ABSTRACT
The chapter argues how Edward Said’s call for an American humanism that could draw on the polyglot and multicultural fabric of US culture exemplifies Transnational American Studies. It can be redefined as a field that challenges the adjective “American” as the effect of the dominant discourses and images that are identified with the US as a supra-power or global sheriff in and across the US borders. Instead it aspires to place “America” in the world, highlighting the differences and temporalities of the cultures it is made of in relation to and reciprocity with other cultures across the world. Said’s After the Last Sky (Said 1999) illuminates Said’s practice of a transnational American analysis whose centre is the decentering of a consolidated vision of the Palestinian life as the “human other” or rogue life outside time and whose aim is to produce a narrative that critically engages neocolonialism and exceptionalism by deconstructing nationalism, religious fanaticism, and racism so that the present remains open to the ones who are here or arriving to inherit it.
