I want to write about the difference it makes to read and write fiction in a class on theories of transnationalism, but I feel out of place writing about a novel when I am not a literary scholar, having no disciplinary training in literary analysis or critique. It is perhaps a feeling of transdisciplinary out-of-place-ness not so dissimilar to the dislocations and dissonances produced through transnational encounters and processes. Let us not forget that disciplinary boundaries are no less imaginary than national ones, and their fortification—especially the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences since positivism has reigned as the dominant epistemological paradigm in the West—is intimately related to nationalist and imperialist knowledge projects, knowledge production in the name of, and as a tool of, nation-building and imperial expansion. So crossing the imagined and disciplined/disciplinary borders of knowledge production can be fraught and complex, at once encouraged by the neoliberal university for its own reasons in a climate of austerity measures in academic capitalism (themselves imbricated in the machinations of global capitalism), at least in theory, and yet sometimes so vexingly challenging, at least when the assumption seems to be that most scholars engaged in transdisciplinary scholarship are themselves rooted in a discipline of their own and crossing borders into new territory.
Yet I find myself without a disciplinary home, having studied in two interdisciplinary fields and now pursuing doctoral work in one of them, and also convinced that transdisciplinary engagement is all the richer for the fragmented and self-consciously partial perspective it provides. And so when I wonder what role fiction plays in thinking through the transnational, I think first of how postcolonial feminist Kamala Visweswaran has argued for writing fiction as a viable ethnographic method for researchers coming up against the dilemmas of power inherent in ethnography. Transnationalism has been engaged from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including both literary studies and anthropology, and so it seems fitting to engage Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, as a knowledge project that operates through and across the borders of nations and disciplines.

We have, in our class, situated the study of transnationalism as one part of critical projects that denaturalize and thus illuminate the contours of the nation-state and its ideological projects. Cole’s novel, too, is a piece of these projects, and arguably in conversation with others in the field. Teju Cole’s novel opens abruptly with his protagonist’s description of how “New York City worked itself into [his] life at walking pace” as Julius began his habit on going on evening walks through the city, a habit that coincided, he tells us, with the habit of watching bird migrations from his apartment (3). Julius’s interest in “the miracle of natural migration” frames his entrance into a year of wandering through the physical geographies of New York City, which become the vehicle for his affective and intellectual wanderings through history and memory, and among transnational encounters that shape his articulation of an increasingly fraught relationship to the nation-state. The narration driving the story follows his wandering mind as it journeys across place and time, so that multiple pasts and presents (and presences) comingle in ways that feel natural and familiar. In the final passage of the novel, Julius’s narration comes back to the theme of birds and their migrations as he ruminates on the history of the large number of migratory birds fatally disoriented by the flame in the torch of the statue of liberty. If Julius’s own wanderings, physical and intellectual and spiritual and social, are framed by his interest in “the miracle of natural migration,” they are also an expression of this “miracle,” and by the end of the novel, we have the impression that people’s migrations might be just as natural if not for the complex (of) violences committed by nation-states. What is the Statue of Liberty, after all, if not a national symbol for the myth of our “nation of immigrants”? In the final passage of the novel, it is also a site of massive and seemingly arbitrary avian deaths, deaths which are not only a direct product of modern industrial technologies (specifically the statue’s use as a light house for ships in the nineteenth century), but also a site at which the nation’s institutions capitalized on these mass deaths for its own knowledge projects, conducted by the military via national museums. In this, Julius finds a persistent sense “that something more troubling was at work” (259). I might have to re-read the novel to get a more complete sense of Cole’s critique of the nation-state, but it certainly is in there somewhere.