Movement characterizes Open City from the very first pages of the novel in which Julius, the narrator, describes his evening walks through NYC and habit of watching bird migrations. While human migration is an obvious global phenomenon, I had strangely never thought about this type of global movement in its relationship to many other species in the animal kingdom. Like humans, other animals migrate to escape certain situations such as inhospitable climates and waning resources, but they also travel long distances for many other reasons including social, economic, and political conditions, to name a few. I found the way in which Cole placed human migration into the many other types of animal migrations to be very engaging. Julius considers bird watching to be a “miracle of natural immigration,” admiring the organization, curious “how our life below might look from their perspective,” and imagining “that were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs masked in a grove” (Cole 4). Despite my admittedly limited knowledge on science, I very much enjoy learning about animals, and happened to have read an article the other day that named “how animals migrate” as one of the top ten current unsolved mysteries of science. (The article can be found here < http://www.iflscience.com/physics/top-10-unsolved-mysteries-science>). The connection between his description of migration as a miracle and its scientific mystery is very much distanced from the political rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon that characterizes much of the common media coverage today. Migration as one of the transnational elements in the world Cole constructs in this novel seems to serve as a means to awareness, understanding, and perhaps even a sort of enlightenment.

Migration is one of many transnational topics that appears in this syncretic novel whose intertextuality weaves different times and places, history and fiction, and spirituality and art into an amalgamation of itineraries and connections that link the world through space and time. Descriptions of interconnectivity help to blur boundaries, especially national, while still allowing for difference (very much in-tune with Appiah’s concept of cosmopolitanism). While on the surface of this multifaceted work the majority of the plot takes place in New York City and Brussels in the present, many other places and time periods are evoked. Images from a movie about Africa stay with the narrator, songs follow him home, books, personal stories, and history itself allow him to see the landscape of New York as a palimpsest in which all of time and space can exist simultaneously, “written, erased, rewritten,” where repressed and mis/underrepresented histories are incorporated into the present (Cole 59). New York City and Belgium are portrayed as hubs of different cultures, languages, and experiences intermingling, connecting but allowing for differences to flourish.

Julius’s relationship to his mixed heritage is characterized by transnationalism. In NYC, his interactions with an African cab driver and a locked-up undocumented Liberian immigrant connect him to his African past, however, as a person of mixed ancestry whose life is a journey in which the constant exchange of worldviews, in particular ethical and moral, contributes to his evolving ideologies, he is always reluctant to fully embrace this somewhat imposed identity. Cole’s narrator describes his own hybrid identity:

The name Julius linked me to another place and was, with my passport and my skin color, one of the intensifiers of my sense of being different, of being set apart, in Nigeria. I had a Yoruba middle name, Olatubosun, which I never used. That name surprised me a little each time I saw it on my passport or birth certificate, like something that belonged to someone else but had long held in my keeping. Being Julius in everyday life thus confirmed me in my not being fully Nigerian. (78)

Julius also at times castes aside his German side, failing to mention in conversation with Dr. Maillotte when they meet for dinner in Brussels that his second language is actually German, not English. While he does try to understand and respect people’s connections to culture and nation, he seems to reject these categories for himself as totalizing, veering more towards a cosmopolitan community as seen as his growing relationship of mutual respect with Farouq.

However, another metaphor in the novel struck me as particularly strong despite its minor role: bedbugs. The apartment of Dr. Saito, Julius’s former professor, mentor, and friend, is infested with bedbugs, and the narrator contextualizes their presence and movement among serious diseases and outbreaks. Cole writes:

But bedbugs were not fatal, and were happy to stay out of the headlines. They were hard to fumigate into oblivion, and their eggs were almost impossible to kill. They did not discriminate on the basis of social class and, for that reason, were embarrassing […] I suddenly felt sorrowful for Professor Saito. His recent encounter with the bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, homophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life. The bedbugs trumped them all. (173)

While transnationalism serves in many ways as a positive force that encourages growth and understanding in Cole’s work, the bedbugs’ cannibalistic and invasive nature seemed to me to be a critique or at least a warning of the negative potential of the erasure of difference and globalization. Bedbugs have no concept of borders or limits, even ignoring class differences (as well as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality). Their involvement in “a kind of low-grade warfare, a conflict at the margins of modern life, visible only in speech,” makes them the representation of the underside to transnational exchange and cross-cultural communication in which this concept of a cannibalistic invading force falls in line with many of the contemporary critiques surrounding economic and cultural globalization (173).  By presenting the tensions between the praise of transnational communities and the condemnation of globalization through fiction and metaphors, Cole is able to shed new light on these theoretical and real-world concerns.

In early twentieth century, based on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin drew attention toward the figure of the Flâneur, the indolent stroller who, amidst the streets of Paris, contemplates with disenchantment and apathy the gigantic transformation of the city caused by the Industrial Revolution. With large crowds of people flooding the cities, its bazars, shops and the now rapid mediums of transportation, the new urban spectator saw the imminent alienation in an era now defined by consumer capitalism. It was the end of the nineteenth century.

In Latin America, the recently liberated colonies were now able to consume the literature of their choice. With the disestablishment of the Casa de Contratación de Sevilla or House of Trade –the entity that regulated any form of communication within the colonies and Spain–, the new nations began to import French literature in an unprecedented way, a behavior that would have a direct impact in all the Spanish speaking nations, including Spain, the agonizing superpower.

Globalization and transnationalism had taken, in the last decades of the Romantic era, a heightened meaning only comparable to the impact of electronic media in today’s society, a rupture that redefined the lives and behavior of people. About these ruptures between the old and the new is something many scholars have highlighted before.

In Global Matters, Paul Jay states that «it is a mistake to approach globalization itself as a contemporary phenomenon and that it makes much more sense to take a historical view in which globalization is dated as beginning in at least the sixteenth century and covering a time span that includes the long histories of imperialism, colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism» (3). He further defines globalization as a «complex back-and-forth flows of people and cultural form in which the appropriation and transformation of things –music, film, food, fashion– raise questions about the rigidity of the center-periphery model» (3).

What better place for that «back-and-forth» of people, ideas and commodities than the city of New York, the modern Babel that agglomerates more than eight million people from the most unimaginable places in the World? In it, a new Flâneur has emerged, as it is seen in the novel Open City by Teju Cole.

Heartbroken by the recent separation with his girlfriend, Julius, a Nigerian immigrant and psychiatry student wanders in the streets of New York City, encountering people from different cultures: an African taxi driver, a Caribbean security guard, a Mexican or perhaps Central American marathon runner, an Indian surgeon, a Polish poet (among others) in a city that could easily be referred to –using the name of a play by Calderón de la Barca– The Great Theater of the World.

Julius or, we should say, the Flâneur of the contemporary globalized world, runs into places where cultures meet and clash under the least expected terms. And so he says: «I took a detour and walked for a while in Harlem. I saw the brisk trade of sidewalk salesmen: The Senegalese cloth merchants, the young men selling bootleg DVDs, the Nation of Islam stalls. There were self-published books, dashikis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drums, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa» (18).

It is then obvious that massive migrations or deterritorrialization aim toward the big cities, creating new encounters and the rise of a new culture or perhaps new cultures in a world in constant motion, more so now than ever before. Julius observes this and informs us about it in the vignettes he gives us as he strolls around the streets of New York City. He perceives that culture is no longer a homogenous concept tied to a specific nation or country but something transformed into multiple faces when people of different backgrounds find themselves living in the same place.

Culture or rather the adjective «cultural», Arjun Appadurai tells us, «moves into a realm of differences, contrasts, comparisons that is more helpful… we have moved one step further, from culture as a substance to culture as the dimension of difference, to culture as a group identity bases on difference, to culture as group identity based on difference, to culture as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity» (12-15).

Julius, the Flâneur, cannot escape from melancholy in every encounter, often reminiscent of his native Nigeria. Like Baudelaire, he cannot avoid reflecting on the issues of his time: migration as one of the major concerns in today’s world and how to tolerate the differences in a society that does not belong to one group but many.

In Teju Cole’s Open City, transnationalism emerges again and again in various ways. It presents itself in many themes; one such theme is immigration. Many characters in Cole’s novel have been displaced, whether by choice or by the will of others. Professor Saito, whom the narrator befriends during his university days at Maxwell, becomes an integral character, one woven throughout the text. Saito, along with his Japanese family, “was forced to leave England” and return to the Pacific Northwest. “With them, shortly afterward, he was taken to internment in the Minidoka Camp in Idaho” (Cole 9). While we as the readers meet Saito in his New York City apartment, the aged professor holds memories from his travels made throughout his lifetime. His apartment holds decorations such as a Papuan ancestor figure and six Polynesian masks. The professor sees himself thus: “We were all confused about what was happening; we were American, had always thought ourselves so, and not Japanese” (Cole 13). To reference another example, I turn to Saidu, an inmate who the narrator happened to meet while with the Welcomers. Saidu began in Liberia, escaped to Monrovia, hitchhiked to Gbarnga, walked to Guinea, crossed between Bamako and Tangier and Ceuta. He continued his journey in Spain, crossed the border in Portugal where he endured hard work for two years before saving enough money to fly into New York. When he reached New York, officers took him away. His home? “I don’t want to go back anywhere, he said. I want to stay in this country, I want to be in America and work. I applied for asylum but it wasn’t given. Now they will return e to my port of entry, which is Lisbon.” If he is allowed to stay in America, Saidu will be an immigrant. If he is deported to Lisbon, he will be an immigrant. Part of his identity for the rest of his life will be that of an immigrant. There are many more characters who are presented to the reader as immigrants, including Nadege and Moji, two female protagonists who interact with Julius in various ways. We only see glimpses of Nadege’s life due to, I believe, the strain in her relationship with the narrator. As for Moji, we are granted the knowledge that she knows Julius from their adolescent years growing up in Nigeria. Both women seem to have become inundated in their new lives in the United States, but Moji in particular retains strong ties to her birth country.

The narrator has only returned once to Nigeria after leaving to attend college in the United States. Despite a good relationship with his father, he and his mother became estranged, and it’s logical that this is the reason he chooses to stay in the States and, even when taking a vacation, chooses to go to Belgium to search for his oma. The narrator certainly appears to be comfortable and settled in his life in the States, with little or no nostalgia for his birth country.

While Open City is a work of fiction, the settings, themes, and characters (whether major or minor) serve as excellent engagement with the reader. While not a real-life story, it is evident that the text works to seem like a real-life story. It is a believable story, and why wouldn’t it be? There are numerous biographies in bookstores today that parallel Cole’s story. Even when the narrator sits down to a film, he describes the people around him. “The ticket buyers were young, many of them black, and dress in hip clothes. There were some Asians, too, Latinos, immigrant New Yorkers, New Yorkers of indeterminate ethnic background” (Cole 28). Throughout the entire novel, the narrator provides little stories or anecdotes about various people, whether his patients or people from history. Each patient he discusses in detail and each historical personage demonstrate, in some way, an aspect of transnationalism. The book contains movement across countries’ borders, but it goes much further than examining physical location, looking into lives of immigrants and how they’ve adapted or struggled to adjust to their new lives in other countries. The novel presents a multilayered critique on transnationalism.

Despite differences in literary genre, Teju Cole’s fictional Open City and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s philosophical essay, Cosmopolitanism, read in remarkably similar ways.  The vast majority of both men’s tales dwell on the way that people interact both amongst their peers as well as how they interact as world or cosmopolitan citizens.  Much as Appiah’s essay draws upon his own experiences as a transnational individual–the result of the intercultural exchange of his British mother and a Ghanaian father–Cole’s narrator, Julius, likewise employs his cross-cultural background as the child of a German mother and a Nigerian father as anecdotal evidence of the postmodern phenomenon that has created such a world where, “…conversations across boundaries can be delightful, or just vexing: what they mainly are, though, is inevitable” (Appiah xxi).  Both Cole and Appiah evoke the inevitability of these “cross-boundary conversations” through many examples of such conversations in both Julius and Appiah’s quotidien lives.  Although Appiah argues that these conversations are inevitable in the twenty-first century, the settings and personal circumstances of both himself and Julius provoke a higher frequency of such conversations for these men than perhaps the average citizen.

The marriage of our narrators’ Western European mothers to their Anglophone African fathers represents a significant aspect of the postmodern world where such marriages result in a new generation of children who exist in, what Appadurai refers to as, a deterritorialized realm.  Such children, like Julius and Appiah, can strictly adhere to neither the cultural traditions of their mother nor their father and thus, instead, inhabit an in-between space that provides them with a vantage point into the intricacies of both cultures.  Appiah reflects the beneficial insight that such a vantage point provides him as he has a clear understanding of different cultural “values.”  That is to say Appiah’s exposure to traditional Asante culture, such as the matrilineal familial structure of abusua, the akiwadeε social taboos such as eating one’s clan animal, and the negative stigmatization of both male and female circumcision, in addition to his exposure to his mother’s Western European heritage enables him to draw parallels between the two cultures without having a natural allegiance to one versus the other.

Similarly Julius transnational parentage provides him with a similar position of straddling a cultural dichotomy.  Even Julius’ childhood in Nigeria which he refers himself to as, “…the Japanese of Africa without the technological brilliance,” and his experiences at a Nigerian military school are interspersed with transnationalism–his swimming lessons at the country club and the presence of other mixed-race children at his boarding school such as the half-Indian student Julius rescues from drowning (Cole 88).  In a purely Nigerian society without the interruption of transnationalism, Julius would not exist in this space and would not be able to use his German swimming lessons to save this other student, but the other student, half-Indian, would not exist to require saving.  Julius and Appiah are not only hybridized individuals in the sense that they exist as the products of intercultural exchange but are furthermore hybridized by the world in which they live.  While Julius grows up in hybridized Nigeria, Appiah spends his childhood in Kumasi, Ghana where his family “…got rice from Irani Brothers…often stopped in on various Lebanese and Syrian families, Muslim and maronite, and even a philosophical Druze…” and where he was constantly in the presence of “…other “strangers…too…the Greek architect, the Hungarian artist, the Irish doctor, the Scots engineer, some English barristers and judges, and a wildly international assortment of professors at the university…” which reveals that even without the transnationalism of his own family, Appiah inhabited a hybridized world, much like Julius in Nigeria (Appiah xix).

As adults Julius and Appiah continue their hybridized lives as they both opt to leave their childhood homes in Africa to attend university in the United States.  This migration, which Cole symbolizes throughout Open City with a bird motif, adds a new social identity to both men. They are no longer African/European hybrids but are now African/European transplants to New Jersey and Manhattan.  Julius ventures to reconnect with his maternal German grandmother living in Brussels, which in itself reveals the great intricacy of hybridization, that a German woman and the victim of Berlin Wall era atrocities, should now inhabit a space already divided between the French and the Flemmish, and–as Julius discovers–a vast myriad of African and Arab immigrants as well.  The further hybridization exposed in Julius’ ventures to Farouq’s wireless café where he converses with the Moroccan clerk about everything from the American leftist movement to the turmoil of the Palestinians while around them individuals talk privately with their family and friends in Brazil, Colombia, Germany reinforces that hybridization transcends all spaces and all people, regardless of their personal background.  Later, he discusses Farouq with Dr. Maillotte, a woman he met on his flight from New York, and his concern that Farouq’s “…specific trouble is about being [in Brussels] and maintaining his uniqueness, his difference…” and later opts to send Farouq a copy of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s novel, Cosmopolitanism, undoubtedly for Appiah’s belief that, “…the deepest mistake…is to think that your little shard of mirror can reflect the whole” which necessitates the individualism that Farouq so desperately defends (Appiah 8).

The fact that Cole actually mentions Appiah’s essay in his novel not only further connects these two men and their work, but also reveals the ever-permeative power, in our postmodern world, for one text to immediately connect to another–that is how small our world has become.  Nor are Open City and Cosmopolitanism close to being the only two works interconnected by the themes of postmodern cultural hybridization.  The entire time I was reading both of these texts, I constantly drew intertextualities to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, another work of postmodern fiction drawing from the real world experiences of those straddling two cultural identities while inhabiting a world inundated with millions more.  As the world nears nine billion people we are becoming pushed closer together into grey areas of cultural and ethnic, gender and race identities and it is our decision whether we wish to entertain the inevitability of cross-cultural conversation as cosmopolitanists or not.

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

In Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Paul Jay refers to many previous works on transnationalism in order to compare and contrast them as a means of laying out his own definition and theory on the topic.  He boils others’ theories regarding the history of transnationalism and globalization and what is behind them down to conclude within his first few chapters that, “the process we call globalization is characterized by the conflation of cultural and economic forms” (34).  What he means by this is that, rather than being driven by the globalization of economic relations or cultural globalization, the transnationalist “trend” is driven by both, that the two are to a certain degree actually inseparable, and that one can therefore not consider globalization as being just “economic” or just “cultural”.

The question of whether culture and material economy should be considered separately or as connected seems largely dependent on the question of what constitutes “culture” to begin with.  Can culture be commoditized, and therefore contribute to the “material” globalization referred to?  When we think of culture we may think of language, traditions, belief systems, etc., and these things are difficult to count as material.  But what about art?  Literature?  Film?  If a painting for example is produced within one culture and then sold in another part of the world into a different culture, can it not be said to be cultural?  And in fact, Jay goes so far as to say that material and cultural forms of exchange “are becoming increasingly indistinguishable” (56).  I wouldn’t say that they overlap completely, but I do agree with Jay that the cultural can definitely be material and play a role in economy, and therefore the globalization that may arise from that.

Matters are further complicated when we take into account that globalization, or at least the movement or exchange of cultures and/or economies can be said to have been happening for a long time.  “It is hard to find a place on the globe where what we might want to celebrate as local or indigenous culture is either local or indigenous,” Jay notes (50).  Because culture is not tied down to particular nation-states or even general regions, but is instead free to be transported anywhere on the globe (whether as material goods or as traditions immigrants continue to practice or some other form), cultures may move, shift or merge with other cultures, and this isn’t necessarily a negative thing.  I found particularly interesting the idea described by David Harvey in Jay’s book that time and space are linked the way they once were – as technology has progressed, transportation has become much faster and easier, which understandably can aid globalization and the alteration of borders (37).

Reading Jay’s reasoning for saying cultural and economic forms are conflated within globalization, I was reminded of a quote from Laura Briggs, et al.’s “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis”.  In discussing the work of Aihwa Ong, they write, “If you theorize too far away from empirical work…you wander into a fantasy that is logical but wrong” (635).  This is also related to the reference Jay makes to feminist critic Caren Kaplan, who criticizes works on globalization for not including enough concrete evidence while including too much theory (69).  If, as Jay says, culture and material influences on globalization are closely linked and even overlap, then to consider one in one’s definitions of globalization would likely be inaccurate, because it would disregard the influence of the other.  “My argument here is that both culturalist and materialist positions, when they are articulated too narrowly, are mistaken,” Jay says.  “Culture is a set of material practices linked to economies, and economic and material relations are always mediated by cultural factors and forms” (45).  I completely agree with this viewpoint, because I don’t believe it is possible to have economies or material relations that are not in any way related to some form of culture.

Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick and J. T. Way. American Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3, Nation and Migration: Past and Future (Sep., 2008), pp. 625-648

In his work, simply and directly titled “Transnationalism,” Steven Vertovec delineates and summarizes six major approaches to transnational studies: social morphology, type of consciousness, mode of cultural reproduction, avenue of capital, site of political engagement, and (re)construction of ‘place’ or locality (4).  Of course, transnational activity influences many facets of communities and cultures, such as their politics, economy, and cultural practices; therefore, the three corresponding approaches are valid and worthy of study.  Though each of these ‘takes’ (as he calls them) are legitimate and sensible, the notion that is most convincing to me is the mode of cultural reproduction approach.

Vertovec describes the mode of cultural reproduction as having a certain basic foundation: a “flow of cultural phenomena and the transformation of identity […] through global media and communications.”  Again, this recurring theme of media and movement reappears in this conceptualization of transnationalism.  This is important because of the manner in which whole cultures are becoming malleable as living, breathing entities.

Cultural phenomena can be as material and surface as music, television programs or movies, clothing, food, and so on.  However, phenomena such as roles, traditions, and practices often deeply embedded within a culture or community.  And despite the seeming immobility of these customs, transnational relationships and experiences cause transformation in both subtle and obvious ways.

Upon reading about the mode of cultural reproduction approach, I immediately thought of the American dream and how it has changed domestically, as well as how it has been adopted transnationally.  This idea comes from an article called “Salsa and Ketchup: Transnational Migrants Straddle Two Worlds” which examines cases of migrant groups in the United States (Levitt).  For instance, it is common to read about transnational migrants who work (often in the United States, they are paid well for their various skills), and send remittances home (8).  In fact, this practice is so common that “the relatively small amounts of money which migrants transfer as remittances to their places of origin now add up to at least $300 billion worldwide” (IFAD 2007, as referenced in Vertovec p.8).  However, all this economic activity is ultimately impacting culture.  In her article called “Salsa and Ketchup: Transnational Migrants Straddle Two Worlds”, Peggy Levitt demonstrates how remittance usage in the Dominican Republic that have influenced the local standard of living.  Upon receiving remittances from a transnational relative or friend, local citizens in Miraflores use the capital to rebuild homes, afford better education or healthcare, or even erect a baseball field for recreation (23).  Though the catalyst of these transformations stem from economic relationships, the final result of such interaction is impressive cultural change.

Levitt also mentions another change that has occurred as Dominican migrants return from their work abroad:  “many young women in Miraflores […] no longer want to marry men who have not migrated because they want husbands who will share the housework and take care of the children as the men who have been to the United States do” (24).  This is an excellent example of how transnationalism causes cultural expectations to transform, even abroad.  That is, although the actual transnational practice does not occur in the local culture – in this case, the Dominican Republic – (at least until the return of the migrants), the local culture does indeed experience quite a transformation.  The changing gender roles cause the Dominican culture, especially in regard to romantic relationships or marriage, to change as well.  This case that Levitt presents is not alone in its metamorphosis, though its specificity is unique.  Vertovec warns scholars to beware the false mutual exclusivity of terms such as transnationalism, assimilation, and multiculturalism (17).  The case of the Dominican Republic demonstrates a continuity of transnational trends, but insists upon its own uniqueness as its culture remains influenced, changed, yet inimitable.

Levitt, Peggy. “Salsa and Ketchup: Transnational Migrants Straddle Two Worlds.” Contexts 3.2 (2004): 20-26. Web.
Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. London: Routledge, 2009. Print.

In my own conceptualization of transnationalism, Arjun Appadurai’s emphasis on the cultural component of globalization was very persuasive. In particular, the notion that electronic media and migration play an important role in how we imagine our identity and surrounding world was very effective. Writing in the 1990s, Appadurai explains how certain migrant groups utilizing technology in new locales, such as Korean-Americans viewing the 1988 Seoul Olympics on television or Turkish guest workers in Germany watching Turkish language films, enable disruptions of traditional national identities, and create new diasporic public spheres.

This appears particularly nascent today in the 21^st century, especially with the rise of internet use, online newspapers, new forms of media such as blogging and youtube, and social media usage. If we consider the example of migrants in distant places away from their homeland, these new forums have created ambivalence in that individuals remain virtually close to their home culture, yet physically removed. We are continually left to ponder the new “imagined” sense of cultural proximity.

In my work as an German educator, for example, I have been able to reflect on Appadurai’s concept. Recently, one of my students returned from spending a rewarding exchange year in Germany, in which she lived with a host family and attended a German school. When I asked what she missed the most about Germany, she mentioned her host family, but added, “It’s not too bad, as we Skype in German almost every weekend.”  Immediately, I thought of the contrast between this student’s experience and my own 15 years prior. When I returned to the United States after spending my senior year of high school in Switzerland, I had to keep in touch with my host family and friends via snail mail or burgeoning emails. In essence, the sense of nostalgia experienced seemed less prevalent with the aid of 21^st century technologies.

On the other hand, I thought with this example how Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, technosapes, and mediascapes readily merge. At this point in time, access with a target language culture and language is readily available to educational institutions, language instructors, and students alike. Perhaps learning a foreign language today may be even more appealing than it was in the past.

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”.

In February of this year, the Salvadorian ambassador to the United States, Rubén Zamora, came to the University of Maryland to talk about El Salvador’s current political and economic landscape. He began by explaining the different causes which, over the past forty years, have led thousands of Salvadorians to leave their country and come to the States. Acknowledging the fact that a large portion of Salvadorians now lives abroad, Zamora proceeded to outline the economic strategy which the current Salvadorian political administration is pursuing in order to elicit economic growth within the country: they are encouraging Salvadorians living outside the country, and who are in possession of capital, to invest in El Salvador. Moreover, in order to strengthen the transnational link between the Salvadorian communities within and abroad, for the first time in the history of the country, voting rights are being extended to those Salvadorians living in the United States as well, so that even from without they may still contribute to, and meaningfully impact, the political discourse of El Salvador.

What is happening in El Salvador is not an isolated incident. In a broader explanation of this phenomena, Steven Vertovec explains that “Political parties now often establish offices abroad in order to canvas immigrants”, and adds that “Emigrants increasingly are able to maintain or gain access to health and welfare benefits, property rights, voting rights, or citizenship in more than one country” (11). This, in turn, has led many—including the cited-above Vertovec—to posit that we are at a crucial moment in history, one in which we are faced with the deterritorialization of the nation-state. Indeed, these constant engagements between the people from the “homeland” and those living outside it (call it “diasporas” or “transnational communities;” experts cannot seem to agree) are bringing into question the very notion of the nation-state as an entity affixed to a geographical construct. In short: those black, arbitrary lines you see on maps dividing one country from another, well, they are getting pretty blurry—at least metaphorically-speaking.

This movement toward the transnational, or “sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations and social formations spanning nation-states” (Vertovec 2), responds to a very pressing need to account for complex cultural differences in a world where we are seeing these “sustained cross-border relationships” happening more rapidly and at a greater ease than ever before due to the advancements of technology and mass media, and well as the constant migratory movement of people, which the nation-state, in its attempt to homogenize, appears poorly equipped to deal with these phenomena.

Because of its theoretical approach, transnationalism brings into question what it is that constitutes a “national narrative”, if we are to account for different types of discourse, or “national literatures,” if we are to be more specific. National narratives, and specially the literature, have been seen as a space where identity seeks to define itself through the production of homogenous and totalitarian discourse within clearly-defined borders. Yet the concept of national narrative quickly enters into crisis if we take into account of people bridging geographical chasms between themselves and remaining culturally attached to each other or their home countries despite the distance. To this effect, I am reminded of Luis Rafael Sanchez’s short story, “The Flying Bus,” which takes center stage on an airplane flight filled with Puerto Ricans. The story finds it climax and eye-opening epiphany when an older lady tells the narrator that she is Puerto Rican, and when the narrator inquiries from where in Puerto Rico she is from, she responds, very pleased, that she is from New York. The transnational need to account for the cross-border relationships renders the totalities attempted by national narratives obsolete while, at the same time, finds a space for new forms of narrating identity in these deterritorialized places.

More importantly, I think, transnationalism seeks to correct a wrong which began after World War II: the flourishing of area studies as a Western technique of research concerned with providing “a major way to look at strategically significant parts of the developing world” (Appadurai 16). As Appadurai further explains, area studies is “deeply tied up with a strategizing world picture driven by U.S. foreign-policy needs between 1945 and 1989” (16). What became “significant”—to U.S. interests—across cultures also became a way of grouping them together into an unintelligible mass of sameness. Even today one can feel the long-lasting effects of area studies, be it in the laughable suggestion that Mexico is everything south of the—U.S.—border, or the fact that six in ten young Americans cannot identity the exact location of Iraq (CBS News). Therefore, debunking the notion of area studies as a way of exploring cultural differences becomes paramount from a theoretical standpoint which seeks to account for cultural exchanges across national borders in a way that avoids the situational, cultural, economic and sociopolitical baggage it has carried for decades and which has favored American exceptionalism.