The Lures and Snares of “The Transnational”

Abstract

[...]what drives this review is the ways in which the three authors independently propose a new field that rejects the comparative model, which has continued to foster a hegemonic paradigm by consistently operating through a developmental or Eurocentric lens to understand difference. Because I wish to foreground how these works are in conversation around trans-Americanism or trans-Americanity and the potential for new intellectual and political practices, I offer admittedly truncated summaries of their claims, regrettably shortchanging some chapters. Turning to over a dozen literary and graphic texts, Saldívar rapidly charts the expressions of political race in the work of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Arturo Islas, Maxine Hong Kingston, Helena María Viramontes, Robert Stone, E. L. In addition, he explodes the assumptions at- tached to the homogenizing view that art historians have of aesthetic practices embedded in social movements and the fables created by the mainstream's invention of postidentity politics.