In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply frame the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of “America” functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. She develops her argument by focusing on South Asians in India and the United States. Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization. Through an analysis of Mattel’s sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered with financial means created by India’s market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh—a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In Transnational America Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood—and studied—as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.

Trans-national America, was published in 1916 in The Atlantic Monthly by Randolph Bourne.

This is an interdisciplinary analysis of the interaction between today's globalisation and Americanisation. Transnationalism involves a loosening of boundaries, a deterritorialisation of the nation-state, and higher degrees of interconnectedness among cultures and peoples across the globe. As people make transnational voyages and live lives of flexible citizenship in two or more cultures, they adhere to a new type of nationalism that creates an exclusionist discourse and builds the Other as conservative defenders of cruder territorial loyalties. This transnational solidarity -- a new communitarianism beyond the loyalties to any one place or ethnic group -- threatens the old order with its conceptions that assimilation and integration will remake the foreigner into a particular national citizen. The authors address the complex issues of globalisation, American mythology, Christian proselytising, modern slavery, conspiracy theory, apocalyptic terrorism, Vietnam stories, international feminism, changing gender roles, resurgent regionalism and the changing definitions of place.

National borders and transnational forces have been central in defining the meaning of race in the Americas. Race and Transnationalism in the Americas examines the ways that race and its categorization have functioned as organizing frameworks for cultural, political, and social inclusion—and exclusion—in the Americas. Because racial categories are invariably generated through reference to the “other,” the national community has been a point of departure for understanding race as a concept. Yet this book argues that transnational forces have fundamentally shaped visions of racial difference and ideas of race and national belonging throughout the Americas, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examining immigration exclusion, indigenous efforts toward decolonization, government efforts to colonize, sport, drugs, music, populism, and film, the authors examine the power and limits of the transnational flow of ideas, people, and capital. Spanning North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, the volume seeks to engage in broad debates about race, citizenship, and national belonging in the Americas.

This book briefly delineates the history of the Haitian diaspora in the United States in the nineteenth century, but it primarily concerns itself with the contemporary period and more specifically with the diasporic enclave in New York City. It uses a critical transnational perspective to convey the adaptation of the immigrants in American society and the border-crossing practices they engage in as they maintain their relations with the homeland. It further reproblematizes and reconceptualizes the notion of diasporic citizenship so as to take stock of the newer facets of the globalization process.

The "melting pot" is one of the most cherished images in US culture, but does it really tell the whole story? Too often there is tension between the sense of American community and the demands of American diversity. The uniqueness of the many American ethnicities provides the roots of identity, yet recognizing those differences often makes Americans feel isolated from the whole. In this discussion, Everett Akam relies on the neglected tradition of cultural pluralism to argue that unity and individuality are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each is a vital source of American identity. He demonstrates that Americans need to acknowledge that they share much in common as Americans, while never forgetting that what sets them apart forms as great a part of who they are.

In Transnational America, Everett Akam brilliantly addresses one of the most fundamental issues of our time--how Americans might achieve a sense of racial and ethnic identity while simultaneously retaining the common ground of shared traditions and citizenship. Akam's study transcends the current debates over multiculturalism and cultural pluralism by retrieving the tradition of cultural pluralist thought neglected since the first half of the twentieth century. He argues that thinkers such as Randolph Bourne, John Collier, Horace Kallen, and Alain Locke sought to reconcile diversity and community by challenging the cults of individualism, universal reason, and assimilation typical of their age. Akam goes on to demonstrate how cultural pluralist thought was eclipsed during the second half of the twentieth century by an intellectual mainstream that both discounted pluralists' emphasis on culture and heralded interest-group pluralism as a model for racial and ethnic relations. Transnational America is an engaging look at the difficulty of achieving the delicate synthesis between identity and community that will be of interest to sociologists, political theorists, and historians alike.