Introduction: Transnational Feminisms

Year 2013, Issue: 38, 5 - 12, 01.10.2013

Tanfer Emin Tunç

Abstract

Over the past decade, transnationalism as a concept has revolutionized numerous fields within the social sciences and humanities, including American Studies and Women’s Studies. As Bahar Gürsel and I outline in the introduction to The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Turkey and the United States, the inclusion of transnational perspectives in American Studies acquired increased academic attention after Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association in which she “called on scholars to move away from a nationalist and/or nationcentered model of reading, teaching and researching the United States that prioritized the agendas of Americanists working in the United States” Tunç and Gürsel 11 . Her call to arms involved repositioning American Studies as a discipline that takes the transnational, rather than the national, as its point of departure. Such an approach, Fishkin posited, would not only ensure the “multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and goods,” but would also, in the process, generate “social, political, linguistic, cultural, and economic crossroads” that would enrich our understanding of America and its global impact Fishkin 21–22 .

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