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

As the fields of inter-American studies, comparative literature, transnational studies, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies converge and interact, books like José David Saldívar’s Trans-Americanity have become increasingly useful to scholars interested in rethinking the Americas in terms beyond those of national frontiers. Saldívar locates such a revisionist project at the heart of his text, explaining in the preface that Trans-Americanity aims to facilitate a “move away from a nationalist American studies” to what he calls “an outernational comparative critical U.S. studies” (xxvi). To help accomplish that “outernational” repositioning—one that coordinates border studies, Chicano/a literature, U.S. literature, and the literatures of the Global South—Saldívar draws support from many well-known political and literary theorists such as (to name but a few of the most frequently cited) Immanuel Wallerstein, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Paul Gilroy, Anna Brickhouse, Partha Chatterjee, and Gayatri Spivak. In fact, it is from Wallerstein’s and Quijano’s concept of “Americanity,” glossed by Saldívar as the still politically and culturally determinative interpenetration of “coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the reification of scientific progress” in the Americas (xv), that Trans-Americanity derives its title, as Saldívar revises Wallerstein’s and Quijano’s specifically American hermeneutics into a global methodology (xvii). Saldívar sees that expansion, and the “stretching” of “the mainline (and traditional) comparative structures of ‘American Studies’” it entails (xxvii), as both “more promising and more politically urgent than the study of traditional field imaginaries such as comparative literature or comparative history” (xxvii).

Saldívar divides his timely book into seven chapters, bracketed on the one side by a preface and acknowledgments, and on the other by an interview with Mónica González García (the appendix), chapter notes, a bibliography, and an index. What connects or “entangles” the chapters (and it should be noted here, as Saldívar makes clear in the acknowledgments, that most of the book’s material has already been published, in whole or in part, elsewhere) is the way in which each “investigates the enabling conditions of narrative (novels, memoirs, narratives) by postcolonial, subaltern writers and the various ways in which their stories of global coloniality of power seek to create an epistemological ground on which coherent versions of the world may be produced” (xx). Chapter 1 networks the “pensamiento fronterizo (border thinking) in Chicano/a Studies” with South Asian literature through readings—anchored in Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the “coloniality of power”—of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Victor Martínez’s Parrot in the Oven, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Chapter 2, “Migratory Locations,” develops what Saldívar calls “the Martí differential” and explores how the remarkable chronicles collected in Escenas Norteamericanas (North American Scenes) position the Cuban writer “as one of the first proto–U.S. Latino anti-imperialist intellectuals” through their repeated contestations of “an emerging U.S. globalization of the world” (37, 55). Chapter 3 offers a contrapuntal reading of Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo’s Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave) and Theodore Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders in order to complicate, supplement, and overtly criticize the imperialist and exceptionalist narrative of the Spanish–American War of 1898 provided by the latter. The fourth chapter provides an insightful study of El Vez (Roberto López), the self-styled Mexican Elvis, and the ways in which his appropriations and reworkings of the King’s songs become a synecdoche for the “intense negotiations with identity that characterize the artists and writers from the U.S.–Mexican borderlands” (84).

In chapter 5, “Making U.S. Democracy Surreal,” Saldívar rehearses many of Trans-Americanity’s primary concerns through a careful and provocative reading of Lani Guinier’s and Gerald Torres’s The Miner’s Canary...