Trans-Americanity

In Trans-Americanity, José David Saldívar advocates shifting the focus of American studies to an ;outernational comparative critical U.S. studies. ; His theoretical touchstone is Aníbal Quijano's and Immanuel Wallerstein's essay ;Americanity as a Concept, ; which developed nuanced arguments about the coloniality of power, transmodernity, and border thinking. Like Quijano and Wallerstein, Saldívar is interested in stretching the mainline and (traditional) comparative structures of American studies, its disciplines and methods, its objects of study, its regional and national units, and even its border and diaspora counterunits. In addition to Quijano and Wallerstein, Saldívar draws on the work of theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, John Beverley, Ranajit Guha, Walter D. Mignolo, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as he investigates the enabling conditions of novels, memoirs, and testimonies by trans-American and South Asian postcolonial, subaltern writers. Through his bravura readings of texts by Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, Gabriel García Márquez, José Martí, Victor Martínez, Toni Morrison, Américo Paredes, and Arundhati Roy, Saldívar reveals how, in narrating their stories of the global coloniality of power, these writers seek to create an epistemological ground on which coherent versions of the world may be produced.