My exploration of Transnationalism as a category of analysis has been inherently tied to my thoughts (and probably anxieties) about my research trajectory.  My post will thus explore how several ideas from this class—in combination with some readings from another class I’m taking this term—have come together to shape the way I’m currently thinking about my academic path.

* * *

Within my graduate work in literature, I’ve been interested in questions of belonging, home, and place, and equally, in questions of displacement, homelessness, and placeless-ness. Generally, these interests stemmed from various personal experiences and trajectories, from being a student to teaching (in Beirut) to moving to travelling. Before applying to graduate schools, I had not thought of these themes as specifically belonging to or within any specific disciplinary category; I simply knew I wanted to explore them through ethnic American and Latin American literatures. As I was applying, though, one of my recommendation writers suggested that these interests meant I should be focusing in Postcolonial Studies. At the time, my reaction was basically “Huh. Interesting…” And then I forgot about it.

When I began my graduate work last fall, however, I soon realized how important it was to be able to better categorize my interests within the field. In each new class, as I was asked to introduce myself with my year and my “focus” or my “interests,” I found myself floundering for a concise response. After my second class, though, I heard someone else say “transnationalism” in her introduction. I remember thinking, “well, I don’t know what that is exactly, but it sounds sort of like what I’m concerned with.” And so I started saying “transnationalism” in my introductions, too…

* * *

This fall, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to explore both categories of analysis, Postcolonial and Transnational, at once.

To be honest, I have often found the distinction between the two confusing and blurry. While there have been moments when the two frames seem to diverge, ultimately they always seem to converge again at others.  As we read Arjun Appadurai in Transnational Theory, we were reading Simon Gikandi’s “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality”—which in many ways seemed like a response to Appadurai—in my Postcolonial Readings course. We read Spivak, Bhabha, Jameson, and Appiah in both classes. While we read Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism in Transnational Theory, we read Bruce Robbins’ “Comparative Cosmopolitanism” and selections from James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century in Postcolonial Readings.

As both courses come to a close, I’m brought back to early essays read in each course: Briggs et al.’s “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis” and Gikandi’s “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” In these essays, the authors explore the viability and usefulness of globalization, postcoloniality, and transnationalism as theoretical frames of analysis. What stands out to me now, in looking back at Gikandi’s essay, is his claim that “part of the attraction of postcolonial theory to questions of globalization lies precisely in its claim that culture, as a social and conceptual category, has escaped ‘the bounded nation-state society’ and has thus become the common property of the world”(631). That Gikandi sees the postcolonial as the frame that has allowed globalization theorists to contemplate the ways that culture has “escaped ‘the bounded nation-state society’” is interesting, as Briggs et al. claim that “the notion of the transnational enables us to center certain kinds of historical events as the emphatically non-national but indisputably important processes that they are”(627; emphasis mine). In these two essays, both the postcolonial and the transnational seem to be serving as the very same frame—even though the first advocates the revision and reuse of an earlier frame, and the second a shift to a new one.

* * *

Despite these overlaps and confusions, in the end I think I have come to a tentative understanding of a difference between the two frames. (The difference is not necessarily large; perhaps it is even as small as the difference referred to when we say “repetition with difference.”) I would like to conjecture that while Postcolonial Studies is certainly inherently concerned with questioning of the “bounded-ness” of the nation state, transnationalism as a frame is concerned with the continual transcendence of the borders—temporal and spatial—of the nation-state.

The question of the two frames, for me, has ultimately come down to semantics: the “post” of postcolonial does something very different than the “trans” of transnational. “Post” implies an after—a future subsequent to a past; it is tied, linearly and temporally, to the very colonialism it departs from. Indeed, critics have widely pointed to this particular “problem” with or “pitfall” of the term postcolonial: “If postcolonial theory has sought to challenge the grand march of western historicism with its entourage of binaries,” Anne McClintock writes, “the term post-colonialism nonetheless re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial/postcolonial.”

To me, therefore, the benefit of the term and the frame of the transnational is that it doesn’t fall into this same pitfall. While on one level, the prefix “trans” also must depend on the root “nation” that it attaches itself to, it does not necessarily imply a temporal or linear departure from that root. Instead, “trans” implies “across,” “beyond” or “through”; it is both temporal and spatial. In this sense, it is perhaps Homi K. Bhabha’s focus on the beyond in his introduction to Locations of Culture that ultimately has influenced my understanding of the transnational the most: “we find ourselves in the moment of transit, where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’”(1).

* * *

In the end, I think it is perhaps in this ambiguity, multiplicity and impossibility of direction (spatial and temporal) implied in transnationalism that I currently see the most potential for my own work.

Indeed, it seems it would be productive to disturb understandings of home or place as “origin” or as fundamental to identity. What if we contested our understanding of home as the definitive point of departure? What if what we normally understand as the home’s barriers (barriers in the form of “you can’t call here home if you were born there”) became permeable frontiers, or “thresholds,” ones that “can be crossed in either direction” (XIV), as Augé puts it?

What if home is actually a non-place, “an intersection of moving bodies”? What is belonging, in a non-place?

What if home only exists as it’s been constructed by various simulacra—by snapshots taken at the airport, as in Orly?

Perhaps Augé is right: “non-places are the real measure of our time.”