Virtually American?

Denationalizing North American Studies. Edited by Mita Banerjee.

The 21st century is a time seemingly without borders, an era of an unprecedented flow of goods, capital, and labor. It is a time, also, in which the very boundaries of our disciplines have fissured out, encompassing spaces well beyond the nation-state. The ten contributions to this volume set out to explore what this opening up of national borders may mean for the disciplines of both American and Canadian studies. At the same time, light is shown on the fact that the apparent denationalization of North American Studies may be a deeply ambivalent concept. It may be moored in realities which drive home the point that the nation state is far from obsolete; yet, it may also point at the way in which particularly in the area of minority studies, the transcending of national borders and the forging of transnational alliances could not be more fruitful. Finally, the volume seeks to explore the meaning of 'Americanness'. At a time when both global politics and popular culture seem to be defined by a seeming ubiquity of the US, other spaces and cultural productions run the risk of being mere copies, of being 'virtually American' rather than originals in their own right. This, too, needs to be reassessed in order to arrive, perhaps, at a more dialogic understanding of what 'America' may mean. - Contents: Rüdiger Kunow: In Sickness and in Health. Transnationalism Reconsidered. - Glen Lowry: On Location, Or Notes toward Remapping North American Studies. Stan Douglas's Potsdam, Detroit, Vancouver. - Alfred Hornung: European Perspectives of American Studies. - Mita Banerjee: The 'Race Codes that Bind'. Gender and Citizenship in a TransCanada Context. - Ingrid Gessner: Moving Beyond Manzanar. Transnationalizing Japanese American Internment Experiences. - Katja Sarkowsky: Democratic Iterations. Articulations of 'Citizenship' in Contemporary Canadian and American Literatures. - Roy Miki: The Poetics of the Hyphen. Fred Wah, Or the Ethics of Reading 'Asian Canadian' Writing. - Tseen Khoo: Common Ground? Deploying Asian North American Studies in Australia. - Nicole Waller: Omar Sharif as Transnational Trickster. The Overlapping Geographies of Diana Abu-Jaber. - Ashok Mathur: Transnational Border Shopping. Virtual Purchases, Body and Nation. 160 Seiten mit 5 Abb., broschiert (Reihe Siegen. Beiträge zur Literatur-, Sprach- und Medienwissenschaft; Vol. 162: Anglistische Abteilung/Universitätsverlag Winter 2009)