The Transnationalism of American Culture

Literature, Film, and Music

Rocío Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136172618
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural production, specifically literature, film, and music, examining how these serve as ways of perceiving the United States and American culture. The volume's engagement with the reality of transnationalism focuses on material examples that allow for an exploration of concrete manifestations of this phenomenon and trace its development within and outside the United States.

Contributors consider the ways in which artifacts or manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, inviting readers to examine the nature of the transnational turn by highlighting the cultural products that represent and produce it. Emphasis on literature, film, and music allows for nuanced perspectives on the way a global phenomenon is enacted in American texts within the U.S, also illustrating the commodification of American culture as these texts travel.

The volume therefore serves as a coherent examination of the critical and creative repercussions of transnationalism, and, by juxtaposing a discussion of creativity with critical paradigms, unveils how transnationalism has become one of the constitutive modes of cultural production in the 21st century.

1 Mapping American Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Transnational Perspectives¹

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

This chapter begins where I left offin the fall of 2004 when I gave my presidential address to the American Studies Association on the transnational turn in American studies. Although for much of the twentieth century we may have been able to consider ideas of the “domestic” and the “foreign” or the “national” and “international” as relatively separate and clearly defined entities, I noted that “the complexity of our field of study as we understand it today [ . . . ] requires that we pay as much attention to the ways in which ideas, people, culture, and capital have circulated and continue to circulate physically, and virtually, throughout the world, both in ways we might expect, and unpredictably.” The central question I explored was this: “What would the field of American studies look like if the transnational rather than the national were at its center?” I then gave an overview of the ways in which it was becoming just that for many scholars in the field. ²

During the last six years, the body of work coalescing around the broad rubric of “transnational American studies” has, indeed, become increasingly central to the field of American studies, flourishing in complex and multifaceted ways. This chapter will gesture to a small portion of the exciting research in transnational American studies that has appeared since 2004, suggesting some of the broad trajectories that it charts. I’ve found that this vast body of work tends to fall into four rough interrelated categories, around which I’ll organize my comments.

(1) I’ll call the first category broadening the frame, integrating U.S. history and literature into broader historical contexts and comparative frameworks and integrating multiple national histories and literatures with one another more fully.

(2) The second category involves work exploring the cross-fertilization of cultures, particularly the ways in which literature and popular culture from different locations influence and shape each other.

(3) The third category involves exploring previously neglected transnational dimensions of canonical figures not generally viewed in transnational contexts before.

(4) The fourth category involves renewed attention to travel and migration. It also involves renewed attention to how texts travel and what we learn about different cultures in the process. This latter category of work often involves recognizing the limitations of an English-only approach to American studies.

I can provide only the most cursory overview of this research, but I hope that my comments will spark readers to delve further, using the list of works cited as a preliminary roadmap on that journey.

Broadening the Frame

One of the best examples of a work that broadens our frame of reference is Thomas Bender’s 2006 book, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History. Bender notes, “In the interest of better preparing our youth for citizenship in a multicultural nation in a globalized world, most states now require schools to offer world history courses . . . [but] most world history courses do not include American history. Somehow the world is everything but us. America’s interconnections and interdependencies beyond its borders are rarely captured in these courses, and the revised curriculum reinforces the very split between American and the world that contemporary citizenship must overcome.”³ Bender wants to explode that split. He argues that his book “proposes to mark the end of American history as we have known it.” He goes on to explain that “‘end’ can mean both ‘purpose’ and ‘termination,’ and both of those meanings are necessary to introduce [his] themes.”⁴ He means

to draw attention to the end to which national histories, including American history, have been put. Histories are taught in schools and brought into public discourse to forge and sustain national identities, and they present the self-contained nation as the natural carrier of history. I believe this way of writing and teaching history has exhausted itself. We need a history that understands national history as itself being made in and by histories that are both larger and smaller than the nation. The nation is not freestanding and self-contained [ . . . ] Nineteenth-century nationalist ideology became embedded in the development of history as a discipline, but it obscures the actual experience of national societies and produces a narrow parochialism at a time when we need a wider cosmopolitanism. ⁵

Rather than writing American history in a vacuum, Bender integrates it with global history, looking at the American Civil War, for example, in the context of the revolutions of 1848, as part of global events in which a range of societies forged new meanings of nationhood with freedom; he similarly looks at the growth of the U.S. empire as one among many empires in the late 1800s, an age of imperialist ventures across the globe. “Thinking of the global dimensions of a national history,” Bender writes, “historians must step outside the national box—and return with new and richer explanations for national development.”⁶

I suggest that the project of probing “the global dimensions of a national history” is greatly enhanced by contributions of scholars with access to archives in multiple national sites. Take, for example, an article published in the summer of 2010 in a journal in Calcutta by Ranjan Chakrabarti of Jadavpur University, entitled “American Merchants, Bengali Banias and Trade in the Bay of Bengal, 1787–1819.”⁷ Chakrabarti mines both Bengali sources and the letters from Bengalis in the Brown University Archives to paint a picture of the key role that the Bengali brokers played in helping wealthy American merchants both manage their trade with the East Indies and obtain the ready credit that helped them build the fortunes with which they would do things like build the earliest cotton mills in New England and establish Brown University. He also notes the ways in which trade with American merchants changed Calcutta as much as it changed Providence, Rhode Island, adding “a new dimension” from Calcutta’s cultural and commercial milieu. He closes with a tantalizing point for future historians to explore. For the Americans who came to Calcutta and other parts of India during this period, Chakrabarti notes, the heady success of the American Revolution was still recent and fresh. He writes that “the revolutionary pamphlet had laid down in flashing phrases, the idea of anti-colonialism. While the British had pursued a policy of racial discrimination, the Americans by their presence had helped to disseminate the message of democracy.”⁸ According to Chakrabarti, historians have largely underestimated and ignored the importance and volume of American trade with India during this period. Thus, not only do they miss key interactions that shaped both countries economically and culturally, they may also miss the earliest implantation of seeds of democracy on Indian soil.

If Bengali sources helped Chakrabarti broaden the frame of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American history, Canadian and Latin American sources helped historian Greg Robinson broaden the frame of the mid-twentieth-century removal of Japanese Americans to internment camps across the West. In his critically acclaimed 2009 book A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America, Robinson analyzes the treatment of over 100,000 West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II in the context of the treatment of people of Japanese ancestry during this period in Canada, Mexico, Latin America, and Hawaii. His book tells the story, for example, of the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico’s Pacific Coast as well as the story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. An episode described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U.S. history takes on new complexity when viewed alongside not only the view from Hawaii, Mexico, and Latin America but also Canada’s confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. ⁹

Scholars in literature and cultural studies, as well as historians, have been broadening the frame, increasingly utilizing comparative frameworks to link multiple national literatures with one another more fully. More and more, for example, one finds scholars engaged in what is often called hemispheric literary studies—a project of contextualizing the literature of the United States with other literatures of the Americas. In 2006, for example, under the editorship of Caroline Levander and Robert Levine, an entire issue of the journal American Literary History was devoted to the subject of hemispheric literary history.¹⁰ The following year, a book was published entitled Hemispheric American Studies with the subtitle, Essays Beyond the Nation, also edited by Levander and Levine, which brought together scholars from Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African diaspora studies, and comparative literature to ask: “What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? [ . . . ][W]hat happens if the ‘fixed’ borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?”¹¹ Levander and Levine argue “key cultural figures” including Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, John Adams, Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Pauline Hopkins, and William Faulkner all “conceived of the U.S. within hemispheric as well as national frameworks.”¹² Whitman’s “The Spanish Element in our Nationality” for example, written in 1883, argues that the “composite American identity” that all Americans should celebrate depends on an ever-present, if too often invisible “Spanish character.”¹³ Levine and Levander suggest that the attention Whitman pays to “crossfiliations and composite national identities comprising ‘American identity’ puts [him] in direct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Perspectives on Transnational American Cultures
• 1. Mapping American Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Perspectives
• Part I: Broadening the Frame
• Part II: The Cross-Fertilization of Culture
• Part III: Exploring Transnational Dimensions of Canonical Writing
• Part IV: Narratives of Travel and Migration
• Contributors
• Index