The combination of articles, novels, books, movies from various contexts, languages and media was exemplary of the transnational and multilingual focus of our class. This convergence offered a great opportunity to compare and contrast different instances of transnationalism, making it hard for me to choose one specific text or idea out of all the works seen throughout this term. Having said that, I would like to revisit an article I found particularly interesting:  Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis by Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick and J.T. Way. The authors argue that even if transnationalism has become very popular over the past years, it has also given rise to some controversial views that should be taken into account. According to them, the proliferation of transnational studies has caused certain conceptual confusion, even contradictory readings and analyses. In order to defend what they consider to be a productive paradigm, they engage in a genealogy aimed at choosing some meanings of transnationalism while discarding others.  This provides them with a framework that allows them to articulate their understanding of the term.

Their approach establishes an analogy between gender as a construction in women´s studies and nation as a constructed entity in transnationalism. In their own words:“`transnationalism´ can do to the nation what gender did for sexed bodies: provide the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all their deployments, compelling us to acknowledge that the nation, like sex, is a thing contested, interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction” (627). Taking this as a starting point, the authors support the idea that the nation has to be de-naturalised and challenged. However, the correlation to gender reminds us that thinking beyond the confines of national borders is not so simple in the globalized era, in the same way that gender is still a constitutive element of identity applied to bodies. In this sense, the materiality of the body contributes to the illusion that there is some concatenation between biological and socio-cultural phenomena and this has remained a pervasive idea in spite of the efforts on the part of gender studies to show how sexed bodies are also constructed.

On the other hand, the realization that gender and nation are constructions does not do away with their effects. The nation continues to exert a huge influence, in spite of the increase in transnational works. Moreover, while political borders tend to be flexible for multinational corporations, most people cannot ignore them. One look at the media is enough to show the centrality of the nation. At least in Spain, when crimes or illegal acts are committed by a foreigner the press always emphasizes the nationality of the perpetrator. Not only that, nationality also determines which events are newsworthy. For example, the death of American or European soldiers in Iraq is bound to appear in the media, but if the dead come from another country, especially if they are from one of the so-called third countries, it is highly unlikely that they will even be mentioned. The case of ebola provides a great example; the virus that had already killed thousands of people in Africa remained unheard of in Western countries, until one American was infected. Suddenly, it became an outbreak.  In a world where certain countries simply do not count, what are the dangers of turning our backs on the nation? Thinking beyond the nation opens up numerous possibilities, but for this to happen the effects of national discourses must be taken into consideration. Otherwise we run the risk of supporting globalizing and imperialist interests that condemn certain countries to oblivion. Instead of fluctuating between nationalism and the exaltation of a world without borders, the nation must be questioned and its constructed “nature” exposed.

Furthermore, the article is particularly relevant for my research in Latina studies, as the analogy the authors establish between transnationalism and women´s studies allows me to pay attention to how nation and gender intersect with one another. Latina studies has occupied an undetermined and evasive zone that resists nation-centered paradigms. As the authors point out in the following quotation: “Much work by Chicana feminist theorists has centered the simultaneity of the transfrontera/ transnational together with the hard-edged and sometimes violent ways that gender collides with and is refigured by race, class and the trans/nation” (632). Gloria Anzaldúa´s groundbreaking Borderlands/La frontera is an excellent example. In fact, many Latina texts, whose authors struggle to create their own voice in the borderlands have been informed by her work. Anzaldúa defined the borderlands as a geocultural space, but also as the metaphorical space she creates for a self in between cultures, identities and traditions. To conclude, the reasons why I chose the article Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis is because in addition to its excellent approach, I consider that its emphasis on establishing a genealogy, along with the identification of transnationalism as a useful paradigm to denaturalise the nation can help to shed new light on different issues within Latina Studies.

The opening pages of Helene Hegemann´s Axolotl Roadkill may lead us to assume that we are about to read a Bildungsroman. The narrator, Mifti, is a sixteen-year-old girl, growing up in Berlin in a wealthy family. This story, however, complicates as we find out about her absent father, her drug addicted mother or Mifti´s serious psychological issues related to some traumatic events during her childhood.  Drugs, sex and depression pervade the episodes included in this diary-like narrative in which any expectation to come across a “coming-of-age drama” (197) is frustrated. On the contrary, as the novel progresses, irresolution and ambivalence become the only certainties. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Mifti does not find her place within the social order, embodying the axolototl: “a comic character (…) reaches sexual maturity without ever undergoing metamorphosis out of the amphibian stage- it just never grows up” (133). This is one of the main aspects that distinguishes this novel from more conventional “coming-of-age” stories: “The typical Bildungsroman journey results in the hero’s return home and his reabsorption into society and an ordained social order. Thus the hero discards his rebellion, taking home only that which has been learned via the rebellion, not the rebellious attitude which has propelled his Bildung” (Estill 26). Regarding the classical Bildungsroman, it is important to remember that this genre originates in a very specific context -Germany in the 18th century- and it reflects the coming-of-age of a male character. Thus, this type of novel has been connected to a specific notion of selfhood that could be defined in the following terms: “all `I´s are rational, agentive, unitary. Thus the `I´ becomes `Man´ … effectually what Spivak has termed the ´straight white Christian man of property´” (Smith & Watson xvii). This connection between gender and genre prompts us to examine how gender matters are articulated throughout Hegemann´s narrative.

Through this post I would like to examine to what extent Hegermann´s representation can be related to neoliberal sexualities and gender identities. To start with, an interesting comparison can be established between sexuality and gender identity represented in Axolotl Roadkill and some central tenants in neoliberal feminisms. One of the main points that needs to be taken into consideration in relation to neoliberal feminism is the emphasis put on choice and the individual. The identification of gender identities and sexualities as an individual choice could be positive to certain degree. On the one hand, it recognizes individuals as agents, able to exert some power on their particular circumstances, which also avoids leading to victim stances that reproduce the idea of certain groups as helpless, in need of someone to liberate them. Nevertheless, if this idea is not accompanied by an examination of some structural constraints that work at the social and collective levels, neoliberal feminism risks supporting the perverse idea that individuals are to blame for their own oppression. Axolotl Roadkill distances itself from this ideology through the depiction of a character that is largely influenced by her particular conditions. In this sense, Mifti is given some agency, but she does not reproduce in any way the illusion of the lone, self-sufficient and self-made individual that different feminists like Susan Bordo, Carol Pateman or Nancy Chodorow helped to unmask. The author seems to acknowledge that extending this illusion to traditionally oppressed groups would not offer any solution. Instead, she depicts a character that comes close to Woltersdoff´s notion of precarious identities, understood within the framework of neoliberal capitalism.

Volker Woltersdorff focuses on “neo-sexualities” in order to define “the sexual forms that go along with this social and economic transformations” (165). Neoliberal capitalism generates an ambivalence between insecurity and the opportunity to disturb normative roles. A Foucaultian approach leads her to conceive power as inescapable, but she keenly stresses that, as Foucault argued, “where there is power, there is resistance”. To defend her point, she draws on “the dialectical potential that is set free by the very paradoxes which emerge from neo-sexual settings” (165). The paradox lies on the fact that certain practices do not limit to reinforce normativity, but also have destabilising effects. Mifti embodies her own definition of precarious sexuality as “the juxtaposition of the gains in individualization and the increase in insecurity that arises through economic deregulation and the decline of social tradition” (167). In this sense, Axolotl Roadkill delves into this ambivalence that Woltersdoff would identify as a potential for change: “For the neo-liberal model opens-up a potential for politicizing and resistance within the process of domination, and paradoxically legitimizes the acceptance and active participation of the dominated. Through this arise the ambivalent situation that criticism is possible as much through refusing as through taking part, and that both, however, can equally lead into affirmation” (179). However, I personally consider that whether the novel ultimately succeeds in destabilising normative roles is questionable and left open to interpretation. Both the danger and the potential of this approach lies on the fact that contradictory interpretations are feasible, as ambivalence embraces normativity and resistance.

Estill, Adriana. “Building the Chicana Body in Sandra Cisneros´s My Wicked Wicked Ways”. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 56. (1994): 25-43. Print.

Smith, Sidonie & Julia Watson. De/colonizing the subject: The politics of gender in women’s autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1992. Print.

Frederick Jameson´s article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, offers a different perspective that expands our understanding of transnationalism, contributing to some of the debates held in our class. More specifically, Jameson interrogates how Western thought has been determined by the fundamental division between the public sphere and the private realm, a dichotomy that has been extensively studied in a number of different fields. For example, Susan Bordo draws on Carlos Guillen to support the argument that during the Renaissance, European culture “became interiorized”, bringing about the proliferation of oppositions, including divisions “between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, between self and world” (45).  Jameson focuses on the radical split between public and private and the way this separation distinguishes Western thought from “third-world” texts, particularly literary texts.

I would like to argue that Jameson´s illustration of the epistemological distinction between the private and the public spheres through his allusion to two of the most influential thinkers of our time -Marx and Freud- serves us as a staring point in order to examine the different approaches we have seen so far in our class. For example, while Bhabha´s central concepts are strongly influenced by psychoanalytical theories, Appadurai or Appiah are mainly concerned with the psychological dimension, as well as the different ways in which individuals are affected by transnational processes. However, I consider that in some cases, their emphasis on the psychological causes them to overlook a materialist analysis that could take into account the impact of external forces. On the other hand, Ong´s Flexible Citizenship aims to combine a Foucaltian approach that pays attention to the specific power contexts that enable certain practices and imaginings.

Jameson attempts to bridge this epistemological breach through his theory of a third-world literature, which according to him, provides us with a breakout from Western binaries. As an example of how theory can become more inclusive when dualisms try to be overcome he mentions the “cultural phenomenon of subalternity” as theorised by Gramsci: “not in that sense a psychological matter, although it governs psychologies … When a psychic structure is objectively determined by the economic and political relationships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it equally cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the economic and political situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise a baleful and crippling residual effect” (76).  In this particular example, we can see how psychological forces cannot be separated from external elements. Although this is not a new thing, Jameson gives a step further when he suggests that this awareness is more visibly manifested in third-world literature.

In other words, third-world literature, as well as third-world intellectuals, merge theory and practice, conceiving literature as a political act. In this sense, Amuleto can be read as an excellent instance of Jameson´s concept of the allegorical. But not only Amuleto, I also consider that to some extent Open City blurs the lines between fiction and epistemology, art and politics, turning literature into a political act. “third-world national allegories are conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective relationships of politics to libidinal dynamics” (80). The historical awareness  exhibited by these literary works characterises “third-world” literature, at the same time that distinguishes them from Western narratives. Jameson refers to their situational consciousness and how that cannot be separated from the collective, and, as a consequence, from politics. “Third world must be situational and materialist despite itself. And this is finally which must account for the allegorical nature of third-world culture” (84).

The allegory he uses to parallel Western and third world literature to Hegel´s Master-Slave relation summarises his convincing argument about third-world writers not being able to escape the “nightmare of history” -as it is obvious in Cole and Bolaño´s novel-.This impossibility or reluctance to ignore material circumstances provides them with a larger vision that reminded me in certain ways of Sandra Harding´s idea of the “epistemic privilege”. As Jameson claims, “only the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is precisely to that that he is condemned” (85).  Despite Jameson´s important contribution, his idea of a “third-world literature” is quite problematic, for even if it is acknowledged that these properties emerge from different historical circumstances, I still feel that there is a certain degree of essentialisation as far as his thesis of the so-called “third-world literature” is concerned.

Bordo, Susan . “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought”. Signs 11 (31). pp.  439-456, 1986.

Like the multicultural space of New York through which the narrator of Open City wanders, Teju Cole´s novel can also be regarded as an expansive dialogue with different types of texts, theories, discourses, languages and writers. Within this framework, Kwame Anthony Appiah´s Cosmopolitanism constitutes one of these instances. In this case, Appiah´s essay dialogues with the Anti-Western ideology that had been previously expressed by Farouq, a character defined by Julius as a radical, the image of a young Vito Corleone, “one of the thwardted ones” (129). On the contrary, the narrator articulates some of the ideas manifested in Cosmopolitanism such as his disapproval of fundamentalisms or his emphasis on pluralism. In particular, the obligation towards the others becomes a central concern in both texts. In Open City, this issue is explicitly formulated in a number of chapters, particularly regarding the suffering of the others. Even from the beginning, Julius conveys his distress when he finds out that the woman next door has been dead for weeks: “I had not known nothing in the weeks when her husband mourned, nothing when I had nodded to him […] I had not noticed not seeing her around” (21). The suffering of others is tackled throughout the novel, becoming particularly relevant with respect to collective traumas, like 9/11, the Holocaust, Haiti, Nigeria or the genocide in Rwanda. These collective traumas can be interpreted as a starting point in order to delve into the relations with others and the creation of the imaginary communities that are interrogated throughout Cole´s work.

The significance of layers leads the narrator to identify the multiple levels that comprise cities like New York or Brussels, personal and collective stories, history or different subjectivities. The connection between self and the others is problematized in different ways. To start with, the representation of different characters trying to establish some kind of identification with Julius due to their sharing of an allegedly common origin questions the grounds on which identity politics lies. Instead of identifying as a Nigerian or as an African, Julius feels emotionally detached from these strangers, contributing to the implosion of the imaginary community. While in America he is being “interpellated” to recognise himself as “Nigerian” or “African”, this category proves to be narrow and reductive at best. “The name Julius linked me to another place and was, with my passport and my skin color, one of the intensifiers of my sense of being different, of being set apart, in Nigeria” (78). Nevertheless, even though the recognition in those cases is unilateral, Julius cannot avoid being part of this community. Furthermore, Julius learns to cope with the fact that the self is partly the product of others´ s projections, desires and identifications.

On the other hand, not only is the idea of an “African” or “Nigerian” identity questioned, but Julius also demonstrates that identities can never be conceived as monolithic. In fact, the novel undertakes different journeys, both physical displacements around New York and Brussels and the imaginary journeys that take the narrator back to Nigeria or Germany. Displacement -more specifically, migration- is precisely where I consider that Open City diverges from Cosmopolistanism. Cole´s fiction problematizes globalization, offering a critical analysis that is missing in Appiah´s essay. This is remarkable in the case of Saidu´s story. Even if Julius seems to mock the idea of the emphatic listener and refuses to visit Saidu again, he tells his story, which is in itself an ethical act.

Through Saidu´s story, the most brutal side of globalization is exposed. Open City unmasks how the free market, the free exchange of ideas and images does not concur with freedom of mobility as far as human beings are concerned. Images of the West circulate around the world, but individuals´ mobility is constrained and strictly regulated. It is tragic that Saidu´s image of America as the country of freedom urges him to embark on a journey that will come to an end when he is in imprisoned on his arrival at JFK airport. This story raises an issue that Cosmopolitanism does not fully address. Appiah refers to criticisms on globalization centered on the erasure of local cultures, but he overlooks the material approach that could provide a larger picture. In so doing he fails to address central issues, such as the unequal balance of power established between countries, extreme poverty or oppression. To conclude, even if Open City, unlike Cosmopolitanism, is a work of fiction, its ultimate goal is not necessarily to articulate ethical principles, I personally consider that it succeeds in its representation of the problems raised by globalization.