In classes related to transnationalism, I have noticed that professors tend to pair theoretical readings on area studies with works of global literature. This has led me to think about why area studies and national literatures have become such a focus of transnational study. On one level, the answer might be quite obvious. As we begin to visualize and interact with people of all different cultures on a regular basis, whether it is talking to Apple tech support in the Philippines or watching a Korean horror film, scholars of culture might find it important that we study and contextualize these particular cultures and global processes. One could do this by learning more about different world regions in terms of their cultural production and national histories. In this way, students in the West can now further access the communities and cultures that may not have been deemed worthy of extended research in previous decades. Through the historical, anthropological, and narrative study of transnational peoples and spaces, once can better understand the dimensions of cultural diversity around the world, in addition to the hegemonic relations that have historically kept the West as a center of power.
Through an analysis of Modernity at Large by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and Global Matters by English professor Paul Jay, one can see the interdisciplinary nature of transnationalism in modern academic study, in addition to the value of incorporating area studies and national literature in transnational research. Appadurai introduces an idea that posits old forms of culture against new ones. Historically, he argues, the Enlightenment master narrative “was constructed with a certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relationship between reading, representation, and the public sphere” (36). He claims that cultural forms in today’s world, however, are “fundamentally fractal, that is, as possessing no Euclidean boundaries, structures, or regularities” (46). What allows people around the world to connect with these new cultural forms is not the consumption of a single literary canon, but rather the imagination, which has become “an organized field of social practices…and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility” (31). Here, we have a compelling theoretical argument for a new way to approach culture in the modern moment, but I’m not yet convinced until he provides examples from film, literature, and fieldwork in India to supplement his points. For example, he explains how Mira Nair’s film, India Cabaret, depicts young lower-class women who have been mesmerized and marginalized by the modern metropolitan glamour they see in commercial depictions of Bombay, and the only way they can participate in the spectacle is by becoming exotic dancers who cater to the Western fantasies of the female “Other” (38-39). Thus, the heightened reality of film becomes actual reality in the world of transnational travel and capital. In this way, I think that Appadurai’s transnational theory becomes most useful and effective when he supplements his argument with examples from area studies or works of national film and literature.
In Paul Jay’s account, he questions the “default narrative for historicizing English,” characterized by the study of literature through “the lens of conventional national histories” (loc. 170). One reason for this, he argues, is that the transnational shift in literary studies has led to a “remapping of the locations we study” (loc. 222). In a similar way that Appadurai describes how the approach to cultural study shifted from the Enlightenment’s notion of “Culture” to the more heterogeneous “cultural,” Jay states that the older cultural model of the late 19th and early 20th centuries collapsed under the “imperative to understand literature as a multicultural object of knowledge…expressive of a whole range of different experiences and identities” (loc. 451). It is here that I can begin to understand my current field of English a bit better. Despite the continued importance of early modern Western literature, how can the field of literary studies, and perhaps the humanities as a whole, continue to expand and flourish if scholars do not question the history of Eurocentrism and consider the literary works of global societies in order to generate new insights on the world and our various positions within it? It is here that I am reminded of a relevant article called “Why American Studies Needs to Think About Korean Cinema,” in which Christina Klein demonstrates how transnational film genres can allow us to explore the various social criticisms of globalization and artistic critiques of the nature of cultural production in the modern world (see article).
Globalization and transnationalism may not be entirely new processes, but in the past few decades, coinciding with rapidly developing telecommunications infrastructures and media technologies in countless international urban centers, these terms are becoming more ever-present in a wide range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Besides direct communication, how can we start to learn more about people from around the world, who were once in our periphery and are now our neighbors? By including histories and ethnographies of particular cultures along with analyses of national literatures as a part of their arguments, transnational theorists can help expand upon the increasingly interconnected (and simultaneously fragmented) nature of our rapidly evolving world.