies Association, I had been invited to give keynote talks at national American Studies Conferences in China, Japan, and Korea. The theme of the conference in China, held in Yunnan University in Kunming, was “America at War and at Peace.” My talk, which I titled “Wars of Words: American Writers and War,” surveyed a century of anti-war writing in America from Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer” (1905) to Calvin Trillin’s 2004 poems on the Iraq War (Fishkin 2005). I included discussions of work by John Dos Passos, e. e. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Dalton Trumbo, Langston Hughes, Tim O’Brien, and Bob Dylan, among others—as well as other writing by Twain, such as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic Brought Down to Date,” “As Regards Patriotism,” and other pieces he wrote in response to the Philippine-American War. I noted that the Mark Twain who wrote these pieces was blowing the whistle on the lies his government told him not because he was a traitor, but because he genuinely loved his country and felt betrayed by it. I argued that “The War-Prayer” laid down the tracks for the century of anti-war writing that followed.

When I finished my speech the Chinese scholars who filled the auditorium applauded enthusiastically. But then something unprecedented happened. An American official from the US embassy in Beijing, who had been sitting in the back of the room, demanded to be given time at the podium immediately. His request was granted. He then proceeded to attack me. (Keep in mind not only that embassy officials are not supposed to intervene directly in this way in scholarly conferences they support—but also that this official had greenlighted my plane ticket.)

He proceeded to argue heatedly that although my comments had focused solely on anti-war writing by Americans, many American writers recognized that there were times when “you had to go after the bad guys—like Ho Chi Minh” (a comment that was perhaps imprudent given that this academic conference on war and peace was taking place just about 200 miles from the Vietnamese border). With an anger that was palpable, he then proceeded to list the names of American writers who had been in favor of various wars—writers whose names were as unfamiliar to me as they were to the Chinese scholars in the audience. He left as soon as he’d said his piece. At lunch afterwards, the Chinese scholars with whom I spoke were not surprised at what had just transpired: I had incurred the displeasure of a government official with my remarks, so he attacked me. “That’s what governments do,” they said; “Our government does it, your government does it – nothing unusual here.” When the State Department spends thousands of dollars to fly the President of the American Studies Association to an American Studies conference in China, it was understood to be following the tradition of soft diplomacy that sent Americans abroad to exercise their free speech in public as a way of modeling the freedom that America gave its citizens. But clearly my remarks had pushed my sponsor’s buttons, leading him to behave just the way the Chinese expected their government to behave.

What made him so angry? A colleague of his later described him to me as being “to the right of Attila the Hun,” but something more than politics seemed to be going on. As I pondered that question on my flight to Kansai International Airport later that day, I suspected that it was my having put Mark Twain at the head of the procession. When the official had paid for my flight to attend the conference that Yunnan University had invited me to keynote, he knew I was a Mark Twain scholar, and probably figured I was “safe.” What could be more American than a talk about Mark Twain? But he clearly had never read “The War-Prayer” and it upset him greatly. Lots of people had never read “The War-Prayer” or the other obscure pieces of passionate, eloquent outrage by Twain that I’d discussed. I found myself musing, what if these writings by Twain had not been suppressed and ignored for so much of the twentieth century? What if Twain’s critiques of imperialism and of his government’s arrogant abuse of power had been front and center in our classrooms all these years? How might American history and world history in the twentieth century have been different if “The War-Prayer” had been as familiar to every high school student as Tom Sawyer? If we had made discussions of these texts central, not peripheral, to American classrooms, might we have been more prepared to remind those who called critics of the Bush administration “traitors” that criticizing your country when you knew it to be wrong was as American as Mark Twain?

I was still shaken by the morning’s events when I arrived in Kyoto later that day for the annual conference of the Japanese Association of American Studies. Soon after I arrived, I attended a reception held by the Japan Mark Twain Society. I had long admired the vibrant community of Mark Twain scholars in Japan, and had agreed to contribute to and serve on the editorial board of the English-language journal, Mark Twain Studies, that the Society had launched the previous year, in 2004. I reconnected with Takayuki Tatsumi, a professor of American literature at Keio University (and editor of the new journal) whom I had met on an earlier visit to Japan. He could tell that I was upset about something. I told him what had happened in Kunming. As it turned out, “The War-Prayer” was on Takayuki’s mind, as well, since he was in the process of writing a paper for an international literature conference to be held the following spring in Nagoya; it was about postmodern writers’ use of black humor in their efforts to narrate post-apocalyptic reality in the wake of fatal disaster, and it began by invoking “The War-Prayer” as an important precursor to these efforts. We agreed that too few people had read “The War-Prayer,” and too few scholars had written about it. What could we do to change that?

Might an international forum on “The War-Prayer” in Mark Twain Studies play a role in prompting broader discussion and debate? We respected each other’s scholarship, breadth of interests, editorial judgment, political vision, and sense of humor, and welcomed the opportunity to work together on such a project. The collaboration was as pleasurable as it was fruitful. We circulated a call for papers, and submissions immediately began filling our inboxes. The international forum that came out in Mark Twain Studies in 2006 included 26 short essays by scholars based in the US and Japan from the fields of English, History, American Studies, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, and Sociology/Anthropology––as well as a Twain biographer, a poet and artist born in Vietnam, an independent scholar, a novelist, a rare book collector, and a stand-up political comic. One of the most insightful and moving meditations on “The War-Prayer” was by Makoto Nagawara, a justly celebrated Japanese Twain scholar who was also a survivor of Hiroshima (Fishkin and Tatsumi 2006, 7–118). Readers found the transnational forum fresh and stimulating, and orders for that issue of the journal, which was available only in print, began pouring in. The positive experience I had collaborating with Takayuki Tatsumi on this project helped prepare me to embrace with excitement the next opportunity for transnational collaboration that presented itself.

May, 2007. I was invited to give a talk on Asian crossroads in Transnational American Studies to students at UC-Santa Barbara by professor Shirley Geok-lin Lim (Fishkin 2006). At lunch at the faculty club before the talk Shirley and I found ourselves commiserating about the challenges of building a genuinely global community of scholars working in Transnational American Studies. We were both aware of valuable articles on transnational topics that had had trouble finding a home in existing journals and agreed that it would be great to have a journal that defined its mandate as publishing just such pieces. But the obstacles were daunting. Colleagues in financially-strapped institutions outside the US often found it hard to keep up with new work in the field since their libraries couldn’t afford subscriptions to the key journals or buy the latest books; how would they be able to afford a subscription to yet another new journal, no matter how helpful it was to their work? Even scholars in the US had trouble accessing relevant work published in small-circulation international journals that existed only in hard copy—such as Mark Twain Studies (which required anyone who wanted to buy a copy of an issue to mail an international postal money order to Japan). An open-access digital journal would be ideal, we mused. But the prospect of actually launching such a journal was beyond us. If only we knew someone with the programming skills willing to help us on a pro bono basis figure out how to create a digital journal. It was a nice daydream.

At the talk I gave that afternoon, Shirley’s students were lively and engaged and we had a stimulating discussion. They were clearly hungry for more opportunities to both read and publish articles in Transnational American Studies, and to have more ways of interacting with like-minded scholars outside the US. Shirley and I brought up the absence of any online, open-access peer-reviewed journal focused on this area, and jokingly asked whether anyone in the room had the programming skills to create one. The students—smart and interesting, but trained in the humanities rather than computer science—ruefully shook their heads.

After the discussion we adjourned for dinner that night at Shirley’s home. Over dinner, one of those students, Eric Martinsen, had an inspired idea: he told us, to our surprise, that the University of California system already had in place a free electronic platform for hosting journals: the eScholarship Repository which was part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. The roughly two-dozen journals the initiative hosted at the time were all in the sciences or the social sciences. But Eric had read the fine print: there was nothing to prevent a humanities journal from using the platform as well. Caroline Kyungah Hong, who, like Eric, was a graduate student at UCSB at the time, was enthusiastic, as well. The seeds of the Journal of Transnational American Studies were planted that night. Caroline and Eric, now tenured faculty themselves, became JTAS’s first managing editors.

Over the next year and a half, Shirley and I recruited an international board of editors who helped us circulate a Call for Papers, recruit articles, assemble an international advisory board, and shape a new online open-access journal cosponsored by UCSB’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and Stanford’s American Studies Program. The founding editors were based in Canada, Germany, Japan, and the US. In addition to Shirley and myself, the group included Alfred Hornung (Obama Institute, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz), Nina Morgan (Kennesaw State University), Greg Robinson (Université du Québec à Montréal), and Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University). The advisory board included scholars based in countries including Australia, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, Taiwan, the UK, and the US (and soon after included scholars from Argentina, India, and Morocco). We encouraged fellow editors and advisory board members to come up with ideas on how to make the journal into a distinctive home for fresh border-crossing, multi-disciplinary scholarship in American Studies focused on transnational topics. Advisory Board member David Bradley (then at the University of Oregon) came up with the inspired suggestion of having a section of the journal called “Reprise,” which would reprint important articles in Transnational American Studies that had appeared in print in books or journals but that had never had an online life. Nina Morgan agreed to edit the Reprise section. The first issue’s Reprise section reprinted the International Forum on “The War-Prayer” that had been almost impossible for readers outside Japan to access previously. Several of us thought about how useful it would be to colleagues both in the US and around the world to run excerpts from soon-to-be-published or recently-published books. Greg Robinson agreed to edit this feature of the journal, which we called the “Forward” section. We liked the idea of having guest editors solicit articles on particular themes, but hesitated to devote entire issues to these special topics; Takayuki Tatsumi reminded us of the category of “Special Forum” that the Japanese journal Mark Twain Studies had developed—the category, in fact, in which our international forum on “The War-Prayer” appeared. With Herculean effort on the part of graduate students at UC Santa Barbara and Stanford, as well as the editorial board and advisory board, The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) was launched in 2009.¹

Over the past nine years, The Journal of Transnational American Studies has published close to over 300 pieces of scholarship by individuals based in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK and the US. These included 148 peer-reviewed articles, excerpts from 84 recently-published or soon-to-be published books and articles, and 66 outstanding articles or book chapters that had been previously available in hard copy only. Special Forums were devoted to “Circa 1898: Overseas Empire and Transnational American Studies;” “Charting Transnational Native American Studies: Aesthetics, Politics, Identity;” “Revolutions and Heterotopias;” “American Studies: Caribbean Edition;” “Sweden and America; ” “La Floride française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World;” and “Disrupting Globalization: Transnationalism and American Literature.”

JTAS is one of the relatively small number of born-digital journals selected for preservation by the Library of Congress. Collaboration has been key to the journal’s success. The founding editors had previously had experience editing journals, book series, and multi-authored works in five countries on three continents; the group included fluent speakers of five languages; and each of us had experience lecturing or teaching in universities in countries outside our own. We were trained in American Studies, literature, history, popular culture, and women’s studies. We brought our awareness of the culture of the academy in a range of national settings to our shared endeavor, as well as our contacts in different academic communities. Each of us moved in different overlapping intellectual circles, helping us cast a broad net for contributors and reviewers. Caroline Hong and Eric Martinsen, the founding managing editors, did a stellar job of recruiting global peer reviewers for the submissions, with members of the global advisory board pitching in on that effort as well. The editorial board reads every submission that passes peer review before it is published. During the last two years, we have expanded the team to include new associate managing editors and editors with broad-ranging expertise and cultural competencies, along with a deep interest in transnational topics and a commitment to collaboration.

In terms of interdisciplinarity, JTAS has featured work by contributors who teach in and/or were trained in African and Africa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Recognizing Transnational American Studies
• 1. Collaboration in Transnational American Studies
• PART I. Theorizing Transnational American Studies
• PART II. Culture and performance: Histories and reciprocities
• PART III. Translating texts and transnationalizing contexts
• PART IV. Political imaginaries and transnational images of the political
• PART V. Remapping geographies and genres
• Index