Comment contributed to the roundtable on 'Transcultural American Studies and Transdisciplinarity: Paradigms and Case Studies'

Sheila Hones


We meet this morning at the end of four days of the transnational, the transoceanic, the transcultural, and the transdisciplinary. With the term “transnational” front and centre in the conference title and the call for papers, it seems that almost everybody presenting here felt compelled to articulate their work in terms of the trans-something. So we’ve been talking around the “trans” for days. Most of the speakers I’ve heard have used the term “transnational” in much the same way that they would use the term “transportation,” as if everybody knows, at least in general terms, what it implies. And perhaps that’s the case. But there has been very little direct engagement, it seems to me, with the question of why this shift from the “inter” and the “multi” or the “post” to the “trans” has been made, what it enables, and what it occludes.

If it means anything, the change in terminology presumably indicates either that Americanist subjects are producing space in new ways, or that Americanists are spatializing their subjects differently. Or both. But even if the change in consensus terminology is just a matter of fashion—a question of getting on the program—still, a move to the “trans” will invoke certain conceptual and spatial connotations and will tend to frame research, and shape explanation, in particular ways.

Let me give an example. One of the papers I heard on Thursday presented the early results of a case-study of expatriate US citizens living in Mexico. The speaker used the term “transnational” to refer to what she described as new, technologically-facilitated ways of living in which space and place no longer determine identity. Within this terminological framework, US citizens living in Mexico but maintaining mailboxes in Texas and taking advantage of VoiP technology to acquire telephone numbers with US area-codes were understood to be transnational because territoriality had become relatively unimportant to their daily lives.

What struck me most forcibly about this definition of transnationality was the way in which it came bundled with the idea of deterritorialization. The expatriate US residents were presented as a demonstration of the “growing insignificance of territoriality in daily life.” This made me wonder: if this definition were translated into the domain of the transcultural, what would replace “territory” as the previously critical but now increasingly insignificant grounding factor? And what would happen if this definition were translated into the domain of the transdisciplinary -- if American studies became a field in which the groundedness, the located identity of disciplinary tradition and difference, became less and less recognized and significant?

Let’s go back for a moment to the idea that territoriality is becoming increasingly insignificant in the world of the transnational and question whether identity really is becoming entirely disconnected from location in the world of elite transnational migrants. Because it seems to me that outside the rhetoric of ambient globalism, in actual lived practice, this is not what’s happening. Far from being irrelevant to the daily lives of expatriate US Americans living in Mexico, in fact, territoriality is critically necessary. Their transterritorial lives are made possible precisely by territorial differences, in taxes, labor practices, property prices, and immigration law. So what the whole thing depends upon is the fact that technologically-mediated geographies of relative distance enable transnational elites already in possession of power to identify and then move to physical locations which will give them even more power. They are not ignoring the territorial; they are taking advantage of it.

Concepts of the “transnational,” the "transcultural" and the "transdisciplinary" easily evoke images of movement and flow, deterritorialization, and freedom from the constraints of fixed location. But there is no transnational without the national, no transcultural without distinct cultures, no transdisciplinary without disciplinary difference. When the “trans” is envisioned as unimpeded movement across surface, what we get is a deceptive flatness, a smoothing out of the bumpiness of uneven development and grounded difference and located practice.

From this kind of privileged flat-earth transnational perspective, the world all too easily becomes a smooth surface, a single theatre of action, in which everything is visible, and things can only be new once. I would like to conclude with the suggestion that a transdisciplinary perspective might all too easily have similar reductive and flattening-out effects on work in the field of American studies: that it might actively disable engaged negotiation with significant disciplinary difference. Let me try to explain what I mean with an anecdote from another session at this conference. In this session, a theoretical argument articulated in the terms of one disciplinary tradition prompted a member of the audience clearly grounded in another to respond to the argument with a half-frustrated and half-satisfied “yes, but this is not new!” What struck me about this exchange was the possibility that the listener was simply unable to recognize what was new about the speaker’s argument because she was filtering what she heard through the mesh of the known. She was misrecognizing the theory as already familiar and therefore not, for her, useful because she was taming its strangeness so comprehensively that innovation was being misunderstood as repetition or even imitation.

If this was indeed what was going on, it is evidence, I think, of a danger inherent in the transdisciplinary: of jumping too quickly to comprehension, of of skating too smoothly over significant disciplinary territoriality and difference. This tendency would easily be exacerbated, I imagine, by the kind of situation in which we have found ourselves at this conference, in which the illusion of a single, transdisciplinary narrative, a single global academic Americanist surface, has been fostered by the prominence of a single free-floating thematic term, a term redolent with powerful connotations but never clearly defined, and never convincingly grounded. So I would like to end here with the suggestion that for the transnational to work as a useful and unifying transdisciplinary term in American studies it will have to be deployed not as something disconnected and ambient but as something grounded in specific disciplinary locations with specific local histories.