The vast majority of the concepts and texts covered in the seminar this semester were new to me, so it’s difficult to point to one idea in particular that has made a bigger impression on my thinking than any other.  There are, however, a few concepts that have definitely made an effect on me that will last long beyond this seminar.  The ideas of between and created spaces that transcend existing borders are among them.  Throughout this semester I’ve found myself attempting to apply transnational definitions of space to readings and discussion in my other classes as well as in my personal life, a change that – while unexpected – has been welcome to me.

The creation of new spaces outside the nation-state or other physical or geographical boundaries can be accomplished through the mixed use of elements characteristic of already-existing spaces.  We examined this idea in practice in our handling of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which uses a combination of languages to convey the experiences of Chicano/a culture and heritage.  Anzaldúa uses dialects of English and Spanish to create a literary space as a means of separating her experiences from those which she problematizes.  She then uses this space to point out the borders, both visible and invisible, which have shaped and restricted those experiences.  La Frontera breaks down our sense of borders and spaces by combining languages in a manner that may be unfamiliar or even uncomfortable for the reader, in order to build and illuminate new ones better suited for understanding her perspective.

Despite having studied German for close to ten years now, I’d never really stopped to consider what can happen when you bring multiple languages together in a single text.  I’d mistakenly assumed Spanglish was a result of a lack of vocabulary similar to what eighth-grade me experienced when my German teacher asked me a question I couldn’t answer, and not a form of language in its own right, a tool one could intentionally use to both transcend and call attention to borders in writing.  This was my first experience with a piece of literature that unapologetically, purposefully did not translate everything into a single language, instead treating long passages in multiple languages as though they were all one continuous language.  This brought up other questions – how does such a work get translated?  Can it be translated without destroying its original intent, and is that possible?  We wondered the same thing about the varied languages in Orly – how does the language usage and the utilization of subtitles change based on the primary language of the viewer?

I remember receiving bonus points on conceptual physics exams in high school because my teacher liked how I always described motion from more than one perspective, typically both the perspective of the person involved in the action as well as that of an outside observer.  I’ve realized through our readings and discussions that a similar method is necessary to view human interaction and understanding through a transnational lens.  Viewing a culture or a people from a single perspective – which too often means viewing it from our own personal viewpoints, because that is what we know best – doesn’t often give you the full picture.  Kwame Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, which particularly struck me out of the books we’ve read over the course of the seminar, explains the need to acquire a sense of others’ views and understandings in many ways as an obligation.  Appiah discusses what is widely considered the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you wish done to yourself.  He points out that there is a flaw in applying this rule on a transnational or even international scale.  What you wish done to yourself may not be at all what someone in another culture wants done unto them, and someone you would never want to be done to you may be something their culture has (for reasons you may not ever even have considered) long held as of the utmost importance.  The creation and use of spaces can come into play here because we have to recognize that people do not all exist in the same space, nor do they always spend their lives in a single space.  Humanity is so much more complicated than that.

This semester, under Dr. Baer’s direction, I have been studying German science fiction through its relatively short history.  Most of the works I have read have involved either an alternate imagining of human history and culture, as in Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I’ll be here in sunshine and in shadow), which tells the story of a 100-year-long world war from the perspective of a black soldier in the (fictional) Swiss Soviet Republic, or an outside, alien species or planet, such as in Kurd Laßwitz’s novel Auf zwei Planeten (On two planets), which is about an invasion of Earth by well-meaning Martians attempting change mankind for the better.  I’ve spent a good amount of time considering these works as they fit into my understanding of the transnational, and what happens when the space created is a physical one that has been little influenced by human cultures and/or does not even exist on the same planet.  I’ve wondered what this can show us about humanity as a whole and how different cultures can be compared or understood via the introduction of a wholly fictional and foreign culture.  What happens when you remove Earth from the picture?  I think there’s a lot of potential for transnational discussion in science fiction that I’d like to explore further.

While not always successful, my attempts to reframe outside reading using transnational concepts have shown me that, despite sometimes thinking that the theory discussed in this seminar was going way over my head, I have actually picked up on a lot, and my thinking has definitely taken on a kind of transnational filter.  Though I don’t (currently) have plans to further my studies or research in Germanic Studies specifically, I expect that there will be many more instances where I find I can apply transnationalism to gain better understandings and new perspectives, and I’m glad to have gained the new level of understanding of the transnational that I have.