Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of American Studies, Stanford University

Transnational American Studies: Next Steps
9:00-9:45, June 6 (Wed)
MBG07, G/F, Main Building

America is not an island. But one would never know that from the insularity of our critical approaches to both literature and history since our founding. The now discredited ideology of American Exceptionalism shaped more than politics: it shaped the way Americans related to the rest of the world. Much as the ideology of American Exceptionalism exempted America from responsibility and guilt, a corollary of it exempted Americans from having to learn foreign languages or pay attention to perspectives on their country that were not homegrown. Even as scholars of American Studies were at the forefront of critiquing American Exceptionalism over the last two decades, we were largely oblivious to the ways in which our own scholarship continued to reify it. I applaud the valuable work of a number of my American colleagues (many of whom are at this conference) who have challenged American Exceptionalism in important ways over the last twenty years. But for all of its novelty and importance, this work, for the most part, shares a basic assumption: the field of transnational American studies might best be advanced by single-author books and articles published in English. Today I’d like to propose a potentially fruitful next step in Transnational American Studies that builds on these important precedents but takes the field in a somewhat different direction: I’d like to ask what kinds of questions transnational, multilingual, collaborative, digital research projects could explore that are virtually impossible for works of monolingual, solo scholarship to address. By way of example, I will raise two sets of questions--one focused primarily in literature, the other in history. I will then describe two multilingual, collaborative, trans-Pacific ventures that have just been launched and will invite fellow Americanists at the conference to participate in them. These trans-Pacific projects have the potential to model new approaches to transnational American Studies in the twenty-first century.