Journal of Transnational American Studies (2025)

The Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies recognizes important work of social, political and cultural relevance for Americanists undertaken by scholars based outside the United States. We're honoured to present an excerpt from Vinh Nguyen’s profoundly contemporary Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience in the Fall 2024 issue ofJTAS that you can read here.

Find out more here

Find out more here.

How and under what circumstances doAsian ideas and bodies travel to and in the Americas? How are ideas and bodiesabstracted from one another and reified into American ideals of non/conformism,and what are the political stakes of restoring their relations?

Editors Bowen Du and Varun Rangaswamy’s JTAS Special Forum explores the transpacific and transimperial contexts in which Asian thought circulates. Watch this space for updates on the launch date. Archived CFP here.

JTAS Special Forum
Edited by Hsuan L. Hsu
and David J. Vázquez

This special forum on The Molecular Intimacies of Empire seeks to deepen intellectual connections between New Materialist scholarship (including in environmental humanities, Science and Technology Studies, and material feminism) and Transnational American Studies by attending to US neo/imperialism's reliance on racialized and uneven molecular intimacies. Essays by Suzanne Bost, Marcel Brousseau, Athia N. Choudhury, Amber Hickey, Rachel Lee, Zaynab Quadri, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Theresa Ventura, plus"The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez," by Hsuan L. Hsu and David J. Vázquez. Read the editors’ introduction here.

Table of Contents to download: here Jump to issue: here

New work in JTAS

We are proud to publish a new essay by Kevin K. Gaines, "Reflections on Ben Okri, Goenawan Mohamad, and the 2020 Global Uprisings," in a special section responding to the year of uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Gaines's essay is accompanied by commentary by Nigerian novelist and poet Ben Okri and Jakarta-based editor and writer Goenawan Mohamad. We are also pleased to present an excerpt courtesy of Rutgers University Press from the Shelley Fisher Fishkin 2020 Prize, this year awarded to Christopher B. Patterson of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Finally, as always, the journal is publishing original research by new and established scholars under the editorship of Alfred Hornung:

• Jonathan van Harmelen, "Lessons from a Different Shore: The Japanese American Incarceration and Redress Movement Portrayed in Western European Newspapers"
• Suzanne Enzerink, "Black Atlantic Currents: Mati Diop's Atlantique and the Field of Transnational American Studies"
• Gavin Wilk, "Hasty Departures: The Evacuation of European Citizens at the Outbreak of World War II"

We’re honored to present an excerpt from Refugee Lifeworlds by the late Y-Dang Troeung, recepient of the Fishkin Prize in 2023 forher book that places Cambodia in narratives of the Cold War in Asia, mappingthe entanglement via archives of institutional and familial memory. Forwardeditor Jennifer Reimer presents the work of Y-Dang Troeung’s and other new work in thefield by Markus Heide, Yu Tokunaga, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Brian K. Goodman, andKay Kaufman Shelemay. Exploring the relevance of Bob Dylan for our times,Reprise editor Brian Russell Roberts commissioned English translations of previouslypublished essays by Yoshiaki Sato, Heinrich Detering, and Ana C. Cara, alongsidetwo essays by Goenawan Mohamad. In our Special Forum on Diagnosing Migrant Experience, editors Mita Banerjee and Davina Höll present a collection ofessays that look at how a medical humanities approach can surface newperspectives on migrant lives and vice versa how listening with care to storiesof migration can deepen an intersectional understanding of health and illness. Newessays by Wilfried Raussert, Alfred Hornung, Davina Höll, Mita Banerjee, andHannah Zaves-Greene. The issue opens with an introduction by editor in chiefAlfred Hornung followed by three individual essays by Frank Kelderman, Cassio de Olivera, and Alexandra Glavanakova.

Dear Readers, we present a new issue for the New Year, with an introduction by Alfred Hornung (editor in chief) and featuring Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of Translations of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, a JTAS special forum edited by founding editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Ronald Jenn, HolgerKersten, and Selina Lai-Henderson, with contributions by Behnam M. Fomeshi, Ronald Jenn and Véronique Channaut, Hamada Kassam, Winston Kelley, Selina Lai-Henderson, Margarita Marinova, Vera Lúcia Ramos, Miguel Sanz Jiménez, Seema Sharma, and An-chi Wang. Forward Editor Jennifer A. Reimer and Reprise Editor Brian Russell Roberts bring you new work and selected important previously published work in Transational American Studies, in both cases framed to highlight the relevance for the contemporary moment, with essays, graphic short fiction, and poetry by Timothy James (TJ) Dimacali and John Raymond (JohnRay) Bumanglag, Annie Isabel Fukushima, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Mark McGurl, Timo Müller, Brian Russell Roberts, Silvia Schulteramandl, and Toyo Suyemoto.

JTAS is proud to include new work by Anndretta Lyle Wilson and Davorn Sisavath in the Winter 2019 issue, and, something very special, five new poems by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. For this 10th-anniversaryedition, we took the opportunity to honorLim, extraordinary lyric poet, principled activist, compelling scholar,educator, mentor, and JTAS founding editor. Editor-in-ChiefNina Morgan commissioned a Festschrift celebrating The Poetry andPoetics of Shirley Geok-lin Lim, edited by Mohammad A. Quayum, with wiseand wonderful essays by BOEYKim Cheng, JoanChiung-huei CHANG, Grace V. S. CHIN, Dennis HASKELL, Walter S.H. LIM, Pauline T. NEWTON, Andrew Hock Soon NG, and Tamara S. WAGNER.

JTAS congratulates Dr. Christopher Patterson, 2020 winner of the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies. Dr. Patterson, who teaches and researches transpacific discourses on literature, queer theory, race, and empire, is Assistant Professor at the Social Justice Institute of the University of British Columbia, Canada. We are excited to offer an excerpt of the awardwinning monograph, reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press. Read the excerpt here or visit Rutgers UP for details about the book.

JTAS congratulates JTAS editors Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi on the publication of Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies (April 2019) with new essays by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Paul Giles, Emron Esplin, Kevin Gaines, Elizabeth West, Takayuki Tatsumi, Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, Hsuan L. Hsu and Bryan Yazell, among others.

ISBN: 978-1-13-805890-3 Order here

Read an excerpt from The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (Stanford University Press, 2019) in our current Winter/Spring issue of JTAS.

"This landmark volume shines new light on the Chinese railroad workers and their place in cultural memory. The Chinese and the Iron Road illuminates more fully than ever before the interconnected economies of China and the US, how immigration across the Pacific changed both nations, the dynamics of the racism the workers encountered, the conditions under which they labored, and their role in shaping both the history of the railroad and the development of the American West."

Abstracts and Table of Contents here

Congratulations to MahshidMayar, who was awarded the Fishkin Prize for her monograph published by The University of North CarolinaPress, Citizens and Rulers of the World: TheAmerican Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. The International Committee of the ASA praised Mayar's work as “A thoroughgoing and creative critical analysis ofchildhood, empire, and space [that] not only offers insightsinto how childhood was figured in relation to U.S. imperial culture, and howchildren took up the 'cartographies in progress' surrounding them, but alsobears more widely on conceptual and methodological questions of space, culture,archive, and subjectivity. Informative, insightful, and beautifullywritten.” HonorableMention goes to Dario Fazzi for “Imperial Constraints: Labor and U.S. Military Bases inItaly, 1954-1979,” which was published in Diplomatic History, Volume45, Issue 3, 2021, and which “offers a rich micro-history of San Vito base, illuminatinghow diplomatic, military, and labor activity shaped the rise and decline ofU.S. military presence. The articleproperly traces the winding routes ofthe Italian local labor-U.S. military bases negotiational relationships,historicizing the impact of the economic and the diplomatic on therepresentation of the 'Yankee' in the local mind, particularly in SanVito dei Normanni and Martina Franca.Fazzi draws on a mix of evidence,including digital documents, to paint an enlivening portrait, the analysis ofwhich has wider implications for understanding the local forms ofcontestation–often around labor–across the US global military archipelago.”

We are excited that the latest issue of theJournal of Transnational American Studiesincludes work by David Bradley, novelist and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America,as well as by several historians such as Teishan A. Latner on the FBI asunwitting archivist of Cuba-solidarity activism, Westenley Alcenat on theunderstudied topic of African American emigration in the revolutionaryAtlantic, Greg Robinson on the soft power diplomacy of Eleanor Roosevelt, aswell as articles by Nir Evron on Israel’s past and future engagements withAmerica as concept and model of liberal thought, Eric D. Larson on how PuertoRican activists in Boston advanced the cause of independence for Puerto Ricowhile also lending the struggle in Puerto Rico an American slant, Begoña Simal-González on the aporiaof transnational American studies, José Liste-Noya’s exploration of the affiliationsbetween transnationalism and the transglobal imaginary found in the sciencefiction of Samuel R. Delany, a JTAS specialforum on American literature and globalization, as well as excerpts from recentbooks by Takayuki Tatsumi, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, AnaRaquel Minian, and others.

Call for Papers: Teaching and Theorizing American Studies Around the Globe

What would American Studies look like if the transnational rather than the national were at its center? Since Shelley Fisher Fishkin first challenged us with this question in 2004, scholars in the US and around the globe have redefined the field imaginary, object of study, and methodology of TAS. Transpacific Studies has theorized US empire-building, military intervention, and economic expansion as an extension of the conquest of the Americas but also promoted decolonization and advocated Indigenous epistemologies in the South Pacific and the Asia Pacific. It is time we shift our attention to how such critical articulations play out in our pedagogy and teaching practices around the globe. If American Studies was a Cold War product, how have US government-funded programs, centers, and journals worldwide impacted and continued to impact our teaching? How do we relate critical issues in American Studies such as race, gender, class, citizenship, migration and border-crossing to colleagues and students around the world?

Thank you to all who submitted proposals. Call now closed. Download CFP.