The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

Introduction: American Studies inTrans-Paciﬁc Perspective

Natsuki ARUGA*

The seven essays featured here are products of the International Symposium,“American Studies in Trans-Paciﬁc Perspective,” held on July 9, 2006, atNanzan University in Nagoya in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of theJapanese Association for American Studies (JAAS). The purpose of the symposium was to search for a new approach to American Studies that would betruly signiﬁcant in today’s world.
During the four decades since the founding of the JAAS, we have seen a seachange in the domestic American and international scenes. With this change,
American Studies has gone through various phases of renovation, and the multiculturalism that arose during these years has transformed American Studies into
a ﬁeld of inquiry devoted to studying diverse cultures and populations, rather
than elucidating a singular American character. Indeed, it should be noted herethat the multicultural perspective has long been applied to American Studies;at the same time, it is important to recognize that this approach was utilized
mainly to study subjects within the national boundaries of the United States.
More recently, with the progress of globalization, Americanists have extended this multicultural perspective beyond the national boundaries of theUnited Sates and have taken up an approach referred to variously as “postnational,” “postnationalist,” “international,” “transnational,” or simply “global.”In doing so they have come to question the validity of American exceptionalism,a long-cherished belief in the uniqueness and superiority of American cultureand history. As early as October 1991, Ian Tyrrell, one of the contributors toCopyright © 2007 Natsuki Aruga. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor, Saitama University, Japan37

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NATSUKI ARUGA

this special issue, wrote an essay in the American Historical Review, entitled“American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” in which hecalled for a study of transnational history.1
Responding to his appeal, a number of essays, books, and conferences debating transnational studies appeared inside and outside the United States. For
example, efforts by students of American Studies to reconstruct their discipline
within global as well as multicultural perspectives were evident at the 39th
annual meeting of the JAAS held on June 2 and 3, 2005, where, in a presidential address entitled “The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Asian
Crossroads,” ASA President Shelley Fisher Fishkin discussed the possibilitiesof “placing transnationalism in the center of American Studies.”2 Similarly, thetheme of the ASA’s 2006 annual meeting was “The United States from Inside
and Out: Transnational American Studies,” an agenda reﬂecting the heightenedinterest in transnational approaches to studying US culture and history currently
held by large numbers of Americanists. Indeed, since the early 1990s, we haveseen debates on “transnational” history and American Studies in such journals
as the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History and theAmerican Quarterly.3 In Post-Nationalist American Studies, edited by John
Carlos Rowe, the authors show ways in which American Studies cross nationalboundaries.4 Likewise, a series of conferences on “Internationalizing the Studyof American History” held between 1997 and 2000 resulted in Rethinking
American History in a Global Age,5 wherein most of the contributors support atransnational, global history of the United States and, moreover, some of themcriticize what they view as the trans-Atlantic bias in a U. S. transnational history that lacks perspectives from across the Paciﬁc. These historians point to
the fact that the United States borders the Paciﬁc Ocean as well as the Atlantic,
and has received many immigrants from the Asia-Paciﬁc region.
Sharing the above interest in transnational studies and criticism of current
works of transnational American Studies, this symposium joined in the international debate on transnationalism in American Studies by introducing transPaciﬁc perspectives. This meant that, rather than following the traditional
westward direction of American expansion and looking from east to west, weapproached US culture and history eastward from the Paciﬁc Rim. At the symposium speakers from seven different countries on the Paciﬁc Rim, namely Ian
Tyrrell from Australia, Sun Youzhong from China, Seong-Ho Lim from Korea,
Oscar V. Campomanes from the Philippines, Victor Vladimirovich Sumsky
from Russia, Gary Y. Okihiro from the United States, and Jun Furuya fromJapan, presented trans-Paciﬁc perspectives on US culture and society and suggested new frameworks for American Studies.
We will see their papers in the following pages. Their contents vary from discussions of trans-Paciﬁc American Studies in broad and general terms historically and thematically, as seen in the papers by Tyrrell, Furuya, and Okihiro, toAMERICAN STUDIES IN TRANS-PACIFIC PERSPECTIVE

39

examinations of speciﬁc topics and geographic areas such as John Dewey, theimage of America as benevolent hegemon, Filipino ideologue Apolinario
Mabini, and anti-Americanism in South Korea, by Sun, Sumsky, Campomanes,and Lim, respectively. However, despite their differences, these papers all share
perspectives that cross the Paciﬁc. We believe that together they will contributeto the ongoing endeavor to reconstruct American Studies in a way that reﬂects
the increasing diversiﬁcation of American culture and society in a global context.

NOTES
1
Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” AmericanHistorical Review 96 (October 1991): 1031–55.
2
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Asian Crossroads/Transnational American Studies,”
Japanese Journal of American Studies, 17 (2006): 5–52.
3For example, the AHR Forum in American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031–72
carries Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism,” Michael McGerr,“The Price of the ‘New
Transnational History,’ ” and Tyrrell, “Ian Tyrrell Responds.” See also “The Nation andBeyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History: A Special Issue,” Journalof American History 86 (December 1999), and “Special Issue on Multiculturalism,”
American Quarterly 45 (June 1993).
4
John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000).
5Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2002).