Fall 2007

AMS 390 • Transnationalism

Course Description

In an effort to revise the cultural nationalism and critique the celebratory exceptionalism that has historically informed the field of American Studies, contemporary American Studies scholarship has turned toward an increasingly transnational, diasporic, global, and post-national approach. The movement of people, labor, capital, and things across national boundaries has created migratory flows and circuits that challenge the role of the nation-state and question its relevance in this postmodern globalized world. How does America become reconfigured in the world and how do scholars begin to envision a critically international vision of American Studies? This course will investigate the move from 'national' to 'post-national' fields of study reading from a wide range of disciplines including: American Studies, cultural studies, immigration studies, history, anthropology, and sociology. We will examine the theoretical formations of modern forms of nationalism and transnationalism and explore the cultural, social, and political effects of global migration, globalization, ethnic consciousness, cultural identity, citizenship, and diasporic communities.

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