Seminar Directors

Eva Cherniavsky Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Literature and Culture
University of Washington

Purnima Bose Associate Professor of English
Indiana University

Seminar Description

A signal promise of the transnational “turn” that has reshaped a number of overlapping interdisciplinary knowledge projects in the past fifteen years (e.g., cultural studies; feminist studies; post-colonial studies; American studies) lies in its potential for articulating culture to materiality. Transnationalism names both a regime of accumulation, marked by the de/regulated flows of people, knowledge, media, capital, and commodities across national borders, and a critical orientation toward the study of national cultures. At the point of its emergence in the early 1990s, the project of thinking transnationalism engaged contemporary transformations in the organization of capital (including the unraveling of the international division of labor) and traced their social and cultural effects. As Inderpal Grewal and Karen Caplan observed in 1994, “there is…significant consensus over the transnationalization of accumulation [and the attendant] shifts that challenge the older conventional boundaries of national economies, identities, and cultures.”
This seminar seeks to reflect on the directions of cultural studies and related scholarship oriented towards transnationalism. As we arrive at a moment where the “transnational” becomes a normative descriptor of (inter)disciplinary specialization (does anyone not purport to do “transnational” work?), how would we assess the merits, limitations, attachments, disavowals, and aporias of transnational cultural studies? We propose the following questions:
• To what extent has the transnational turn focused attention on the articulations of culture and materiality? To what extent has "transnationalism" become a short hand for a political economy that we don’t need to think in its evolving specificities (freeing us to focus solely on the business of cultural analysis)?
• To what does the “trans”oblige us, at the level of framing our objects? What is "transnational culture"?Does "transnational cultural studies" take up fundamentally different objects of study from the "cultural studies" that came before? Does "transnational" suggest an obligation to work across more than one national site? Relatedly, how does the transnational turn bear on questions of academic expertise (e.g., preparation for comparative research)?
• Is the enthusiasm for transnational studies itself transnational? Or does it center in the U.S. and West European academies? What might we learn from considering the way in which this critical orientation travels?
• What might a genealogy of the transnational turn reveal? That is, what alternative critical and/or historiographical projects has this dominant orientation short-circuited or eclipsed?

Application Process

Prospective participants should submit a short (250-500 word) statement of interest and a brief biography to the conference organizers Eva Cherniavsky and Purnima Bose.