Recent jtas items

"interdisciplinary in the best sense of American studies”

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Larger than Life: Alfred Hornung

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A Tribute to Alfred Hornung

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

George Saunders and the NASDAQ Variations: An Introduction for Students of American Literature

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Support for Early Career Researchers Revisited

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Encountering Care

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reflective Essay for Alfred Hornung's Eightieth Birthday

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wagons, Ho! US Route 80

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For Alfred

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alfred Hornung: An Inspiring Transnational Scholar

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ceci n'est pas une Laudatio

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Model Mentor

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Signature of Alfred Hornung

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A Singular Seminar: A Lifetime of (Self-)Discovery

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Contribution for Alfred Hornung's Eightieth Birthday

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Splashes, Happenings, and Journeys: Learning with Alfred Hornung

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

American Eagles and Tibetan Vultures

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Not Determined by Deadlines: A Tribute to Alfred Hornung

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On Arriving Late to the Table that Alfred Hornung Set

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Be Close to Real Life and Go Transnational: American Studies in the Example of Alfred Hornung

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

"By definition political": Alfred Hornung and Transnational American Studies

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alfred at Eighty--Really?

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Citizen of the World

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For Alfred

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Working Together with Alfred Hornung over the Years

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Homage to Alfred

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alfred Hornung's Transnational Mentorship and My Journey Between Worlds

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For Alfred

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For Alfred on his Eightieth Birthday

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To the Only "Super Global Professor of American Studies" I Know

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A Tribute to Alfred Hornung, On the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Polea Loca

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Short story by Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937).

Postwar, Relational, and Other Memories

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay contemplates the multiscalar perspectives on memory and forgetting regarding the Vietnam War. It travels through the “country of memory,” a space materialized through multiple state narratives, personal experiences, representational images, activists’ history and constructed vignettes of their absences, to confront the political implication of enunciated forgetting in postwar Vietnam, in the refugee diaspora, and under the US’s order of/to forget(ting). Highlighting new cultural and literary voices from the postwar generation in Vietnam, specifically Mai Huyền Chi’s documentary 50 Years of Forgetting, and the significance of their locality, this essay delineates the complex relationship to silence among Vietnamese war survivors. Arranged in proses that are “bursts of remembering,” the essay interrogates various contexts and forms of state-sanctioned amnesia and official memory through a postwar generational critique. In a blend of cultural and historical...

Thinking With and Beyond the Vietnam Antiwar Movement: An Interview with Frank Joyce, Rebel for Peace

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The fiftieth anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end provides a valuable occasion to examine the Vietnam antiwar movement and to elevate themes of friendship and peace that connect the mid-1970s to the contemporary moment. Elder Frank Joyce presents a worthwhile example of a white “veteran” of the civil rights and antiwar movements who senses new realities on the horizon and continuously reflects on the past to understand what is possible in the present and future. Having participated firsthand as an invited delegate in the April 30, 2025 commemorative events for “Reunification and Liberation” in Viet Nam, Joyce offers poignant comparisons between efforts to heal the wounds of war in Viet Nam and a proliferating “culture of peace” in the United States. Joyce’s example of firsthand involvement and continuous reflection allows the Vietnam antiwar movement, far from being frozen in a snapshot of protest and defiance, to emerge as a dynamic setting for envisioning a future beyond...

Mujer de la Cabellera Roja

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Short story by Ester del Toro.

Review of Settler Militarism

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Settler Militarism: WWII in Hawai‘i and the Making of US Empire (Duke University Press, 2024) by Juliet Nebolon | Reviewed by Mariko Whitenack (New York University)

Non-English American Short Stories

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Non-English American Short Stories

Practices of Resilience: Nahuatl and Nahua Online Cultural Initiatives in Mexico City and Los Angeles During COVID-19

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article introduces the concept of cyber-resilience as a pathway to urban Indigenous empowerment through digital media. Building on Karina Korostelina and Jocelyn Barrett’s (2023) framework of “practices of resilience,” I extend these ideas to cyberspace, examining how Indigenous content producers in urban areas used digital platforms to navigate challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2023. The focus is on Mexico City and Los Angeles, designated sister cities in 1969, whose shared Spanish colonial histories and transnational migration networks are further connected by Nahuatl as a living Indigenous language. The analysis examines social media content from two organizations in Mexico City – Conformidad Ollinkan and Resistencia Tenochtitlan – and cultural initiatives in Los Angeles by the Anahuacalmecac University Preparatory School and Nahuatl instructor Cuitlahuac Martínez. Using qualitative methods, including multimodal content analysis (images, video, text) and...

The Woman with the Red Tresses

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ester del Toro's short story "Mujer de la Cabellera Roja," in English translation.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," by Edgar Allan Poe

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Short story.

Racial Performance at Sea: Race, Region, and Empire on the Empress of Australia

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the 1928–1929 world cruise of the Empress of Australia, a ship owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Drawing upon concert programs, passenger accounts, Canadian Pacific official publications, and historical newspapers, it focuses on a concert that happened while the ship was at sea. It examines three songs—“Ol’ Man River,” “Hawaiian Memories,” and “Chu Chin Chow”—to show how nostalgia for the American South found purchase beyond US borders next to representations of a mysterious “Orient” and tropical Pacific. Situating this voyage within the larger context of Canadian nationhood and the Canadian Pacific’s investment in the British empire, I argue that the combination of these songs on a ship bound for sites of white empire did two things. One, it reassured white passengers that the racial order of the southern past would continue in the present. Second, it reinforced their experiences in China, Hawai'i, and other stops during the cruise....

Review of Natalie Koch's Arid Empire

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Book review of Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia, by Natalie Koch (Verso, 2023).

Introduction: Thinking with and Beyond “Vietnam”: 50 Years after the US Wars in Southeast Asia

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Coeditors' introduction to the JTAS Special Forum "Thinking with and Beyond 'Vietnam': 50 Years after the US Wars in Southeast Asia"

Transpacific Exceptionalism: The Making of Japan-US Militarist Interimperiality

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay shows how Japan and the United States, the two competing imperial powers during the Asia Pacific War, preserved, modified, and reinforced both empires’ exceptionalist ideologies, building a new interimperial hegemony across the Asia Pacific. The “demilitarize and democratize” policy of the American occupation forces soon morphed into an effort to sanction Japan to refashion and redefine its militarism, racism, and neocolonialism to enable these imperialist apparatuses to persist in the decolonizing Cold War world. American exceptionalism and Japanese exceptionalism, I argue, have mutually constituted and dialectically reproduced one another throughout the long Cold War era. I term this interimperial complicity “transpacific exceptionalism,” which enables us to address how such nationalistic myths can converge and operate complicitly in the international political arena.

Idle Pulleys; or, the Art of Becoming a Good Public Servant By Horacio Quiroga

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Translation

Review of Julie Greene's Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Book review of Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal, by Julie Greene, University of North Carolina Press, 2025.

"Angin Musim Gugur," by Mochtar Lubis

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Short story by Mochtar Lubis (1922–2004), one of Indonesia's most influential journalists and fiercest advocates of press freedom.

Reprise Introduction--Non-English American Short Stories: A Transnational Anatomy

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reprise is a curated section of important previous work in the field of transnational American studies, brought together in a new constellation.

Autumn Gales, By Mochtar Lubis

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Translation from Indonesian into English. A short story by one of Indonesia's most influential journalists and fiercest advocates for press freedom. Translated for the Journal of Transnational American Studies.

Notes on the Contributors

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Author biographies

The Refugee Carceral Condition under Racial Capitalism: Histories of Intracommunity Policing across French Indochina, Cold War Southeast Asia, and US Resettlement Contexts

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Citing contemporary examples of Southeast Asian police officers within the refugee diaspora, this essay traces a genealogy of “refugee cops” as they emerged vis-à-vis increased criminalization of growing Southeast Asian communities in the resettlement context. Locating their emergence from a deeper historical lineage of indigène officer cultivation across French Indochina and American Cold War intervention in the transpacific circuit between Southeast Asia and the United States, the genealogy weaves critical refugee studies’s accounts of the refugee as key to understanding international relations into a political economic arc across the timeline of racial capitalism to ultimately discuss what I term the refugee carceral condition. Southeast Asian cops, from this view, emerged from racial capitalism’s ongoing carceral reliance on confinement and the operation of sites that normalize “bare life” to securitize racialized space for the purposes of dispossession, exploitation,...

Ecologies of Memory: Memorializing Militarized Environments of the Vietnam War

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay proposes ecological forms of memory that unsettle dominant processes of remembering war that privilege nationalist narratives of heroism and conquest in mourning the loss of human life. Instead, we theorize an aesthetic relationship between refugee memory and more-than-human witnessing that offers an avenue to remember militarized landscapes differently. While nationalist practices of memory often demand cohesion around a collective identity or a universal humanism, ecologies of memory prioritize diffuse stories of horizontal kinship that open up new possibilities of making community amongst more-than-human denizens caught in the web of imperial war. In this essay, we examine three incomplete aesthetic inquiries into the memorialization of militarized environments: the community curation of The Missing Piece Project Collective, Tiffany Chung’s installation For the Living, and Binh Danh’s chlorophyll prints One Week’s Dead. These interventions...

War’s Returns: Refugee Archiving, Living, Refusing

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay draws on the framework of countercommemoration to reflect on the fiftieth anniversary of Hmong presence in the US as a legacy of unresolved contradictions that highlights Hmong acts of archiving, living, and refusing. It approaches the analysis through an examination of community archiving at an organization called Hmong Museum, refugee testimonies, queer mentorship, and performance, and grassroots organizing to center how these acts of refusal can offer anti-imperialist frameworks and subjectivities in today’s precarious present. These acts of living are important sites of analysis because they reflect the ways Hmong refugee knowledge and ideas are rooted in actions that challenge imperialist paradigms of interpreting history and navigating contemporary politics while maintaining an embodied politics of relationality with others. Drawing from critical refugee studies and queer and feminist critiques, this essay investigates how queer and refugee livability...

Pembunuhan Aneh di Rue Morgue, by Edgar Allan Poe

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Edgard Allan Poe's "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" (1841–1845) in Indonesian translation.

The "Vietnam" Corona-Quagmire: Rescripting Forever Wars in a Time of Chronic Crisis

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay considers the legacies of the Viet Nam-American War through the lens of contemporary events of global scale such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The fiftieth anniversary since the end of that conflict occurs right after the cessation (but not end) of the worst socio-health crisis facing the planet and humanity in recent times. As a frame for remembering militarized Cold War histories in the face of ongoing crises and political quagmires, I consider how the Cold War specter of Viet Nam has been marshalled against biopolitical threats in the twenty-first century. That cultural and ideological rescripting reinforces racial, colonial, capitalist, and imperialist logics of control that simultaneously invite us to revisit and refashion that infamous war’s meaning. I approach the “war on coronavirus” through the prism of “Vietnam” to conceptualize what I am designating as “corona-quagmire.” By looping conflicts of the past into the cascading crises of the present future, corona-quagmire...

Beyond Kinh(ship): The Making of Vietnamese Settler Refugeeism Through Land and Dispossession

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 1954, the US expanded its military presence in South Viet Nam following decolonization from France, claiming to help refugees escape communism. However, Vietnamese people rarely use the term “refugee,” seeing themselves as internally displaced people who never crossed international borders. I examine how the concept of “refugee” functions as a settler colonial technology that fosters Vietnamese settler refugeeism, serving both the US empire and Vietnamese ethnonationalist goals. The article explores two key points: first, how refugee resettlement in the Cái Sắn canals consolidated Kinh dominance and dispossessed Indigenous Khmer Krom in the Mekong Delta; second, what it means to engage with the land as a form of relationship-building. Centering internally displaced Vietnamese within the land's history, this work offers a counternarrative to US state-sponsored historiography. Grounded in migration and settler colonial studies and engaging with Vietnamese studies, I posit...

Introduction: Transpacific Connections and Transnational American Studies

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Issue introduction by the editor in chief

Chinese Reflections: Trump, Political Division, and the Unearned Privilege of American Exceptionalism