This essay is inspired by the surge in interest that has taken place in recent years around the place of transnationalism in American studies. These varied, and at times conflicted, conversations come at a time when practitioners of American studies have dedicated considerable energy to theorizing the transnational routes and roots of racial identities, cultural expressions, labor networks, and community practices that have crisscrossed US geographical and ideological terrain. Scholars often begin with Randolph Bourne's early use of “trans-national America” as an inchoate form of contemporary neologisms like “translocal,” “postnational,” and “glocalization.” The definition of transnationalism oscillates between, on the one hand, inter-/multinational webs and networks in which the “nation” is preserved as a category of analysis, and, on the other, deconstructing the term, describing the movement of people, goods, and ideas across boundaries and borders that break with models which locate culture or groups solely in terms of the nation-state.

This has raised important questions around “transnational” versus “comparative” methodologies, as well as the importance of non-English sources and dialogue with non-US academics in the study of US history, politics, and society.Footnote ¹ This emerging body of scholarship, which has taken root across area-studies programs and history, has a special place in US–Latin American studies, where transnational scholars for some time have focussed on expanding standard borders and boundaries of “America” to include other American republics. This has prompted a reimagining of the United States as one nation among many in the larger hemispheric cultural system and has produced a new geographic alignment.Footnote ² Still frustrating, however, is pinning down a precise definition of the term. How do we differentiate “transnational” from “international,” “multinational,” “cosmopolitan,” or “comparative,” or do we? Is there really anything new under the sun with transnational scholarship, or is this simply another iteration of conversations that have already taken place in comparative literature or world history?

I do believe there is something new and refreshing in the transnational turn in American and Latin American studies and submit that we look at these developments in connection with the veritable scholarship on the African diaspora. As a model of inquiry, diaspora studies has at its core the fundamental question of cross-border identity formation, whether physical or ideological, as a politics of memory or mode of activist mobilization. Several years ago, Brent Hayes Edwards provided a useful genealogy of “diaspora,” illustrating its Greek and Jewish antecedents and tracing its use into the twentieth century, so that by the 1960s the term had become a way to bypass the heretofore ambiguous differences between (small p) pan-Africanism and Pan-Africanism. It was in that moment, Edwards writes, when “the ‘African diaspora’ … inaugurate[d] an ambitious and radically decentered analysis of transnational circuits and politics that are resistant or exorbitant to the frames of nations and continents.”Footnote ³ Edwards stresses that the turn to diaspora allows us to access difference within and between black communities in a way that “Pan” does not. Most notably, diaspora scholarship recognizes “differences within unity” in the myriad experiences of Afro-descended peoples. Edwards employs the useful trope of a “joint” as a sight of both connection and disconnection, where two parts are united yet remain separate components of a larger appendage. Such an image sparks the notion of always-present difference or separation that can refuse translation – not only linguistically, but culturally in the widest sense of the term: nationality, sexuality, class, art, aesthetics. Edwards proffers that we must mind the gap in translating, transcribing, or transferring the black experience within and across time and space, even as we link it to the politics of allegiance, alliance, and unification that structure diasporic culture, nationalism, politics.Footnote ⁴

It is via this brief exposition that I seek to discuss two recent works which serve as fitting examples of the intersection between diaspora studies and transnational American studies. Uneven Encounters, by Micol Seigel, and Forging Diaspora, by Frank Andre Guridy, use transnationalism and diaspora in their enriching applicability: as a scholarly method and practice, and as a category of subjectivity and a conceptual framework. In valuable ways, both authors examine the theoretical and methodological contours of the trans-nation by rethinking nationalism as it is traditionally understood. Seigel and Guridy demonstrate that transnationalism and diaspora pose palatable alternatives in their adherence to the categorical in-between, as a way to rupture nation-bound understandings of race, nationalism, and culture. Rethinking the trans-nation in these terms, then, becomes a denaturalizing and deconstructive enterprise, which generates refreshingly new critical paradigms when positioned within the overlay of the African diaspora.

Both books shed light on how we might use transnational methods to impress a more supple excavation of the historical negotiation of race and nation by border-crossing Afro-descendant subjects across the Americas. Both authors reveal the fickleness of routing national and racial identities when contextualized within different class structures and geographies. The decidedly hyphenated interactions between US residents and other nationals, Brazilians in Seigel's book, Cubans in Guridy's, unveil a cartography of vastly diffuse cultural locations. Discovering the inner workings of various “contact zones” – to invoke Mary Louise Pratt's well-known term – is a dialogical endeavor, with the production, distribution, and consumption of US, Cuban, and Brazilian aural, visual, and literary texts flowing across borders. Understanding the transnational and diasporic in this sense does not do away with nationalist sensibilities but rather destabilizes and remaps them, showing them much more variegated in an assortment of cross-national cultural activities from jazz performance and coffee consumption to anti-racist poetry and black tourism.

Seigel opens Uneven Encounters by differentiating transnational history from other historical methodology: “Where international history explores the relations of nation-states (or just states) as well-bounded subjects, transnational history explores the global in the local, via interactions of groups or entities that do not fit national borders, whether because they are greater or less or both” (xiii). Central to Seigel's transnational model, and to a certain extent to Guridy's, is calling into question comparative analyses of race and identity. Her invective against the comparative approach stems from the tendency to draw bordered totality where it does not always exist (race means this in Brazil, while it means that in the United States). While most readily accept that no national context or racial formation is a hermetically sealed whole, Seigel rightfully maintains that scholarship in area studies and history is still too comfortable in its adherence to the custom of nation-centered analysis.Footnote ⁵

She thus begins with the opposite premise: that nothing is truly national (xi). To think more broadly about US–Brazilian constructions of race and nation requires an understanding of the physical and metaphysical border and boundary crossings, the making of what Seigel calls “transnational mental maps” (3) that unite, or separate, Afro-Brazilians, African Americans, and “whiter” North Americans and Brazilians. The language is important, particularly for those who write about the Americas, for decisions about the very use of “American” (as whites or blacks, North or South) necessarily factor into this vein of scholarship. Drawing from a rich variety of sources culled from both US and Brazilian archives, Seigel employs text, image, and song to show the ways in which Brazilians and North Americans negotiated nation and race together, in jointed but “uneven” ways throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It was at this time that coffee advertisements, dance, music, the popular stage, newspapers, and public monuments became laden with varied meanings as cultural forms which crossed borders along with their designers, practitioners, and consumers.

The coffee trade and its early advertising market, Seigel shows, was one site where new forms of “consumer citizenship” constituted changing ideas about national belonging and racial identity. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States and Brazil sought new commercial pacts that resulted in Brazil producing 75 percent of the world's coffee harvest and supplying 75 percent of the US coffee market (19–20). Associations like the Joint Coffee Trade Publicity Committee united roasters, planters, government officials, and coffee connoisseurs in new hemispheric markets. Brazilian planters and US consumers participated in a web of labor and commerce that generated new ideas about “Latin” and “Saxon” racial identities in coffee advertisements. This was a visual lexicon that harnessed different racial and gendered assumptions about domestic life and service. Bodily representations of physical labor and bourgeois respectability appeared in drawings and fashion, making larger statements about the value-difference between Brazilian and US citizenship.

Seigel then moves the reader through the cultural avenues of US–Brazilian musical performance, spotlighting the maxixe rage in New York City, jazz in Rio de Janeiro, and the itinerant melody-making of performers like the flutist and saxophonist Pixinguinha. Here Uneven Encounters makes a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on black modernism, the period of “Negro Vogue” that connected Europe, Latin America, and the United States on a cartography of diasporic cosmopolitanism. The traveling artistry of Josephine Baker, Romeu Silva, Elliot Carpenter, to name just a few, unveil a valuable – and still understudied – circuit of racial and national performance in the transnational experience of empire and exotica. Seigel adroitly demonstrates how racial markers were always shifting (but always present) in the self-expression and talent of such performers. Black vaudevillians actively sculpted their own racial and national identities to satisfy expectations around fetishized exotica that were the rage at this time. Black performativity could be fraught with the actors' own orientalist understandings of entertainment, as evidenced in the opera singing of “Black Patti” (Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones) or the hit run of Oriental America (1896–99), which brought various embodiments of – and resistance to – “black exoticist performance” of song and dance (140). These performances evince what Seigel calls “nation drag” and point to the ongoing slippage (the “gap” in Edwards's language) of racial and national performance (137–38). Such instances of “passing” included African Americans who were understood to be ethnic others in episodes of exotic spectacle. Accordingly, songstress Laura Bowman could pass as “Hawaiian” in Indianapolis while performing with the Ethiopian Art Players in New York City; African American tango musicians could evince Argentine identities while onstage; and Olive Burgoyne could be a leading figure of the “Brazilian dance” that grew popular in Chicago, despite her seeming lack of exposure to Brazil or Brazilian culture. Many of Seigel's figures perform their identities according to the varying cultural contexts of their transnational lives as well as the projections of exoticist desires and aesthetic expectations that audiences and art forms demanded. Burgoyne is an interesting case because she is one of many historical actors appearing in Uneven Encounters who lived the life of a polyglot cosmopolitan, enjoying lengthy residencies in Europe, Russia, and the United States.

These moments furnished opportunities for a diasporic nationalism that simultaneously combated racism and racist ideologies such as eugenics and segregation. But within this politics of unity, Seigel also discloses the decidedly different ways Afro-Brazilians and African Americans lived and understood their unique racial and national identities. Many Brazilians of color, for instance, did not celebrate Africa to the degree many African Americans did in the 1920s and 1930s. Africa could be a place deemed backward and primitive, not the cherished Zionist homeland lauded by Pan-Africanists. Likewise, the United States held an ambivalent position in Brazilian national consciousness. On the one hand, the northern hegemon was a benchmark of modernity, a political, economic, and technological marvel to be emulated. But more often, Seigel shows, black and white Brazilians positioned the United States as racist, unlike Brazil, which factored into notions of Brazilian exceptionalism that gained traction at this time. Seigel conducts a much-needed treatment of the origins of, and challenges to, the myth of “racial democracy” that is still synonymous with Brazil. During the 1920s and 1930s this discourse held the country to be a colorblind society, a notion that made up the bedrock of a new nationalism in which both blackness and whiteness were valued in Brazilian narratives of belonging. In contrast stood the supposed magnanimous United States where racism was rampant in what reputedly was the beacon of democracy. Brazilians could rest assured that in terms of social equality they were forward-thinking and modern, unlike their northern neighbors. Such assurances proved that their country progressed where the United States lagged.

Seigel expands these converging and diverging understandings of racial and national identities to include the cultural expression of monumentality. Her especially provocative analysis of Brazil's Mãe Preta (“Black Mother”) sculpture unveils the socially constructed nature of nostalgia that remained significantly local but also assumed transnational meaning in the modernist era. A legacy of slavery, Mãe Preta is an image of an Afro-Brazilian woman nursing an infant (who is often white) that celebrates Brazil's race-mixing, part of the iconography of the nation's racial democracy. In the 1920s it conjured an Eve-like status, a maternal progenitor that provided the proverbial milk to the modern Brazilian nation born out of abolition. Seigel argues that the Black Mother motif gained credence following World War I as an antidote to the social anomie associated with urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, which brought fear of family disintegration and indictments against the “modern woman” (212). Mãe Preta, by contrast, emphasized the value of rurality, family, and black–white interaction. While there are many who critique this form of memory as racist and overwhelmingly essentialist, Seigel shows that the image was celebrated as part of Brazil's badge of racial democracy that put blackness – and specifically black womanhood – front and center in the body politic. Mãe Preta was supported by black and white Brazilians, who agreed that the statue was an important symbol of racial tolerance and integrated nationhood (209). It also delivers an illustrative instance of diasporic “gap,” because an equivalent form of memory did not take hold in the United States. Seigel is quick to point out, in fact, that when in the same era the United Daughters of the Confederacy mobilized to erect a “Mammy” statue in Washington, DC, they failed in their lobbying efforts due to public outrage, particularly among African Americans, at such a symbol. Nevertheless, African Americans apparently did admire Brazil's monument from afar, with the Chicago Defender applauding the tribute to “the Colored mothers of the country” and touting “women of the Race” (222).

Echoing Seigel's call to historicize transnationally, Frank Guridy has produced a study of African American/Afro-Cuban “cross-national exchange” that is more narrowly focussed on the African diaspora. Myriad gestures of black artistic and political kinship, he argues, find common ideological and affective ground cultivated from the shared memory and legacies of the Middle Passage. Like Seigel, Guridy shows that recovering these voices demands wading through the “messy process of translation” consisting of broken English and Spanish, bodily gestures, and various textual performances. And as with Seigel's book, Forging Diaspora widens the binational focus (US–Cuba) to encompass other countries and regions, unearthing a broader map of diasporic cosmopolitanism among black elites and members of the “black aspiring class” (to borrow Michele Mitchell's useful phrase). Guridy's historical subjects are also Panamanian, Haitian, and Puerto Rican, which underscores that “diaspora-making” should be understood in concert with other nationalist compulsions. He also maintains that Afro-diasporic linkages between Cuba and the United States were varied and uneven, and they created opportunities for racial solidarity as well as instances of opportunism granted by empire.

In many ways, Forging Diaspora is structured more chronologically than Seigel's book. Guridy begins with US intervention in Cuba's War of Independence and subsequent occupation as the generative moment for these interactions. It was at this point when US and Cuban populations of color were drawn into a unique nexus of imperialism and racial segregation, a period that gave life to new “transcultural” dialogue and diasporic networks in what Guridy amplifies to include the “U.S.–Caribbean world.” In an illuminating evaluation of African Americans who used Cuba's War of Independence as a way to secure social advancement, Guridy situates Booker T. Washington as one who saw the war as a potential benefit for the race when he advocated sending African Americans to Cuba, because “the climate of Cuba is peculiar and dangerous to the unacclimated white man” (23). As with their white counterparts, black entrepreneurs like Langston Hughes's father, James Nathaniel, believed that the postwar occupation was a ripe time to obtain land and set up businesses in Cuba. Thus not only did Afro-Cubans and African Americans view their subaltern status as a way to unite towards collaborative campaigns of anti-racist activism, but they could also find themselves in unequal positions of power due to their national origin and economic standing. Forging Diaspora minds the diasporic gap in showing both connections and separation in these episodic “joints,” unveiling how the “difference within unity” was varyingly practiced amid war and empire.

But more often than not, however, the book uncovers the many ways empire brokered important exchanges of solidarity-building between Afro-Cubans and African Americans. Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, which recruited Cuban students during the US occupation, made the concept of “racial uplift” into a transnational creed. Cuban students made their way to Alabama as Havana elites set up their own Instituto Booker T. Washington; Tuskegee taught US, Cuban, and Puerto Rican members of the black aspiring class the moral virtue of industrial labor and civic leadership. Guridy points out that a significant part of this regimen later informed the black nationalist discourse of the Garvey movement. During the 1910s and 1920s, the UNIA set up offices in New York City and various city centers around the Caribbean. Guridy provides a crucial recovery of Garveyism in Cuba, a topic often overlooked or dismissed as inconsequential by prior historians. His discussion, by contrast, reveals that the Havana office, under the leadership of Rogelio Galindo, was quite engaged with UNIA organizing on the island and drew the attention of primarily anglophone Caribbean immigrants.

Guridy uses the discussion of Garveyites to shed light on another understudied diasporic topic when he details the formidable history of black migrant labor to Cuba. Concentrating on Oriente (Eastern Cuba), the book highlights a population of polyglot workers from the Caribbean that included those who left Panama for Cuba following World War I. There they joined laborers from Costa Rica and Haiti to bring the estimated total of migrant workers in Cuba during the first thirty years of the twentieth century to over 300,000 (67). In a Marxian sense, Forging Diaspora focusses on the economic or material base of the ideological and political dimensions of diaspora-making. The institutionalization of racial politics like Tuskegee and Garveyism, then, is complemented with an insightful discussion of how labor and capital undergirded and catalyzed these strands of diasporic movement.

The materialist component of the book also underlies the flourishing array of performative practices that crossed the Florida Straits. Like Seigel's book, there is a fabulous musical theme that runs through Forging Diaspora. One immediately finds resonance with what Edward Said described as his method of postcolonial reading, what he likened to listening to “contrapuntal melodies” in a polyvocal composition of geographies and histories. In the present transnational context, we might say that these overlapping melodies are at once literal and metaphorical, evinced by the sounds of jazz, son, opera or rumba, as well as in the imbricated histories and polyvalent nationalisms that make up diasporic identity. Guridy points out that Booker T. Washington desired to “harmonize his loyalty to the United States with an identification with the worldwide colored race” (20). Harmonizing these racial and national allegiances necessarily brought affective elements not only of jazz and rumba, but also of UNIA pageantry, from speeches and parades to songs and uniforms worn by the Garvey Women's Brigade. The making of transnational harmonies also bore artistic connections between afrocubanismo and the Harlem Renaissance. We are invited to listen to the poetic interactions between Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes, and weave through a variety of cultural traffic directed by hemispheric aesthetes like Miguel Covarrubias, José Antonio Fernández de Castro, and Carl Van Vechten at a time when Havana and Harlem were vibrant centers of art and political agitation in the heyday of black modernism.

In their totality, Uneven Encounters and Forging Diaspora follow the enviable, though difficult, journeys of Afro-diasporic people as they creatively negotiated their ambitions and labors in a transnational world. Both books bring the rewarding conclusion that in order to tell these stories, transnational scholars, too, must embark on their own globetrotting expeditions to recover the voices of their historical subjects. Retracing these steps means immersing oneself in multinational archives and participating in stimulating dialogue with students and scholars from other countries. It means attending to different historiographical and epistemological traditions, excavating the cultural scripts of the in-between to create a novel understanding of beliefs, aesthetic standards, and narratives of selfhood that people use to describe themselves and their communities. Reevaluating Cuban, Brazilian, and US cultural forms along these lines uncovers the myriad ways in which nations are performed and written. In addition to producing ideas about brasilidade, cubanidad, and US Americanism, black subjects also produced varying local, hemispheric, and global expressions in their cultural and political identities. Though grounded in a binational axis (US–Cuba, US–Brazil), these books create a much larger Afro-diasporic map, extending from Chicago to São Paulo, Harlem to Havana, Paris to Moscow. The identities of the people who populate these texts reach well beyond national singularity.

With the virtues of this expansiveness, however, come pitfalls as well. The sheer magnitude of narrating a story transnationally – because we are still accustomed to telling one-nation histories – means that explaining the varied historical contexts can be belaboring and overly truncated. Seigel, for instance, provides a thin explanation for why the historical period in question – the World War I and interwar eras – is central to her narrative. We are left wondering about the historiographical reasons for her inquiry. Similarly, Guridy provides attenuated commentary on the gendered dynamics of African American–Afro-Cuban interaction. Though he breeches the subject of women and gender on several occasions, he fails to venture into a deeper critical treatment in spots that ask for expansion. Such sections might have included the work between the National Council of Negro Women and the Asociación Cultural Femenina, or how Afro-diasporic female artistry and tourist travel affected the politics of black womanhood. Finally, in both accounts race permeates the analysis, but Guridy and Seigel continue the norm of focussing on a black–white axis, when Brazil, the United States, and Cuba have complex immigrant histories and distinct discourses of mestizaje that demand a more dedicated reading of racial hierarchies, even if in an introductory way. Though both make mention of these varied dynamics, more theoretical or empirical elaboration on these categories would enrich the critical perspectives of their arguments.

But editing choices must be made, and these shortcomings do not detract from the overall usefulness or importance of either book. Both are excellent models of transnational work that exemplify how scholars of American studies might go about writing the conceptual redress of “nation” and “culture.” In posing an effective challenge to the synonymic usage of these terms, it is worth recalling earlier work by Homi Bhabha, when he asked the pivotal question, how do we narrate the nation? He continued,

Uneven Encounters and Forging Diaspora take care to exhibit the complexity of this ambivalence in erudite and subtle ways. Seigel's “global in the local” and Guridy's “transcultural and cross-national” exemplify how as a category of analysis transnationalism can function in dialogue with other conceptual frameworks like race, gender, or class. Scholars from a variety of disciplines would be wise to take up these global ways of seeing in our assessments in poetry, films, and politics, connecting where and how the global imagination operates and under what circumstances it is informed from afar.

Finally, the liberal use of non-US sources in both texts bears witness to how the US empire is lived, resisted, and enabled elsewhere, even by subaltern subjects. Following Said's method of contrapuntal reading, transnational scholarship widens the conversation on how non-US populations may reject or serve US imperial desire. They help uncover what the voices of “Other” sound like in their confrontation with US hegemony. These figures are not simply passive recipients or agent-less objects of US actions. Rather, Seigel's and Guridy's non-US actors are active subjects with their own desires, their actions shaped by the relationships and realities granted by wider webs of power and influence. If in fact we live in an era of postmodern globalization that increasingly looks beyond the nation-state to explain new worldwide webs of mutuality and conflict, it is desirable that we also delve deeper into the past to explain how populations collaborated across national borders and boundaries as part of the ongoing exercise in liberation from marginalization and dispossession. This agency produces new ideas about accountability. Widening the scope of racial and cultural logics that explain resistance and oppression discloses a weathered history of contestation and imagination on the combative terrain of place and meaning, which continue to fluctuate according to vying political objectives and moral purposes. Cataloguing these interactions affords today's scholar the opportunity to participate in and redesign the meaning and significance of these border-crossing moments.