American studies has long wrestled with a contradiction. It examines a country whose influence reaches across the globe, yet its scholarship has sometimes avoided calling that influence an empire.
The Empire That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist
William Appleman Williams identified the denial of an American empire as a central theme in American historiography. At the same time, the United States has been described as a world power steadily expanding since 1890 and extending different degrees of sovereignty abroad.
This tension shaped the discipline. If American studies focused too heavily on national stories, it risked becoming a scholarly companion to American foreign policy and globalization.
The Transnational Turn
After the United States emerged from the Cold War as the dominant global power, scholars increasingly studied connections crossing national borders. Amy Kaplan helped initiate this “Transnational Turn,” while Paul Giles called for attention to networks rather than patriotic narratives.
The goal was to move from an isolated national framework toward race, migration, culture, and power operating across borders.
A New Critique
Not everyone viewed this shift as a solution. Frank Kelleter argued that transnational approaches could become an escape from confronting the United States’ actual global power. Dissolving the country into a web of international connections, he suggested, might make imperial dominance harder—not easier—to understand.
The disagreement reveals a difficult balance. National frameworks can conceal overseas power, but transnational frameworks can blur the unequal power at the center of global networks.
American studies therefore faces a double obligation: recognize the United States’ extraordinary reach while refusing to treat that reach as natural, harmless, or the only force shaping the world.