Having spent a significant portion of my life in airports, I have often felt that the experience is an interesting in-between, a limbo of sorts. While I’m accustomed and almost comfortable with some airports more than others, my familiarity with the building or the look of the check-in counters, security lines, waiting areas, customs, and baggage claim areas does not take much away from that feeling of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time; in-between here and there. I’ve slept on airport floors and benches; I once awoke to a homeless man’s bare feet next to my face on my backpack that I was using as a pillow. I was stranded in Heathrow for days after all flights were cancelled due to a fire. I’ve wandered into the strange last-stop souvenir shops and bought things from the duty-free zones. I’ve talked to strangers, and ran into friends. I’ve had my bags searched, and lost bags as well. I’ve been dropped off and picked up. I’ve had to find my way to and from the airport in countries whose languages I did not speak. I’ve even gone to the wrong airport, only to find that out once I arrived. (Why does Brussels have so many airports?). I always tend to be in airports at my most tired, packing until an hour before my 5am flight or feeling the residual effects of Dramamine after a 10-hour bus ride. Maybe it has something to do with that tension between feeling the lack of control and the conceding of all personal privacy and rights while at the same time the (forced) “go with the flow,” state of mind, almost freedom. Maybe it’s the semi-altered state I always find myself in while inside airports, (or maybe it’s the airport that causes the semi-altered state), but I could never put my finger on what made the experiences of these (non-)places so distinct.

I must say that while many of the concepts and texts we read this semester have sparked my interest and made me think through a different (transnational) perspective or lens, the idea of the non-space has affected me the most. If Augè is right in his hypothesis that these non-places are the product of supermodernity, an opinion towards which I tend to lean, then these (non-)places are a relatively new concept. We have read much about globalization and its ties to transnationalism, and it seems to me that with the increased global flows and exchange only amplified with technological advances, these non-places are a logical product. When traveling long distances with such frequency was not so common, people tended to stay within more isolated communities, places as defined by Augè as “relational, historical, and concerned with identity.” Before the standardization of time that came with the advent of railroads, the existence of such non-places had to have been inconceivable. The notion of the non-place, and the subsequent overlapping and blurred relationship between place and non-place that Augè describes, is one of many concepts that has helped me to make sense of ambiguities that I have encountered in my life experiences, as well as ones that I foresee helping to shape my academic processes and practices in the future.

While the concept of the non-place is of significance to me due to my previous exposure and interest in other theories involving space and place, currently I am working on a paper involving the photographic work of the Puerto Rican artist/writer Eduardo Lalo and reading different image theories. The idea of the non-space has affected my thinking about photography. When Augè writes, “Everything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the present,” I see a correlation between the photograph and the non-place in the possibility of a unique potential of photography to capture a specific aspect of the non-place (84).

I am also interested in the traveler and/or the tourist as subjects involved in complex processes, and since Augè proposes the traveler’s space as the “archetype of non-place,” I wonder how the space/place of the “native” can be articulated, especially in relation to the traveler. While all of these ideas are circulating, however, I always bear in mind that “Place and non-space are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten,” (my personal favorite quote of the reading) (64).

To conclude, this course’s narrow (yet simultaneously very broad) theme of transnationalism has been a very interesting and useful theoretical tool in my academic studies. I have long questioned the validity of national and other socially, politically, and culturally constructed borders, and thinking about different transnational frameworks and aesthetics has been and will continue to be very productive in my field of interest. I believe it’s an important context that should be considered in most every field, at least as a point of comparison or contrast, due to the increasingly (with no end in sight) globalized world that is the present.