Overview

A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, JosÉ David SaldÍvar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and ""outernational"" paradigm for American studies. SaldÍvar urges Americanists to adopt a world-system scale of analysis. ""Americanity as a Concept,"" an essay by the Peruvian sociologist AnÍbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, the architect of world-systems analysis, serves as a theoretical touchstone for Trans-Americanity. In conversation not only with Quijano and Wallerstein, but also with the theorists Gloria AnzaldÚa, John Beverley, Ranajit Guha, Walter D. Mignolo, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, SaldÍvar explores questions of the subaltern and the coloniality of power, emphasizing their location within postcolonial studies. Analyzing the work of JosÉ MartÍ, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and many other writers, he addresses concerns such as the ""unspeakable"" in subalternized African American, U.S. Latino and Latina, Cuban, and South Asian literature; the rhetorical form of postcolonial narratives; and constructions of subalternized identities. In Trans-Americanity, SaldÍvar demonstrates and makes the case for Americanist critique based on a globalized study of the AmÉricas.

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Reviews

Trans-Americanity is a magnificent, visionary book. I cannot think of another scholar working today who has helped to instantiate new fields and new lines of inquiry in the manner of Jose David Saldivar. He is an unusually generous and curious scholar, one who is perfectly willing to rethink earlier assumptions, appreciate the insights of his critics, and read broadly across disciplines. These strengths contribute to what I believe will be an extremely influential text, one that will be widely taught and carefully reviewed. Mary Pat Brady, author of Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space Intent on discerning the common concerns of subaltern studies, global coloniality, and transmodernity, Jose David Saldivar examines persistent motifs and literary themes in the imaginative literature of Greater Mexico and South Asia. Individually and collectively, the minoritized writings that he discusses articulate new epistemological grounds for critiquing a transmodern world governed by global capitalism and new forms of coloniality. Saldivar advocates an 'Americanity' that opens up the idea of America to contexts well beyond the United States, Latin America, and the Western hemisphere. Donald E. Pease, author of The New American Exceptionalism

Intent on discerning the common concerns of subaltern studies, global coloniality, and transmodernity, Jose David Saldivar examines persistent motifs and literary themes in the imaginative literature of Greater Mexico and South Asia. Individually and collectively, the minoritized writings that he discusses articulate new epistemological grounds for critiquing a transmodern world governed by global capitalism and new forms of coloniality. Saldivar advocates an 'Americanity' that opens up the idea of America to contexts well beyond the United States, Latin America, and the Western hemisphere. --Donald E. Pease, author of New American Exceptionalism

Intent on discerning the common concerns of subaltern studies, global coloniality, and transmodernity, Jose David Saldivar examines persistent motifs and literary themes in the imaginative literature of Greater Mexico and South Asia. Individually and collectively, the minoritized writings that he discusses articulate new epistemological grounds for critiquing a transmodern world governed by global capitalism and new forms of coloniality. Saldivar advocates an 'Americanity' that opens up the idea of America to contexts well beyond the United States, Latin America, and the Western hemisphere. --Donald E. Pease, author of New American Exceptionalism

Author Information

JosÉ David SaldÍvar is Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. His books include Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, as well as The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History and Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (co-edited with HÉctor CalderÓn), both also published by Duke University Press.

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