I start this Editorial with the sad task of having to report, with regret, the untimely passing of recent contributor to the June 2014 special issue on ‘“America” in India’, Prof. Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri, who died in a road accident on 4 August 2014, near Chandigarh. An energetic and dynamic scholar, she was Head of the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, and Associate Professor of English, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Ropar, India, with specialties in post-colonial studies, gender studies, and the linguistic analysis of literature, including new media. She will be sadly missed by colleagues, friends, and family.
Examining transnational flows and intercultural communication was central to Prof. Khushu-Lahiri’s work, and they are at the heart of the essays collected together in this issue of Comparative American Studies. Emily Cheng’s essay, which opens this issue, examines adoption and immigration from China to the US through the lens of the news media and literature. Cheng shows how the figure of the Chinese nanny destabilizes neoliberal accounts of the family; the transnational mobility that she comes to signify highlights the social and cultural inequalities upon which adoption and immigration rest.
The following two essays of this issue both look to nineteenth-century literary figures as means of opening up understanding of the operation of US literary culture within broader, transnational frames. Páraic Finnerty’s essay looks at a transatlantic influence, that of Robert Browning on Emily Dickinson. Such a relationship has been often remarked, but little analyzed. What such an analysis reveals, Finnerty argues, is the extent to which Dickinson’s lyric voice (and, by extension, that of a newly emerging American poetic sensibility) presents impersonal masks rather than realized interior states of the poet’s mind. The transnational flow of influence between Browning and Dickinson comes to mark the political potential of US poetics to disrupt tropes of intimacy and self-assured individualism, so often assumed to be central to the articulation of ‘American’ identity. Kelly Franklin’s reading of the flow of poetic influence between Whitman and Chilean poet Vincente Huidobro likewise speculates on how the Whitmanian ‘multitudes’ that a national poetics may ‘contain’ provide radical political and cultural purchase, rather than a simple confirmation of established ideological positions. Huidobro, the essay asserts, ‘writes back’ to Whitman to challenge his unified vision — literally, via metaphors of sight — of the US after the Civil War. Kelly’s essay persuasively argues that, from Huidobro’s vanguardist, Chilean perspective, Whitman’s poetics endorses an imperial vision for the US.
The final two essays in this issue turn to popular culture in order to chart changing social and cultural perceptions within the US. In both cases, though, it is that which lies outside the US which precipitates such change. Again we see how cultural flow follows a process of looking beyond US national boundaries. Astrid Haas’s essay examines the adoption and development of football — that is, soccer — in the US. The essay examines five recent US films about soccer as means of tracing the ways in which issues of gender, ethnicity, and nationhood are inscribed in US attitudes to the game. Haas argues that soccer — once marginalized within US sport — is now firmly established in the cultural mainstream largely because it is the interrelated flow of such issues which frame it within the US. And, finally, Zachary J. Lechner’s essay, which closes this issue, examines the changing frames of masculinity in the US as a result of the Korean War. Pitting ideas of masculinity in crisis at home against the experience of masculinity abroad for soldiers during the Korean conflict, this essay argues that worries about a social (and gendered) danger at home — whether that be ascribed to ‘momism’, corporatization, faceless bureaucratization, or a lack of aggressive individualism — are inspired by the sending of men abroad to fight in a little-understood conflict. As with the other essays in this issue, comparative analysis of the cultural flow and tension between US and non-US cultures can be seen to reveal the fractures, tensions, and ambiguities upon which any claim to US national and personal identity rests. Reading such signs is what the work of American studies (and that of ourselves as ‘Americanists’) must necessarily deliver.
I close, as ever, with my usual invitation: please feel free to send me any essay submissions for consideration for publication in the journal, as well as any comments, responses to essays published in the journal, ‘conversation pieces’, and ideas for books for review that you feel appropriate. Please send any material you have directly to me at [email protected]. And please, also, feel free to suggest Comparative American Studies as a venue for publication, and a journal to subscribe to, to any colleagues for whom you feel it would be appropriate.