Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
About nine decades after Randolph Bourne's much-cited pamphlet "Trans-National America" was published on the eve of the U.S.'s entry to World War [1], the field of American Studies has recently undergone what has been called a transnational turn. Within this paradigm, the focus of study is increasingly on the transnational exchange of ideas and goods, on border-crossing migrations of people, and on how all of these movements shape (and are shaped by) cultural discourses within and outside the U.S., always in a historically diachronic perspective [2]. Bourne, coining the term "trans-national", started his essay by an analysis of the failure of the leading self-image of American society as a melting pot, a passage that has not entirely lost its actuality if one regards the surge of a narrowly defined, nationalist patriotism since 9/11, a discourse which has claimed the solidification rather than a diversification of America as a desirable goal to fend off potential enemies....
Repository Citation
Ganser, Alexandra. "On Ian Tyrrell's Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1–8. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss4/21