Journal of Transnational American Studies

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Issue introduction by the editor in chief

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. Through their depiction of Blacks and Asians as submissive and alien, these songs collectively romanticized and exoticized people of color and the places they inhabited—whether living in the wake of slavery in the American South or under US and British imperialism in the Pacific. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the importance of the transnational for understanding the export of nostalgic representations of the American South and how they adopted new meaning outside of a US context.

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.

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 interviews, this study highlights how these groups leveraged digital tools to sustain Mesoamerican memory, promote Indigenous heritage, and foster community engagement. My analysis of these materials contributes to literature on digital content production and Mesoamerican identity, emphasizing how online initiatives in urban diasporic contexts strengthen Indigenous cultural knowledge and language preservation.

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

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 asserts the bravery of survival and persistence in fashioning joyous lifeworlds outside the contemporary moment of fear induced through anti-queer and -trans violence and refugee deportations during Presi­dent Donald Trump’s first and second administrations. Building on the potential of critical refugee studies to push back against state violence, we suggest that by reframing Hmong’s historical entanglements with the US state through acts of resis­tance against rather than soldiering for empire, a unique Hmong refugee anti-imperial politics and subjectivity can emerge.

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 analysis and autobio­graphical offer­ing informed by the Third World radical traditions of ethnic studies, women of color fem­inism, and critical refugee studies, the essay gestures toward enunciating a relational mem­ory—a framework more capacious than existing national lexicons and designations—that continues to dream toward collective liberation and decolonized landscapes.

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 respond to the enduring presence of the Vietnam Veterans Mem­orial in Washington, DC, as a representation of how memories of scarred psyches and environments are consolidated into a national consciousness. In doing so, these artists com­plicate forms of memorialization by attending to the diasporic, ephemeral, and incon­clusive, creating new forms of collective memory that account for communal relationships with each other and with nonhuman environments.

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 war.

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 that internal refugees should not be treated solely as pathological or juridical object, but rather as an analytical category linked to broader practices of domination and exploitation.

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, accumulation, and disposal. Closing by turning to the writings of Cedric Robinson and H. L. T. Quan to help imagine old and new refugee ways of living and being free beyond carceral imperialism, the essay ends by taking up the notion of preserving the ontological totality as has been elaborated in the Black Radical Tradition, considering how an embrace of refugee ontological wholeness might work to dematerialize and divest from the global prison-border appar­atus.

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 presents critical opportunities for rethinking the fraught global relations among society, self, subjects and states. From the spread of disinformation to America’s mishandling of the new coronavirus to Viet Nam’s martial response to the problem, the “Vietnam-sized” language mobilized against COVID-19 presents a means to analyze the dialectics of permanent wars, as they are reproduced within an era of endless violence. Corona-quagmire in the end shines light for scholars seeking to disentangle ongoing processes of militarization, nationalism, and empire.

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

Non-English American Short Stories 

Short story by Ester del Toro.

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

Short story. 

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

Short story by Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937).

Translation

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

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.

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

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

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)

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Author biographies