As a few others have written in their posts, I knew precious little about the concepts of globalization and transnationalism when this seminar began. Of course, I have started most of my seminars here at Maryland in the same position, so nothing new there. What was new with this seminar was a degree of uncertainty that came with our introduction to the main topics to be covered over the semester. The requisite “what do you all think of when you hear the term __________?” discussion on day one seemed pretty standard. Let’s talk about the ideas and preconceptions we all have going into this course. Agreeing to a set of terms to be used is an essential step in framing the overall discussion to come. However, the theoretical texts of the first several meetings almost seem to be responding to the same question, and they offer nearly as many disparate answers as we did.

Naturally, scholars often disagree about the finer points of theory development and application, and it is in those disagreements, those lively debates, that we have the opportunity to refine our approach and edge a little closer to meaningful advancement in the field, whatever it may be. Still, in past seminars covering German Studies or Twenty-first Century German Literature, I was reasonably certain of what the movements addressed, and in which period they were situated. When I tried to pin down “the transnational turn”, I found myself at somewhat of a loss. The three texts that truly gave me pause were Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, Paul Jay’s Global Matters, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, and I believe that they have continued to do so throughout the seminar. With each fictional text we read, I found myself marking passages with “as in Jay/Appiah” or “not according to Appadurai” notes.

With Appadurai and Jay, the disconnect between their views on the origin of transnationalism and its relationship to globalization was particularly exciting. Appadurai suggests that the phenomena of globalization and the transnational effects it brings are recent phenomena. “Implicit in this book is a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (3). He credits the boom in technology—especially communications technology—with starting the whole process. It has made possible the various -scapes he proposes in the opening section of his book. As diasporic populations achieve greater ease and speed in communication and community building, new identities are imagined and spread.

Indeed, for Appadurai, condensing time and space is an essential element of his theory of rupture, which he describes as “necessarily a theory of the recent past” (9). The thing about ruptures, though, is that they come from the inside, and although they may seem abrupt or sudden, the causal weakening tends to occur over time. Jay, I believe, recognizes this fact. While he acknowledges some merit in Appadurai’s theory of rupture, he criticizes that “Appadurai’s approach to globalization emphasizes rupture, speed, convergence, and disjunction at the expense of historicizing the forces that have led to this rupture in the first place” (Jay 36). He asserts in his own arguments that globalization is not the sole or simple cause of transnationalism, that it is not a contemporary phenomenon. A more thorough understanding lies in a blend of materialistic and cultural approaches.

Kwame Anthony Appiah echoes Jay’s promotion of a historical and cultural element at least partially driving the transnational movement of today. Appiah, a philosopher, takes an ethical approach with his proposal of a new cosmopolitanism, asserting in essence that while humans (and cultures) are different, we can and have a responsibility to learn from those differences. Like Jay, he cautions that globalization is not simply the threat of homogenization; rather, under his cosmopolitanism, it can serve as a threat to homogeneity. His suggested slogan: “universality plus difference” (151). He grounds his arguments in the ancient traditions of his own ethnic heritage with the Ashanti people of Africa.

So, long story short: I’m a fan of Jay and Appiah, not so much of Appadurai. I am simply not convinced that globalization and transnationalism are firmly rooted in the present or very recent past. Since my first seminar dealing with the Cultural Studies model of literary analysis, I have asked myself the same questions. How can we not consider culture all the way down to its smallest unit, namely the individual? At what point does culture become culture? With ten people? One hundred? One thousand? And how can we talk of culture as a static phenomenon when it changes with every iteration? For me, the three texts I mentioned above speak to those questions. Jay and Appiah address the necessary inclusion and historicizing of the cultural element in understanding transnationalism. I think I see in them some validation of the questions I have had regarding culture, whether with a big or a little “c”, and how it fits into a meaningful approach to literature.