Journal of Transnational American Studies

Introduction to the issue by the journal's editor in chief.

Vinh Nguyen is the recipient of the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for 2024 for his monograph Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience (University of California Press, 2023). "Resentment" is an excerpt that the Journal of Transnational American Studies is honored to include here. Awarded for excellent publications that present original research in transnational American studies, the prize honors Shelly Fisher Fishkin’s outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world.

Migrant cultures of consumption mostly exist as anomalies within the neoliberal food system of America, which functions through the superfluity of mass-produced, branded food and through the systemic obscurity of migrant microcultural flavors. The play of presences and absences of specific tastes has sociocultural implications in embodying the migrant as “minority.” Taking up specific instances of gustatory transactions between South Asians and Americans, this essay will examine the gastro-politics of migrant South Asian identity in America, and the issues of discrimination and racism that are revealed in such transactions.

This essay builds a close-reading analysis of the television series Undone, whose treatment of race and disability suggests a framework that I call a “Mad migrant imaginary.” This imaginary is comparative and considers the racial, colonial, linguistic, and political environments in which ableism is situated. In doing so, such a framework considers colonial antecedents to the US nation-state which is simultaneously a site of struggle for accommodation of people with disabilities, while also problematizing the state’s centrality as a settler formation in disability analysis. My general claim is that without centering the racial–colonial, a disability analysis risks propounding the effects of the colonial and its inherent disabling effects. I also seek to attend to the ways that disability—which analytically tracks the distribution of vulnerability across difference—is vital for a comparative racial analysis of dispossession. I want to make it clear that disability analysis benefits greatly from racial analysis and that disability stands to enrich a critique of racism. I avoid positioning disability as a transcendent mode of difference which phases out race by implicitly assuming its parochial status for understanding the body and its differences. Instead, I suggest that attending to the generalized imposition of disablement across communities explicitly engages with the ways that race is a logic that rationalizes, promotes, and politically sanctions disablement as itself the prominent experience of being racialized partly as a function of access to citizenship, freedom of movement in the form of migration, and language sovereignty.

This article maps the American reception and erasure of the Icelandic novelist and Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness, revealing a complex transnational literary and political conflict rooted in Cold War tensions between Iceland and the US. After World War II, the American military outpost in Iceland became a site of contact and contestation in the newly independent nation. During the 1940s and 50s, Laxness was at the center of this discourse as he critiqued Iceland’s move toward a military alliance with the US and its entry into NATO. This article offers a bilateral reading of this controversy, examining Laxness’s political essays and his prescient novel The Atom Station (1948) in dialogue with American newspapers and declassified government documents. Recovering the story of Laxness’s literary suppression and his scrutiny by the American government provides new insights into Cold War cultural containment with implications that extend beyond the writer himself, expanding the study of anti-Communist repression and foregrounding a lesser-known site of literary resistance to the rising American military-industrial complex.

This introduction reflects on the place of dates and calendrical time in transnational American studies and contemplates relevant insights offered by four readings.

In “What’s in a Date? Temporalities of Early American Literature,” Sandra M. Gustafson considers the interpretive and pedagogical considerations involved in dividing American literary history at four different points: 1789, 1800, 1820, and 1830. Each date corresponds to certain conventions and resources in the field, and they produce different and sometimes conflicting literary historical narratives. Gustafson also reflects on topics including transnationalism and multilingualism emerging in the field.

Best known for “Notes on Camp” and “On Photography,” the writer and critic Susan Sontag also spoke out vehemently against US imperialism in Vietnam. During the late 1960s, she not only spoke and wrote against the War—at least once, she was accompanied in her acts of protest by an antiwar Green Beret, at other times, by like-minded poets, artists, and writers—she also traveled to Hanoi to meet face to face with the revolutionary forces of North Vietnam. Her essay, “Trip to Hanoi,” declares that “radical Americans profited from the war in Vietnam [which gave them] a clear-cut moral issue on which to mobilize discontent and expose the camouflaged contradictions in the system.” Once in Hanoi as a war witness, Sontag became disturbed by the mismatch between her intellectual position of solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution and her shocking inability to develop an emotional connection to the Vietnamese people themselves. Seeking to explain and resolve this gap, she focused inward. Her Hanoi essay leaves out precisely those details about the external world that other travel writers tried to emphasize. Sontag’s turn toward self-reflection in Vietnam comprised a subtle yet powerful alternative method of analyzing and interpreting US imperialism that served her well decades later when, in a special issue of The New Yorker, she denounced the Bush Administration’s war-mongering response to the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center.

The science of dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, provides archaeologists with the most accurate, precise, and therefore reliable dates available to guide their analyses. In the 1920s through 1940s, dendroarchaeology research on “tree-time”  forced archaeologists to radically revise their understanding of the prehistoric past. However, the history of archaeological tree-ring dating has until now been woefully inadequate. This chapter is excerpted from Time, Trees, and Prehistory: Tree-Ring Dating and the Development of North American Archaeology, 1914-1950, a work that examines the impact of dendroarchaeologists’ work on the interpretation of North American prehistory and contextualizes archaeological practices from that period, demonstrating that archaeologists of this era were more analytically sophisticated than they are often given credit for, as they established the basis for revolutionary developments in archaeological theory and method for the next three decades.

A historical play that moves between Barbados and England, African theatrical practices and Caribbean performance traditions, Voodoo: A Drama in Four Acts offers a glimpse into the understudied oeuvre of an important but neglected figure of Black internationalism, Henry Francis Downing (1846–1928).

During a period conventionally viewed as an expansion of American soft power aided by the rise of global capitalism, historian Oz Frankel reevaluates the US influence on Israeli society through the lens of transcultural exchange, tracing the adoption and reshaping of the Black Panther movement in Israeli society, where it was embraced not only by the Left but also by reactionary voices, ultimately underscoring that it was not so much or not only Israelis who became americanized but also American culture and politics that came into the orbit of Israeli-American transculturation.

The history of modernism changes when viewed not only as a transformative exchange across various borders including geographic ones but also as the transculturation of methodologies and ways of doing and making. Art historian Robin Schuldenfrei turns to the objects to tell this new history, reflecting on the conditions of exile that created lacunae but also opened up new material possibilities and launched new practices in architecture, art, and design.