Ever since 8 November 2016, it has felt practically obligatory for all educated citizens and those with intellectual and other interests in America to reconsider both their own views and just about all things going forward in light of Donald Trump's historic election to the office of the President of the United States and erstwhile “leader of the free world.” All the more so for an academic organ with the name Journal of American Studies! Indeed, the magnitude of its improbability along with the predictably disastrous results that will follow make this event seem to mark a shift in the historical trajectory of the United States as a cultural and political entity. Under this new reality of “alternative facts” and the demonstrated values of the current administration, it would seem that, among other things, the tide of the “transpacific” has suddenly receded, gone out to sea along with Trump's showy withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership as one of his first acts in office (and one of the few campaign promises that he's actually been able to make good on!). Add to that the ongoing “bromance” with Vladimir Putin (however rocky it has gotten at different moments), as well as the unfolding array of potentially treasonous entanglements between Russia and the denizens of Trumplandia (Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Paige, Jared Kushner, and God knows who else!), and what do you get? A collective turning of attention away from East Asia and the Pacific Rim (at least for the moment) and back towards something that resembles more of a Cold War configuration of global relations. It seems as if Donald Trump has a perverse nostalgia not just for the cultural values of 1950s, but also for its broad geopolitics.

The strange antics of Kim Jong-un and events taking place on the Korean peninsula (or not) have the potential to change this broad scenario at any moment. Still, however shortsighted and/or short-lived this (re)turn turns out to be, it is nevertheless due to this turn of events that one reads through the collection of essays expertly and generously edited by Yuan Shu and Donald Pease, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific, with an acute sense of just how swiftly run the currents of history. As its title suggests, the volume seeks to bring the emergent field of “transpacific studies” into productive contact with the long-standing intellectual project that Pease in particular has shepherded and called transnational American studies. (The volume is the latest installment in the book series edited by Pease and named Remapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies.) And in their useful Introduction, the editors argue persuasively for the importance of such a task “at this historical juncture” (19), based primarily on the rising economic importance of the Asia-Pacific region following the end of the Cold War. To be sure, at the time of its publication less than two years ago in 2015, such an argument seemed entirely reasonable and prospective, aligning perfectly with the broader “turn to Asia” in the US and elsewhere under the auspices of the globalist vision advanced during the Obama years and epitomized by that administration's seemingly total commitment to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, despite the many and serious flaws in the fundamental structure of that agreement. Indeed, composed at the tail end of the Obama presidency, essay after essay in this collection seems to take for granted the triumph of values such as racial diversity and internationalism. With Trump's election and the subsequent withdrawal from the TPP, some of that synchronicity has been disrupted; or, perhaps more accurately, deferred. Live by the politico-economic argument, die by the politico-economic argument, I suppose. By that same token, however, the transpacific as an intellectual and economic project goes forward apace outside the US, in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and elsewhere. And the national economies throughout the Asia-Pacific region continue to seek ways to foster stronger relations both economic and political in an effort to contain the growing power of China. And so forces operating on a global scale ensure that the tide of the transpacific will come in again. For the time being, then, we can, I think, most productively approach Turning toward the Transpacific as a guide at once to our recent past and to our imminent future. And an impressive and useful guide it is.

Divided into four broad sections and featuring an eclectic mix of contributions from an international cast of luminaries, this once and future guide offers probably the best general mapping to date of the notion of the “transpacific,” a loose and ever shifting geocultural formation that has emerged in different areas of scholarly discourse over the last twenty years or so. This manifold terrain centers, of course, around the physical expanse of the Pacific Ocean, along with the various land masses connected with that body of water, including the continents of Australasia and North and South America. More than just physical geography, however, the complex space of the transpacific also encompasses the vast and intricate web of economic, political, cultural, and social relations and exchanges among and between the diverse national, imperial, ethnic, commercial, and other formations that have persisted, changed, and arisen or diminished over historical time, and which continue to contest, occupy, and compete among one another to define (i.e. to dominate) the area of the world commonly referred to as the Pacific Rim region. As Shu and Pease note, “the transpacific is not a coherent region so much as a volatile space of interaction that contains overlapping contradictory forces and is defined by historical conflicts over geography, economy, and political spheres of influence” (7). Clearly taking inspiration from the work of scholars like Paul Gilroy and others connected with Atlantic studies, this formation also draws upon theoretical and methodological resources, as well as concerns, from Asian area studies, comparative literature, American ethnic studies (most especially Asian American studies), and postcolonial studies, while also working in turn to reconfigure the dimensions of these more established fields by mapping the complex topography of their mutual intersection.

Four main sections make up the body of Turning toward the Transpacific, each with three or four essays that collectively explore different vectors within the complex space of the transpacific under the auspices of a broad and capacious rubric. Part I, “Transnational Practice: Outside/Inside American Studies,” leads off the collection with the disciplinary argument contained in the volume's full title. In addition to essays by the editors Shu and Pease, this section includes a contribution from Eva Cherniavsky on “Post-Soviet American Studies,” whose title makes her essay suddenly one of the most urgently relevant in the volume as she explores “the proliferation of both American studies and, not incidentally, of American-style universities in the regions of the former Soviet bloc” (64). Part II offers the biggest mouthful as a title: “Deep Maps, Postracial Imaginaries, Diasporized Networks and Other Transnational Literary Assemblages.” It features essays by Shelley Fisher Fishkin on the transnational dissemination and reception of Mark Twain as a global literary figure; by Rafael Pérez-Torres on “how modernity haunts the racialized imagination of contemporary Chicano/a culture” (139); and by Ramón Saldívar on recent speculative fiction by people of color, including Susshu Foster's 2005 novel Atomik Aztex.

Part III broadens things beyond the usual white American subjects in various ways. And it exhibits some of the strongest utopian impulses in the volume to boot. “Remapping the Transpacific Turn: From the Black Pacific and Oceanic Ecopoetics to Antipodean Transnationalism” opens with a thoroughly documented consideration of W. E. B. Du Bois's late interest in Asia and the Pacific region by Japanese scholar of American literature Etsuko Taketani. Also in this section, Rob Wilson elaborates an “Ecopoetics of Oceania” in an effort “to open the American Pacific region – and American Studies – up to stronger modes of translocal solidarity, ecological alliance, and world belonging” (213). The final two essays of this section insist in different ways on the importance of empire in the (ongoing) formation of the transpacific. Paul Giles looks at the transpacific from the point of view of Australia and other locations in the southern Pacific region that bear the mark of imperialism, and not just that of the United States. He reminds readers in his essay, “Antipodean Transnationalism: The Empire Lies Athwart,” that the transpacific circuit

Subsequently, John Carlos Rowe echoes Giles on the need “to study the still operative legacies of imperialism and neo-imperialism in the Pacific” (261), while reminding readers about the ever close connection between the field of American studies and the national politics of the United States in “Transpacific Studies and the Cultures of US Imperialism.”

Lastly, Part IV, “Decolonizing Knowledge Production for the Pacific Century,” closes out the volume with a suite of four essays that collectively illustrate the epistemological generativity of the transpacific, the new areas and forms of inquiry opened up by this intellectual formation. Walter Mignolo offers “A Decolonial Argument from the Global South” as his contribution by thinking about the discipline of American studies from a “locus of enunciation” situated in the Caribbean and South America rather than always and only the United States. Next comes an essay by Viet Thanh Nguyen on a topic that has become the central theme for his own increasingly recognized body of work: the variety of experiences of the war in Vietnam and their differential memorialization (or not) in art under a range of national, political, and cultural regimes. Likewise exploring the intersection between art and politics, Alfred Hornung follows with an essay that traces “the evolution of intercultural relations between China and America since the second half of the nineteenth century” across “three decisive moments, which correspond to three major movements in literature and the arts of the twentieth century: modernism, postmodernism, and neorealism” (344). Indeed, his neologism of “ChinAmerica” and the argument of his essay more broadly together neatly encapsulate the basic proposition of Turning toward the Transpacific: “this transcultural constellation will potentially serve as a basis for a new arrangement of global affairs between the two major global players in the twenty-first century and for the establishment of a new transnational consciousness, which includes a concern for the preservation of the planet” (340). Finally, exercising a very well-deserved editor's prerogative for his lead efforts, Yuan Shu closes out the volume on a similarly strong note with “Negotiating the Technological Empire: Cosmopolitics, Colonial Modernity, and Early Chinese American Autobiographical Writing.” This essay situates works such as Yan Phou Lee's When I Was a Boy in China (1887) and Yung Wing's My Life in China and America (1909) in relation not just to the rise of Asian American ethnic identity in the United States, but also to recent political and cultural developments since the 1980s in the People's Republic of China, where these works “have been rediscovered by the Chinese state media and academy as pioneering Chinese intellectuals and practitioners of what now has been officially established as the reformation and open door policy” (366). In doing so, Shu elaborates the rich and complex multiplicity of these texts when regarded from a transpacific vantage point that lies at the shifting intersection among Asian American, Asian, and postcolonial studies.

Testifying to both the hard work and the professional acumen of the editors, all of the essays in Turning toward the Transpacific show a uniformly high level of quality, as well as an impressive degree of intellectual coherence. The editors have successfully solicited, shepherded, and organized contributions by an all-star lineup of transnational American studies scholars from around the world. And as anyone who has edited a volume of essays knows, that effort alone deserves our collective admiration. Even among this impressively assembled group, though, some instances of happy foresight stand out. So, for example, we have Eva Cherniavsky's article on American studies in the post-Soviet era mentioned above. Similarly, in his essay on the historical formation of American studies, Walter Mignolo mentions one of the founding moments for the discipline: “on May 8, 1928, an English Professor at the University of Washington, Vernon Parrington, received a telegram from the Pulitzer Prize Committee announcing that he had won the historical writing award for the first two volumes in his Main Currents in American Thought” (282). And the very next essay in the volume is by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who at the time of publication in 2015 had not yet won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Sympathizer.

Of course, any cartographic enterprise leaves some parts of the terrain uncharted. The most glaring blank spot in Turning toward the Transpacific comes in the absence of any essays whatsoever focussing on Korea, either North or South; or on (representations of) the Korean War, or K-pop, or any of several other topics potentially relevant to the notion of the transpacific. I certainly don't think this was intentional. But insecure and narcissistic leaders perceive slight at every turn. And so, for any number of reasons and under more than merely one set of small thumbs, attention may turn back to the transpacific at the push of a button. We would do well, then, to attend to volumes like Shu and Pease's Turning toward the Transpacific as we wait for the tide to turn yet again.