I’m interested in Bronsky’s novel for how it can be read against what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls the neoliberal novel of migrancy. Harrison writes that the novel of migrancy, while traditionally being an account of the entanglement between identity and place, takes on different exigence when contemporary stories “formally position migrant subjects as analogues of capital” (203).
Two central imperatives that Harrison identifies in the classic immigrant novel are national assimilation, which suggests that a sense of rootedness (to place or nation) is the key to individual identity and cosmopolitanism (the movement between nations that instantiates that journey) which exists as its opposite number. In the classic immigrant novel, these two imperatives are joined. They operate together to inform the changes that identity undergoes as individuals move about within global structures.
Harrison’s intervention lies in her suggestion that the neoliberal novel of migrancy “breaks down the classic immigrant novel’s standard trajectory from ethnic identity to national cosmopolitanism, replaying this simple, linear trajectory with a free-floating transnational cosmopolitanism more akin to that of capital itself than that of the assimilated citizen” (203). However, rather than suggesting a full on critique of cosmopolitanism in its similarities to the flow of capital across borders, she argues that by allying the notion of human capital with the literal flow of bodies within cosmopolitanism, these stories highlight “a contradictory tension between cosmopolitanism’s endorsement of unallied global mobility and the rootedness of national assimilation” because the nation itself is no longer a fixed goal. The journey to a new nation in the novel, instead of standing for itself operates as mirror for “neoliberal capital’s paradoxical reliance on the nation as an economic mechanism that can facilitate competitive conditions for the free flow of capital and increasing globalized wealth (203-4).
Why I find Bronsky’s novel relevant to this discussion is in how it repudiates cosmopolitanism itself in how it privileges singular, isolated space as being central to identity in a world post-nuclear disaster. Baba Dunja and the other returnee’s to Tschernowo operate outside of the generally recognized flow of capital in their isolated village. As Bronsky describes it, it exists outside of the flow of a lot of things, a kind of silent oasis amongst the radiation.
What I would never trade for running water and a telephone in Tschernowo is the matter of time. Here there is no time. There are no deadlines and no appointments. In essence, our daily routine is a sort of game. We are reenacting what people normally do. Nobody expects anything of us. We don’t have to get up in the morning or go to bed at night. For all anyone cares, we could do it the other way around. We imitate daily life the same way children do with dolls, or when they’re playing store. (Bronsky 95).
Tschernowo, despite its wastelandish makeup, is the perfect place to stage this discussion of identity and emplacement because it is a place that has no exploitable value under capitalism. Tschernowo and other locations within exclusion zones–or what Baba Dunja calls “death zones” trouble notions of the specific value of certain places within a neoliberal framework. While at the same time, the uneasy, blurred boundary prompts readers to consider larger questions of the impact of nuclear disaster because, as Baba Dunja notes, the notion that the death zones “[stop] at the borders people draw on maps” is facile (43).
We’ve talked a lot about the importance of intentional community in class as well as the power found in emplaced thinking. Considering Bronsky’s novel as a means of re-reading migrancy under neoliberal capitalism allows us to probe what it means to return to, rather than escape from, disaster as a means of empowerment and solidarity. Baba Dunja’s Last Love models an emplaced knowledge that is based on both individual and communal identities. Individual in that Baba Dunja prioritizes self-reliance and personal responsibility. Communal in that she conceives of the above identities as thriving best within a place that prioritizes rhythm of life extensive with nature. The characters’ return frames a different kind of cosmopolitanism–one predicated not on the flow of capital, but on a resistance to that flow for the sake of putting down deeper roots.
One final point I’d like to add is in how Baba Dunja complicates neoliberal capital’s imperative to personal responsibility. While I do not believe that Tschernowo is a libertarian dream-land, as I noted above, the village exists in a space that has no value in economic terms, and all of the activity done there, by old bodies with no intention of increasing human-capital, sits outside the system laughing.
Also, as a side note, here’s this interesting essay I stumbled upon while Googling about place and identity in literature. I can’t really speak about it here, but it’s something I’m hoping to read over the break, and since it seems related to the work we’re doing in class, I wanted to share it here.
- “The Neoliberal Novel of Migrancy.” Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture. Edited by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, Johns Hopkins, 2017. pp. 203-219.