Saldivar is one of the founders of border studies and one of the most respected senior scholars in American Studies. In this work he introduces the term "trans-Americanity" as a frame for thinking more hemispherically within a global, world-systems frame. There have been previous attempts at thinking the Americas as a whole, but often they have brought Latin America into a North American context. Saldivar wants to decenter the U.S. and national narratives more generally, and does so here in a series of readings which draw on literatures and events throughout the hemisphere.

A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, José David Saldívar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and "outernational" paradigm for American studies. Saldívar urges Americanists to adopt a world-system scale of analysis. "Americanity as a Concept," an essay by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, the architect of world-systems analysis, serves as a theoretical touchstone for Trans-Americanity. In conversation not only with Quijano and Wallerstein, but also with the theorists Gloria Anzaldúa, John Beverley, Ranajit Guha, Walter D. Mignolo, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Saldívar explores questions of the subaltern and the coloniality of power, emphasizing their location within postcolonial studies. Analyzing the work of José Martí, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and many other writers, he addresses concerns such as the "unspeakable" in subalternized African American, U.S. Latino and Latina, Cuban, and South Asian literature; the rhetorical form of postcolonial narratives; and constructions of subalternized identities. In Trans-Americanity, Saldívar demonstrates and makes the case for Americanist critique based on a globalized study of the Américas.

"“Saldívar is one of the boldest and most important scholars in American Studies today. Like few others, he engages what Martí calls Nuestra América, and for that he should be congratulated. Trans-Americanity is well worth reading.”" - Rocky Mountain Review

"“Saldıvar is one of the more interesting contemporary scholars in the field of American Studies. . .. [A]n excitingly inventive book that is sure to generate new avenues of scholarly inquiry.”" - Journal of American Culture

"“Trans-Americanity is extraordinarily ambitious in its scope. . . .  By providing conceptual linkages between authors and texts that are rarely read or taught together, Saldívar provides a critical map for scholars seeking to transnationalize American and US Latina/o studies.”" - Journal of American Studies

"“Trans-Americanity’s seven chapters, useful preface, and experimental ending offer broad intellectual coverage of Latin America, South Asia, and the Americas from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.”" - American Quarterly