Comparative American Studies: Hybridity and Beyond

Amériques transculturelles - Transcultural Americas

“…Kirsten Silva Gruez, for example, sets out in her Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing "to imagine a new form of U.S. cultural history in general, which would unseat the fiction of American literature's monolingual and Anglocentric roots and question the imperial conflation of the United States with America" (2002: 4). In an effort both to restore the phrase "American literature" to its broader meaning, and "internationalize" U.S. American studies-to renegotiate the boundaries of U.S. American studies and resituate it in a global context-, the field has seen a rapid expansion in geographical, linguistic and conceptual terms (see Porter 1994;Wald 1998;Patell 1999).…”

Introduction: Comparative Border Studies

“…5 Transnational scholarship often examines connections between US ethnic and racial communities and their geographies of origin -within models such as the Circum-Atlantic, the Black Atlantic, and the Trans-Pacific -and includes foreign-based scholarly perspectives on the United States (Desmond & Domínguez, 1996;Patell, 1999), though few connections between these various frameworks exist. In addition, border studies have also influenced scholarship that highlights the central role of the Americas for transformations in the colonial/modern world (Mignolo 2000;Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992;Quijano & Ennis, 2000), and they have shaped hemispheric work that explores historical and contemporary connections among events, people, communities, and geographies in the Americas and that includes Latina/o populations.…”

Theorizing the hemisphere Inter-Americas work at the intersection of American, Canadian, and Latin American studies

“…Calls for 'comparative American studies' that reside at the heart of the publication in which this article appears, however, attest to the sheer theoretical complexity involved in attempts to rethink the field outside and beyond national boundaries. While some US-based Americanists have understood internationalization to mean more comparative work on US ethnic and racial groups (Patell, 1999), others have equated it with a hemispheric perspective (Sandoval, 2002), while still others have employed it in reference to the global study of the United States as an area, emphasizing foreign-based scholarly perspectives on US culture and thereby resituating the field's traditional institutional sites of power (Desmond and Domínguez, 1998).…”