Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies

Introduction: Re-mapping the Transnational Turn

donald e. pease introduction: re-mapping the transnational turn the “transnational turn” in American studies has effected the most significant reimagining of the field of American studies since its inception. It has been either the explicit topic or the subtext of the last seven presidential addresses at the American Studies Association, the basis for innumerable conferences , and the term responsible for the founding of several new journals and book series. “America” remains the commonly accepted self-representation in American studies associations. But the term “transnational” has replaced “multicultural,” “postcolonial,” and “postnational” as the most frequently invoked qualifier. In acquiring this status, the “transnational” has exercised a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spatial and temporal orientations to the object of study— including multicultural American studies, borderlands critique, postcolonial American studies, and the more general turn to American cultural studies— within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge. Transnational perspectives have changed the way Americanist scholars imagine their relationship to their work, their objects of study, and their disciplinary protocols, as well as the field in which they conduct their research . This volume is the outcome of a transatlantic conversation on the topic “Transnational America” that was conducted over a three-year period from 2007 to 2009, in which more than sixty scholars from universities in the United States and Germany gathered to assess the historical significance of and examine the academic prospects for the transnational turn in American studies. The German and United States scholars contributing to this volume have published work within each of the newly transnationalized disciplinary formations. Three international conferences were held between October 2006 and October 2009 at the University of Southern California (2006), at the Free University, Potsdam University, and Humboldt University in Berlin (2008), and at Dartmouth College (2009). With support from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, Dartmouth College, and the University of Southern [2] Introduction California, scholars from Germany and the United States presented position papers on the impact of transnational perspectives on American studies. Distributed in advance of the conference meetings, these papers were briefly summarized and elaborated during the actual conference, followed by extensive discussion and debate. The meetings took place at the conjunctural moment in which Germany and the United States were determining their individual and joint relationship with drastically reorganized global and economic processes. The transatlantic dialogues began in the shadow of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror and concluded in the wake of the collapse of the financial markets, Barack Obama’s assumption of the American presidency, and Angela Merkel’s pronouncement that multiculturalism was a failed social experiment in Germany. German American studies scholars conducted their scholarly work within the European nation that was most perhaps the most exposed to the structures of knowledge that U.S. American studies instituted in the aftermath of the Second World War. Throughout the Cold War, German scholars and policy makers resorted to an American reference both as a model and a countermodel to debate the role of the state and the rule of law, immigration policies and migrant populations, the underclass and the welfare state, as well as questions of racism, feminism, and gay rights. German American studies scholars experienced the transnational turn in an event, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that drastically undermined the bipolar relationship between the domestic and the international that Cold War dynamics had installed. After the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the U.S. State Department began to withdraw funding from the German American studies programs instituted during the Cold War. As a consequence of these and other factors, the German contributors to this volume harbored strong academic stakes in conceptualizing the transnational turn. The convoking members of the transatlantic project included a cadre of senior Americanists—Winfried Fluck and Ulla Haselstein, the co-directors of the John F. Kennedy Institute in North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin; Rüdiger Kunow, the chair of the American Studies Program of Potsdam University; Günter Lenz, former chair of American studies at Humboldt University; John Carlos Rowe, the chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Southern California; and Donald Pease, founding director of Dartmouth’s Futures of American Studies Institute— had been involved in ongoing dialogues about the problems and prospects of the new field. Those conversations led to contradictory accounts of the import and purpose of transnational American studies. Did the newly configured field foster...