Many of the texts we’ve read for this course account for the uses of the term “transnational” as it circulates in academic study and political discourse, as a descriptor of a set of phenomena linked to globalization, as a qualifier for the cultural identities and products that emerge from the experiences of these phenomena, as a critical perspective that makes visible the workings of the nation-state. Of all the creative and theoretical texts we’ve read this semester, though, the one that has been the most influential to my way of seeing and thinking about the world and ways of learning (in) it is, perhaps, one of the more straightforward discussions of the transnational in terms of a transnational practice of studying identities in the context of globalization. Inderpal Grewal and Caran Kaplan’s 2001 article, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” provides a really useful articulation of what a transnational feminist practice of studying sexual identities might look like, consider, and prioritize, and how such a transnational practice helps overcome some limitations of conventional disciplinary approaches to the study of sexuality which, they argue, have been “unable to address some key issues and problems” (666). I suspect that one of the reasons their articulation of this practice has resonated with me in such a lasting way has to do with the order of things on the syllabus, as we read this article after the unit focusing on the transnational practice of studying the meanings and events of 1968; having already had this case study exemplifying a transnational scholarly practice surely made Grewal and Kaplan’s explanation of it all the easier to apprehend.

Grewal and Kaplan argue convincingly that “a more interdisciplinary and transnational approach that addresses inequalities as well as new formations” can more adequately explore the complex terrain of sexual politics and identities in the current phase of globalization (664). Their ideas about this approach to feminist study have expanded my previously entrenched understandings of transnationalism as primarily a thing of its own or a mode of being under contemporary global capitalism. This is, and will be, most useful to me not only in the realm of research, in terms of the way I determine and articulate my methodologies as an interdisciplinary feminist scholar; it also has profoundly affected the way I think about and wish to approach teaching feminisms and feminist studies, especially in the space of the introductory classroom (and perhaps even more especially in the UMD classroom, where student diversity reflects a range of the effects of transnational movements and economic policies on the Maryland population/demographics, a specificity to which I hope my teaching can be sensitive).

So my first application of this idea of a transnational practice of feminist study (of identities, of events, of cultural productions) has been/will be in my thinking through how to revise my syllabus for the introductory Women’s Studies course I teach on “Women, Art, and Culture” in order to reflect transnational histories of feminisms and, importantly, to destabilize the hegemonic narrative of Western/Eurocentric feminist thought and action. My biggest challenge will be in how little I feel I know about women’s (or feminist) artistic and cultural production outside of a U.S. or European context, although once I begin the work of selecting texts in earnest I may very well surprise myself on this front. In any case, I’ve begun to think seriously about how a transnational approach to teaching women’s studies could structure my syllabus, and thus an introduction to a field of study. Looking to Grewal and Kaplan’s explanatory examples of a transnational approach to the study of sexuality for hints about how this might translate to a transnational approach to feminist pedagogy: they start by examining how colonial and postcolonial discourses of modernity and tradition have structured feminist cultural production, identity politics, and national policy and activism, continue by interrogating how global political discourse and national policies on international relations produce subjects and identities, and also consider the how the deployment of feminist/social activist discourses about global issues shapes the emergence of local/national activist agendas (672-673). They also point to how certain topics of study, such as tourism and travel, provide “a window onto specific connections among nationalism, political economy, and cultural formations” as many of the figures and debates that come up in the study of tourism (such as the “Third World prostitute” and global trafficking and sex tourism) indicate colonialist habits of thought (673). Following these leads, perhaps a transnational approach to teaching an introductory women’s studies class might start by exploring a range of instances of artistic and cultural production relating to a particular topic (such as tourism or migration), from various locations and perspectives, in order to teach key concepts (power and privilege, inequalities, identity, difference, discourse, representation, activism, nation, etc.). I’m only at the beginning stages of revising my syllabus, but am excited about the possibilities opened up by a transnational approach to an introduction to Women’s Studies syllabus, and Grewal and Kaplan’s thinking will be incredibly useful in this regard. 

I find myself really taken by the ethical and epistemological stakes in considering Hegemann’s literary technique (the technique itself, and her use of it) in the context of global media production, circulation, and consumption. The technique in question involves using material without acknowledging their source, what whistle blowers call plagiarism, but Hegemann defends as “mixing,” according to Nicholas Kulish’s New York Times article. We may ask which it “really” is, or whether the technique itself challenges prevailing notions of knowledge/cultural production, or whether Hegemann’s use of the technique in this case was ethical. Rather than taking and defending a position in the debate (of which there are many sides), I think it’s more interesting to think about different aspects of some of the broader questions such a debate raises.

Hegemann is right, I believe, in claiming that there’s no such thing as originality anyway, and that knowledge production always involves a sort of taking and remixing. I think this is a pretty solid epistemological stance, one which challenges proprietary notions of knowledge and culture, notions grounded in Western philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment that presuppose/require a rational subject, and which are universalizing in nature. This stance also threatens canonicity in art, literature, and other institutionalized domains of cultural production, thus challenging imperial cultural hierarchies of race, nation, gender, class, and ability. Challenging these prevailing notions of knowledge and culture as proprietary and therefore profitable entails a critique of rights predicated on ownership, the model according to which most modern nation-states are articulated; transnationalism enables such a critical position, and transnational approaches to knowledge and cultural production can shine a light on other ways the nation-state is involved. In describing this epistemological stance, I suppose I’m thinking in terms of the post-positivist stance taken by poststructuralist, postcolonial and transnational feminist academics including those thinking in terms of new materialisms, but I also wonder to what extent Hegemann’s defense of her literary technique represents an epistemological stance characteristic of more and more widely held (ie not purely academic) attitudes towards cultural production in the current phase of globalization. In either case, it’s important to clarify that the stance is not the technique. In other words, the technique itself may or may not do these things that its justification does—it depends on context—but the technique and its use are perhaps part of a wider shift in consciousness regarding cultural/knowledge production that attends the current phase in the global circulation of media and information technologies.

I’m more of mixed minds when it comes to the claim that this technique represents a generational shift in thinking about knowledge and culture, as Hegemann’s defense of her technique makes. There are perhaps bits of truth in such a claim, but it’s a bit too totalizing and needs to be thought through in terms of specific and deeply contextualized histories of the developments in new media and information technologies and the global circulation of culture and ideas, as well as the specific techniques, practices, and aesthetics that have developed across a range of modes of cultural production. In other words, we must be careful not to let a specific technique, like sampling and remixing, stand in metonymically for all kinds of similar techniques used in different contexts under globalization, lest we risk losing historical specificity. This is, perhaps, where a transnational analytical approach would be most critical.

And finally, whether or not the technique itself is epistemologically legitimate, or indicative of historical shifts in processes of cultural production and knowledge production (and common sense understandings of/attitudes towards these) in the current era of globalization, was Hegemann’s use of the technique ethical, given the technique’s (implication in) various histories? Answering this question requires taking the long historical view of globalization as driven by the processes of colonization and its aftermath advocated by Paul Jay, while keeping in mind warnings of the inadequacy of theories of “Western” cultural imperialism in explaining globalization, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan and others remind us. I make this point in order to be cognizant of the central role that stealing ideas played in various histories of imperialism and colonization—the theft of local knowledges has been central in oppressing indigenous and local mixings of culture via colonization, by which colonizing powers extract local knowledges like a raw material resource and appropriate them in order to exploit colonized peoples, processes which lead to the extermination of entire groups of people and local histories. So the stealing of ideas is not without its history in the history of globalization, but we must also be careful not to let this understanding become reductionist. Acknowledging this tension as part of the context in discussions of “mixing” as a literary technique in the current phase of globalization invites a mode of study similar to what Grewal and Kaplan advocate: one that “adopts a more complicated model of transnational relations in which power structures, asymmetries, and inequalities become the conditions of possibility of new subjects” (671). This view of transnational relations, one that takes the material histories of various kinds of transnational encounters as central to understanding the practices that flow through and out of them, enables a more rigorous and ethical approach to answering the questions such as those raised by Hegemann’s “mixing.”

I want to write about the difference it makes to read and write fiction in a class on theories of transnationalism, but I feel out of place writing about a novel when I am not a literary scholar, having no disciplinary training in literary analysis or critique. It is perhaps a feeling of transdisciplinary out-of-place-ness not so dissimilar to the dislocations and dissonances produced through transnational encounters and processes. Let us not forget that disciplinary boundaries are no less imaginary than national ones, and their fortification—especially the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences since positivism has reigned as the dominant epistemological paradigm in the West—is intimately related to nationalist and imperialist knowledge projects, knowledge production in the name of, and as a tool of, nation-building and imperial expansion. So crossing the imagined and disciplined/disciplinary borders of knowledge production can be fraught and complex, at once encouraged by the neoliberal university for its own reasons in a climate of austerity measures in academic capitalism (themselves imbricated in the machinations of global capitalism), at least in theory, and yet sometimes so vexingly challenging, at least when the assumption seems to be that most scholars engaged in transdisciplinary scholarship are themselves rooted in a discipline of their own and crossing borders into new territory.
Yet I find myself without a disciplinary home, having studied in two interdisciplinary fields and now pursuing doctoral work in one of them, and also convinced that transdisciplinary engagement is all the richer for the fragmented and self-consciously partial perspective it provides. And so when I wonder what role fiction plays in thinking through the transnational, I think first of how postcolonial feminist Kamala Visweswaran has argued for writing fiction as a viable ethnographic method for researchers coming up against the dilemmas of power inherent in ethnography. Transnationalism has been engaged from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including both literary studies and anthropology, and so it seems fitting to engage Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, as a knowledge project that operates through and across the borders of nations and disciplines.

We have, in our class, situated the study of transnationalism as one part of critical projects that denaturalize and thus illuminate the contours of the nation-state and its ideological projects. Cole’s novel, too, is a piece of these projects, and arguably in conversation with others in the field. Teju Cole’s novel opens abruptly with his protagonist’s description of how “New York City worked itself into [his] life at walking pace” as Julius began his habit on going on evening walks through the city, a habit that coincided, he tells us, with the habit of watching bird migrations from his apartment (3). Julius’s interest in “the miracle of natural migration” frames his entrance into a year of wandering through the physical geographies of New York City, which become the vehicle for his affective and intellectual wanderings through history and memory, and among transnational encounters that shape his articulation of an increasingly fraught relationship to the nation-state. The narration driving the story follows his wandering mind as it journeys across place and time, so that multiple pasts and presents (and presences) comingle in ways that feel natural and familiar. In the final passage of the novel, Julius’s narration comes back to the theme of birds and their migrations as he ruminates on the history of the large number of migratory birds fatally disoriented by the flame in the torch of the statue of liberty. If Julius’s own wanderings, physical and intellectual and spiritual and social, are framed by his interest in “the miracle of natural migration,” they are also an expression of this “miracle,” and by the end of the novel, we have the impression that people’s migrations might be just as natural if not for the complex (of) violences committed by nation-states. What is the Statue of Liberty, after all, if not a national symbol for the myth of our “nation of immigrants”? In the final passage of the novel, it is also a site of massive and seemingly arbitrary avian deaths, deaths which are not only a direct product of modern industrial technologies (specifically the statue’s use as a light house for ships in the nineteenth century), but also a site at which the nation’s institutions capitalized on these mass deaths for its own knowledge projects, conducted by the military via national museums. In this, Julius finds a persistent sense “that something more troubling was at work” (259). I might have to re-read the novel to get a more complete sense of Cole’s critique of the nation-state, but it certainly is in there somewhere.