Re-examining English and/in the Geography of (World) Literature

Three different areas of contemporary modernity in literature in the anglophone sphere are thoughtfully and challengingly explored in these three remarkable volumes. While these books differ in their goals and (theoretical) perspectives, each in a distinctive way is an invaluable contribution in the respective fields—American Studies, Contemporary American Poetry, Translation Studies, and English Literature. They explore three dimensions in which contemporary literary studies in English either in Great Britain, in the United States, or in other regions of the world develop today. In this respect, they embody concise, multidirectional, and thought-provoking perspectives regarding the wide map of contemporary American and English Studies while satisfying the interests of a broad range of academics and students who work in these fields.

American Studies as Transnational Practice is a volume derived from the 2010 Texas Tech University symposium "American Studies as Transnational Practices". Through fourteen excellent essays divided into four sections—"Transnational Practices: Outside/Inside American Studies"; "Deep Maps, Postracial Imaginaries, Diasporized Networks, and Other Transnational Literary Assemblages"; "Remapping the Transpacific Turn: From the Black Pacific and Oceanic Eco-Poetics to Antipodean Transnationalism"; "Decolonizing the Geopolitics of Knowledge for the Pacific Century";—written by leading and rising scholars in the field of American Studies, this volume addresses the concept of transnational(ism) in the context of American Studies and underlines the fact that the transpacific is a direction where this field of studies might well find its renewal and future perspective. The essays elaborate on the phenomenon of the crossroads of culture, which is at the heart of the transnational paradigm in American Studies. Analysis on American power and its cultural sources, on the challenges represented today by the concepts of imperialism, (de) colonization, cosmopolitics, diaspora, planetary consciousness, memory, history, transpacific, nation, state, neocitizen, indigeneity, migration, colonial modernity, and so on, represent part of the great input of this edition. The other two books addressed in this review also elaborate on some of these concepts—imperialism, (de)colonization, diaspora, nation, transnational(ism), migration, and so on—but also add to this very significant network of phenomena: bi and multilingualism, translation, place making, and so on. The editors of American Studies maintain that Asia and the Pacific–with the immense expanse and the complexity of their borders have played an important role in the construction of the U.S. imperial state and the United States too has a crucial role in the macropolitical restructuring of the region (3). Thus, further elaboration of this viewpoint is found throughout the essays of the book based on various perspectives such as the postcolonial, the postnational, the transoceanic and so on. These essays provide conceptual categories and modes of analysis for a wide range of transnational studies (8).

Essays in the second section of the book focus on literature and try to interpret, archive, and categorize the literary formations of the twenty-first century (25). The transnational turn in American Studies is seen as an opportunity to collect and interpret contributions to American literature written in languages other than English, which would help us read in transnational perspective many American writers—Mark Twain in this given case who is one of America's first truly cosmopolitan writers (109). This would encourage further research in a multilingual, transnational, and comparative perspective (110). Since American literature is originally written also in Spanish, in French, Chinese, Yiddish, and so forth, a transnational perspective would draw the scholars' attention to "the ways in which other languages have inflected the timbres and tones of American literature written in English" (109).

In another contribution of the book, the United States is seen as a plurinational state that necessarily includes transnational formations...