Locating New Fields in Transnational American Studies

keynote speaker Shelley Fisher Fishkin reviewed the twenty-year history of the innovative concept which she launched at the American Studies Association convention in Atlanta in 2003.While she expressed her own fascination about the astonishing productivity of her research project, she also stated that it had only passed its teens and was yet young.Reviewing the contributions to this issue we can call it-without exaggeration but with pride-forever young.In view of their geographical locations, the articles focus on areas in Southeast Asia, East and Central Europe, and on the sites of Japanese American wartime incarceration in Arizona, on land and sea related to American politics, history, culture, and/or the environment.They deal with film, animation films, documentaries, life writing, newspapers, performances in the theater and new funeral practices onboard of ships.Their authors are affiliated with American Studies institutions on the islands of Hawai'i, Taiwan, and Nova Scotia, in the Netherlands and Germany, and in the United States.All of them have a transnational career and background.Yana Chang, who just completed her PhD degree at the University of Hawai'i at Mnoa, offers a very comprehensive and insightful reading of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019), in which she links the film's reception in Asia and the United States to show how the postwar Korean history and that of the American presence in South Korea are intertwined.Over and above the obvious display of social class divisions in South Korea, Chang's analysis reveals the film's underlying message of coping with the haunting legacy of the Korean war as resonance not only of military engagements but more importantly of the nefarious influences of settler colonial capitalism.The political and cultural ramifications of Polish and Slovak immigrants to the US and their acculturation as reflected in their print media before and after the Second World War is the topic of

American studies · Humanities · Manifest destiny · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Pride · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Law