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.

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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…

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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.

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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).

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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.”

The Guardian’s 2012 interview with Helene Hegemann focuses on surviving the aftermath—specifically the “notoriety”—of the plagiarism controversy that surrounded Hegemann’s debut novel, Axolotl Roadkill. In the interview, more than two years after the controversy began, Hegelmann continues to defend her stance (with an idea/phrase that’s actually “sampled” from Jim Jarmusch in the first place): “But I’ve said it again and it’s still my best defense: there’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity.”

As the Guardian article, as well as this earlier NY Times article notes, this sentiment is lifted from the very Jarmusch quote that she’s accused of plagiarizing: the novel’s page 7 turns the quote into a dialogue between Edmond and Mifti. After Edmond drops another “sampled” line, this one from a blogger by the name of Airen (“Berlin is here to mix everything with everything”), Mifti questions his originality: “Did you make that up?” In reply, Edmond muses, “I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination … my work and my theft are authentic…” (7).

But what really is authenticity? Or rather, what does it mean to be authentic in terms of literary production? For Edmond (via Jarmusch), work, and even theft, are authentic “as long as something speaks directly to [his] soul.” What are the implications if we define it as he does? What weight does and should “authenticity” really hold? If we understand and valorize authenticity as Edmond/Hegemann/Jarmusch do, does it mean that we are willing to consciously blur the boundaries of intellectual property rights?

What disposes the judges of this literary contest to shrug off plagiarism charges based on Hegemann’s claims to “authenticity” (“I believe it’s part of the concept of the book,” one jury member says)? What inclines us, and those judges, to understand the literary “sampling” or “mixing” that Hegemann engages in as “authentic” in the first place?

What does it mean to be an “authentic” writer in a transnational context? What does authenticity mean in a postmodern globalized world?

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The NY Times notes that in response to the plagiarism charges, Hegemann “defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new.”

This idea—particularly the “whirring flood of information across new and old media”– reminded me most immediately of Appadurai’s mediascapes, which “provide large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world”(35). Indeed, if, as Appadurai argues, “the imagination in the post-electronic world plays a newly significant role . . . and has now become part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies”(5), then it would seem to follow that in the postmodern world, the imagination in itself “samples” from various “narratives, images, and ethnoscapes.” Once it is incorporated into the individual imagination, is it authentic? Is it theirs?

My mind is brought back from both Appadurai’s idealism and grounded in my own English 101 students’ difficulties as they struggle with those admittedly fine lines involved in internet etiquette and fair use. In building their own webpages—which are, from the start, modeled after the NY Times’ Room for Debate pages–they are required to incorporate research from popular sources and encouraged to incorporate images, or even embed YouTube videos. While they are of course required to cite everything and are only allowed to use images licensed for re-use for the project, my experience so far has shown that while all of my students are using Flickr/creative commons & Wikimedia Commons because I told them they have to—most of them don’t quite understand why. “What if we include a hyperlink to the original article where the image is from under the image?” multiple students have asked.

When they know the image is just a click away for their audience—it’s hard to see exactly why they can’t just eliminate that click.

While my students can’t, in the end, eliminate that “click,” it’s easy to see what Hegemann means about being “representative of a different generation.”

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In the end, I also wonder if Hegemann’s idea of “sampling” can be seen as an extension—a sort of update, or an extreme version—of what Jameson has described as “pastiche.” For Jameson, pastiche, in short, is comprised of cannibalized style or styles: after the fragmentation of the subject in the postmodern world and the subsequent dissolution of unique or peculiar style, the postmodern artist must look to the past for style. In other words, since there is no longer a subjective self to express or from which to generate authentic content, artists must resort to “imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a new global culture” (Jameson 18).

But Hegemann doesn’t limit herself to “imitation of dead styles.”  While Hegemann often does seem look to the past for her samplings—Mifti references her “excessive identification with Patti Smith”(139) and celebrates her playlist comprised of found 60s garage band music, for example—she just as often looks to the present. As she said, she “mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media.”

Indeed, names, both past and present, high and low, local and global, (Western) pop culture and world (also, more often than not, Western) literature are dropped all over the place throughout the novel, in seemingly random places and to the point where it does become difficult to tell what comes from where—even when she’s seeming to cite things. In a chapter headed with a quote (about nostalgia for the 70s!) from American actress Leisha Hailey, Mifti goes with her class to the site of a Concentration Camp; it almost seems appropriate that Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer appears in this chapter. Luis Buñuel (perhaps an inspiration for her surreal cinematic style) appears as her stepmother flicks through a documentary, shortly after chapter headings dedicated to Sexy Julia (who, from my quick Google-work, seems to be a German YouTube sensation) and a German broadcasting company’s advertising slogan.

Is this all received naturally (in the West) as part of our “global” imaginary? Does our own postmodern and globalized condition incline us to both intuitively understand and accept Hegemann’s version of artistic authenticity?

It would be difficult, I think, to see Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet as other than allegory. In a novel whose narrator is both named Auxilio (“help” in Spanish) and claims to be the “mother of Mexican poetry,” it becomes impossible to see the narration as working on a purely “individual” level, or rather, not on a symbolic one. Nonetheless, I would hesitate to categorize Amulet as the type of third-world national allegory that Fredric Jameson wants to define in his “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”

In that controversial essay, Jameson asserts that “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, even when, or perhaps . . . particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (69).  This statement, I would argue (as others already have), is problematic in a number of ways, but perhaps primarily in its conception of “third-world texts.” In the end, I would probably agree with Aijaz Ahmad’s objections to it: “I shall argue,” Ahmad writes, “that there is no such thing as ‘third-world literature’ which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge.”[1] I think Jameson’s assertion here becomes even more problematic, though, in relation to Latin American literature. In his thesis, for example, Jameson equates “first world” (or not-third-world) with “western” (which is, I think, a slippage, though not an uncommon one). While Jameson would likely categorize the majority of Latin American countries as “third-world” (especially in 1986) – would he also categorize them as “non-western”? Latin America is certainly not “eastern”… although perhaps, in the formulation “the West and the Rest” one might think of Latin America as being part of “the Rest.” These ambiguities only get more complicated when we consider Jameson’s categorization of the novel as “western machinery,” and then consider the complex roles of Spain, Spanish and Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Latin America.

Bolaño’s Amulet, in particular, presents other problems for this (reductive) category of ‘third-world literature’ (including, among other issues, recent contentions that Chile, Bolaños’ country of origin,  has “ascended” to the first world)—but, more importantly, it also seems to disrupt Jameson’s concept of national allegory as it relates to the third world.

Jameson outlines the difference between “allegory” in first world literature and “national allegory” in third-world in four parts, but I’ll just focus on the first two for now:

1. Jameson contends that in the first world cultural tradition, the political is usually recast as psychological. It is common, he offers as an example, to interpret “60s revolts in terms of Oedipal revolts.” In the third world, on the other hand, this formulation is reversed and the psychological (or libidinal investment, as he terms it) is recast as political. Here, his example is of a character’s oral fixation—it’s cannibalism—being recast in terms of a national/social oral fixation (and cannibalism).
2. He then argues that in “first world” tradition of allegory, “figures and personifications” are assumed (even if incorrectly) to be static: they can be “read against some ‘one-to-one’ table of equivalences.” In other words, we see each animal in Orwell’s Animal Farm is symbolic of one “type” of person (or even real person) in the real political world. In third world allegory, though, there isn’t “one-to-one” equivalence. To illustrate, Jameson gives Lu Xun’s novel as an example, where more than one character symbolizes China itself (thus casting China itself as an unstable, multivalent, entity).

To combine these two points—if I am not being too reductive (and I might be)—Jameson is more or less contending that in the third world, all individuals are representative of the nation, whereas in the first world, while the nation can be cast as an individual for the purposes of art, analysis, etc., each first world individual is allowed to be a private entity and isn’t representative of the nation.

(I could say many things about this, but I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent. I will say that in general, I find this formulation frustrating, reductive, … But, I would also mention that I realize that there are several recent defenses of Jameson’s argument—and I haven’t read them, but knowing that they exist makes me think that I am perhaps missing some of the nuances of Jameson’s contention.)

So, according to Jameson, to be a third world national allegory, Amulet’s allegory would need to be multivalent—or rather, various characters would need to represent the nation–and, more importantly, those would need to be related first as individuals with various psychoses, and then, one could cast those characters/their psychoses back on the political sphere to determine the character of the nation.

To me, Amulet doesn’t do that. In fact, I would argue that Amulet’s allegory it fits better into Jameson’s category of first world allegory.

From the start, as mentioned above, Auxilio Lacoutre’s name and role as “the mother of Mexican poetry” sets her up as a symbol. While it’s a bit hard, at first, to pinpoint what exactly she’s symbolizing—Mexico itself? The student movement?—she seems to reveal it more clearly to readers in the fourteenth chapter: “I thought: I am the memory”(174). Auxilio Lacouture, it would seem, is the nation’s 1968, or rather, Mexico’s memory of 1968 and its student movement.

Indeed, like a memory, perhaps what is most noticeably/immediately strange about Auxilio is her relationship with time; by the second page, she’s already unsure of her arrival year in Mexico. It soon seems clear to the reader that she holds 1968 as a sort of ground zero. That “ground zero”, though, is constructed by future events—or rather, the future shapes the memory of 1968. But the past also overlaps with 1968, or spans out from there, so that the past and the future happen at the same time in the memory of 1968. So, for and in Auxilio, future/past/present become indistinguishable. Auxilio, or the memory, is, as Martin Klimke notes in thinking about the memory/legacy of 1968, “in a constant state of transformation”; “previously coherent forms of group memory have now been substituted by locations of memory with no particular hierarchical or narrative order”(18).

Other connections seem to come out of the woodwork: By the early 70s, Auxilio has, like the student movement, and/or the memory, lost her teeth. She covers her mouth when she speaks, conjuring the image of Mexican student protesters with tape over their mouths: “I covered my depleted mouth with the palm of my hand,” she writes, “a gesture that…was taken up and imitated in certain circles.” Indeed, her next statement, “I lost my teeth but not my sense of propriety”(33), evokes Claire Brewster’s narrative of the September 1968 silent student march: “their silence was a protest against the lack of public dialogue, and to show the students’ discipline in contrast to the violence used against them” (153). Auxilio’s life takes place at night. Her own narrative is inextricable from her interaction with poets. Auxilio—the mother of Mexican poetry—later attends “the birth of History.” And finally, finally, Tlatelolco’s presence/memory enters Auxilio’s narrative (though not by name), as she sees/hears “the children, the young people…singing and heading for the abyss” (183).

Thus, in the end, I would argue that Mexico’s nationhood—or more specifically, the Mexico’s social/political memory of 1968—is recast in terms of a narrator’s psychoses… and not vice versa. The nation is cast as an individual, while the individual only really ever exists in the novel as a symbol of the nation.

“It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond,” writes Homi Bhabha in the introduction to The Location of Culture. Elaborating on this “realm of the beyond,” he continues:

The ‘beyond is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past . . . Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years, but in the fin de siècle, 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’: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth. (Bhabha 1)

The reader of Teju Cole’s Open City is immediately aware of his narrator, Julius’s “restless movement” within this realm of the beyond – the au delà, the here/after. Indeed, in the novel’s very first line, as Julius sets the scene of his seemingly aimless wandering that will characterize the whole novel, the name of the New York City neighborhood of Morningside Heights stands out as an incommensurable confusion of time and space (the heights on the side of morning?). As “an easy place from which to set out into the city”(1), it is from within this very confusion that Julius guides his readers through the “open city”­ (a place, and title, that unsurprisingly also connotes the dissolution of time and space borders) that he inhabits, and indeed, that he never escapes: on the last page, the reader finds him still aimlessly wandering, still inhabiting a disorienting, liminal space (and time). Just as it began in media res, the narration also leaves off in transit. 

Time-space confusions are inescapable throughout the entirety of Open City. They appear as other places and times (re-) present themselves to Julius and the reader through the city’s architecture (as with the Loews 175^th Street Theater), in seemingly irrelevant asides—9/11 being described as a “great empty space”(52)—and in more direct reflections: “The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space”(155) or “they left, and time’s shape was restored”(213). In fact, Julius’s musings at moments seem to echo Bhabha directly: where Bhabha says that being in the beyond is “to touch the future on its hither side”(Bhabha 7), Julius wonders, “Why did I feel suddenly that they were visiting from the other side of time?”(55).

It is thus within a framework of Bhabha’s beyond, I would probably argue, that the novel’s major themes (which certainly include transnationalism, globalism, and post-colonialism) are best understood. Conversely, it is perhaps only through fiction’s manipulations, fragmentations, and concentrations of time that Bhabha’s beyond can truly become palpable, present, for the reader.

As he introduces the scene in which he crosses paths with Moji for the first time in New York, Julius muses, “we experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities”(155). The reader later recognizes this musing as foreshadowing for the disturbing, forgotten fragment of Julius’s life that reveals itself later. These two episodes (the first meeting, which foreshadows the later revelation) thus appear as discontinuous both in the novel and in Julius’s life, but they later reveal themselves to be part of a continuum—albeit an invented one. In the very recognition of foreshadowing, the reader thus realizes that the experience of reading the novel is much like what Julius has just described life to be like. It first appears as continuous: one reads novels linearly, just as, on a day-to-day level, she experiences time linearly. But in the life of the mind, one’s life becomes disjointed; some moments return, others are lost, and time, spaces and history are reconstructed out of simulacra.

It is a full 75 pages earlier (from his place in New York) that Julius has revealed an episode from his past in Nigeria, in which his mother “decided to take [him] with her into her memories”(79). His memory of his mother’s disjointed memories become part of his own narrative as he discloses to the reader that he has pieced together his mother’s past (perhaps much like his readers later piece together the fragments of the novel) to realize that his mother was a child of war—a child likely born of a rape. Here, he similarly reflects on his and her overlapping past: “It was an entire vanished world of people, experiences, sensations, desires, a world that, in some odd way, I was the unaware continuation of”(80). The reader must wonder: is Julius’ past act, which re-presents itself much later in the novel, a repetition of his past? Regardless, this fragment seems to join in the continuum with the other two episodes presented above, despite its displacement and disjuncture from them in the time and space of the novel.

“The present,” Bhabha asserts, “in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced”(4). The reading of novel itself seems to perform this return to the present, then, that the inhabiting of the beyond entails.