Transatlantic Studies: The Discipline that Thinks Itself Beyond its Threshold

Transatlantic studies can be seen as a response to institutional pressures to rationalize resources by collapsing former units into “super-regional” frames of reference. Transatlanticism proposes an inter-continental framework, bringing under its canopy the cognate but often alienated specialties of Hispanism and Latin Americanism. In the “new” discipline, the old system of Hispanic studies, featuring the culture of Castilian Spain and its linguistic legacy in the nations born of its former colonies, reasserts itself under conditions of scarcity associated with the implosion of the Humanities. An alternative to this “modern” paradigm could be a postmodern, ironic discipline. The mark of the postmodern is the retention of pre-modern elements within an incongruous structure operating with a different functionality. For transatlantic Hispanism, irony could translate into awareness of the discipline’s imperial origins, while recasting it according to a new principle of organization that no longer rests on the alleged universality of an imperial language that fixes cultural value. An ironic discipline takes stock of its limits, and by doing so leaves them conceptually behind. In this way, and in this way only, it thinks the “trans” of the “trans” and assumes its place in the post-postmodern university.