In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Ghosts of Transnational American Studies:A Response to the Presidential Address
  • Grace Kyungwon Hong (bio)

I imagine this response to Emory Elliott's presidential address as truly and literally a "response." In his address, Elliott poses a number of questions, both explicitly and implicitly, and I now take the opportunity to try to answer some of them myself. My thoughts will most likely intersect with Elliott's, but it is also my hope that I will have something of my own to offer. This seems to me the most fitting response to Elliott's address, because it is a reflection of how I understand the long arc of his career, which has been dedicated to encouraging and facilitating the work of younger scholars, particularly those of us working on race, gender, and sexuality. In innumerable ways, Elliott has helped to open up space for our ideas.

Elliott's explicit question in his presidential address is, "What does it mean when American studies is transnational?" But underlying this question are others: What is our responsibility when the most vividly felt version of American "transnationalism" currently takes the form of war, terror, and destruction? Is it possible to engage in American studies in a way that does not inadvertently replicate the terrible violences, past and present, that have turned the United States into, as Elliott writes, "the richest, most powerful, most wasteful, and most terrifying country in the world?" That is, Elliott rightly identifies arrogance as the affective form of contemporary U.S. imperialism, an arrogance based on the notion that the United States knows what's best for the rest of the world. How do we who are, after all, knowledge producers, avoid replicating this sense that we know best, that we know all?

Elliott's answer is to center ethnic studies, and in particular African American studies. Perhaps this is not so surprising. Elliott's impulse brings together the two most important avenues of inquiry in American studies of the past decade, pursuits that have reinvigorated American studies as a field: the careful attention to the importance of race as constitutive of foundational institutions of American society on the one hand and, on the other, the critique of a notion of the United States as a territorially bounded, internally coherent nation-state. While, [End Page 33] as Elliott observes, these two lines of inquiry sometimes have been posited as antagonistic to each other, in my view as in his, some of the most important work in American studies has been and is being produced at the intersection of these analytics. Many studies of race, in other words, have given us insight into the fact that race is, was, and has always has been, a transnationally organized category. As Elliott details, intellectuals, scholars, artists, and writers of color of all generations thought transnationally in order to fully comprehend the complexities of racialization and to fashion their antiracist politics. Following C. L. R. James, Roderick Ferguson has noted that African American studies from its inception had to have a transnational emphasis because its focus was a critique of the racial project of Western civilization, which was never limited to any one national culture.1 Indeed, Robin Kelley's definition of "transnational" as an approach that reveals "how tenuous boundaries, identities, and allegiances really are"2 gives us some insight into why the study of race must be in fact inherently "transnational." Kelley, who argues that African American historiography had a global vision from its inception, encourages us to define a "transnational" approach not merely as multinational but as an analytic or methodology that denaturalizes the forms of social, subjective, and political organization implied by the nation-state form. In that case, racialized histories of enslavement, genocide, forced migration, and labor exploitation are inherently transnational insofar as they give lie to the paradoxical American promises of, on the one hand, boundless assimilability and, on the other, territorial coherence and the boundedness of the nation-state. The sheer volume of recent scholarship referenced in Elliott's address attests to the urgency and generative potential of these intellectual questions.

Yet, as varied and as vibrant as the recent scholarship in transnational studies of race...

pdf

Share