Journal of Transnational American Studies

Issue introduction by the editor in chief of the Journal of Transnational American Studies

This essay reads Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite and its surrounding discourses as significant texts for reconsidering US imperialism in Asia without recentering the US and while creating space to consider an alternative Asian American critique. It analyzes Parasite’s representation of the haunting memories of the Korean War and the US as a figure of modernity by placing the film in longer histories of the development of the South Korean film industry in the 1950s, South Korea’s rapid industrialization, and US support of South Korean military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and the social movements that followed in the 1980s, protesting the unequal class structures. Borrowing Jodi Kim’s formulation of the Cold War as an epistemological project, I investigate how the shared lack of attention to the film’s representation of the Korean War in selected reviews gestures to complex US interventions in Asia. By examining the film’s representation of the history of the secret bunker and North Korean nuclear threat, I argue that these “Cold War’s ruins” productively foreground the protracted Korean War and US militarism in Asia. Building on Lisa Yoneyama’s transpacific critique, I suggest that these ruins of geohisorical violence elucidate the otherwise unrecognized transpacific entanglements.

For East European migrants, part of acculturating to the US was embracing a “white” frame of mind. This process was facilitated by the Slavic-language press, where African, Asian, and other colonized peoples were often covered in a condescending manner. Yet a counternarrative rejecting white privilege and championing colonized peoples was offered in Communist-affiliated newspapers. For leftist Slovaks, the newspaper Rovnosť ľudu unequivocally condemned American empire and European colonization of Africa and Asia. The paper was one of the few Slavic organs to denounce imperialism and champion anticolonial struggles. In the 1940s, a Polish leftist newspaper, Głos Ludowy, likewise consistently advocated an end to European and American colonialism. Although the Slovak paper was red-baited out of existence by the end of the 1940s, the Polish paper survived until 1979, and into the 1960s championed African and Asian independence movements from Kenya to Algeria to Rhodesia and condemned American adventures in Vietnam and other sites of US imperialism. These newspapers rejected a narrow focus on the immediate concerns of Slavic readers and instead consistently adopted an editorial policy with a transnational, anticolonial focus. The Communist immigrant newspapers indicate that, for a minority of Slavic American workers, solidarity with anticolonial struggles was possible across racial and international divides.

The wartime imprisonment of Nikkei on Indigenous lands has been recognized as having produced a double displacement under the auspices of American settler colonialism. Less clearly understood are the forms of postwar political awareness that this displacement provoked in Nikkei inmates, especially those who were children or teenagers at the time. One determining factor in our lack of understanding is the fact that mass incarceration, like the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples before, alongside, and after it, obliviated much of the historical record. However, while the fragmentation of memory, both individual and shared, has been a hallmark of Nikkei experience in the US, it also has been a spur to political action, even alliance. This article addresses efforts at unearthing the memory of imprisonment on Indigenous lands. Its aim is to begin accounting for the longer-term impacts of contact between groups that imprisonment generated. That contact matters, not only because it defies the white settler-colonialist narrative of the time, but also because it has begun to generate important, if nascent and complex, intergroup alliances.

The Marshall Plan is mostly remembered for its allegedly stimulating impact on the economic recovery of Western Europe following World War II. While scholars have questioned this aspect, the effects of soft power, however, cannot be overestimated for a young generation of Europeans. European complicity in producing, disseminating, and circulating iconic images helped to create the myth of the Marshall Plan, whose repercussions are still evident today. Renewed calls for new Marshall plans to solve major crises from COVID-19 to climate change and most recently the recovery of war-torn Ukraine abound. In the following article, I will take a close look at a special dimension of the Marshall Plan propaganda that has often been pushed to the margins: the visual grammar of animation films.

Examining six short, animated films aimed at young audiences in Germany, collectively called “Hugo at the Circus” by Toonder Studios, about the German caricature Hugo and his self-inflated ego, I will investigate these as interpictorial clusters in the sense theorized by Udo Hebel and propose that they are part of a grammar of graphics employed in the films that also is based on the rich corpus of visual sources of the Marshall Plan information campaigns between 1948 and 1952. Contrary to the assumption that Marshall Plan filmmakers in the European Recovery Project countries had a lot of freedom in framing their stories of inter-European collaboration, the case of the Hugo films shows how Americans intervened in and shaped the animation sequences created in Toonder’s Dutch animation studio. By uncovering the strategies behind the animation program and mapping the European-American imagery to educate West German audiences, this article will reveal the carefully constructed use of soft power across different media to exert influence on and redirect German self-interest towards transnational goals.

Introduction to curated selection of excerpts from new and recent work in the field of Transnational American Studies.

Introduction to Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement (Columbia University Press). 

© 2023 Columbia University Press. Used by permission of Columbia University Press. All Rights Reserved.

“Prologue” and “Addendum: A Martinez-Inspired Counterstory about the German Hamilton” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: Silenced Women’s Voices and Founding Mothers of Color: A Critical Race Theory Counterstory.

© 2023 Peter Lang GmbH. Used by permission of Peter Lang GmbH. All Rights Reserved.

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