The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 32 (2021)

Editor’s Introduction

It is hard not to be struck by a sense of irony as we present Number 32 of
the Japanese Journal of American Studies, with its focus on thetransnational approach to American Studies. The onset of COVID-19
worldwide coincided with the start of preparation for this volume, and thevirus has been with us since. The adverse effects that this epidemic has hadon scholarship, from restrictions and bans on research trips abroad to ageneral sense of discouragement from undertaking ambitious projects, are all
too familiar by now to members of the Japanese Association for American
Studies. Understandable as the restrictive measures are, there is no denying
today that national borders are constricting us in a significant way byseparating us physically from the rest of the world.
We offer this volume, nonetheless, with the belief that the transnational
approach will continue to develop even as COVID-19 will eventually comeunder control. By paying attention to movements of people, capital, goods,and information across borders and the ways people have framed theirthinking, writing, and acts transnationally, the transnational approach toAmerican Studies challenges the traditional framework of analysis centeredon the nation, the national culture, and the government. Pioneered in the1990s by Australian historian Ian Tyrrell among others, this approach overtime has inspired not just historians but Americanists of various otherdisciplines in and out of the United States. Cultural studies scholars andliterary historians today deal with many different forms of inspiration that
artists, authors, and traveling visitors have derived from their contact withthe world outside the United States without neglecting the imperialinclinations, explicit or implicit, that often accompanied their glimpses andforays. Nowadays, even international relations scholars pay greater attention
to nongovernmental international organizations as significant actors in themaking of major foreign policy decisions. While US state and nationalculture in itself still merits attention as a legitimate subject of inquiry,
1

2

HASHIKAWA

scholars in a variety of disciplines today are invited to examine the flows
and connections between the United States and the rest of the world.
A look back at one of the early issues of our journal reminds us of thedistance JAAS has come in embracing this approach. Number 18 (2007) of
this journal was devoted to the transnational approach, featuring American
Studies Association president Karen Halttunen’s address on it and papers byTyrrell, Gary Okihiro, and others that were presented at the association’s
40th anniversary symposium in 2006 called “American Studies in TransPacific Perspective.”1 Compared with those included in the journal in 2007,
the articles published in this volume are indicative of the degree to which
this approach has been incorporated by JAAS members. In 2007, theemphasis was on the “Trans-Pacific,” reflecting in part where Japan waslocated geopolitically vis-à-vis the United States; the present issue features
articles on Americans who acted in, or with (the governments of), Europe,Africa, countries in the Western Hemisphere and even Middle East to alesser degree. Of course, this volume represents no more than one point in
the long sweep of a developing trend in scholarship that is still unfinished.
The articles featured here are just some samples, as of 2021, of scholarship
informed by such creative strategies on the part of JAAS members.
This volume begins with the undelivered presidential address by formerJAAS president Yuko Takahashi. In “Transgender Students and New
Admission Policies at Historically Significant Women’s Colleges in TwentyFirst Century United States and Japan,” she discusses how the Seven Sisters,
America’s leading women’s colleges, have struggled to come up with new
ideas to open their gates to transgender students while maintaining theiridentity as women’s colleges. She rounds off her address/article with a
discussion of how women’s universities in Japan are making their own
efforts to create a framework that is accommodating to such students.
Regrettable is the missed opportunity for JAAS members to hear thisaddress presented by President Takahashi herself at JAAS’s annual meetingscheduled to be held at Hokkaido University June 13–14, 2020, but which
was cancelled due to COVID-19. Still, through the written version publishedhere, readers can benefit from her research and conclusions and see how an
American Studies perspective can contribute to creative thinking on a major,pressing issue in academia today.
Our special feature on transnationalism continues with literary studies, inwhich scholars explore how authors in their sojourns abroad haveincorporated aspects of foreign histories, foreign artists, and literary
traditions into their works as contexts or themes—subjects that have escaped

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

3attention in the traditional framework of American literature. In “Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Transnational Revision of America and Civil Wars,” Nozomi
Fujimura discusses three versions of a narrative in Hawthorne’s unpublishedmanuscripts that were later compiled as The American Claimant
Manuscripts in the 1970s. Taking a cue from historian David Armitage’sargument on the recurrent nature of civil wars in political and juridical ideasabout the flow of history, Fujimura shows how Hawthorne during his stay in
Britain and Italy in the 1850s came to see those countries through the prismof their various civil wars—the ancient civil wars in Rome, the War of theRoses, the seventeenth-century English Civil War, the wars during theRisorgimento—and increasingly connected them with his own America with
its impending civil war. As his manuscript morphed from one form toanother with significant alterations, images of civil wars continued to bewoven into the story in subtle ways that provide an important transnationalcontext. In the third version of The American Claimant Manuscripts, theUnited States takes its place as part of this long train of civil wars.
Takayuki Tatsumi describes how literary imagination has worked acrossborders in his “The Laws of Literary Life Cycle: Reading Mark Twain’s Is
He Dead? as a Transnational Play.” Inspired by Sōseki Nasume’s idea of“literary life cycles” (patterns in the rise and fall of popular appreciation of awork of art and its author/creator, in part conditioned by the times), Tatsumi
explores this “cycle” in Mark Twain’s Is He Dead?, a black comedy written
in 1898 during Twain’s sojourn in Vienna but published only in 2003.
Twain’s drama takes the career of the French painter Jean-François Milletand adds his own twists. Twain turns Millet, who was very popular in
America during the Gilded Age when he was writing, into a transvestite, as
he poses as a wealthy widow in an attempt to escape from his debt collector
by arranging his own funeral. The “death” and funeral is even expected toboost the market value of his paintings (the first “law” of the literary lifecycle). This rendition of Millet presents a totally different painter from thethen-current image of him as a poor but honest artist. In his second life, thepostfuneral Millet has to live in an assumed identity that reflects another of
the “laws” of the literary life cycle: he is condemned to live as an imitator ofhimself, imitating the best works of the “deceased” Millet.
The last two articles in this volume turn to social movements andinternational history. In “Transnational Nationalism: Revisiting the Garvey
Movement,” Keiko Araki takes up the issue of race in the nation-based
international order of the early twentieth century. Marcus Garvey and hisUniversal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) sought to secure a4HASHIKAWA

strong territorial state for Blacks that would support them both within thestate and outside it, one that could take its place in the world community ofnations. From 1919 through 1924, UNIA approached Liberia for a land
grant for its Back-to-Africa movement. Garvey also petitioned the League ofNations in 1922 for access to the former German colonies in East Africa andSouthwest Africa as homelands for what he considered the transnationalracial group of Black people and won some backing from Haiti and theprince of Persia. Araki argues that Garvey believed that a strong Black
territorial state could guarantee fair treatment to all Blacks in the world andthat educated Africans would assume leadership over those in Africa inforging an African nationalism. Though these initiatives lacked muchprospect of realization at the time, given the dominant understanding of thestate as an entity separate from race, Garvey’s ideas and movements wereboth national and transnational.
In “Interwar Transnational Network and the British Commonwealth: TheInstitute of Pacific Relations and Transformation of Relations among theUnited Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, 1942– 43,” Yoshie
Takamitsu discusses how Canadian intellectuals with membership in theUS-led Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) anticipated the reactions of theUnited States to the policy outlook of the Britain-led British Institute ofInternational Relations (BIIR) and sought to mediate more cooperative
Anglo-American relations as their vision of a postwar world order wasforming during the critical years of 1942– 43. In the exchanges in February
1943 between Canadian officials at the Department of External Affairs andIPR-based members, in the aftermath of the 8th IPR conference at MontTremblant (December 1942), the Canadian side agreed to urge Britain toengage in multilateral negotiations with colonies to arrest potential conflict
between Britain and the United States. More cognizant of the US
perspectives, Canada was asserting itself more forcefully in Commonwealthand world affairs vis-à-vis Britain, which intended to hold on to its empire
and was not inclined to consider the US position.
As always, we thank Katy Meigs for her assistance in copyediting articlesfor this journal and Maki Tsunoda for her support. The authors, however, aresolely responsible for the articles published in this volume. Finally, wewould like to note and thank that the publication of this issue has been madepossible by generous financial support from the Tokyo-based AmericanStudies Foundation. The articles published in the Japanese Journal ofAmerican Studies, including those from back issues, are freely available
online (http://www.jaas.gr.jp). We invite responses and criticisms from ourEDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

5readers and hope that the journal will continue to be an important player inthe field of American Studies.
NOTE
Karen Halttunen, “Transnationalism and American Studies in Place,” and Natsuki Aruga
et al., “American Studies in Trans-Pacific Perspective,” Japanese Journal of American
Studies 18 (2007): 5–19, 37–162.
1KENRYU HASHIKAWA
Editor