This essay originally appeared in Representation and Decoration in a Postmodern Age, edited by Alfred Hornung and Rüdiger Kunow (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009), 65–96.

Günter H. Lenz’s important essay focuses on W. E. B. Du Bois’s education and experiences in Germany. Tracing Du Bois’s time in Germany, from his university years there (1892–1894) to his visits in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to his last stay in 1958 when he received an honorary doctorate in Berlin, Lenz’s analysis of Du Bois’s work indicates how political factors and social change in Germany influenced and transformed Du Bois’s interpretation of the US but also shifted the ground of Du Bois’s critique to the larger forces of global imperialism and colonialism. Moving from a study of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) through an analysis of the less popular Dark Princess (1928) and on to essays and books such as Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), Lenz develops an argument for reading Du Bois’s “radical cosmopolitanism” as “an open, trans (and post-)national, diasporic discourse that acknowledges and negotiates intercultural multiplicity, heterogeneous interests and positions, and hybrid publics.”

Excerpt from Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (2011), edited by Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, published by Dartmouth College Press in Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies. Used with permission. http://www.upne.com.

This piece, which is drawn from Günter Lenz's contribution to a new anthology volume on transnational American Studies, attempts to make sense of the “transnational turn” by contrasting it with what he refers to as “transcultural studies” and looking at how both are informed by cosmopolitanism.

The following set of essays consists of revised versions of contributions read at, or prepared for, a roundtable discussion at the 2009 convention of the American Studies Association in Washington, DC. The short contributions by the individual authors reflect on the boundaries, the perspectives, and the transdisciplinary dynamics of the field imaginary of transnational American Studies and the specific political role of new notions of citizenship and the parameters of a new cosmopolitanism beyond the limits of the Western tradition.