Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico by José David Saldívar (review)

American Studies scholar José David Saldívar has long chased culture across national boundaries. In Border Matters (1997), he tackled the Southwestern U.S. Mexico border region, and in Trans-Americanity he highlights the larger stage of the Hemispheric Americas. Saldívar draws heavily from Anibal Quijano's and Immanuel Wallerstein's 1992 essay "Americanity as a Concept," in which the authors describe New World colonization as the "constitutive act" of modernity, since so many of our conceptions of ethnicity, race, nation, labor, and economic development were forged in this "American crucible," only to be exported globally (549, 552). Just as Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic traced cultural routes between the Americas, Africa, and Europe, Saldívar builds on previous scholarship to map the Americas as an important cultural terrain. What might happen, Saldívar asks, if we read ethnic/regional U.S. writers like Sandra Cisneros and "postcolonial" writers like India's Arundhati Roy alongside each other as fellow subaltern voices conditioned within a capitalist modernity predicated on the divisions and hierarchies enabled by Americanity?

At a time when U.S. presidential "foreign policy" debaters fail to mention Mexico (let alone Europe or Africa), Saldívar's "outernational" American Studies is especially timely. He dismantles inward-looking readings of the U.S. as an exceptional and non-imperialist nation, and thus as an unambiguous beacon of light toward the world. Rather, for Saldívar the Americas were built on a racialized division of labor that still echoes today. In response to this catastrophic history of colonialism, he considers Quijano's and Wallerstein's utopian claim that a future politics might be found in the subaltern modernity produced in the Americas—specifically, in a new synthesis of the Enlightenment's liberal ideals and a broadly indigenous framework of "reciprocity" and "social solidarity" (Quijano and Wallerstein 557). Saldívar, then, attempts to situate the local "small voice of history" within the global metanarrative of commodity flows, and to bridge ethnic identity with global subaltern solidarity (xviii). In search of a "critical and comparative cosmopolitanism from below," (30) he looks to Chicano/a artists, to Toni Morrison and José Martí, and to political figures like Mexico's Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and Bolivia's Evo Morales.

Trans-Americanity is not an exhaustive study, but an initial gambit that might ideally generate new scholarship elsewhere. When it comes to close reading, Saldívar is capable of great insight; he powerfully suggests that authors like Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Victor Martínez are not merely ethnic or regional U.S. curiosities, but figures of global significance. Early on, he deftly connects Anzaldúa's reformulation of hegemonic frontier thinking, Martínez's vernacular barrio poetics, and Roy's challenge to the postcolonial Indian kinship system. This chapter fulfills the book's promise as an urgent search to "re-examine who counts in our cultures and societies" (29). Later, Saldívar convincingly reads Cisneros as both a playful deconstructionist and a spiritual prophet of social revitalization, and achieves a depth that makes up for the unfocused treatment of magical realism in Chapter 5. Finally, in chapters on Jose Martí and the Spanish-American War, Saldívar successfully argues that foreign policy is not always so foreign: that a Cuban expatriate in 19th century New York might have more insight into the U.S. than a French Aristocrat like Alexis de Tocqueville, and that Theodore Roosevelt's arrogant blindness to the agency of black soldiers (both U.S. and Cuban) might have been tragically repeated in Lyndon Johnson's underestimation of North Vietnamese fighters in a later colonial war.

Occasionally, Saldívar's broad scope results in shallow readings based on a too-simple binary of Anglo-U.S. dominance and global anticolonial resistance. In highlighting Américo Paredes's sojourn in Japan, Saldívar fails to engage complications in the great Texas writer's sympathy for...