Transnational American Memories

Abstract

The present volume is a sequel to the collection of essays Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures (2003) by the same editor. Its significance for American studies arises from its aim to apply the new transnational perspective to the current field of memory studies. All nineteen articles written by contributors from the United States and Europe bear witness to the productivity unleashed by the paradigmatic shift from a strictly national to a transnational view of ‘cultural memory’-phenomena. As Udo Hebel puts it in his introduction to Transnational American Memories: “The recognition of the boundless and creative transnational flow of commemorative energy in and out of the cultures grounded in or associated with the space of what today is the United States of America makes for the wide geographical, historical, cultural, and political scope of the individual essays” (2f.). In view of this broad spectrum, Hebel’s succinct summaries of the individual articles allow the reader to see the multiple facets and, above all, the complexity of bringing together the two concepts “transnational” and “memory” (3–6). Indeed, they provide a valuable starting point for looking into various issues of the “transnational memory” topic such as the question of how transnational memory is created, recovered or lost. Alfred Hornung (Art. 8), for instance, observes that the contemporary US American novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo enrich their respective 9/11 narratives Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Falling Man (2007) with transnational memories when they refer to other man-made catastrophes such as the destruction of Dresden or the Tower of Babel to describe the 9/11 disaster. Orm Øverland (Art. 4) regards the letters of Norwegian immigrants to the US as a store of transnational memories which help to recover the immigrants’ attitudes towards Native Americans. Kirk Savage (Art. 15) draws attention to the ways a site of transnational memory can lose its transnational signification. Originally intended as a transnational project that was meant to tie the Ukrainian nationalist hero Shevchenko to the US Cold War ideology, the Shevchenko memorial in Washington, D.C., lost its transnational significance when it “lapsed into the realm of ethnic heritage” (347). These are only a few of the articles that deal with the creation, recovery, and loss of transnational memory. The study is, however, of additional interest as it documents a variety of methods and media in the discovery of transnational memory facets. Several authors look at literary texts, others link literature with autobiography, then there are a number of studies that focus on non-literary texts, studies of monuments and other sites of transnational memory, and, last but not least, studies on cinematic narratives. Juan Bruce-Novoa (Art. 1) has selected a literary text for his transnational memory investigations. He argues that the Mexican-American-German poet Rita María Magdaleno’s collection Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother (2003) adds an international dimension to the corpus of Chicano literature, which focuses predominantly on the “obvious national mixtures” (12), and traces the ‘transnational’ intermixture of Mexican, U.S. American, and German themes (e.g., the Holocaust in sections II and III) in the biographically informed poems (e.g., Magdaleno’s German mother followed a GI to the U.S. and, later on, married a Jewish concentration camp survivor). All along Bruce-Novoa draws parallels between the Mexican Malinche myth and Magdaleno’s poetry (e.g., “Abused German women mirror Malinche abused by her family”, 26) to substantiate his claim that her