156 APPALACHIAN JOURNAL INTRODUCTION Transnational Perspectives: Attachment and Appropriation in “Our” Appalachia¹ CHRISTIAN QUENDLER AND BENJAMIN ROBBINS , GUEST EDITORS Christian Quendler is Professor of American Studies, Film, and Media at the University of Innsbruck, where he is currently chairing the Department of American Studies and co-directing the Center of Inter-American Studies. He is the author of three monographs: From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction, Interfaces of Fiction, and e Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema. His articles have appeared in e New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Amerikastudien/American Studies. His current research project “Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes and the Alpine Model” examines the history of the mountain cinema from transnational and ecocritical perspectives. Ben Robbins is an assistant professor in American literary and cultural studies in the Department for American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. His work in the research areas of Southern studies, Faulkner studies, modernism, popular culture, and gender and queer studies has appeared in the Journal of Screenwriting, e Faulkner Journal, Genre, Studies in American Culture, and Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives. He is a senior collaborating editor on the digital humanities project Digital Yoknapatawpha, which has created interactive visualizations to explore the fictions of William Faulkner, and has been a visiting fellow at both the University of Virginia and l’Ècole des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. T raveling through Appalachia, one may encounter several “Switzerlands”that foreground different forms of local and global place attachments. To this day the town Helvetia in West Virginia proudly celebrates its history of Swiss immigration dating back to 1869. Little Switzerland, North Carolina, founded in the early 20th century, claims its share of the Alps because of its panoramic views that may or may not bring to mind the Swiss Alps. And there are, of course, many commercial references to Switzerland that bank on alpine prestige as part of a transnational tourist culture. Photo credit: Jake Schneider