New issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies
Journal of Transnational American Studies
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 death 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 excited to present work by the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize winner Christopher B. Patterson of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia). Finally, as always, the journal features essays by emerging and established scholars. We welcome submissions of individual essays at any time as well as proposals for curated special fora.
Table of Contents | JTAS 12.1 (2021)
1–7 Note from the Editor in Chief | Alfred Hornung [pdf]
Special Section: RESPONSES to the 2020 Global Uprisings
9–44 Reflections on Ben Okri, Goenawan Mohamad, and the 2020 Global Uprisings [pdf]
Kevin K. Gaines (University of Viriginia)
45–47 “I can’t breathe”: Why George Floyd’s Words Reverberate around the World [pdf]
Ben Okri
49–51 Strange Fruit [pdf]
Goenawan Mohamad
ARTICLES
53–81 Black Atlantic Currents: Mati Diop’s Atlantique and the Field of Transnational American Studies [pdf]
Suzanne Enzerink (American University of Beirut)
83–106 Lessons from a Different Shore: Japanese American Incarceration and the
Redress Movement Portrayed in Western European Newspapers [pdf]
Jonathan van Harmelen (University of California, Santa Cruz)
107–28 Hasty Departures: The Evacuation of American Citizens from Europe at the Outbreak of World War II [pdf]
Gavin Wilk
SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN PRIZE for international scholarship IN transnational american studies
129–185 “Pluralism, Transition, and the Anglophone,” and
“Just an American Darker than the Rest: On Queer Brown Exile” [pdf]
Excerpts from Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press)
Christopher B. Patterson (University of British Columbia)
about the Contributors [pdf]
Abstracts
Black Atlantic Currents: Mati Diop’s Atlantique and the Field of Transnational American Studies | Suzanne Enzerink
This essay reads French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantique, a Senegalese-French-Belgian coproduction, to argue that its oceanic focus gestures at the haunting histories that suture the US and Senegal. Atlantique, spoken in Wolof, explores global and local class inequalities through a romance narrative that foregrounds the lasting effects of colonialism and economic imperialism on Senegal. Despite this distinct national context, Atlantique was soon absorbed into a global media stream, being rapidly picked up by Netflix and subsequently distributed to more than one hundred and sixty-five million subscribers. While Atlantique appears to tackle the ravages of capitalism on a global scale by highlighting labor migration and the disruptive effects on the women left behind, a close reading of the film reveals a more complicated and transnational story. Atlantique forces us to also think about the United States. The American continent in the colonial era formed the tragic third corner in the triangular Atlantic economy based on the slave trade. Placing Atlantique within a Black Atlantic trajectory yields a richer, more politically invested reading of the film that simultaneously helps us to rethink the political work that film can do in a globalized world. In particular, I posit that Atlantique’s circulation to the US and Europe helps reverse the traditional patterns of flow, North to South, West to East, as such challenging limited understandings of the US's cultural and political ties to Senegal. After a discussion of production and circulation, I therefore turn to a close reading of the film and the paratext surrounding it to proffer a theory of how films like Atlantique can help us rethink the potentialities and investments of transnational American Studies as a field.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize 2020 | Christopher B. Patterson
This excerpt from Transitive Cultures asks how South East Asian writing in English can be analyzed in conjunction with texts from its North American diasporas to reread forms of global multiculturalism within a longer genealogy of “pluralist governmentality:” an art of government that expects individuals to visibly express their difference via given group identities, and in doing so, to represent imperial state power as neutral, universal, or benevolent. Patterson asks how South East Asian migrant narratives deracinate the optics of pluralist governmentality by emphasizing forms of transitivity that Patterson dubs “transitive cultures,” the sets of camouflaged and shifting cultural practices tactically mobilized in contexts where identity is defined as fixed and authentic. To read across ethnicized genres and identities, Patterson reframes Asian migrant texts as transpacific Anglophone texts—a category that stresses encounter and exchange—and shines a spotlight on works that trouble a global multiculturalist reading because they are deemed “inauthentic” to both nationalist literatures, global literatures, and American ethnic literatures. Chapter 4, Just an American Darker than the Rest: On Queer Brown Exile, extends the inquiries of transitivity by reading texts of queer brown migrancy. It pairs Lawrence Chua’s 1998 novel, Gold by the Inch, with R. Zamora Linmark’s 2011 novel, Leche. Both novels consider queer of color travel as a rejection of American senses of brownness and homonormativity.
Lessons from a Different Shore: Japanese American Incarceration and the Redress Movement Portrayed in
Western European Newspapers | Jonathan van Harmelen
The history of Japanese American incarceration is traditionally framed as one of the bleakest chapters in twentieth-century US history. Yet interest in the story of Japanese Americans and the lessons of the incarceration are not limited to the United States or the Japanese diaspora. This article examines media reactions to the story of the Japanese American incarceration and the redress movement of the 1980s in four Western European countries—the Netherlands, United Kingdom, West Germany, and France. In each country, media outlets discussed the redress movement and the Japanese American experience, larger issues of racism within the United States, and financial compensation for war victims. In doing so, these media accounts both dramatize the nature of public opinion on the subject of reparations and touch on larger debates on the collective memory of the Holocaust and colonialism that were emerging in Western Europe.
Hasty Departures: The Evacuation of American Citizens from Europe at the Outbreak of World War II | Gavin Wilk
When World War II began in September 1939, upwards of one hundred thousand American citizens were residing and traveling throughout Europe. Over the next three months, nearly seventy-five thousand of these individuals would be returned to the United States on crowded passenger ships and merchant vessels. This evacuation, organized and facilitated by the US government, shipping representatives, and labor organizers, proved to be difficult. Besides contending with logistical obstacles, officials leading the operations had to assist evacuees with bookings and other personal matters, contend with rowdy ship crews, and ensure that the vessels traveling across the Atlantic Ocean were safe from German U-boats. This article offers insight into the Americans who were assisted, the US government officials who orchestrated the repatriation efforts, and the ships that were involved in the transatlantic crossings. It also provides a unique glimpse into the activities of American consular staff in France, Britain, and Ireland during the early days of the international conflict.