Transnational Portuguese Studies

Transnational Portuguese Studies offers a radical rethinking of the role played by the concepts of ‘nationhood’ and ‘the nation’ in the epistemologies that underpin Portuguese Studies as an academic discipline. Portuguese Studies offers a particularly rich and enlightening challenge to methodological nationalism in Modern Languages, not least because the teaching of Portuguese has always extended beyond the study of the single western European country from which the language takes its name. However, this has rarely been analysed with explicit, or critical, reference to the ‘transnational turn’ in Arts and Humanities. This volume of essays from leading scholars in Portugal, Brazil, the USA and the UK, explores how the histories, cultures and ideas constituted in and through Portuguese language resist borders and produce encounters, from the manoeuvres of 15th century ‘globalization’ and cartography to present-day mega events such as the Rio Olympics. The result is a timely counter-narrative to the workings of linguistic and cultural nationalism, demonstrating how texts, paintings and photobooks, musical forms, political ideas, cinematic representations, gender identities, digital communications and lexical forms, may travel, translate and embody transcultural contact in ways which only become readable through the optics of transnationalism. Contributors: Ana Margarida Dias Martins, Anna M. Klobucka, Christopher Larkosh, Claire Williams, Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Edward King, Ellen W. Sapega, Fernando Arenas, Hilary Owen, José Lingna Nafafé, Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Maria Luísa Coelho, Paulo de Medeiros, Sara Ramos Pinto, Sheila Moura Hue, Simon Park, Susana Afonso, Tatiana Heise, Toby Green, Tori Holmes, Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Zoltán Biedermann.

Issue 2 of Portuguese Studies for 2019: Transnational Portuguese Women Writers

The contributors to Transnational French Studies situate this disciplinary subfield of Modern Languages in actively transnational frameworks. The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities – both material and non-material – that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book considers the transnational dimensions of being human in the world by focussing on four key practices which constitute the object of study for students of French: language and multilingualism; the construction of transcultural places and the corresponding sense of space; the experience of time; and transnational subjectivities. The underlying premise of the volume is that the transnational is present (and has long been present) throughout what we define as French history and culture. Chapters address instances and phenomena associated with the transnational, from prehistory to the present, opening up the geopolitical map of French studies beyond France and including sites where communities identified as French have formed.

Transnational Russian Studies offers an approach to understanding Russia based on the idea that language, society and culture do not neatly coincide, but should be seen as flows of meaning across ever-shifting boundaries. Our book moves beyond static conceptions of Russia as a discrete nation with a singular language, culture, and history. Instead, we understand it as a multinational society that has perpetually redefined Russianness in reaction to the wider world. We treat Russian culture as an expanding field, whose sphere of influence transcends the geopolitical boundaries of the Russian Federation, reaching as far as London, Cape Town, and Tehran. Our transnational approach to Russian Studies generates new perspectives on the history of Russian culture and its engagements with, and transformation by, other cultures. The volume thereby simultaneously illuminates broader conceptions of the transnational from the perspective of Russian Studies. Over twenty chapters, we provide case studies based on original research, treating topics that include Russia's imperial and postcolonial entanglements; the paradoxical role that language plays in both defining culture in national terms, and facilitating transnational communication; the life of things 'Russian' in the global arena; and Russia's positioning in the contemporary globalized world. Our volume is aimed primarily at students and researchers in Russian Studies, but it will also be relevant to all Modern Linguists, and to those who employ transnational paradigms within the broader humanities.

The focus of this book is two-fold. First it traces the expansive geographical spread of the language commonly referred to as Spanish. This has given rise to multiple hybrid formations over time emerging in the clash of multiple cultures, languages and religions within and between great empires (Roman, Islamic, Hispano-Catholic), each with expansionist policies leading to wars, huge territorial gains and population movements. This long history makes Hispanophone culture itself a supranational, trans-imperial one long before we witness its various national cultures being refashioned as a result of the transnational processes associated with globalization today. Indeed, the Spanish language we recognise today was ‘transnational’ long before it was ever the foundation of a single nation state. Secondly, it approaches the more recent post-national, translingual and inter-subjective ‘border-crossings’ that characterise the global world today with an eye to their unfolding within this long trans-imperial history of the Hispanophone world. In doing so, it maps out some of the contemporary post-colonial, decolonial and trans-Atlantic inflections of this trans-imperial history as manifest in literature, cinema, music and digital cultures. Contributors: Christopher J. Pountain, L.P. Harvey, James T. Monroe, Rosaleen Howard, Mark Thurner, Alexander Samson, Andrew Ginger, Samuel Llano, Philip Swanson, Claire Taylor, Emily Baker, Elzbieta Slodowska, Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Henriette Partzsch, Helen Melling, Conrad James and Benjamin Quarshie.

This volume consists of a series of essays, written by leading scholars within the field, demonstrating the types of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities underpinning German-language culture and history as these travel right around the globe. Contributions discuss the inherent cross-pollination of different languages, times, places and notions of identity within German-language cultures and the ways in which their construction and circulation cannot be contained by national or linguistic borders. In doing so, it is not the aim of the volume to provide a compendium of existing transnational approaches to German Studies or to offer its readers a series of survey chapters on different fields of study to date. Instead, it offers novel research-led chapters that pose a question, a problem or an issue through which contemporary and historical transcultural and transnational processes can be seen at work. Accordingly, each essay isolates a specific area of study and opens it up for exploration, providing readers, especially student readers, not just with examples of transnational phenomena in German language cultures but also with models of how research in these areas can be configured and pursued. Contributors: Angus Nicholls, Anne Fuchs, Benedict Schofield, Birgit Lang, Charlotte Ryland, Claire Baldwin, Dirk Weissmann, Elizabeth Anderson, James Hodkinson, Nicholas Baer, Paulo Soethe, Rebecca Braun, Sara Jones, Sebastian Heiduschke, Stuart Taberner and Ulrike Draesner.

Transnational Italian Studies is specifically targeted at a student audience and is designed to be used as a key text when approaching the disciplinary field of Italian studies. It allows the study of Italian culture to be construed and practised not simply as the inquiry into a national tradition but as the study of the interaction of cultural practices both within Italy itself and in those parts of the world that have witnessed the extent of Italian mobility. The text argues that Italian culture needs to be considered in a transnational/transcultural perspective and that an understanding of linguistic and cultural translation underlies all approaches to the study of Italian culture in a global context. Contributions deploy a range of methodological approaches to understand and illustrate how language operates, how culture inhabits and constitutes public and private space, how notions of time operate within people’s lives, and the multiple ways in which people experience a sense of personhood. Chapters stretch from the medieval period to the present and demonstrate how transnational Italian culture can be critically addressed through the examination of carefully chosen examples. Contributors: Alessandra Diazzi, Andrea Rizzi, Barbara Spadaro, Charles Burdett, Clorinda Donato, David Bowe, Derek Duncan, Donna Gabaccia, Eugenia Paulicelli, Fabio Camilletti, Giuliana Muscio, Jennifer Burns, Loredana Polezzi, Marco Santello, Monica Jansen, Naomi Wells, Nathalie Hester, Serena Bassi, Stefania Tufi, Teresa Fiore and Tristan Kay.

Transnational East Asian Studies demonstrates how transnationalism as a mode of intellectual enquiry has wide-ranging interdisciplinary potential and has immense value when examining the past, just as much as much as when examining the present. Artificially erected borders, which appear on maps and globes, fail to consider the ways people in diverse regions live and practice their everyday lives, existing beyond boundaries. The people of East Asia have always been on the move, they have never been homogeneous, and have evolved together, not apart. In this sense, people around the globe and also in East Asia have always been involved in a process of change and transformation. Hence, transnationalism is a way to overcome methodological nationalism, not only as a concept of identity and spatiality, but also as a concept temporally situated in the modern, because as a methodology, transnationalism does not take the national as a precondition. It allows us to move beyond and across borders, and to examine how ideas have been used and transformed in different contexts. This book thus underscores the complex interactions in the context of East Asia, past and present, while shaping the future of this complicated region.