Before enrolling is this course, transnationalism was a theoretical context I had encountered previously in a graduate seminar, but never realized how it directly applied to my life outside of literature. Currently, after a dynamic semester of engagement with how interconnectivity between global contexts functions, I observe, experience, teach, and reflect on transnationalism on a daily basis, particularly in my profession as a foreign language teacher. Not only do I consider how transnational contexts posit my role as an educator in the 21^st century, but also how they can improve upon the way I teach German. For example, how can new transnational technology resources enhance the foreign language learning process? Although transnationalism is applicable to many spheres, it seems to currently occupy a front row seat in my educational life.

At the beginning of the semester, the introductory text by Appadurai Modernity at Large and his framework of various “scapes” enabled me to reframe my perception of how my work and learning environments are part of the “new global cultural economy.” Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, or the “landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live” appeared to adequately describe the diverse individuals that I work with and teach in suburban Washington DC. With citizens from around the world in my environment who may fluently speak other languages in addition to English, one question that I often found myself asking was, “How does knowledge of other languages assist with learning languages such as German?” When I posited this question to co-workers and students, especially those that spoke Spanish, French, and Russian, I found that “grammar” was the most common answer. Another discussion that arose with colleagues was different methods or traditions of teaching foreign languages and adjustments that may be needed by foreign teachers in the American cultural context. One colleague mentioned how the grammar/translation method is quite common in Eastern Europe, but is rarely used in North America. In addition, several co-workers mentioned their amazement at the change in foreign language offerings in secondary school in this particular metropolitan area. While French, and Spanish remain popular, languages such as German and Latin are slowly being replaced by Arabic, Chinese, or Korean for an anticipated need in the “global economy” of the future.

Technoscapes, or the “the global configuration of technology…which now speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries” was also influential in my new line of thinking. In particular, I reflected on how virtual spaces, such as learning platforms, social media, and communication devices, have facilitated communication across borders. In today’s German language classroom, students can chat on Skype with a Swiss peer, watch a music video in German on YouTube, or take a test online. Learning possibilities with both ethnoscapes and technoscapes seem endless, and I often wonder how it will evolve further as advances are made (Appadurai 329-331).

As our seminar began to discuss transnational cinema in November, I considered how to apply this transnational framework to my teaching of German films in upper level language classes. Ezra and Roden’s definition of transnational cinema as one that arises in the “interstices between local and global” and which has the ability to “foster bonds of recognition between groups” created room for thought (Ezra & Roden 4) Shortly before Thanksgiving, in collaboration with my German colleague, we decided to show Sandra Nettelback’s 2003 Bella Martha to our fourth year German sections.

The story of a workaholic chef in Hamburg, who also engages with Italian culture, citizens, and cuisine, facilitated many examples of curricular transnationalisms. In terms of thinking locally, students made cross-cultural connections between American restaurants and cuisine with the German ones depicted in the film. In terms of thinking globally, students were able to compare and contrast German-Italian culture with German-American and/or American-Italian culture. While many cultural nuances relating to Italy were similar, others, such as work culture were vastly different. While the idea of a “workaholic” chef was not surprising to American students due to the typical American work culture, students were amazed to learn that this is rare in Germany or Italy. Thus, the negative reaction of Martha’s co-workers and acquaintances made more sense against this cultural backdrop.

Bella Martha (2002) by Sandra Nettelback

In addition, Ezra and Roden’s discussion of “Hollywoodization” came into focus, especially when several students mentioned having previously seen the American remake of Bella Martha, Scott Hick’s 2007 film No Reservations, without realizing its German origin. Within this framework, students could simultaneously compare cultural nuances of how films are made in different countries. Interestingly, in concurrence with Ezra and Roden’s analysis of American films, students noted the “universalization” of American culture, while the German film seek to evoke more “truth” in relation to German/Italian cultural contexts.

No Reservations (2007) by Scott Hicks

While Appadurai and Ezra & Roden have shaped my work environment perception and teaching methods in new ways, other transnational frameworks continually interest me and I hope to peruse them in the future when time allows. For example, last’s week discussion on the Berlin School and Halle’s article on “German Film after Germany” were intriguing and provided some teaching ideas on how to frame Germany culture, society, and politics in the 21^st century, especially after the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Many of the texts we’ve read for this course account for the uses of the term “transnational” as it circulates in academic study and political discourse, as a descriptor of a set of phenomena linked to globalization, as a qualifier for the cultural identities and products that emerge from the experiences of these phenomena, as a critical perspective that makes visible the workings of the nation-state. Of all the creative and theoretical texts we’ve read this semester, though, the one that has been the most influential to my way of seeing and thinking about the world and ways of learning (in) it is, perhaps, one of the more straightforward discussions of the transnational in terms of a transnational practice of studying identities in the context of globalization. Inderpal Grewal and Caran Kaplan’s 2001 article, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” provides a really useful articulation of what a transnational feminist practice of studying sexual identities might look like, consider, and prioritize, and how such a transnational practice helps overcome some limitations of conventional disciplinary approaches to the study of sexuality which, they argue, have been “unable to address some key issues and problems” (666). I suspect that one of the reasons their articulation of this practice has resonated with me in such a lasting way has to do with the order of things on the syllabus, as we read this article after the unit focusing on the transnational practice of studying the meanings and events of 1968; having already had this case study exemplifying a transnational scholarly practice surely made Grewal and Kaplan’s explanation of it all the easier to apprehend.

Grewal and Kaplan argue convincingly that “a more interdisciplinary and transnational approach that addresses inequalities as well as new formations” can more adequately explore the complex terrain of sexual politics and identities in the current phase of globalization (664). Their ideas about this approach to feminist study have expanded my previously entrenched understandings of transnationalism as primarily a thing of its own or a mode of being under contemporary global capitalism. This is, and will be, most useful to me not only in the realm of research, in terms of the way I determine and articulate my methodologies as an interdisciplinary feminist scholar; it also has profoundly affected the way I think about and wish to approach teaching feminisms and feminist studies, especially in the space of the introductory classroom (and perhaps even more especially in the UMD classroom, where student diversity reflects a range of the effects of transnational movements and economic policies on the Maryland population/demographics, a specificity to which I hope my teaching can be sensitive).

So my first application of this idea of a transnational practice of feminist study (of identities, of events, of cultural productions) has been/will be in my thinking through how to revise my syllabus for the introductory Women’s Studies course I teach on “Women, Art, and Culture” in order to reflect transnational histories of feminisms and, importantly, to destabilize the hegemonic narrative of Western/Eurocentric feminist thought and action. My biggest challenge will be in how little I feel I know about women’s (or feminist) artistic and cultural production outside of a U.S. or European context, although once I begin the work of selecting texts in earnest I may very well surprise myself on this front. In any case, I’ve begun to think seriously about how a transnational approach to teaching women’s studies could structure my syllabus, and thus an introduction to a field of study. Looking to Grewal and Kaplan’s explanatory examples of a transnational approach to the study of sexuality for hints about how this might translate to a transnational approach to feminist pedagogy: they start by examining how colonial and postcolonial discourses of modernity and tradition have structured feminist cultural production, identity politics, and national policy and activism, continue by interrogating how global political discourse and national policies on international relations produce subjects and identities, and also consider the how the deployment of feminist/social activist discourses about global issues shapes the emergence of local/national activist agendas (672-673). They also point to how certain topics of study, such as tourism and travel, provide “a window onto specific connections among nationalism, political economy, and cultural formations” as many of the figures and debates that come up in the study of tourism (such as the “Third World prostitute” and global trafficking and sex tourism) indicate colonialist habits of thought (673). Following these leads, perhaps a transnational approach to teaching an introductory women’s studies class might start by exploring a range of instances of artistic and cultural production relating to a particular topic (such as tourism or migration), from various locations and perspectives, in order to teach key concepts (power and privilege, inequalities, identity, difference, discourse, representation, activism, nation, etc.). I’m only at the beginning stages of revising my syllabus, but am excited about the possibilities opened up by a transnational approach to an introduction to Women’s Studies syllabus, and Grewal and Kaplan’s thinking will be incredibly useful in this regard. 

            As a few others have written in their posts, I knew precious little about the concepts of globalization and transnationalism when this seminar began. Of course, I have started most of my seminars here at Maryland in the same position, so nothing new there. What was new with this seminar was a degree of uncertainty that came with our introduction to the main topics to be covered over the semester. The requisite “what do you all think of when you hear the term __________?” discussion on day one seemed pretty standard. Let’s talk about the ideas and preconceptions we all have going into this course. Agreeing to a set of terms to be used is an essential step in framing the overall discussion to come. However, the theoretical texts of the first several meetings almost seem to be responding to the same question, and they offer nearly as many disparate answers as we did.

Naturally, scholars often disagree about the finer points of theory development and application, and it is in those disagreements, those lively debates, that we have the opportunity to refine our approach and edge a little closer to meaningful advancement in the field, whatever it may be. Still, in past seminars covering German Studies or Twenty-first Century German Literature, I was reasonably certain of what the movements addressed, and in which period they were situated. When I tried to pin down “the transnational turn”, I found myself at somewhat of a loss. The three texts that truly gave me pause were Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, Paul Jay’s Global Matters, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, and I believe that they have continued to do so throughout the seminar. With each fictional text we read, I found myself marking passages with “as in Jay/Appiah” or “not according to Appadurai” notes.

With Appadurai and Jay, the disconnect between their views on the origin of transnationalism and its relationship to globalization was particularly exciting. Appadurai suggests that the phenomena of globalization and the transnational effects it brings are recent phenomena. “Implicit in this book is a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (3). He credits the boom in technology—especially communications technology—with starting the whole process. It has made possible the various -scapes he proposes in the opening section of his book. As diasporic populations achieve greater ease and speed in communication and community building, new identities are imagined and spread.

Indeed, for Appadurai, condensing time and space is an essential element of his theory of rupture, which he describes as “necessarily a theory of the recent past” (9). The thing about ruptures, though, is that they come from the inside, and although they may seem abrupt or sudden, the causal weakening tends to occur over time. Jay, I believe, recognizes this fact. While he acknowledges some merit in Appadurai’s theory of rupture, he criticizes that “Appadurai’s approach to globalization emphasizes rupture, speed, convergence, and disjunction at the expense of historicizing the forces that have led to this rupture in the first place” (Jay 36). He asserts in his own arguments that globalization is not the sole or simple cause of transnationalism, that it is not a contemporary phenomenon. A more thorough understanding lies in a blend of materialistic and cultural approaches.

Kwame Anthony Appiah echoes Jay’s promotion of a historical and cultural element at least partially driving the transnational movement of today. Appiah, a philosopher, takes an ethical approach with his proposal of a new cosmopolitanism, asserting in essence that while humans (and cultures) are different, we can and have a responsibility to learn from those differences. Like Jay, he cautions that globalization is not simply the threat of homogenization; rather, under his cosmopolitanism, it can serve as a threat to homogeneity. His suggested slogan: “universality plus difference” (151). He grounds his arguments in the ancient traditions of his own ethnic heritage with the Ashanti people of Africa.

So, long story short: I’m a fan of Jay and Appiah, not so much of Appadurai. I am simply not convinced that globalization and transnationalism are firmly rooted in the present or very recent past. Since my first seminar dealing with the Cultural Studies model of literary analysis, I have asked myself the same questions. How can we not consider culture all the way down to its smallest unit, namely the individual? At what point does culture become culture? With ten people? One hundred? One thousand? And how can we talk of culture as a static phenomenon when it changes with every iteration? For me, the three texts I mentioned above speak to those questions. Jay and Appiah address the necessary inclusion and historicizing of the cultural element in understanding transnationalism. I think I see in them some validation of the questions I have had regarding culture, whether with a big or a little “c”, and how it fits into a meaningful approach to literature.

The vast majority of the concepts and texts covered in the seminar this semester were new to me, so it’s difficult to point to one idea in particular that has made a bigger impression on my thinking than any other.  There are, however, a few concepts that have definitely made an effect on me that will last long beyond this seminar.  The ideas of between and created spaces that transcend existing borders are among them.  Throughout this semester I’ve found myself attempting to apply transnational definitions of space to readings and discussion in my other classes as well as in my personal life, a change that – while unexpected – has been welcome to me.

The creation of new spaces outside the nation-state or other physical or geographical boundaries can be accomplished through the mixed use of elements characteristic of already-existing spaces.  We examined this idea in practice in our handling of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which uses a combination of languages to convey the experiences of Chicano/a culture and heritage.  Anzaldúa uses dialects of English and Spanish to create a literary space as a means of separating her experiences from those which she problematizes.  She then uses this space to point out the borders, both visible and invisible, which have shaped and restricted those experiences.  La Frontera breaks down our sense of borders and spaces by combining languages in a manner that may be unfamiliar or even uncomfortable for the reader, in order to build and illuminate new ones better suited for understanding her perspective.

Despite having studied German for close to ten years now, I’d never really stopped to consider what can happen when you bring multiple languages together in a single text.  I’d mistakenly assumed Spanglish was a result of a lack of vocabulary similar to what eighth-grade me experienced when my German teacher asked me a question I couldn’t answer, and not a form of language in its own right, a tool one could intentionally use to both transcend and call attention to borders in writing.  This was my first experience with a piece of literature that unapologetically, purposefully did not translate everything into a single language, instead treating long passages in multiple languages as though they were all one continuous language.  This brought up other questions – how does such a work get translated?  Can it be translated without destroying its original intent, and is that possible?  We wondered the same thing about the varied languages in Orly – how does the language usage and the utilization of subtitles change based on the primary language of the viewer?

I remember receiving bonus points on conceptual physics exams in high school because my teacher liked how I always described motion from more than one perspective, typically both the perspective of the person involved in the action as well as that of an outside observer.  I’ve realized through our readings and discussions that a similar method is necessary to view human interaction and understanding through a transnational lens.  Viewing a culture or a people from a single perspective – which too often means viewing it from our own personal viewpoints, because that is what we know best – doesn’t often give you the full picture.  Kwame Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, which particularly struck me out of the books we’ve read over the course of the seminar, explains the need to acquire a sense of others’ views and understandings in many ways as an obligation.  Appiah discusses what is widely considered the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you wish done to yourself.  He points out that there is a flaw in applying this rule on a transnational or even international scale.  What you wish done to yourself may not be at all what someone in another culture wants done unto them, and someone you would never want to be done to you may be something their culture has (for reasons you may not ever even have considered) long held as of the utmost importance.  The creation and use of spaces can come into play here because we have to recognize that people do not all exist in the same space, nor do they always spend their lives in a single space.  Humanity is so much more complicated than that.

This semester, under Dr. Baer’s direction, I have been studying German science fiction through its relatively short history.  Most of the works I have read have involved either an alternate imagining of human history and culture, as in Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I’ll be here in sunshine and in shadow), which tells the story of a 100-year-long world war from the perspective of a black soldier in the (fictional) Swiss Soviet Republic, or an outside, alien species or planet, such as in Kurd Laßwitz’s novel Auf zwei Planeten (On two planets), which is about an invasion of Earth by well-meaning Martians attempting change mankind for the better.  I’ve spent a good amount of time considering these works as they fit into my understanding of the transnational, and what happens when the space created is a physical one that has been little influenced by human cultures and/or does not even exist on the same planet.  I’ve wondered what this can show us about humanity as a whole and how different cultures can be compared or understood via the introduction of a wholly fictional and foreign culture.  What happens when you remove Earth from the picture?  I think there’s a lot of potential for transnational discussion in science fiction that I’d like to explore further.

While not always successful, my attempts to reframe outside reading using transnational concepts have shown me that, despite sometimes thinking that the theory discussed in this seminar was going way over my head, I have actually picked up on a lot, and my thinking has definitely taken on a kind of transnational filter.  Though I don’t (currently) have plans to further my studies or research in Germanic Studies specifically, I expect that there will be many more instances where I find I can apply transnationalism to gain better understandings and new perspectives, and I’m glad to have gained the new level of understanding of the transnational that I have.

Going into this course, I must admit I had relatively little idea as to what we would actually be discussing.  Transnationalism is a concept that I had certainly heard of before, and some of the theoretical and literary texts are works that I had previously encountered, but that prior knowledge didn’t really hint at what we would cover.  One profound difference between my preconceived notions of a transnational seminar and what was actually encountered lies in the idea of the nation.  I had assumed, at the beginning of the semester, that much of this class would deal with the nation and ideas of nationalism.  I believe, in some ways, early readings, for example from Appadurai or Jay, served to reinforce this idea.  And while nations as agents and the idea of nationalism certainly figured into the course, what would eventually be most interesting to me was largely independent from, and much smaller than, the nation.  To me, the most profound aspect of this course has been the human dimension.  The lived experiences of individuals whose lives have been impacted by transnational phenomena really serve to highlight what is personally the most important aspect of transnational study.  Because it seeks to examine phenomena that spread widely, quickly and across borders, transnationalism is something that affects the daily lives of a vast array of people.  The idea of the personal narrative is thus one that is profoundly impacted by the study of transnationalism.

In the readings for this class, I found examples of the transnational impact on personal narrative in both fictional and non-fictional works.  Though the work straddles the line between those two classifications, as it does with so many other ways of classification, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera presents a very personal account of how a personal narrative can be affected.  Her story of growing up in an area caught between a nebulous, vague border that is defined differently in terms of spatiality, temporality and culture shows how limiting the idea of the nation can be when dealing with individual lives.  One particularly interesting anecdote found in the book describes Anzaldúa’s encounter with the mythical figure Coatlicue.  Coatlicue, a goddess culturally indigenous to Anzaldúa’s people, is a mythical representation of duality.  This figure, reflective of the fragmented identity that the author presents in the text, is nonetheless “encountered” in a very unexpected way.  She describes an encounter with a representation of the goddess: “I first saw the statue of this life-in-death and death-in-life, headless ‘monster’ goddess (as the Village Voice dubbed her) at the Museum of Natural History in New York City (69).”  Anzaldúa’s encounter with a physical manifestation of Coatlicue occurs hundreds of miles from the context in which she first learned of the figure, in a city that is radically different from her Borderland.  This anecdote made me consider the ways in which our lived experiences, influenced by so many factors, impacts how we perceive and engage with the world around us.  In Anzaldúa’s personal story, Coatlicue represents a “monster goddess.”  Would Anzaldúa agree with this evaluation?  Whose interpretation of Coatlicue is “right,” if any?  These are all things, I believe, that are dependent on personal narrative.

The difference context can make in perceiving the world is also reinforced in other fictionalized presentations of personal narratives.  In Persepolis, Marji appropriates cultural items from disparate sources, from east and west during the height of the cold war, and uses them to craft her identity.  American rock music is mixed with Marxist philosophy and take on a new contextual significance in the midst of the Iranian revolution.  This process is seen in several works examined this semester.  Cole’s Open City presents an African born man, living in New York City, traveling to Belgium and having deep philosophical discussions with Muslim immigrants running an Internet café, a figurative and literal access point to the rest of the world.  The amount of lived experiences, national and transnational phenomena converging during these moments of philosophizing is unimaginable, but it’s presented as a rather quotidian event.

Examples like Persepolis and Open City really serve to illustrate to me how imperceptibly slight but massively impactful transnational influences are in personal histories.  Encounters between people bring together so many different elements, which could be coming from so many different sources, and puts them into contact that could lead to so many new permutations.  In my own area of interest, I believe it will be helpful to consider these personal aspects for the artists and works that I examine.  Though the spread of transnational phenomena was not as easy in the nineteenth-century, the lives of the artists that interest me are certainly not limited by national contexts.  The works of Debussy are impacted by the poetry of Baudelaire, who was influenced by the music of Wagner, who developed a new style to stand in contrast to Italian operas.  The personal narratives of people are impacted by an unimaginably large number of influences, which come through, between and around borders.

The combination of articles, novels, books, movies from various contexts, languages and media was exemplary of the transnational and multilingual focus of our class. This convergence offered a great opportunity to compare and contrast different instances of transnationalism, making it hard for me to choose one specific text or idea out of all the works seen throughout this term. Having said that, I would like to revisit an article I found particularly interesting:  Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis by Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick and J.T. Way. The authors argue that even if transnationalism has become very popular over the past years, it has also given rise to some controversial views that should be taken into account. According to them, the proliferation of transnational studies has caused certain conceptual confusion, even contradictory readings and analyses. In order to defend what they consider to be a productive paradigm, they engage in a genealogy aimed at choosing some meanings of transnationalism while discarding others.  This provides them with a framework that allows them to articulate their understanding of the term.

Their approach establishes an analogy between gender as a construction in women´s studies and nation as a constructed entity in transnationalism. In their own words:“`transnationalism´ can do to the nation what gender did for sexed bodies: provide the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all their deployments, compelling us to acknowledge that the nation, like sex, is a thing contested, interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction” (627). Taking this as a starting point, the authors support the idea that the nation has to be de-naturalised and challenged. However, the correlation to gender reminds us that thinking beyond the confines of national borders is not so simple in the globalized era, in the same way that gender is still a constitutive element of identity applied to bodies. In this sense, the materiality of the body contributes to the illusion that there is some concatenation between biological and socio-cultural phenomena and this has remained a pervasive idea in spite of the efforts on the part of gender studies to show how sexed bodies are also constructed.

On the other hand, the realization that gender and nation are constructions does not do away with their effects. The nation continues to exert a huge influence, in spite of the increase in transnational works. Moreover, while political borders tend to be flexible for multinational corporations, most people cannot ignore them. One look at the media is enough to show the centrality of the nation. At least in Spain, when crimes or illegal acts are committed by a foreigner the press always emphasizes the nationality of the perpetrator. Not only that, nationality also determines which events are newsworthy. For example, the death of American or European soldiers in Iraq is bound to appear in the media, but if the dead come from another country, especially if they are from one of the so-called third countries, it is highly unlikely that they will even be mentioned. The case of ebola provides a great example; the virus that had already killed thousands of people in Africa remained unheard of in Western countries, until one American was infected. Suddenly, it became an outbreak.  In a world where certain countries simply do not count, what are the dangers of turning our backs on the nation? Thinking beyond the nation opens up numerous possibilities, but for this to happen the effects of national discourses must be taken into consideration. Otherwise we run the risk of supporting globalizing and imperialist interests that condemn certain countries to oblivion. Instead of fluctuating between nationalism and the exaltation of a world without borders, the nation must be questioned and its constructed “nature” exposed.

Furthermore, the article is particularly relevant for my research in Latina studies, as the analogy the authors establish between transnationalism and women´s studies allows me to pay attention to how nation and gender intersect with one another. Latina studies has occupied an undetermined and evasive zone that resists nation-centered paradigms. As the authors point out in the following quotation: “Much work by Chicana feminist theorists has centered the simultaneity of the transfrontera/ transnational together with the hard-edged and sometimes violent ways that gender collides with and is refigured by race, class and the trans/nation” (632). Gloria Anzaldúa´s groundbreaking Borderlands/La frontera is an excellent example. In fact, many Latina texts, whose authors struggle to create their own voice in the borderlands have been informed by her work. Anzaldúa defined the borderlands as a geocultural space, but also as the metaphorical space she creates for a self in between cultures, identities and traditions. To conclude, the reasons why I chose the article Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis is because in addition to its excellent approach, I consider that its emphasis on establishing a genealogy, along with the identification of transnationalism as a useful paradigm to denaturalise the nation can help to shed new light on different issues within Latina Studies.

Our transnational theory class has been a truly unique experience in every way I can imagine: not only are the students from all types of departments and backgrounds, but mixed-media assignments are constantly assigned and presented.  The class is taught by two professors from separate disciplines, and we read novels and scholarly articles and view films written by artists all around the globe.  To be sure, this is the most appropriate environment in which a transnational theory class could be taught.

The themes we have examined – from migrant points of view to non-binary gender identities and feminisms, from literary language to transnational cinematography – are diverse and yet all inter-related.  We live in a paradoxical world of growing homogenization alongside differential tension, and these issues are of critical importance.  With our newsfeeds, televisions, and radios filling up with headlines about racial discrimination and violence, gender gaps and inequality, immigration issues, and religious misunderstandings, time is of the essence to education oneself about the various cultures and the perspectives that accompany those cultures across all borders.

In Borderlands/La Frontera we saw issues like misogyny and territorial injustice.  These issues clearly persist today, and in concrete forms.  The most recent wave of feminism is currently in a battle with domestic violence and rape, which Anzaldúa references in some of her poetry; and the debate of immigration between Mexico and the US is far from over.  We saw some of these issues in Persepolis as well; the graphic novel takes place further from our home, which opens our eyes to issues in the Middle East, a place of utmost controversy in recent years.  We are witness to political corruption and violence in Bolaño’s Amulet, and though we may hope that the problems from 1968 have gone by the wayside, we are only reminded that these concerns, unfortunately, often resurface and can worsen.  Axolotl Roadkill demonstrates the decadence that can be found in the lives of wealthy adolescents in the twenty-first century.  After a year in which mental illness has been brought to the foreground in our culture, we can see here in Hegemann’s novel some of the roots and contributors to substance abuse and depression.

These are only a few examples of relevant literature from our semester, and they show us several very applicable and recurring themes that transcend national and linguistic borders.  This semester’s seminar has taught me that not only is literature a type of media that cannot be contained by boundaries, but that the linkages that it creates between peoples are essential for learning and surviving as a global community.

Too often in graduate classes, we students take classes exclusively on theory, or we are blindly given theoretical readings that correspond to our texts. As a new masters student, this approach can be rather overwhelming. When theory is treated as a subject independent of literature, it is difficult to see the connections that exist between disciplines, and it can seem impossible to apply it appropriately when asked. This class has so clearly bridged the gap between critical theory and literature/cinema, and I look forward to applying transnational theory to my personal research on French theater in the future. French identity was troubled after WWII and continues to be troubled today in the era of postcolonialism, due to surges in immigration and emigration, as well as Europe becoming more “global” as a whole. Transnational theory is increasingly relevant in my studies—while Europe may see itself as borderless, France’s anti-immigrant stance has created a myriad of issues both nationally and internationally. I see theater as a hybrid genre—reading the text and experiencing the presentation become two vastly different practices. When performing a play, the audience becomes part of the experience, and true interaction occurs between the actor and the viewer. To me, transnationalism becomes evident when plays address post-WWII issues, especially when reflecting on recovering, remembering, and reconstructing Jewish identity. This course gives a name to a concept and will allow me to address my research in a more holistic manner.

In the beginning, I was mostly unfamiliar with our readings. I must admit, Teju Cole’s Open City has been in my Amazon shopping cart for months, and I was very excited to read it, especially in an academic setting, but what honestly moved me most was Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. I feel strange, having written so much about it, yet not producing a long research paper on the novel. Perhaps I was predisposed to like this work since it was originally written in French, but mostly I enjoyed reading it so much because it was completely different from anything I had ever read before. The concept of the graphic novel was foreign to me, and I appreciate the clear voice Satrapi gives to her problematic. This novel reminded me that non-traditional works (referencing the graphic novel as opposed to classical literature) merit study in an academic context and can offer interdisciplinary approaches that expand our viewpoint towards “what is literature”.

I feel that this idea of interdisciplinarity corresponds with the articles we read concerning how to apply theory in the classroom, or even more generally, the structure of academic departments themselves. Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline comes readily to mind. I had not read this article, yet the argument sounded vaguely familiar. With the 1990s overhaul in academia, many programs were reorganized. French departments are behind in this regard, tending to lump everything into “centuries”, with Francophone texts on the side in their own category. Spivak’s article comments on transnationalism at play in creating these academic departments—comparative literature, area studies, ethnic studies…the names seem to modify indefinitely. “Whatever our view of what we do,” she writes, “we are made by the forces of people moving about the world” (Crossing Borders, 3).  This movement, however, creates issues when attempting to neatly categorize we humans and our literary contributions. “What I am proposing is not a politicization of the discipline,” she continues. “We are in politics. I am proposing an attempt to depoliticize in order to move away from a politics of hostility, fear, and half solutions” (Crossing Borders, 4). Spivak’s theory is directly applicable to our lives as academics and impacts how we study and categorize our fields.

Spivak’s text brings literature to life, as does Satrapi’s Persepolis. We can easily quote the modernist Ezra Pound when he wrote, “literature does not exist in a vacuum”, but more often than not, the quote is taken out of context, much like most other famous literary citations (ex. Sartre’s “Hell is other people”). In reading Pound’s quote to refer to the societal obligation of authors, it is fascinating to work though transnational readings of texts in order to conceptualize their impact on readers. This entire class has expanded my knowledge of literary impact and social movements. My two interdisciplinary courses (the other being Cinema of Empire) at UMD have strengthened my French research by helping me include a larger scope and a more universal approach to my studies. Transnational activities are all around us—as emerging scholars, it is up to us to continue exploring and developing this movement as civilization evolves throughout the world.

My exploration of Transnationalism as a category of analysis has been inherently tied to my thoughts (and probably anxieties) about my research trajectory.  My post will thus explore how several ideas from this class—in combination with some readings from another class I’m taking this term—have come together to shape the way I’m currently thinking about my academic path.

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Within my graduate work in literature, I’ve been interested in questions of belonging, home, and place, and equally, in questions of displacement, homelessness, and placeless-ness. Generally, these interests stemmed from various personal experiences and trajectories, from being a student to teaching (in Beirut) to moving to travelling. Before applying to graduate schools, I had not thought of these themes as specifically belonging to or within any specific disciplinary category; I simply knew I wanted to explore them through ethnic American and Latin American literatures. As I was applying, though, one of my recommendation writers suggested that these interests meant I should be focusing in Postcolonial Studies. At the time, my reaction was basically “Huh. Interesting…” And then I forgot about it.

When I began my graduate work last fall, however, I soon realized how important it was to be able to better categorize my interests within the field. In each new class, as I was asked to introduce myself with my year and my “focus” or my “interests,” I found myself floundering for a concise response. After my second class, though, I heard someone else say “transnationalism” in her introduction. I remember thinking, “well, I don’t know what that is exactly, but it sounds sort of like what I’m concerned with.” And so I started saying “transnationalism” in my introductions, too…

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This fall, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to explore both categories of analysis, Postcolonial and Transnational, at once.

To be honest, I have often found the distinction between the two confusing and blurry. While there have been moments when the two frames seem to diverge, ultimately they always seem to converge again at others.  As we read Arjun Appadurai in Transnational Theory, we were reading Simon Gikandi’s “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality”—which in many ways seemed like a response to Appadurai—in my Postcolonial Readings course. We read Spivak, Bhabha, Jameson, and Appiah in both classes. While we read Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism in Transnational Theory, we read Bruce Robbins’ “Comparative Cosmopolitanism” and selections from James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century in Postcolonial Readings.

As both courses come to a close, I’m brought back to early essays read in each course: Briggs et al.’s “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis” and Gikandi’s “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” In these essays, the authors explore the viability and usefulness of globalization, postcoloniality, and transnationalism as theoretical frames of analysis. What stands out to me now, in looking back at Gikandi’s essay, is his claim that “part of the attraction of postcolonial theory to questions of globalization lies precisely in its claim that culture, as a social and conceptual category, has escaped ‘the bounded nation-state society’ and has thus become the common property of the world”(631). That Gikandi sees the postcolonial as the frame that has allowed globalization theorists to contemplate the ways that culture has “escaped ‘the bounded nation-state society’” is interesting, as Briggs et al. claim that “the notion of the transnational enables us to center certain kinds of historical events as the emphatically non-national but indisputably important processes that they are”(627; emphasis mine). In these two essays, both the postcolonial and the transnational seem to be serving as the very same frame—even though the first advocates the revision and reuse of an earlier frame, and the second a shift to a new one.

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Despite these overlaps and confusions, in the end I think I have come to a tentative understanding of a difference between the two frames. (The difference is not necessarily large; perhaps it is even as small as the difference referred to when we say “repetition with difference.”) I would like to conjecture that while Postcolonial Studies is certainly inherently concerned with questioning of the “bounded-ness” of the nation state, transnationalism as a frame is concerned with the continual transcendence of the borders—temporal and spatial—of the nation-state.

The question of the two frames, for me, has ultimately come down to semantics: the “post” of postcolonial does something very different than the “trans” of transnational. “Post” implies an after—a future subsequent to a past; it is tied, linearly and temporally, to the very colonialism it departs from. Indeed, critics have widely pointed to this particular “problem” with or “pitfall” of the term postcolonial: “If postcolonial theory has sought to challenge the grand march of western historicism with its entourage of binaries,” Anne McClintock writes, “the term post-colonialism nonetheless re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial/postcolonial.”

To me, therefore, the benefit of the term and the frame of the transnational is that it doesn’t fall into this same pitfall. While on one level, the prefix “trans” also must depend on the root “nation” that it attaches itself to, it does not necessarily imply a temporal or linear departure from that root. Instead, “trans” implies “across,” “beyond” or “through”; it is both temporal and spatial. In this sense, it is perhaps Homi K. Bhabha’s focus on the beyond in his introduction to Locations of Culture that ultimately has influenced my understanding of the transnational the most: “we find ourselves in the moment of transit, where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’”(1).

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In the end, I think it is perhaps in this ambiguity, multiplicity and impossibility of direction (spatial and temporal) implied in transnationalism that I currently see the most potential for my own work.

Indeed, it seems it would be productive to disturb understandings of home or place as “origin” or as fundamental to identity. What if we contested our understanding of home as the definitive point of departure? What if what we normally understand as the home’s barriers (barriers in the form of “you can’t call here home if you were born there”) became permeable frontiers, or “thresholds,” ones that “can be crossed in either direction” (XIV), as Augé puts it?

What if home is actually a non-place, “an intersection of moving bodies”? What is belonging, in a non-place?

What if home only exists as it’s been constructed by various simulacra—by snapshots taken at the airport, as in Orly?

Perhaps Augé is right: “non-places are the real measure of our time.”