This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural production, specifically literature, film, and music, examining how these serve as ways of perceiving the United States and American culture. The volume’s engagement with the reality of transnationalism focuses on material examples that allow for an exploration of concrete manifestations of this phenomenon and trace its development within and outside the United States.
Contributors consider the ways in which artifacts or manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, inviting readers to examine the nature of the transnational turn by highlighting the cultural products that represent and produce it. Emphasis on literature, film, and music allows for nuanced perspectives on the way a global phenomenon is enacted in American texts within the U.S, also illustrating the commodification of American culture as these texts travel.
The volume therefore serves as a coherent examination of the critical and creative repercussions of transnationalism, and, by juxtaposing a discussion of creativity with critical paradigms, unveils how transnationalism has become one of the constitutive modes of cultural production in the 21st century.
Contents
Introduction: Perspectives on Transnational American Cultures Rocío G. Davis 1. Mapping American Studies in the 21st Century: Transnational Perspectives Shelley Fisher Fishkin Part 1: Broadening the Frame 2. Transnational Spaces and Black American Identities in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark Jopi Nyman 3. Remembering What to Forget: Memory as Transnational Practice in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy Silvia Schultermandl 4. Transnational and Transcultural Exchanges in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books Pin-chia Feng Part 2: The Cross-Fertilization of Culture 5. "I used to like gangsters and newspaper films, but I’m not so sure now:" The Hollywood Dreams of Jessie Matd the British Film Industry James Stone 6. Post-Communist American Dreams in Romanian Music Ioana Luca 7. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan Revisited: Musical "Authenticity" and Transnational Adaptations of Country and Folk Music Monika Mueller Part 3: Exploring Transnational Dimensions of Canonical Writing 8. "I just want to go home:" Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama and Disturbed American Transnationalism Alison Lutton 9. "Vagabond Internationalism:" The Transnational Life and Literature of Claude McKay Bairbre Walsh 10. Multiculturalism with Transnationalism: Food Scenes as Contact Zones Samir Dayal Part 4: Narratives of Travel and Migration 11. Intersecting Atlantic Trajectories in Junot Diaz’s and Edwidge Danticat’s Stories Ana Mª Manzanas 12. Spheres of Influence in Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation: the Classroom, the Blog, and the Ethnic Story Monica Chiu 13. Hospitality across the Atlantic: American Guests and the International Space of Flows in Spielberg’...
