This is an interdisciplinary analysis of the interaction between today's globalisation and Americanisation. Transnationalism involves a loosening of boundaries, a deterritorialisation of the nation-state, and higher degrees of interconnectedness among cultures and peoples across the globe. As people make transnational voyages and live lives of flexible citizenship in two or more cultures, they adhere to a new type of nationalism that creates an exclusionist discourse and builds the Other as conservative defenders of cruder territorial loyalties. This transnational solidarity -- a new communitarianism beyond the loyalties to any one place or ethnic group -- threatens the old order with its conceptions that assimilation and integration will remake the foreigner into a particular national citizen. The authors address the complex issues of globalisation, American mythology, Christian proselytising, modern slavery, conspiracy theory, apocalyptic terrorism, Vietnam stories, international feminism, changing gender roles, resurgent regionalism and the changing definitions of place.

In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply frame the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of “America” functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. She develops her argument by focusing on South Asians in India and the United States. Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization. Through an analysis of Mattel’s sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered with financial means created by India’s market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh—a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In Transnational America Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood—and studied—as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.

The "melting pot" is one of the most cherished images in US culture, but does it really tell the whole story? Too often there is tension between the sense of American community and the demands of American diversity. The uniqueness of the many American ethnicities provides the roots of identity, yet recognizing those differences often makes Americans feel isolated from the whole. In this discussion, Everett Akam relies on the neglected tradition of cultural pluralism to argue that unity and individuality are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each is a vital source of American identity. He demonstrates that Americans need to acknowledge that they share much in common as Americans, while never forgetting that what sets them apart forms as great a part of who they are.

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice. In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the "transnational" and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico's border crossings to the intifada's contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Michael Jackson, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump. The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as the emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies.

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world's fairs as transnational sites of memory.

This book provides a new map of American literature in the global era, analyzing the multiple meanings of transnationalism.

As people migrate, they face the need to create a stable space within a disconcertingly unfamiliar environment. This experience of creating new spaces opens opportunities for positive transcultural connections; however, these opportunities can also serve as the disciplining of the migrant body. This text focuses on the movement of bodies in transnational communities and the formation of domestic and communal spaces that provide respite from migratory paths, negotiate transnational relationships, or establish a new home. In doing so, we explore literary texts that question, challenge, and deepen our understanding of the experience of migration through the use of space and place. The texts in question examine three levels of transnational spaces: intimate spaces such as family, personal growth, or sexuality; inherited spaces reflected in generational conflicts, religious identity, and inherited histories; and national spaces that look at issues of broader national identities. The texts we examine engage with transnational communities within the United States, and the ways in which narratives reimagine new space to negotiate change and create new norms. These narratives can sometimes bridge both cultures or can sometimes result in a violent sense of displacement. Each chapter problematizes a different aspect of transcultural adaptation, and the geographic ties of each community focus reflect the multicultural reality of the U.S., with connections to Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The field of American Jewish studies has recently trained its focus on the transnational dimensions of its subject, reflecting in more sustained ways than before about the theories and methods of this approach. Yet, much of the insight to be gained from seeing American Jewry as constitutively entangled in many ways with other Jewries has not yet been realized. Transnational American Jewish studies are still in their infancy. This issue of PaRDeS presents current research on the multiple entanglements of American with Central European, especially German-speaking Jewries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles reflect the wide range of topics that can benefit from a transnational understanding of the American Jewish experience as shaped by its foreign entanglements.

This wide-ranging collection brings together an eclectic group of scholars to reflect upon the transnational configurations of the field of American studies and how these have affected its localizations, epistemological perspectives, ecological imaginaries, and politics of translation. The volume elaborates on the causes of the transnational paradigm shift in American studies and describes the material changes that this new paradigm has effected during the past two decades. The contributors hail from a variety of postcolonial, transoceanic, hemispheric, and post-national positions and sensibilities, enabling them to theorize a "crossroads of cultures" explanation of transnational American studies that moves beyond the multicultural studies model. Offering a rich and rewarding mix of essays and case studies, this collection will satisfy a broad range of students and scholars.

Like many Jews of our generation, Jon Stratton grew up in a family more concerned about assimilation than about preserving Jewish tradition. While he could easily 'pass' among non-Jews, he found himself increasingly torn between his fear of not belonging and a deeply-felt commitment to his family's past. Coming Out Jewish examines the unique challenge of constructing an identity amid the clash between ethnicity and conformity. For many Jews, the idea of full assimilation ended with the Holocaust. But the pressure to adapt to the mainstream, Stratton eloquently argues, remains powerful, especially for those with anglicized names, assimilationist parents, a history of recent immigration, or ambivalent experiences of themselves as Jews. With reference to the work of Daniel Boyarin, Ien Ang, and Homi Bhabha, among others, Stratton offers fresh analysis on a wide range of topics, including the Jewish origins of pluralism in the US, anti-Semitism in Germany, the Jewishness of sitcoms like Seinfeld, and the Yiddishization of American culture since World War II. More than a book about Jews and Jewishness, Coming Out Jewish smartly and accurately mines the Jewish experience in the West to give voice to the issues of migration, Diaspora, assimilation and identity that affect those, displaced and 'othered', around the world.