Why are the questions of area studies and national literatures such prominent topics in theories of transnationalism?

In brainstorming as a group on our first day of seminar, we collectively questioned the meaning of the term “transnational” and how it applied to our language and literature studies. We added the words “cross borders” and “non-state actors” to describe transnationalism, while the term “international” seemed to concern the relation between state actors. In area studies, these two concepts merge. Interdisciplinary in principle, area studies pertain to regions or areas as a whole, most of which differ significantly based on how scholars choose to define the “area.” This definitional fluidity fits snugly into the study of transnationalism, which “designates spaces and practices acted upon by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal”, as expressed by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih (Minor Transnationalism, 5). That transnational theories focus on national literatures questions the simplest idea of what it is to be a nation. Paul Jay queries the origins of globalization and its historical evolution in the world, but I do not doubt the significance of the relatively recent upsurge in globalization scholarship in fueling a transnational focus in both area studies and national literatures.

In most areas of the world, one must only step into a crowd, look at a newspaper, or browse the internet to experience globalization in motion. In understanding that globalization is simply the international exchange of ideas, goods, or other entities, I am inclined to agree with Paul Jay who, in his 2010 book Global Matters, argues that globalization is not at all a recent movement. Properly historicizing globalization would require one to go back at least to the sixteenth century, if not earlier, and to not presuppose that the movement is strictly Western.  In delving deeper into the matter, Jay cites economist Amartya Sen who argues that globalization was in play as long ago as the “printing of the world’s first book” (39).

The study of globalization is essential to the involvement of transnational theories in area studies and national literatures because it calls to attention the question of what is global and what is local in our world and how to analyze relationships between the two (Jay 74), both in the twenty-first century and centuries earlier. In “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” Briggs, McCormick and Way “argue against writing histories or analyses that take national boundaries as fixed, implicitly timeless, or even always meaningful” (627). This approach invokes Arjun Appadurai’s “scapes” theory, where ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes reinforce the idea of fluidity and motion. This vision imagines transnationalism as an independent theoretical actor and allows it to exceed the static present.

Mirroring Appadurai’s changing scapes, transnational theories are so strongly linked to area studies and national literatures due to their ever changing and multiplying actors and components. Homi K. Bhabha expresses this idea by coining the use of the “beyond” in The Location of Culture (1991). This beyond reflects the questioning of identity, or as Bhabha writes, “an awareness of the subject positions—race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation…” (1). In his work, Bhabha often recalls the idea of an “in-between” in order to define a “third-space” that has not been previously recognized. It is in his beyond that transnationalism resides and can be used as a theoretical tool in studying fluidly inclusive areas.

As a theoretical device, it appears nearly effortless to apply transnationalism to area studies, as the field encompasses both the humanities and social studies. Since national literature departments tend to be rooted specifically in the humanities, however, one might question the use of such a polysemic term. To include transnational studies helps question the very foundation of what it means to be national or to study “national literature”. In Global Matters, Jay argues for the inclusion of transnational studies in literature by writing that “we make a choice to study literary texts and other cultural forms as national productions” and that the decision of where to house these texts is fundamentally arbitrary (73). Therefore, the addition of transnational theory to national literature expands the basic umbrella of the term “national” to include entire chains of events and generations of cultural otherness. To prove his argument, Jay cites Paul Gilroy, scholar of the function of nationalism in literary studies in Britain and the United States. By focusing on “the black Atlantic”, Gilroy questions and expands ideas of national borders and identity in order to propose a more complete analysis and “complicate our understanding of the construction of both ‘Englishness’ and ‘modernity’” (84).  Consequently, national literature is lifted from the confines of physical space and is able to incorporate hybrid multiplicities of analysis, thus becoming “transnationalized”.