Going into this course, I must admit I had relatively little idea as to what we would actually be discussing.  Transnationalism is a concept that I had certainly heard of before, and some of the theoretical and literary texts are works that I had previously encountered, but that prior knowledge didn’t really hint at what we would cover.  One profound difference between my preconceived notions of a transnational seminar and what was actually encountered lies in the idea of the nation.  I had assumed, at the beginning of the semester, that much of this class would deal with the nation and ideas of nationalism.  I believe, in some ways, early readings, for example from Appadurai or Jay, served to reinforce this idea.  And while nations as agents and the idea of nationalism certainly figured into the course, what would eventually be most interesting to me was largely independent from, and much smaller than, the nation.  To me, the most profound aspect of this course has been the human dimension.  The lived experiences of individuals whose lives have been impacted by transnational phenomena really serve to highlight what is personally the most important aspect of transnational study.  Because it seeks to examine phenomena that spread widely, quickly and across borders, transnationalism is something that affects the daily lives of a vast array of people.  The idea of the personal narrative is thus one that is profoundly impacted by the study of transnationalism.

In the readings for this class, I found examples of the transnational impact on personal narrative in both fictional and non-fictional works.  Though the work straddles the line between those two classifications, as it does with so many other ways of classification, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera presents a very personal account of how a personal narrative can be affected.  Her story of growing up in an area caught between a nebulous, vague border that is defined differently in terms of spatiality, temporality and culture shows how limiting the idea of the nation can be when dealing with individual lives.  One particularly interesting anecdote found in the book describes Anzaldúa’s encounter with the mythical figure Coatlicue.  Coatlicue, a goddess culturally indigenous to Anzaldúa’s people, is a mythical representation of duality.  This figure, reflective of the fragmented identity that the author presents in the text, is nonetheless “encountered” in a very unexpected way.  She describes an encounter with a representation of the goddess: “I first saw the statue of this life-in-death and death-in-life, headless ‘monster’ goddess (as the Village Voice dubbed her) at the Museum of Natural History in New York City (69).”  Anzaldúa’s encounter with a physical manifestation of Coatlicue occurs hundreds of miles from the context in which she first learned of the figure, in a city that is radically different from her Borderland.  This anecdote made me consider the ways in which our lived experiences, influenced by so many factors, impacts how we perceive and engage with the world around us.  In Anzaldúa’s personal story, Coatlicue represents a “monster goddess.”  Would Anzaldúa agree with this evaluation?  Whose interpretation of Coatlicue is “right,” if any?  These are all things, I believe, that are dependent on personal narrative.

The difference context can make in perceiving the world is also reinforced in other fictionalized presentations of personal narratives.  In Persepolis, Marji appropriates cultural items from disparate sources, from east and west during the height of the cold war, and uses them to craft her identity.  American rock music is mixed with Marxist philosophy and take on a new contextual significance in the midst of the Iranian revolution.  This process is seen in several works examined this semester.  Cole’s Open City presents an African born man, living in New York City, traveling to Belgium and having deep philosophical discussions with Muslim immigrants running an Internet café, a figurative and literal access point to the rest of the world.  The amount of lived experiences, national and transnational phenomena converging during these moments of philosophizing is unimaginable, but it’s presented as a rather quotidian event.

Examples like Persepolis and Open City really serve to illustrate to me how imperceptibly slight but massively impactful transnational influences are in personal histories.  Encounters between people bring together so many different elements, which could be coming from so many different sources, and puts them into contact that could lead to so many new permutations.  In my own area of interest, I believe it will be helpful to consider these personal aspects for the artists and works that I examine.  Though the spread of transnational phenomena was not as easy in the nineteenth-century, the lives of the artists that interest me are certainly not limited by national contexts.  The works of Debussy are impacted by the poetry of Baudelaire, who was influenced by the music of Wagner, who developed a new style to stand in contrast to Italian operas.  The personal narratives of people are impacted by an unimaginably large number of influences, which come through, between and around borders.

Film, as a medium, has reached near universal status as a part of contemporary life.  Throughout the world, unbounded by culture, language or geography, cinema has become a large part of life.  And, increasingly, film is no longer restricted in terms of access or scope by national boundaries.  The most obvious example of this is the Hollywood blockbuster, which is expected to be distributed to a global audience, and made to fit this task.  Indeed, the value of transnational appeal of these films is becoming increasingly more apparent.  In the past few years, major Hollywood films are being distributed first internationally, often in China and other parts of Asia, before being released in the United States, and are making far more money abroad than domestically.  But it is not just the blockbuster that follows transnational patterns.  Even in the United States, which typically gives less regard to international media, foreign films and films made in collaboration with foreign participants are gaining more visibility.  Hollywood action films take inspiration from Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and foreign directors like Guillermo del Toro are picked to direct movies with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and earn back several hundred million more.  Transnational movement of film is making it harder to define a purely national style of cinema, and with the lower cost of the technology required to create films combined with the increasing ease of distribution, it is likely this trend will continue.  In their introduction to Transnational Cinema, Ezra and Rowden note that “Today, the transnationalization of cinema extends beyond European and Euro-American coproductions to include international production centers in, most notably, south and East Asia.  In an increasingly interconnected world, these hybridizing tendencies have become predominant (2).”  This hybridization, as they term it, does not, I believe, lead to a bland and homogenous global cinema.  The hybridizing tendencies should serve instead to further promote transnational collaboration and shared ideas and techniques to allow filmmakers to better realize their vision.

As Higson highlights in his examination of transnational cinema, “The cinemas established in specific nation-states are rarely autonomous cultural industries and the film business has long operated on a regional, national and transnational basis (19).”  The influences that affect filmmakers have not been restrained to their local contexts, nor have their works been similarly restrained.  To appreciate the collaborative, transnational processes that affect filmmakers, I think it is fruitful to consider African cinema.  There are two films in particular I would like to reference, Quartier Mozart and Karmen Gei.

Quartier Mozart by Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo, released in the early 90s, shows a clear influence from Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing.  As with Lee’s film, Quartier Mozart explores the socio-economic dynamics amongst a group of exaggerated, stereotypical characters in a limited, local context.  The majority of characters in Lee’s film are known only by nicknames, such as “Buggin’ Out” and “Radio Raheem.”  Similarly, Quartier Mozart largely features characters with names such as “Chien Mechant (Mad Dog)” and “Montype (My Guy).”  However, the influences of Lee’s film are mixed into a plot that is specific to the Cameroonian context.  The central story of the film follows the story of a young girl who, wishing to experience life as a man, is transformed by a witch into the young man Montype.  Mixing the aesthetic of Lee’s Do the Right Thing with supernatural elements that are unique to the African context, it shows how filmmakers are using the transnational nature of cinema to expand the ways in which they can present their stories.

Karmen Gei also shows the influence of transnational works in the creation of national cinema.  The film, released in 2001 by Senegalese director Joseph Gaï Ramaka, reimagines the story of Georges Bizet’s 19^th century opera Carmen, which was itself inspired by a novella by Prosper Mérimée.  The film recasts the characters of the opera into a contemporary Senegalese setting, taking place in the capital of Dakar.  The musical aspect of Bizet’s work is retained, as the film is a musical, but the music has been translated to match the local context.  The titular character Karmen repeatedly sings lines from Carmen’s famous Habanera, but the lyrics are in Wolof, and the rhythm and accompaniment are taken from popular Senegalese music.  The transnational nature of the film is further highlighted by the large scope of the film, clearly inspired by Hollywood musicals.  This process of appropriating themes, aesthetics and material from abroad serves to enhance the final product.  I believe these two films exemplify what Higson states about the impact of foreign films on indigenous cultures: “…the introduction of exotic elements may well have a liberating or democratizing effect on the local culture, expanding the cultural repertoire (19).”

I would like to end with a short personal anecdote.  During the past year, between finishing my graduate program at Virginia Tech and beginning my studies in Maryland, I worked in a daycare.  During this time the Disney film Frozen was released, and became incredibly popular with the young children I worked with.  Shortly after the film was released, Disney uploaded to Youtube a video, currently with more than 41 million views, of the song “Let It Go” sung in many different languages.  I remember the kids at the daycare being very excited as they found this video, trying their best to imitate the languages and asking me to teach them the rest of the lyrics in French.  I think there’s something inherently appealing and humanizing in the realization that, throughout the world, people are captivated by the same films.

            For one who studies France, the events of 1968 certainly hold a place of prominence.  However, and I may be exposing a bit of historical ignorance in admitting this, it has been very interesting to learn the extent to which the 68 protests spread beyond France, beyond Europe, and the similarities and differences that exist in the way in which the spirit of 68 manifested itself.  As a moment of global protest, it is understandable why this year holds such an appeal in transnational studies.  Appadurai’s Modernity at Large excitedly discusses the beginning of a transnational change becoming possible due to advances in mass media technologies, but this report comes nearly thirty years following the events of 68.  These protests, and the cultural, economic and political shifts that they provoked, occurred in a greatly different landscape for technology and media.  The spirit of 68 also did not necessarily involve the movement of any people in particular, nor was it an ideology spread through a specific intellectual work.  The spread of protests in 68 was of a very immaterial nature, and thus represents an intangible transnational process.  To study the events of 68 is to analyze a much less visible transnational phenomenon than people crossing borders or using the Internet to speak to one another.  1968 was a very visible moment, not dependent on any particular location, people, or means of communication, but I believe its true value is symbolic.  1968 is the representation of a diffuse and broadly applicable moment of transnationalism.

That the year 1968 is so evocative of rebellion and protest for so many people, regardless of national or cultural boundaries, is in itself reason to consider what it adds to the idea of transnationalism.  As Martin Klimke notes in Revisiting the Revolution, the general memory of 68 is something that goes beyond borders.  He notes “…there is, in addition to our national recollections, also a transnational pool of memories.  In fact, icons, images, references, and experiences associated with ‘1968’ have been circulating across national borders ever since this turbulent decade.  They have created a loose, but nonetheless potent generational identity as well as a firm imprint in popular culture that transcends national boundaries (27).”  I believe it is fair to say that 1968 is a broadly shared memory held by people regardless of location, and even by those who were not there.  However, despite the broad spread of events in 1968, not all manifestations of 1968 were reacting to the same thing, or working towards the same goal.  In Reading Mexico 1968, the author cites a fictionalized German participant from Luis González de Alba’s Los días y los años who states that the demands of a Mexican student participating in a protest in the year has demands that are, to the German, incomprehensible (303).  The effects of 68 were broad, and are held by a great variety of people, but care must be taken when analyzing it so as not to take the great deal of similarities as indication that 1968 represented a unified vision.

Another potential hurdle in choosing one year to be representative of a transnational process is coming to terms with the fact that a broad phenomenon cannot sit so neatly in a well-defined spatial and temporal context.  Though 68 is the emblem of national and transnational protest in the 1960s, it cannot be removed from the context of what occurs before and after.  In 1968 in Europe, Klimke and Scharloth note the metaphorical significance of 1968: “The roots of many of these movements reach back to the beginning of the 1960s and the previous decade, making a strong case for extending the general periodization to the ‘long 1960s,’ dating roughly from 1956 to 1977.  In this book, ‘1968’ thus stands as a metaphor used to capture the broad history of European protests and activism… (3).”  Sarah Waters similarly notes the strength of 68 being applied more metaphorically: “Thus, recent comparative studies use a wide historical lens, taking 1968 as a symbol for a far larger moment in time (Introduction: 1968 in Memory and Place 2).”  The use of a specific year like 68 in analyzing a transnational phenomenon should thus be done carefully, with more regard to a defining moment in a larger process rather than a specific moment that exists in a vacuum.

The interest in 68 is important for the study of transnational processes.  It shows that something as abstract as the idea of protest can spread through national boundaries, and can do so without Twitter or Skype to facilitate communication.  It shows that transnational movement is not dependent on the current mass media landscape.  It has existed, continues to exist and presumably will continue to evolve and manifest itself.  However, there are pitfalls in limiting the study of transnationalism to such a specific time.  As noted, care must be taken to avoid generalizations.  Though 1968 was defined by global student protests, what these students were protesting for is not at all uniform.  Nor is 1968 a specific moment that exists out of time.  It is situated in a much longer history of rebellion and protest, and it is important to consider it in context of what lead to it and what changes it caused.  Still, for the study of something as broad, diffuse and potentially transparent as transnationalism, I believe that there is value in using specific emblematic moments of change.

It is increasingly easy to see evidence in daily life of transnationalism, and encounter people whose lives have followed transnational patterns.  As Appadurai states in the introduction of Modernity at Large, “…few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities (4).”  The most visible transnationalism comes from movement.  However, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera offers a look at a very different sort of transnationalism.  Rather than focus on the act of moving across borders, she focuses on the lived experience of those who exist between and are caught up in constantly shifting borders.  Because the experience of living in this Borderland is so deeply personal, and has had such a profound impact on those who experience it, I feel that the greatest strength in Anzaldúa’s project is how effectively she uses herself as an example.  She engages her audience in such a profoundly personal level and allows us to take part in the space in which she’s lived.  Thus, in responding to the first prompt for examining this text, Anzaldúa’s idiosyncratic approach to presenting the material is crucial to the effectiveness of the work.  Her use of language, cultural memory and biographical elements help allow readers to experience life between borders, between binaries.

Much of the transnational readings we have discussed this semester focuses on the movement of people, objects or ideas across borders.  Borderlands is unique in this regard for focusing on people who have had borders move across them.  Rafael Pérez-Torres highlights the unique circumstances of Anzaldúa’s community by explaining “Their transnationalism is not one borne of the movement from a national context to another.  Rather, it is one that is produced by the historical realities of shifting borders in the southwestern United States.  The borders here are linguistic, social, and economic borders negotiated and crossed by Chicano subjectivities working through multilingual cultural identities and dissident practices (Minor Transnationalism 318).”  The history of these people exists between national, cultural or linguistic borders.  The personal narrative offered in Borderlands shows the way in which people can exist without being defined by a clear border.

Borderlands begins by offering a historical context for the tejano people.  The narrative differs from what one is likely to hear in the United States, with people first immigrating south, into Mexican territory, before appropriating the land and becoming a republic.  As Anzaldúa puts it, “Tejanos lost their land and, overnight, became the foreigners (28).”  The border was imposed onto the people, creating a divide between those who remain in Mexico and those who stayed in the territory of what would become the state of Texas.  Despite the divide, the people remain tejano, and their identity is defined by elements that have no regard for the border.

Anzaldúa explains that “Culture forms our beliefs.  We perceive the version of reality that it communicates.  Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture (38).”  The culture of the tejanos play a much larger role in giving identity than the border that separates Texan from Mexican.  The people that Anzaldúa describes are, in a sense, outside of the border.  In giving us this personal account, she shows to us the fallacy of relying on binary concepts to analyze the world.  It is not a complete picture to only consider Texan and Mexican, as these people are at once both and neither.  Her personal accounts continue to bring attention to the insufficiency of using the binary.

Borderlands frequently switches between English and Spanish, but this too is not a binary.  Anzaldúa points out that her language is fluid, influenced by English and Spanish yet being fully neither.  She lists the various languages that she is required to know in order to exist between communities.  Chicano Spanish, her Spanish, is a “border tongue which developed naturally (77).”  For people that live in the border, language must be flexible enough to accommodate all sides.  She also uses another element of her life, her lesbianism, to highlight other false binaries.  Sexuality and gender are not binary, and she brings attention to the danger in viewing them as such.  She sees her culture as an inherently misogynistic one, with harmful norms for what constitutes masculinity.  The rigid binary between masculine and feminine continues these harmful practices.  For her it is, again, those who are between the binary that are able to push for change.  She says “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity (106).”

It is easy, in examining transnational action and events defined by borders, to think of binaries.  Immigrant and native, English and Spanish, us and them.  Anzaldúa’s work shows the error in resting in a binary view of the world.  Neither English nor Spanish, neither prose nor poem, Borderlands is proof that life exists between the borders.