The “transnational turn” has reshaped multiple disciplines in productive ways without generating a consensus on the meaning of transnationalism. It can refer to migration, postcoloniality, cosmopolitanism, diasporism, indigeneity, international relations, cultural production, and more. It can also refer to the transnational flows of people, power, and capital between the United States and Latin America, or between the Americas and Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The movement of humans and their artefacts through the region and the wider world either physically, through travel, migration, and exile, or symbolically, through the circulation of texts, images, ideologies, music, film, dance styles, art, architecture, etc. has long been a feature of the experience of the Americas. Directed by CLALS Affiliate Faculty Max Paul Friedman and Núria Vilanova, and with contributions from several other colleagues, this project aims to analyze contemporary usage of the concept across disciplinary boundaries and foster exchange among scholars working with transnationalism in order to enrich our understanding of people who live transnationally in the Americas, and to identify common and divergent approaches to the study of the concept that can contribute to the development of scholarly work informed by interdisciplinarity.

Two workshops are bringing together scholars from across the Americas and Europe for whom transnationalism is central to their work. The meetings, one in February 2020 at American University and one in July 2020 as an online forum are sponsored by the Lateinamerika-Institut at the Freie-Universität Berlin and, at American University, the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History, Department of World Languages and Cultures, and the Humanities Lab.