The Lures and Snares of “The Transnational”
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The three books under review articulate a pivotal moment in the trajectory of area and ethnic studies. Foremost, they offer “roots and routes,” to borrow José David Saldívar’s phrase, out of the parochialism of American studies, the hegemonic orientation that dominates Latin American studies, and the invisibility that occurs with the disavowal of US Latinos and Latino studies. Each book exposes and expands the boundaries of disciplinary, nationalist, colonial, and Eurocentric thinking, and although orienting from different vantage points, makes the same call for new “field-imaginaries of Latin American studies, American studies, or US Latino/a studies [that] cannot be reduced to a single, monotopical paradigm …, arguing for a unit of analysis that is greater than that of the nation-state today” (Saldívar xv). Taking critical aim at US and Latin American intellectuals, Saldívar, John Beverley, and Arlene Dávila advance a trans-Americanism that engages with the new social and political forms that aim to ameliorate inequality and human suffering. That is, they do not simply ask, what would a trans-Americanism look like? They want to know what it could do.
Embedded in these questions for a new field-imaginary are the anxieties of American studies, especially those that have circulated since the anti-exception-alist paradigm rose to authority in the discipline. The new field these authors seek is more than the invention of democratic area studies. Indeed, what drives [End Page 429] this review is the ways in which the three authors independently propose a new field that rejects the comparative model, which has continued to foster a hegemonic paradigm by consistently operating through a developmental or Eurocentric lens to understand difference. Because I wish to foreground how these works are in conversation around trans-Americanism or trans-Americanity and the potential for new intellectual and political practices, I offer admittedly truncated summaries of their claims, regrettably shortchanging some chapters.
Americanity Otherwise
Trans-Americanity is driven by the questions posed at the opening of chapter 4: How can we begin suturing a new set of contingent relationships to democratize an emerging trans-American studies? How can we begin mapping out space that situates the Américas in our age of globalization as a cohesive but complexly differentiated space? (75). Saldívar conceptualizes this planetary study through the political economy that emerges from colonialization, global capitalism, and neoliberalism. Trans-Americanity’s seven chapters, useful preface, and experimental ending offer broad intellectual coverage of Latin America, South Asia, and the Americas from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The proposed field is therefore situated in Aníbal Quijano’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s notion of “coloniality of power,” but for Saldívar it extends beyond the Rio Grande (xiv). I comment on his middle chapters to illuminate the proposed trans-Americanity and its significance for ethnic and area studies.
Chapter 3, “Looking Awry at the War of 1898,” is one of the most illuminating chapters because it performs precisely what is proposed by trans-Americanity. Here Saldívar reads Theodore Roosevelt’s memoir The Rough Rider “against the grain” of Biografía de un Cimarrón, a Cuban novella testimonial by Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo, to show how American exceptionalism cannot account for insurgent Cuban mambises in defeating Spain’s imperial army (xxii). Tracking back to the United States but as part of Greater Mexico, Saldívar turns to Jorge Mariscal’s anthology of Chicano experiences of the Vietnam War to illustrate how activists and veterans within the US Empire critically respond to imperial wars. This coupling of texts across the Américas challenges how we think about 1898...
