Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature

Silvia Schultermandl is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Münster. She is the author of Transnational Matrilineage: Mother-Daughter Conflicts in Asian American Literature and co-editor of six collections of essays which explore various themes in transnational studies, American literature and culture, as well as family and kinship studies, including Ethnicity and Kinship in North American and European Literatures. Among others, her articles have appeared in the following journals: Meridians, Atlantic Studies, Interactions, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Journal of American Culture. Together with May Friedman, she is series editor of the Palgrave Series in Kinship, Representation, and Difference. Silvia’s areas of interest include affect theory, literary theory, critical race theory, queer theory, visual culture, and transnational feminism.

Introduction: Ambivalent Transnational Belonging



Olaudah Equiano’s Liberal Authorial Subject of the Circum-Atlantic Middle Passage



Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Clarence, Sentimental Kinship, and the Transnational American Novel of Manners



Cosmo-Nationalist Aesthesis and Essentialized Womanhood in Henry James’s Daisy Miller



Precarious Intimacies and Narratives of the Transnational Care Economy in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy



Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Transnational Ambivalence at the Limits of Multiculturalism