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.

The opening abstract of Volker Woltersdorff’s article “Paradoxes of Precarious Sexualities” summarizes his considerations of neo-sexualities, a concept developed by Volkmar Sigusch, as relating in part to “the provision of care giving, sustainability of commitments, and loss of autonomy” (164). An approach to Helene Hegemann’s novel Axolotl Roadkill with these three domains in mind yields many opportunities to question concepts of sexuality and gender identity. Moreover, the novel provides ample evidence of the precarity claimed by Woltersdorff, and which is a prerequisite for “queer movements that contest both heteronormativity and neo-liberalism” (165).

Woltersdorff begins his exploration of precarity with Judith Butler’s ideas of instances of instability as sources of pleasure (qtd. in Woltersdorff: 167). He suggests that stability, too, can provide both pleasure and discomfort necessary for eroticism to emerge, and goes on to question exactly where stability and instability might clash. In Hegemann’s novel, it is the protagonist, Mifti, who embodies this interplay. Her reliability as a narrator is at best suspect and at worst non-existent. Clouded by copious drug use, hallucinations, and blackouts bordering on fugue states, her recounting of events produces a jarring experience for the reader. However, between her ramblings and non sequiturs, Mifti manages at times to relate a coherent story. As such, the reader, along with Mifti’s conversation partners are left to question concepts of authority and authenticity.

Sexuality and gender identity are also called into question throughout the novel. In fact, for the first several pages, it is unclear whether the narrator is male or female. An exchange with a “heterosexual female communication designer in blue and grey striped cardigan” (5) clearly identifies one interlocutor, but not the other. A certain maleness is suggested by the fact that Mifti needs help with shopping and food preparation, stereotypically women’s duties, as further evidenced by the communication designer’s assumption that the mother initiated the errand.

The later revelation that Mifti is biologically female does little to straighten out, so to speak, the issue of sexuality. One of Mifti’s first explicitly mentioned sexual encounters involves her friend Ophelia. The two are watching television and discussing scenes they find arousing and end up kissing. As Ophelia describes the situation, “[w]e’re both so gender-confused, honey” (38). Smoothio, a fling of Mifti’s bisexual (gay?) brother questions her orientation directly. Her reply—“I hardly jumped for joy when I found out about it, but yeah, I’m as bi as they come as well”—is not exactly a declaration of pride or conscious branding (130).

Mifti describes sexual relations with several men, too, but always with a sense of detachment or disengagement on her part. With the taxi driver, Pörskin, and the psychoanalyst, she seems to come to midway through the act itself, as if unsure how it began. I believe that Woltersdorff’s ideas of sustainability of commitments and loss of autonomy are important here. Mifti describes early on the conflict she faces in fighting or giving in to her desires. “Doing what I want is dangerous because it really makes me vulnerable. Not doing it is not an option” (15). Here we see the stability versus instability, with the latter seeming to win out. She later states that “[s]ex is always an act of violence anyway” (52), though none of the trysts seem to fall into the category of rape. Indeed, on two occasions she claims rape (172) or offers to (113) as a means of diminishing personal accountability for her own actions. In some way, though, she does seem not to be in control of her own actions, and while drugs are a likely cause, the loss of autonomy is undeniable.

With the psychoanalyst—and eventually Ophelia—sustainability of commitments is the issue. Mifti has trouble maintaining the status of her relationships with these two people. The psychoanalyst states quite clearly that he is not interested in sex (169), and genuinely seems to want to care for an incapacitated and weakened Mifti, but not ten pages later, the relationship takes a carnal turn. With Ophelia, it is an established friendship that withers in the end. Here, the difference in age and functionality again hint at a caregiver relationship somehow complicated by unclear boundaries. A similar disconnect between care giver and charge occurs within Mifti’s immediate family, too. An abusive, mentally ill mother; an affluent but absent father; and older siblings who practice the same drug-filled lifestyle leave her with no adult figures to whom she might turn for guidance. In the end, Mifti seeks to fill that gap in the figure of Alice, a woman who also represents Mifti’s greatest lost love.

The precarity of sexuality and gender identity is illustrated in Axolotl Roadkill in the model of instability argued by Volker Woltersdorff. In Mifti, the reader encounters a teenage girl facing insecurities brought about by drug use and dysfunctional relationships with family and friends. In the wake if these insecurities, Mifti is left to chart her own course and define her own identities as daughter, sister, and lover.

Roberto Bolaño’s novel Amulet introduces the reader to a female narrator/protagonist by the name of Auxilio Lacouture. Auxilio opens her tale with a warning to the reader. “This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection, and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that” (Bolaño 1). Indeed, throughout her narration the promised episodes of malice never materialize definitively. Instead, they are obscured, whether intentionally or not, by a series of remembrances and digressions, which themselves meld assorted locations, people, and times into an accounting of the significance of the happenings of September 1968.

The convergence of time and literal and metaphorical space in Amulet can be traced to a single location and span, namely a toilet cubicle in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. It is in this setting that Auxilio witnesses the occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) on September 18, 1968. By a fortunate chance, she finds herself sequestered in the bathroom and has the wits about her to remain hidden while students, faculty, and staff are beaten, arrested, and carted off to unknown fates. More than a hiding place, this bathroom becomes her “timeship from which [she] can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are” (Bolaño 56). It is a temporal epicenter, from which her story races in multiple directions, and back to which it inevitably returns. One might see in this fractured timescape a rhizome as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Like cracks spreading across the surface of a damaged mirror, Auxilio’s thoughts expand laterally into the future and the past, from Uruguay to Mexico and beyond.

Herself a native of Montevideo, she is unsure of the exact date of her arrival in Mexico City. In trying to pin it down, she sets reference points according to the deaths of writers she has encountered. “Hold on, let me try to remember. Let me stretch time out like a plastic surgeon stretching the skin of a patient under anesthesia” (Bolaño 2). In her description, she imparts not only a physical quality to time, but also a pliable one. Time is subject to change; it can be repaired to account for aesthetics. Throughout the novel, Bolaño plays with this malleability of time through Auxilio’s recollections. She often offers ranges of years when recounting meetings with various (usually) literary figures, sometimes blurring when one or the other actually lived.

The same flexibility is true of nationality, as seen in her often-hesitant declaration of herself as the mother of Mexican poetry. Later, she describes some Mexican clay figurines given to her as a gift. “…[T]hey were just figurines made by Indians in Oaxaca, who sold them to traders, who resold them at much higher prices at markets and street stalls in Mexico city” (Bolaño 12). Especially in the second example, nationality and its part in identity formation undergo a sort of evolution. The figurines, created by the indigenous people, become Mexican merely by virtue of an economic transaction.

Location, in the form of nationality, also clashes with time in some of Auxilio’s stories. One of her friends who makes frequent appearances in her thoughts is Arturo Belano. An alter ego of Bolaño himself, Arturo is also Chilean. Auxilio grapples with the disconnect of Arturo’s non-Mexican identity, which complicates his inclusion in either the “young poets” or “new generation” in Mexico. Further problematizing the constraints of canon by means of location versus time, Auxilio ponders a “what if” meeting of two poets, Darío and Huidobro. She speculates that Darío might have been able to establish “an island…between modernism and the avant-garde” (Bolaño 60), a metaphorical ground between two literary epochs.

Auxilio also extracts physical spaces from their real-world locations and brings them together in the non-fixed time of her thoughts in the bathroom. One striking example is the Clover Hotel, where she travels with Arturo to help free another friend from impending sexual slavery. She finds the hotel’s neon sign “funny, in a way, since it was like finding an establishment by the name of Paris in the Calle Berlin…” (Bolaño 90). The improbable Irish name is compared to the almost antipodal relationship between France and Germany, all within the confines of Mexico City. Similar juxtapositions are suggested through language. When listing the places she visited with her friend Elena and her love interest, many seem to have origins in indigenous tongues, though the orthography is clearly Spanish. On another occasion she comments on the return of Arturo’s Chilean accent after he has spent some time in his home country, and wonders if she might experience something similar were she to return to Montevideo.

While the actual time Auxilio spent in the bathroom at UNAM is revealed to be approximately twelve days, the trauma of the military occupation she witnesses clearly skews her experience. Hours, days, and even years swirl together with her memories leading to sometimes contradictory storylines. One could argue that this altered perception of time calls into question her reliability as a narrator. However, I believe that Bolaño’s choice to unanchor his protagonist from the constraints of linear time frees her to better convey the importance of 1968. Her recollections push the boundaries to encompass the time before and after that year, much as Sarah Waters and Martin Klimke and Joachim Shcarloth do in their discussions of 1968 as a truly transnational phenomenon. The main setting in Amulet—the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor—as a non-linear, non-locational focal point for Auxilio’s stories echoes the events of ‘1968’ as they occurred and rebounded around the globe.

Teju Cole starts his novel Open City with the narrator’s recently acquired pastime of evening walks through New York. A recounting of the various routes and their particular sights follows, along with one of the preceding hobby, namely, bird watching. While these descriptions do not ground the narrator’s initial interest or the subsequent change, they do share a common theme: movement. The movement of both the narrator and the birds immediately evokes a pattern of migration, of travel to a destination and of return to an origin, or home. One could easily interpret this imagery through the lens of trans-national studies and make the connection with people, or peoples, who set out on journeys to new and unfamiliar places, whether out of necessity or desire. However, I would like to consider Open City not from the perspective of movement, but from that of boundaries and restrictions of movement. The barriers found in the pages construct an inability on the narrator’s part to connect with other people, and blocking cultural accessibility.

Some of the boundaries found in the novel are ordinary, physical obstructions. Early, as the narrator makes his way to visit a friend, he finds one path blocked by police cordons (7). As he remembers a visit he once made to a detention center for undocumented immigrants, he describes the meeting room as “split down the middle by Plexiglas, with…small perforations at face level” (64), yet another border to cross. Even at home in his own apartment building, he is cut off from his neighbors. He is stunned at the revelation that the woman who lived next door died, and that he had not known. The gap between apartments twenty-one and twenty-two seems too great for him to manage without engaging in “false intimacy” (21). While the narrator is often able to engage with other figures and hear their stories, these physical blockades prevent the type of intimate interaction that could lead to a more complete understanding.

Other boundaries in the novel are more inter-personal in nature, without any physical obstacles. The narrator describes a trip on the subway after one of his evening walks. Lost in thought about one of his patients, he fails to exit the train and misses his stop. As he considers possible reasons behind this momentary lapse, he becomes aware of the other passengers on the train, and how they all ride in total silence. After switching to another train, he notices its passengers are livelier, but although some are talking with each other, and others’ reading materials seem to invite interaction, he makes an escape through closing doors and is left “all alone on the platform” with “this assortment of inwardly focused city types still swirling in [his] mind” (45). Even in one-on-one interactions, as is the case in the scene with the African taxi driver (40-41), he is unable to bridge the distance and reach another person. Their shared African identity, whether real or imagined, leads not to harmony, but instead discord due to a cultural misunderstanding.

The last boundary I would like to address is that of time and space, one that Cole addresses both directly and through metaphor in his novel. The many memory scenes—I would not refer to them as flashbacks—serve to provide biographical information about the narrator, as well as some of the other characters he encounters. Further, these memory scenes provide the chance to grapple with events and places from the past that have shaped the narrator’s present, and continue to do so. Memories of his grandmother, for example, set the stage for his chapter-spanning trip to Belgium, where he must cope with multiple cultural identities in a multicultural setting. In addition to distinct intervals, past and present, Cole also writes of elastic time (74) imbuing it with a physical quality. Carrying the metaphor further, he occasionally blurs the boundary between time and space. As the narrator wanders the streets of New York, a tourist asks for directions to 9/11, “not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones” (52). At the site of another memorial for fallen officers, he describes “a vast, blank face of polished marble, awaiting those among the living who would die in uniform, and the not yet born, who would be born, grow up to be police officers, and be killed while doing that work” (57).

As a fictional work, Cole’s Open City is able to create a context for the reader, in which questions of heritage, identity, nation, and culture can be asked. The form allows Cole to present these questions outside the structured outline of a theoretical argument. In fact, the reader is under no obligation to follow, accept, or even identify an argument at all. Instead, the narrator guides the conversation(s) important to a trans-national critical understanding through plausible settings and experiences. The reader is able to engage first with the characters and story, and then (or simultaneously) with an examination of what it means to be African, or German, or Belgian, or American, or some hyphenated combination of national identities. The fictional form brings with it both a freedom from strict theoretical analysis, as well as an environment where such analysis can be carried out organically.