Founded In    2008
Published   annually
Language(s)   Multilingual (all titles and abstracts must be in English)
     

Fields of Interest

 

Interdisciplinary American Studies including cultural studies, media studies and new media, literature, visual arts, performance studies, music, religion, history, politics, and law

     
ISSN   1940-0764
     
Affiliated Organization   UC Santa Barbara's American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and Stanford University's Program in American Studies
     
Editorial Board

Editorial Board

ERIKA DOSS, Special Forum Editor
University of Notre Dame (USA)

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN
Stanford University (USA)

KEVIN K. GAINES
University of Virginia (USA)

ALFRED HORNUNG
Johannes Gutenberg University (Germany)

HSUAN L. HSU
University of California, Davis (USA)

SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM
University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)

NINA MORGAN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Kennesaw State University (USA)

JENNIFER REIMER, Forward Editor
Oregon State University-Cascades (USA)

BRIAN RUSSELL ROBERTS, Reprise Editor
Brigham Young University (USA)

GREG ROBINSON
Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)

TAKAYUKI TATSUMI
Keio University (Japan)

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) encourages both established and emerging scholars to submit manuscripts throughout the year. Anyone may submit an original article to be considered for publication provided she or he owns the copyright to the work being submitted or is authorized by the copyright owner or owners to submit the article. Authors are the initial owners of the copyrights to their works (an exception might exist if the authors have, as a condition of employment, agreed to transfer copyright to their employer).

Submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, must follow the Chicago Manual of Style, and include an abstract (not to exceed 250 words). All manuscripts are submitted electronically, and we prefer DOC or RTF files (although PDF files are allowed if all fonts are embedded and they are created using Adobe’s PDF Distillerinstead of PDF Writer).

     
Mailing Address
     

Journal of Transnational American Studies
American Cultures and Global Contexts Center
Department of English / 2607 South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

E-mail address: jtas.editor@gmail.com
Phone number: (805) 893-8711
Fax number: (805) 893-4622

» Journal of Transnational American Studies newest issue out now (JTAS 9.1)

Important new work in transnational American studies by Westenley Alcenat, David Bradley, Elsa del Campo RamÍrez, Nir Evron, Claire Gullander-Drolet, Teishan A. Latner, Eric D. Larson, José Liste Noya, Lori Merish, Christen Mucher, Begoña Simal-González, Mandala White, Janet Zong York, with a Special Forum introduction by Begoña Simal-González and an editors’ introduction by Nina Morgan and Sabine Kim.

» Now out: JTAS’s Special Forum on La Floride française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World

This issue of JTAS’s Special Forum 2017 examines Florida in its interactions with France, Haiti, Spain, and the broader French-speaking world. The varied perspectives focus on the 1560s Franco-Spanish conflicts, the French colonial history, the impact of the Haitian Revolution, Quebecois snowbirds, and the Native American presence—enriching existing work on the French Atlantic (Marshall 2009) and offering ways to grasp the socio-cultural meanings of a disavowed French diaspora in the heart of the United States.

» Check out important new and forthcoming scholarship excerpted in JTAS’s Forward section

Forward collects important new work in transnational American studies and presents selected excerpts for JTAS readers. The latest issue features Vince Schleitwiler, Vaughn Rasberry, and Marco Mariano in English translation.

Journal of Transnational American Studies

The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) is a peer-reviewed online journal that seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary study of American cultures in a transnational context. JTAS is the first academic journal explicitly focused on what Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 American Studies Association presidential address called the “transnational turn” in American Studies.

JTAS functions as an open-access forum for Americanists in the global academic community, where scholars are increasingly interrogating borders both within and outside the nation and focusing instead on the multiple intersections and exchanges that flow across those borders. Moving beyond disciplinary and geographic boundaries that might confine the field of American Studies, JTAS is a new critical conduit that brings together innovative transnational work from diverse, but often disconnected, sites in the U.S. and abroad. In order to facilitate the broadest possible cultural conversation about transnational American Studies, the journal will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

JTAS brings together the vital contributions to transnational American Studies from scholars who focus on topics as diverse as cultural studies, media studies and new media, literature, visual arts, performance studies, music, religion, history, politics, and law, as well as scholarship that deals with ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and Stanford University’s Program in American Studies, JTAS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library.

 

» Visit Journal Web Site

Fall 2016, Volume 7, Number 1

The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) is a peer-reviewed online journal that seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary study of American cultures in a transnational context. JTAS is the first academic journal explicitly focused on what Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 American Studies Association presidential address called the “transnational turn” in American Studies.

JTAS functions as an open-access forum for Americanists in the global academic community, where scholars are increasingly interrogating borders both within and outside the nation and focusing instead on the multiple intersections and exchanges that flow across those borders. Moving beyond disciplinary and geographic boundaries that might confine the field of American Studies, JTAS is a new critical conduit that brings together innovative transnational work from diverse, but often disconnected, sites in the U.S. and abroad. In order to facilitate the broadest possible cultural conversation about transnational American Studies, the journal will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

JTAS brings together the vital contributions to transnational American Studies from scholars who focus on topics as diverse as cultural studies, film and new media, literature, visual arts, performance studies, music, religion, history, politics, and law, as well as scholarship that deals with ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class.

JTAS is sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and Stanford University’s Program in American Studies and supported by the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Studies Certificate Program.

JTAS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library.

Editor's Note A Community of Thought: Connecting with Transnational American Studies


Performing Transnational Arab American Womanhood: Rosemary Hakim, US Orientalism, and Cold War Diplomacy


The first Miss Lebanon-America, Rosemary Hakim, landed at Beirut Airport in July 1955 to start a public diplomacy tour. As an American beauty queen from Detroit visiting Lebanon, her parents' homeland, she was greeted enthusiastically by the local press and closely monitored by US government representatives. After her return to the States, she documented her experiences abroad in an unpublished memoir, entitled "Arabian Antipodes." However, this 1955 account does not just chronicle her travels. Hakim performs here her own approach to Arab American womanhood. In this essay Koegeler-Abdi contextualizes her narrative performance within the histories of American orientalism, the emerging Cold War, and ethnic beauty pageants to provide a better understanding of the specific intersection in these 1950s hegemonic discourses that framed and enabled her public agency. Her analysis then looks at how Hakim herself strategically cites these discourses in her self-fashioning to claim her own subject position as a white Arab and American woman during the 1950s. She argues that, while most Arab American authors at this time avoid a serious Arab ethnic affiliation, Rosemary Hakim already proudly uses a transnational sense of Arab Americanness to negotiate her own gender and ethnic identity. This is significant because we currently lack a broader historical understanding of Arab American women's public agency, particularly during the mid-twentieth century. Hakim's memoir requires us to rethink the history of Arab American women's strategies of self-representation in ways that acknowledge but are not confined within the terms of conventional orientalist discourses.

Reprise Editor's Note


Special Forum: Sweden and America (edited by Dag Blanck and Adam Hjorthén)


Forward Editor's Note


The Forward section of JTAS features excerpts from outstanding new and forthcoming works in American Studies with a transnational dimension. The current installment focuses on historically informed studies of transnational creativity. The authors of this section, who come from a range of fields, bring a wide variety of approaches to their study of the past. Through their explorations, they have not only discovered diverse unsuspected connections--between the Harlem Renaissance and Mexican popular culture, say, or Texas agriculture and Chicana poetry--but have thereby proposed tools for enriching research and teaching about United States history.

Interplanetary Border Imaginaries in Upside Down: Divisions and Connections in the American Continent


This paper provides a close analysis of Upside Down (dir. Juan Solanas, 2012), a science fiction film that presents two radically different portraits of two neighboring planets to metaphorically explore and negotiate the economic divide between the US and Latin America. The film focuses on the role of borders, legal provisions, and contact between humans in structuring interactions and movement between Latin America and the US. Gómez Muñoz employs Mark Shiel's geographic approach to film and pays special attention to characters' movements in the spaces that the film depicts. The first part of the paper focuses on boundaries and discrimination practices in the Americas. The second part considers exceptions to the limitations that borders try to impose in the film and examines the potential of transnational love in bridging differences and advancing understanding. Upside Down suggests that people infuse their images of borders and other nations with their own personal and local perceptions. Their transnational/trans-American relationships allow them to draw from different sources and bring disparate practices together for their own and their societies' benefit.

Transnational Post-Westerns in Irish Cinema


This article reviews the implications of two film categories developed in the last few decades (the transnational and post-Westerns) and applies them to two films produced in Ireland and usually not identified as such. After a review of the concepts of post-Westerns and transnationalism, two examples from Afghanistan (The Kite Runner) and Turkey (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) are provided to illustrate the proposed category. A review of the cultural implications of the West in Ireland follows, with examples from James Joyce's Dubliners and John Ford's film The Quiet Man. Finally, two Irish films (Into the West and Mickybo and Me) are analyzed. These films, like other transnational post-Westerns, make explicit references to American Westerns, establish a dialogue with the original film genre, question its values and assumptions, and, at the same time, probe into the national identities and conflicts of both Ireland and the US.

Towards a Worldly Post-9/11 American Novel: Transnational Disjunctures in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland


This paper traces possible responses to the mutations in US state power after 9/11 by analyzing the worldly and transnational gestures of the post-9/11 American novel. Irom maps how post-9/11 fiction speaks back to the state's hegemonic imaginaries through an analysis of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. Irom proceeds from the premise that in light of the nation's "geopolitically imperialist" ambitions, it becomes all the more crucial to delineate oppositional transnational practices that do not repeat the hegemonizing moves of the state that often operate under the semantic guise of the "transnational." While Netherland takes up the challenge of imagining worldliness through its various counternarratives -- the transnational history of cricket, the geospatial imaginary of Google Earth, and the protagonists Hans and Chuck -- the essay locates its reading between the osmotic spaces wherein the constituent elements of the transnational bear varying relations of resistance, conflict, and consonance with power structures. Irom argues that these disjunctures effect an unsettled and ambivalent series of counternarratives with unstable relations to power structures. In reading the disjunctures overdetermining Netherland's transnational entities and in locating the novel's aspirations towards a post-9/11 worldliness between the competing pulls of globe and nation, we come to a fuller comprehension of the ways in which nation-states still exercise a spectral fascination upon the imagination and how novels might more fruitfully gesture towards challenging such tenacious hegemonies.

"This Land Is Holy!" Intersections of Politics and Spirituality in Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter


This essay discusses the intersections of politics and spirituality during the Porfiriato era in Mexico, an oppressive period that initiated northward migration into the United States; specifically, Lopez examines Luis Alberto Urrea's 2005 novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter, which blends narrative, history, and biography. Merging a historical focus on the political impulses of northward migration with attention to spiritual and religious epistemologies, Urrea's narrative of "Teresita," a regional folk saint of northern Mexico, highlights a critical time that would significantly determine the intertwined futures of both nations. As the author brings Teresita and her community to life for readers, he simultaneously describes the Porfiriato era's relationship with US interests, the state's violent push towards modernization, and power struggles over indigenous land rights, all of which would eventually culminate in the Mexican Revolution and mass migration into the United States. Ultimately, Lopez argues that, in its narrative representation of political conflicts over land rights during the Porfiriato, The Hummingbird's Daughter functions as a form of witnessing to state violence and, further, highlights a complex, embodied spirituality through which indigenous and mestizo peoples responded to state violence with contestation and counterdiscourse. This essay highlights Urrea's work as a substantial contribution to the further development of Border Studies, Chicano/a Studies, and Transnational American Studies.

The Transnational Artists Yun-Fei Ji, Hung Liu, and Zhang Hongtu


Tijuana Transa: Transa as Metaphor and Theory on the US-Mexico Border


This essay explores the varied potential of "transa" as a new metaphor to describe the US-Mexico borderlands in the twenty-first century and the formal transactions used in the photo-textual essay Here Is Tijuana! (2006). Reimer identifies certain "transa techniques" in the book that connect reader-viewers to a practice of reading-viewing (both text and city) that contests North American and Mexican stereotypes depicting Tijuana (and the borderlands writ large) as a city of vice, illegality, poverty, or a cultural wasteland. What makes Here Is Tijuana! different from the many other texts produced about Tijuana (a large number of which are cited in the book itself) is the concept of transa. Reimer expands the authors' usage of the term to offer a theoretical-aesthetic intervention into the existing discourse, not only on Tijuana itself, but also on the US-Mexico border and cultural studies in general. Transa offers an alternative approach to encountering experimental cultural productions. Through transa techniques that include textual-visual collage, pastiche, juxtaposition, and sampling, Here Is Tijuana! documents and visualizes a series of geopolitical and cultural phenomena encountered in Tijuana, such as free trade, uneven urban development, border crossings and migration, labor struggles, and urban and traditional art practices. The book forces readers into its transas to offer new ways of "reading" or "seeing" the US-Mexico border (through Tijuana) that testify to its contradictory power to transgress -- and even to render obsolete -- national boundaries, while also heightening the perceived power and presence of states and cohesive national identities.

Feminist Novels in a "Non-Feminist" Age: Pearl S. Buck on Asian and American Women


Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck articulated a feminist sensibility in her best-selling novels and short stories from the 1930s to the 1960s about Asian and American women, showing both victimization and strength. This study demonstrates that Buck and her colleagues -- female reviewers, readers, and other authors -- in these non-feminist years not only helped keep a feminist perspective in the public eye but helped set the stage for the feminist revival of the 1960s. Moreover, Buck used her experiences growing up in China and her credibility in the US as an expert on Asia, not to bolster a sense of superiority among Americans with regard to others, but to show similarities in the social conditions of Asian and American women -- an outlook that Shaffer calls "critical internationalism." Moreover, as her career developed, Buck increasingly portrayed the strength of Asian women in their societies, even when relegated to the "private sphere." This essay explores what appears to be a paradoxical approach in Buck's fiction, that over time she maintained her critique of "separate spheres" in American society while she came to appreciate the potential for women of "separate spheres" in Asian societies.

Old Masters' Madonnas in "New World" Photographs: Instances and Impact of Interpictoriality in Lewis W. Hine's Photography


This article proposes to investigate the degree and manner in which American photographer Lewis W. Hine in his works of the early twentieth century drew on previous artworks originating outside the United States. Many of Lewis Hine's photographs, as the analysis of three selected case studies shows, make clear implicit and/or explicit interpictorial references. More specifically, the article focuses on the usage of the Madonna motif in selected Renaissance paintings, in photographs by nineteenth-century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and in photographs by Hine. In these pictures, taken in such diverse contexts as Ellis Island, New York City tenements, and post-World War I Europe, Hine ventures beyond the representation of his actual photographic subjects, women and children, thereby expanding his photographic repertoire as well as the pictures' meanings: by referring more or less overtly to other artworks and art forms, Hine adds not only to the appeal, the implications, and thus the effectiveness of his pictures (in the context of social documentary), he also redefines and repositions himself as a photographer between the two presumably opposite poles of social documentary and art photography.

Other Issues

JTAS 9.1, Vol. 9, No. 1
Fall 2017, Volume 8, No. 1
March 2015 , Volume 6, Issue 1
Journal of Transnational American Studies, Volume 3, Number 1
Journal of Transnational American Studies: 2.1, Volume 2, Number 1
Inaugural Issue: Journal of Transnational American Studies, Volume 1, Number 1