Turn West: Finding and Defining the Transnational in California

Abstract

In introducing this special issue of Comparative American Studies, this essay traces a history of attempts to define and practice a transnational American studies, and suggests that such efforts face inherent and perhaps intractable difficulties. It then explains this issue's rationale for approaching the culture, literature, and history of California through a transnational lens, proposing why we might productively, indeed necessarily, think of this subnational entity as a transnational one. It does so by discussing and responding to the different ways in which a transnational conception of California is constructed and mobilised in each of this issue's constituent articles.

“For the planet. For home”: Generating planetary responsibility in the climate fiction of Los Angeles

“…Michael Doherty is among numerous scholars who have posited that ‘California culture’—entailing such international exports as Disneyworld, Google, Apple, Hollywood—has a ‘global appeal’ (p. 107). Docherty goes on to argue that ‘California's pull, its cultural gravity, is so powerful that it has troubled and destabilised the very ideas of nation and of state’ (2022, p. 111). The Golden State's global influence means it is ‘a place that one can instantly access (and be accessed by) at any moment, in any direction and from any point on the planet’ (p. 111).…”