American Studies Over_Seas 1: Narrating Multiple America(s)

Acknowledgements

The editors of American Studies Over_Seas wish to acknowledge the invaluable support, financial and other, provided for this project by a number of institutions and individuals:

• ‒Luso-American Foundation for Development (FLAD), for a generous grant for the editing and post-editing stages of these volumes. FLAD’s work over the past four decades embodies many of the ideas behind this project, uncovering the academic and artistic potential in Portugal, strengthening the ties with Portuguese American communities, and narrowing the distance between people and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic;
• ‒American Corners Portugal and Pedro Estácio, librarian of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, for the financial support in the dissemination of the project. Since it was set up, American Corners has been making available invaluable resources to students for investigation purposes, as well as implementing key programs designed to promote culture, research & development;
• ‒ULICES—The University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, with whom many of the contributors to both volumes are affiliated, for its institutional backing and assistance in navigating the waters of Portuguese bureaucracy;
• ‒The Department of English Studies of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon and all its academic staff, whose collegial spirit provided sustenance and encouragement throughout this editorial undertaking;
• ‒The Portuguese Foundation for Research and Development (FCT), the national agency in charge of promoting science, technology and innovation in Portugal, and under whose aegis Portuguese scholars have ←ix | x→been given the means to pursue national and international research projects;
• ‒The peer-reviewers and first readers of the essays that comprise both volumes, for their sagacious advice and kind observations:

Introduction by the Editors

In the year 1972–1973, just before the overthrow of Portugal’s forty-three-year dictatorial regime, Teresa Ferreira de Almeida Alves and Teresa Salter Cid Gonçalves crossed paths in the hallways of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. They were germanistas, which meant that they were doing degrees which combined both German and English studies. Although they started their careers as instructors of German Literature, they were quickly drawn to the teaching of American Literature and Culture, most notably the subject matters brought over by the winds of the “Carnation Revolution,” unconventional and unheard courses such as “Racism in the United States,” which subsequently evolved into “Minorities in the United States.” Their friendship progressed steadily as they enrolled in their PhD programs. Following a visit to the United States in 1976, as part of a US government program designed to promote academic contacts between the two countries, Alves devoted herself to the author Saul Bellow and Cid to Nathanael West. From then on, their close collaboration in everything that had to do with American Studies grew, infused with the desire to garner recognition for this disciplinary field within the University of Lisbon. They helped to establish dialogue and cooperation with their international counterparts, becoming affectionately known as “the two Teresas” in the lively and productive academic encounters they took part in not just in the United States but also in Europe.

Inspired by the example of “the two Teresas,” the two volumes that comprise American Studies Over_Seas aim to acknowledge the kindred collegiality among Americanists then and now. They bring together contributions from academics who have collaborated with our two honorees over the years, or belong to later generations who have benefited from their teachings, either through their academic work or else that of the scholars they helped to train. In fact, Teresa F. A. Alves and Teresa Cid played a pivotal role in building the interdisciplinary foundations that sustain this editorial project epistemically, namely the interrelation between American Studies, literary theory, and ←1 | 2→historicism, on the one hand, and the Portuguese diaspora in North America and transatlantic/maritime studies, on the other.

With scholarly work from Portugal, several European countries, as well as from North America, this homage is meant to showcase the wide-ranging scholarship being produced internationally in the field of American Studies, confirming the significant role played by our “shared” Atlantic, and extending its scope to other ocean crossings that evidence how the sea is a social construct (Steinberg) and how its imagery evolved through cultural exchanges, historical connections and migration movements to and from North America over the centuries. Many of the contributions to this project fall within the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical maritime or oceanic studies, as there is more than one side to this “Blue revolution.”¹ If, on the one hand, it impels us to acknowledge how the chartering of the oceans follows a logic of value accumulation and fluctuation entailing seaborne exploitation and extractivism, as argued by Campling and Colás in Capitalism and the Sea, on the other, its conception as an environmental space that facilitates movement might allow for the watery transformation of our critical categories. We may envision, therefore, as suggested by Steve Mentz in the creative “deterritorializing preface” to his Ocean (2020), the replacement of “field” with “current,” “progress” with “flow” (xv–xvi), or, we propose, “linear” with “wavy.”

So, our readers are invited to read the underscore sign connecting the words “over” and “seas” in the title of our editorial project not just as a low line but as a sea wave as well, a character which reminds us that the process of going overseas is not simply an escape from a given place, but also a special movement whereby we choose to have, or lose our bearings neither “on” nor “in” and not even quite in-between.² As it stands, the underscore signals both a border marker and a connecting aspiration, simultaneously bridging and at the same time separating, just like the oceans, the shores of nations and the cultures of the world, and shaping our current configuration of what the imaginative spaces of America can be. We thus seek to graphically represent the in-between places where individuals meet and become transformed, the “contact zones” Mary Louise Pratt describes as intercultural spaces characterized by separateness, difference, or distinctiveness, as much as by “co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices . . .” (8). Another interrelated reflection on our use of the underscore sign comes from Myra Jehlen, who has discussed the mutual transformation that occurs when diverse peoples come together, “the common ground they construct new to both, and on which they are neither the same nor different but only inextricably related; indeed neither the same nor different through their relation” (54).

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This project comprises separate but interconnected parts: the current volume, Narrating Multiple America(s), aims to highlight the diverse and at times dissenting ideological underpinnings involved in the study of “America” as a mindscape, currently understood to be varied and non-essentialist in nature, not least in the artistic decantation of discourses surrounding class, gender, religion, race, ethnicity, nationality. The second volume, (Multi)vocal Exchanges Across the Atlantic, curates not only academic essays that illustrate Portuguese American encounters from a variety of standpoints, but also personal testimonies, poems, short stories, and chronicles that help us to piece together an intellectual backdrop to the transnational turn in American Studies.³ Taken together, both volumes evidence this paradigm shift in the study of America while questioning the consensus view of exceptionalism and eschatology in US history, historiography, and culture.