So this will probably come off as a little ridiculous, but I had never been asked to discuss my ideas on “transnationalism” before enrolling in this class. While this may seem a broad topic, it really took a lot of my energy and focus to fully comprehend transnationalism and all of its qualities, many of which we discussed in class. I feel like I identified the most with the novels we read for the class and how they exemplified transnationalism as a whole. I learned a lot from Teju Cole’s Open City, which is the text I will use here to describe how I came to truly comprehend the idea of transnationalism (as opposed to cosmopolitanism, globalization, internationalism, etc., that we discussed on the first day of class this semester). To begin, I find that the idea of transnationalism (or using a transnational approach to writing) is crucial to creating a paper/thesis, mainly because while many of us our stuck in our ways of taking psychoanalytical, Marxist, or feminist approaches to literature in our respective language fields, it is imperative for us to realize that other nations and peoples influence the foreign literature that we study.

Something I used to find distinctly and only French in nature, one of my favorite literary forms from Charles Perrault, are the contes de fees, or fairy tales. To put it in basic terms, nothing is black and white. Nothing can be purely French in my eyes anymore. There are always other factors—namely, transnationalism. Yes, Perrault wrote them in French and he was inspired by tales from French history, the idea of the fairy tale comes from the more general folk tale, a genre that comes from numerous regions around the globe; thus, delving deeper into Perrault’s influences, I found that he may have read texts from other countries such as Spain, Germany, and Italy. That’s just one way in which transnationalism has affected my academic work thus far.

In Cole’s Open City, at first glance I perceived the story as merely that of an immigrant now completely enmeshed in New York City life. But it was so much more! His life, as well as that of his friend, Professor Saito, proved a network of transnational experiences. Regarding Professor Saito, “[Following the Second World War] The last subject was so total in its distance from my experience that it was perhaps of most interest to me. The war had broken out just as he was finishing his D.Phil, and he was forced to leave England and return to his family in the Pacific Northwest. With them, shortly afterward, he was taken to internment in the Minidoka Camp in Idaho” (Cole 9). Saito’s life cannot be condensed into his tenure at Maxwell College; rather, his life experiences and movement from country to country, across multiple borders, fashioned him into the scholar he is at the moment when Julius visits him at the beginning of the novel.

The reader is only introduced to the transnational elements surrounding the life of Julius in Chapter Six. “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…Being Julius in everyday life thus confirmed me in my not being fully Nigerian. [On his name being taken from his mother who, in turn, was named after a relative] She had in her early twenties extricated herself from Germany and run off to the United States; Julianna Müller had become Julianne Miller” (Cole 78). We discover more about circumstances surrounding our narrator’s youth and his disembarkation from Nigeria for university later on in the text, but from this passage we learn of his Nigerian and German descent and how both nationalities held a profound influence over his upbringing as well as his identity. His name, Julius, is not Nigerian but German in origin. So we discover our narrator is more than his Nigerian heritage; he is profoundly linked in multiple ways, transnationally speaking, to other countries. Here we find he is linked to Germany; later we find his link to Belgium.

While I’ve only cited a few examples in this post of the importance of transnationalism in Open City, the text is full of many other examples. This book, along with Satrapi’s Persepolis and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, greatly influenced my final group project members and I to look at transnationalism and border-crossings on many different levels, including historically, physically, and politically. We wanted to demonstrate a creative method (a virtual museum) to utilize, in depth, our comprehension of transnationalism.