The combination of articles, novels, books, movies from various contexts, languages and media was exemplary of the transnational and multilingual focus of our class. This convergence offered a great opportunity to compare and contrast different instances of transnationalism, making it hard for me to choose one specific text or idea out of all the works seen throughout this term. Having said that, I would like to revisit an article I found particularly interesting: Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis by Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick and J.T. Way. The authors argue that even if transnationalism has become very popular over the past years, it has also given rise to some controversial views that should be taken into account. According to them, the proliferation of transnational studies has caused certain conceptual confusion, even contradictory readings and analyses. In order to defend what they consider to be a productive paradigm, they engage in a genealogy aimed at choosing some meanings of transnationalism while discarding others. This provides them with a framework that allows them to articulate their understanding of the term.
Their approach establishes an analogy between gender as a construction in women´s studies and nation as a constructed entity in transnationalism. In their own words:“`transnationalism´ can do to the nation what gender did for sexed bodies: provide the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all their deployments, compelling us to acknowledge that the nation, like sex, is a thing contested, interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction” (627). Taking this as a starting point, the authors support the idea that the nation has to be de-naturalised and challenged. However, the correlation to gender reminds us that thinking beyond the confines of national borders is not so simple in the globalized era, in the same way that gender is still a constitutive element of identity applied to bodies. In this sense, the materiality of the body contributes to the illusion that there is some concatenation between biological and socio-cultural phenomena and this has remained a pervasive idea in spite of the efforts on the part of gender studies to show how sexed bodies are also constructed.
On the other hand, the realization that gender and nation are constructions does not do away with their effects. The nation continues to exert a huge influence, in spite of the increase in transnational works. Moreover, while political borders tend to be flexible for multinational corporations, most people cannot ignore them. One look at the media is enough to show the centrality of the nation. At least in Spain, when crimes or illegal acts are committed by a foreigner the press always emphasizes the nationality of the perpetrator. Not only that, nationality also determines which events are newsworthy. For example, the death of American or European soldiers in Iraq is bound to appear in the media, but if the dead come from another country, especially if they are from one of the so-called third countries, it is highly unlikely that they will even be mentioned. The case of ebola provides a great example; the virus that had already killed thousands of people in Africa remained unheard of in Western countries, until one American was infected. Suddenly, it became an outbreak. In a world where certain countries simply do not count, what are the dangers of turning our backs on the nation? Thinking beyond the nation opens up numerous possibilities, but for this to happen the effects of national discourses must be taken into consideration. Otherwise we run the risk of supporting globalizing and imperialist interests that condemn certain countries to oblivion. Instead of fluctuating between nationalism and the exaltation of a world without borders, the nation must be questioned and its constructed “nature” exposed.
Furthermore, the article is particularly relevant for my research in Latina studies, as the analogy the authors establish between transnationalism and women´s studies allows me to pay attention to how nation and gender intersect with one another. Latina studies has occupied an undetermined and evasive zone that resists nation-centered paradigms. As the authors point out in the following quotation: “Much work by Chicana feminist theorists has centered the simultaneity of the transfrontera/ transnational together with the hard-edged and sometimes violent ways that gender collides with and is refigured by race, class and the trans/nation” (632). Gloria Anzaldúa´s groundbreaking Borderlands/La frontera is an excellent example. In fact, many Latina texts, whose authors struggle to create their own voice in the borderlands have been informed by her work. Anzaldúa defined the borderlands as a geocultural space, but also as the metaphorical space she creates for a self in between cultures, identities and traditions. To conclude, the reasons why I chose the article Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis is because in addition to its excellent approach, I consider that its emphasis on establishing a genealogy, along with the identification of transnationalism as a useful paradigm to denaturalise the nation can help to shed new light on different issues within Latina Studies.
Thanks for this discussion of the Briggs article. I agree that the article’s approach is really useful, especially in contrast to Appadurai’s perhaps overly optimistic view of the disappearing nation-state. Rather than looking forward to world without borders and risking the homogenization/imperialism that is likely to follow, as you mention, it’s more realistic and useful to recognize national borders as contested. I think that Briggs et. al’s view is comparable to Augé’s understanding of borders as “frontiers” that are permeable and traversed in multiple directions, but that nonetheless should be recognized and respected.
I also really liked your discussion of the article’s applications to your work in Latina studies and to Anzaldúa’s *Borderlands/La frontera*. It is interesting to think of the ways that the nation is often constructed in a gendered way, to begin with, and thus exposing the constructed-ness of the nation often inherently entails an exposure of its gendered constructs.
Macarena, I’m so glad you wrote about the Briggs article! I remember that we read Briggs along with Bhabha and Apadurai for our first assignment, and I was disappointed that the discussion in class focused on the latter two. But I agree, I found that article’s argument rather fascinating in its comparison as gender and national borders as social constructions/inventions. It really made me re-imagine the globe, mentally erasing all of the lines that separate each country. It does seem kind of silly, in this mindset, that the lines we see on maps and globes, and the colors that differentiate nations, have become such stark reality. Your thoughts about nationalism in the news are undeniably true. It sounds rather kumbaya, but it can be refreshing to remember that we are world citizens, and that the lines that separate us and determine the color of our passports are invented (though there is little we can do about it).