Over the last twenty years, U.S. scholars have witnessed a proliferation of programmatic calls to abandon research that takes the nation-state as an unquestioned frame of analysis in favor of what have variously been called transnational, international, inter-American, transatlantic, black Atlantic, circum-Atlantic, Pacific rim, border, postnationalist, hemispheric, diasporic, cosmopolitan, and global frameworks. Often initiated from interdisciplines such as women’s studies, American studies, African American studies, Chicano and Latino studies, and Asian American studies, these calls have also been taken up by traditional disciplines such as history and literary studies.1 Some scholars have in turn revisited the genealogies of those traditional disciplines and have rediscovered earlier attempts to break out of the nation-state frame.2
