José David Saldívar is a revered figure in the fields of Chicana/o cultural studies, American studies, and comparative literature. His first book, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1991), is one of the earliest monographs in these fields to question the meaning of “America,” in this way prefiguring what is now called the transnational (or hemispheric) turn in American and US Latina/o studies. He is also the coeditor and author of two foundational texts in US–Mexico border studies, Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (1991, coedited with Héctor Calderón) and Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997). Saldívar's latest book brings together his interest in the critical study of national boundaries with his insistent questioning of the nation-state's legitimacy as a geopolitical concept.

Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico collects essays written over a span of many years and scrutinizes a wide scope of material by scholars, artists, and activists from both the global North and the global South. Saldívar underscores the connectedness of these essays by identifying keywords that unite them (coloniality of power, transmodernity, and border thinking) and placing these concepts at the service of an overarching objective: to “challenge the border-patrolled area studies fields' historical understandings of themselves” (xiv) and to propose within these fields “a unit of analysis that is greater than that of the nation-state” (xv).

The eight chapters that make up Trans-Americanity support this larger objective. Chapter 1 examines the coloniality of power in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Víctor Martínez, and Arundhati Roy. Chapters 2 and 3 trace the history of nineteenth-century US imperial expansion and its legacy in the twentieth century, looking at “the politics and poetics of subaltern modernity” (55) in the work of Cuban public intellectual José Martí (chapter 2) and accounts of the Spanish–American War by Theodore Roosevelt and Afro-Cuban ex-slave Esteban Montejo alongside Chicana/o accounts of the Vietnam War collected by George Mariscal (chapter 3). Chapter 4 begins where Border Matters leaves off, with an analysis of the work of El Vez (the Mexican Elvis) and John Rechy that proposes “a larger shift in the unit of analysis in U.S. Latino/a studies” (89). Chapter 5 combines Lani Guinier's and Gerald Torres's concept of “political race” with Latin American formulations of magical realism to look at texts by Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Arturo Islas, Maxine Hong Kingston, Helena María Viramontes, Robert Stone, E. L. Doctorow, and Jaime and Gilbert Hernández. Chapter 6 expands Saldívar's prior work on the foundational tejano writers Américo Paredes and Rolando Hinojosa, revealing “the planetary Asian-Pacific and Cuban-Gulf of Mexico roots and routes” (124) that have informed their work. Chapter 7 is a comprehensive analysis of the fiction of Sandra Cisneros, examining “the heritage of internal colonialism … that is part and parcel of Americanity” (181–82). Finally, the book concludes with an interview with Saldívar conducted by Mónica González García, touching upon such varied topics as the emerging field of comparative American studies and the ongoing influence of Saldívar's The Dialectics of Our America; the history of empire; the cultural interventions of Cuba's Casa de las Américas; current debates around US immigration law; and the 2009 staging of the play Fukú Americanus, a theatrical adaptation of the work of Junot Díaz.

Trans-Americanity is extraordinarily ambitious in its scope, a fact that Saldívar himself acknowledges, modestly describing his project as “speculative and risky” (xvi) and “somewhat sweeping” (1). By providing conceptual linkages between authors and texts that are rarely read or taught together, Saldívar provides a critical map for scholars seeking to transnationalize American and US Latina/o studies. This work is at its most elegant when Saldívar combines his theoretical investment in the concept of trans-Americanity with close analysis of literary texts. Here I would cite in particular the chapter on Cisneros, which provides a rare look at the entirety of her work, placing detailed readings of stories like “Bien Pretty” from Woman Hollering Creek, and symbols like the bodies that populate The House on Mango Street (from the protagonist's “little feet” to the corpulent Mamacita), alongside an expansive examination of the novel Caramelo. While some of the chapters that examine a larger number of authors may occasionally leave one wishing for more of the sustained, close textual analysis that characterizes the chapter on Cisneros, Trans-Americanity as a whole fluctuates productively between its emphasis on broad theoretical interventions and close analysis of individual authors. In this way, the book expands our critical knowledge of the American continent.