Introduction

Abstract

This special issue aims to formulate a 'worlded' version of American Studies to deal with emergent complexities of Asia/Pacific as well as North–South trans-Americas flows and imbalances characterizing today's empire of neo-liberal globalization. Scholars of this sublimated new world order face a strange and uneven moment of international globalization-cum-decolonialization. Disciplinary critique and field transformation are urgently needed. This issue would help forge a 'cross-roads' vision of US area studies refracting North/South and East/West transactions, theorizing comparative discrepancies, trans-oceanic linkages, and a cultural studies refiguring of the transnational field-imaginary.     

Resisting terror,resisting empire The evolving ethos of American Studies

Abstract

The internationalization of American Studies is a reflection of its evolution from provincialism into a new regionalism. This raises the question of coping with the transnational while problematizing the national, thus landing American Studies in the welter of globalization both as a process and as a discourse. The global engagements of the US have produced global anti-Americanism. Terror in conjunction with globalization appears to have subsumed all other discourses in our times. To pursue American Studies in an environment of terror becomes more complicated by the fact that America itself is perceived by many as a source of global terrorism, evoking the chimera of the return of empire as envisaged in the recent work of Hardt and Negri. Resistance to the global reach of the American Empire and a global percolation of terror appear to be the two most crucial intellectual concerns of American Studies at the moment.     

The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Response to Peak Oil

ABSTRACT

After the two-fold crises of the liberal world order in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the debacle of the Global War on Terror and the global financial crisis around 2008, we are witnessing a combined crisis of US hegemony and the transnational moment, along with the explosion of populism across the Atlantic world. In this context, this research not only analyses how the United States has designed and maintained the liberal interstate order and globalization but also the way the hegemon proactively starts to destroy its cross-national project today. Therefore, I aim to fathom the future of globalization by interrogating the current US state's key strategies that express America's changing national identity and self-role conception under shifting structural imperatives from unipolarity to the emerging multipolar world.     

Negotiating race and place in the Garifuna Diaspora: Identity formation and transnational grassroots politics in New York City and Honduras

This paper is an exploration of the relations between the politics of identity and the socio‐economic and political processes of the current era of globalization. Using ethnographic material from the transnational grassroots organizations of the Garinagu—an Afro‐Indigenous population living in transnational communities between Central America and the US—I show the multiple ways that they articulate their identity between and among the tropes of “autocthony,” “blackness,” “Hispanic,” “diaspora,” and “nation.” This construction and negotiation of identity is intimately connected to the negotiation of rights vis‐à‐vis nation‐states and international political bodies, where ideologies of race, ethnicity, nation, and citizenship carry with them different implications for rights and belonging. I argue that the complexities of this case point to the uneven processes of globalization, within which the power to define the ideological terrain of economic and political struggles is still profoundly unequal.     

'Re-cognition' of the borderlines of German-American authorship The case of Friedrich Gerstäcker

Abstract

Focusing on the literary life of Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–72), this article attempts to (re-)negotiate the range of 'German-American' authorship in the light of new, transnational views of hyphenated literatures. In the process, it reexamines several of Gerstäcker's best known texts with an eye to their potential hybridity and transnational nature, resulting from the influence of, notably, James F. Cooper and William G. Simms. Gerstäcker, who had read Cooper before he emigrated to the USA, adapted the mode, style and tone of US adventure tales for German purposes – he might even be seen as writing 'American' novels and stories in Germany. This transnational format and the reception of Gerstäcker's works, in both languages and in Germany as well as the USA, make him a special literary figure that transgresses traditional conventions.     

Index of Volume 4, 2002

This article links a theoretical debate within poststructural feminisms – whether feminist politics can be pursued without hegemonic representations of women and gender – to the practice of transnational feminist organizing in the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban in 2001. It goes beyond the traditional analysis of ‘adding’ gender to a mega world conference and asks the critical question of what

gender signifies in this instance of UN politics. The article argues that feminists’ strategic use of the concept of ‘gender as intersectionality’ marks a paradigm shift from the predominant monolithic representation of gender as women, being equal to or different from men, in international human rights frameworks. It puts the issue of diversity among women at the forefront of the intergovernmental WCAR. Far from entailing an abandonment of feminist politics, as some poststructuralist feminists have suggested, it is argued that opening up ‘gender’ for unlimited signification in

the case of WCAR marks the beginning of a new phase of transnational feminist mobilization.     

Rural Women Knowing All: Globalization and Rural Women's Organizing in China

Rural women in China are located on the periphery of that country's processes of globalization and modernization. They also, in the 1990s, acquired a voice of their own through the magazine Rural Women Knowing All. This magazine, founded through the intersection of Chinese and transnational feminisms, provided rural women with connections, knowledge and a venue for their own aspirations. Through examining the dichotomies presented by urbanization, the ‘global economy’, ‘culture’ and education, and activism and organizing, this article discusses the ways that Rural Women Knowing All transformed the meanings of globalization for contemporary Chinese rural women, and in the process granted them agency to shape rural identities and existences in alternative ways.     

Globalization,spectral aesthetics and the global soul Tracking some 'uncanny' paths to trans-Pacific globalization

Abstract

The intensification of neo-liberal globalization under US hegemony has all the more activated uncanny forces and spectral forms in various trans-Pacific sites. This article contrasts Korean and US films and travelogues to elaborate uncanny paths to globalization and articulate modes of spectral critique. The seamlessness of globalization across the Pacific is thus threatened by uncanny anxieties, disrupted space–time coordinates, and everyday fears that challenge the end-of-history triumph in marketization.     

The Endangered Empire: American Re- sponses to Transnational Organized Crime

Abstract

Transnational organized crime in the United States represents the dark side of globalization. This chapter attempts to identify the key problems that face US law enforcement in its efforts to cope with the challenges posed by transnational crime. While the realities of global crime require a broad, comprehensive law enforcement response, unfortunately, even in the United States, law enforcement agencies still tend to turn to local organizations and resort to local remedies to combat international criminal activity. In recent years the size of illegal markets and the resources of transnational crime networks have imposed financial burdens on governments that must devote resources to this struggle. Furthermore, the needs for flexible international trade initiatives and commercial investment frameworks makes the task of US law enforcement agencies engaged in criminal containment and control strategies more difficult to develop and sustain. US law enforcement is multi-layered with jurisdictional authority that is sometimes overlapping and reinforcing which in turn strengthens responses to crime. On the other hand, there are serious issues concerning decentralized enforcement authority that affects federal, regional, and state jurisdictions. Complicating matters still further are the external threats that transnational crime poses that lay beyond the official reach of U. S. criminal justice. Other US issues that complicate and indeed thwart adequate enforcement responses include: the politicization of law enforcement budgets and central government allocations of resources for law enforcement which too often depend upon political partisanship and party loyalties. And media-engendered fears about transnational crime phenomena are often confused with genuine social problems such as immigration and illegal aliens. Too frequently, media distort public attention about crime problems such as urban street gangs operating across national borders.     

Local Armed Uprisings and the Transnational Image of Claim Making: The Kurds of Turkey and the Zapatistas of Mexico in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore why and how some local armed uprisings are able to go global with a transnational image of ‘social justice’ while others fail to build such image despite becoming transnational. The cases to be analyzed in the article are the pro-Kurdish mobilization in the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey and the pro-Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) movement in Mexico. In explaining the relative success of the latter, the study seeks to make connections with the globalization literature in general and the transnational social movement literature in particular. Particularly, the article focuses on the ability of social movements to market their causes in international arena with a good image. Overall, this study lays out several key strategic differences between the two movements such as the holding and the use of arms, duration of armed resistance, and the leadership and organizational structure to unpack why some social movements are more successful to market their causes as a just cause within ‘global civil society’ and why others fail to do so ending with being listed as a terrorist organization.     

Evidence of a transnational capitalist class‐for‐itself: the determinants of PAC activity among foreign firms in the Global Fortune 500, 2000–2006

Transnational capitalist class (TCC) theory is rooted in the claim that the globalization of the economy has led to a globalization of economic interests and of class formation. However, systematic evidence linking the indicators of transnational class formation with political behaviour is largely missing. In this article, I combine data on board of director interlocks among the 500 largest business firms in the world between 2000 and 2006 with data on the political donations to US elections of foreign corporations via the corporate political action committees (PACs) of their subsidiaries, divisions or affiliates. Controlling for the various interests of individual firms, I find that foreign firms that are highly central in the transnational intercorporate network contribute more money to US elections than do the less central foreign firms. Given prior research on board of director interlocks, this finding suggests that a segment of the transnational business community has emerged as a class‐for‐itself.     

'Hirelings in the Camp,the Court & the University': some figurations of US English departments,area studies and Masao Miyoshi as Blakean poet Written for the 'Imminent Questions' Conference at NYU, 29 April–1 May 2004

Abstract

This article concerns figuring forth and dismantling the poesis of area studies in the era of transnational capital and what Jack Spicer called 'the English Department of the Spirit'. I will build out from some poems, anecdotes and historical memories as well as play upon Kenzaburo Oe's figurations of Blake as visionary poet of geopolitical transformation and a revolutionary will to liberationist energies to connect the work Masao Miyoshi has done and prodded into trans/disciplinary and transnational coalition since the 1970s. I will figure forth Masao Miyoshi as a Blakean poet working to energize the refiguration and dismantling of the whole US field-imaginary of Japanese and Asian, as well as British and American area studies, which was our shared starting point in the dialectics of post-1968 history as teacher/student on the left-coast trans-Pacific US front.     

Transnational politics at the edges of sovereignty: social movements,crossings and the state at the US–Mexico border

This article documents the history of border crossings among a group of social movement activists located in southern Arizona. By comparing two types of US–Mexico border crossings separated ten years apart, the article explores how political groups become ‘transnationalized’ and in relation to what kinds of ‘states’. By contrasting the shift from a state‐centric movement to a transnational coalition, the case study analyses why, in the later period, political activists were no longer able to identify the same kind of state. In chronicling the disappearance of one kind of state formation and the emergence of a transnational one, this research argues that globalization—rather than simply reflecting a decline of the nation state—is a process entailing not only new forms of transnational political activism but also new forms of the state.     

De-Americanizing the global?: Overcoming fundamentalism in a volatile world

Abstract

This article discusses the role of different fundamentalisms in the dramatic escalation of the desire to 'de-Americanize' the global in the post-September 11 world. I argue that the line between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist tendencies in world views is blurred, and that fundamentalism should not be dismissed as something totally alien from the life of liberal-democratic societies. In particular, the current process of US-dominated globalization has tended to produce a rise in fundamentalist ways of thinking in different parts of the world, as people resort to defending their embattled traditions and identities as a mode of resistance against the unsettling forces of globalization. And as the US mode of dominating the world is couched in an American fundamentalist frame, it will inevitably engender and reinforce new anti-American fundamentalisms.     

The Uses and Misuses of Globalization in the Study of Social Movements

On a general level this article seeks to improve our understanding of the relationship between the concepts of globalization and transnational mobilization; a question that is surprisingly rarely addressed in an explicit manner in the already extensive (and still growing) body of literature on these issues. The article proceeds from the assumption that globalization does not necessarily lead to transnational mobilization. The missing link between globalization and transnational mobilization is a process of social construction that seeks to link the local, the national and the global. Globalization, in this perspective, is both an objective process involving certain structural transformations and a subjective process intimately related to the way social actors interpret these changes and give them meaning. Proceeding from a critique of mono-causal and political economic approaches to transnational mobilization the main objective of this article is to outline an analytical framework able to encompass both of these dimensions; a task achieved by combining insights from the globalization literature and the social constructionist framing approach to social movements. This integration is captured in the concept of transnational framing.     

Confronting Gender Discrimination in the Mexican Workplace

Abstract

This article focuses on the issue of gender discrimination in Mexico, in light of NAFTA since passed in 1993. A model of transnational contention from social movement theories is modified and used to analyze the integration of actions by Mexican, US and Canadian women's and labor group's actions, as they fight for Mexican pregnant workers' rights. Data from interviews with labor leaders, female legislators, political parties and feminist NGOs in Mexico and tri-national government documents are processed in a typology of transnational contention, revealing a high degree of integrated transnational and domestic efforts-which I argue is the basis for a growing women's labor movement in the region.     

A Transnational Perspective on Divorce and Marriage: Filipina Wives and Workers

Building on the burgeoning literature on gender and transnationalism, this article considers how Filipina women's labor and marriage migrations are intertwined in complex and paradoxical ways with global, local, and personal factors. Central to the article are the stories of two women, one a Filipina overseas contract worker in Hong Kong and the other a Filipina in the Philippines who sought to meet a foreign marriage partner through correspondence. These stories illustrate how, because of the absence of divorce in the Philippines, women creatively maneuver across transnational terrain in order to realize their desired marital subjectivities. These stories point to women's agency and to the importance of structural factors-particularly legal ones-that both constrain women and yet simultaneously allow them to creatively utilize legal inconsistencies across transnational spaces to redefine themselves as wives and to reclaim a "respectable" marital status. In contrast to the common assumption that women marry foreign men in order to migrate or primarily for material gain, this article argues that-in at least some cases-migration can also serve as a means to attain the valued goal of (re)marriage.     

'Traveling Barbies' and rolling blackouts Images of mobility in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding

Abstract

This article proposes to read Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding through a critical framework provided by transnational anthropology. Such a framework suggests that approaches celebrating transnational mobility must be balanced against nationally specific forms of constraint. It is argued that Monsoon Wedding bears out precisely such a balance. Nair's film suggests that the mobility of human lives may not be quite as unfettered as that of cultural commodities. Moreover, the filmic narrative insists on a differentiation within the Indian diasporic community. Similarly, some theorists of transnationalism have cautioned that the concept of a 'diasporic community' may serve to obfuscate class distinctions. At the same time, Nair's film is read in conjunction with theories of commodity circulation. Through the image of the 'traveling Barbie', this article explores the ways in which US cultural commodities may be indigenized, while also suggesting that Indians at 'home' may hardly benefit from such indigenization. Rather, Non-Resident Indians may travel from the US to India to buy a token of their own 'Americanness' in Delhi.     

When food becomes a feminist issue: popular feminism and subaltern agency in the World March of Women

In ongoing contests over neoliberal globalization, feminists are increasingly forging alliances with non-feminist others around common struggles, both locally and transnationally. This is indicative of a broader shift in transnational feminist politics from intra-movement to inter-movement alliances, and maps onto a historic transition from the UN era (roughly 1985–1995) to the global justice era (roughly 1995–present). Engagement with new partners on non-traditional issues is shifting the scope and contours of the feminisms in question and raising anew the question of hierarchy in transnational feminist networks and in their coalition politics. This article traces the appropriation of food sovereignty by the World March of Women in the context of its alliance with the transnational peasant movement, Vía Campesina, the development of a feminist politics and discourse of food sovereignty, and enquires into the relationship between these processes and “grassroots” members of the March – the rural, peasant and Indigenous women who are understood to be the primary subjects of a feminist politics of food sovereignty.