The vast majority of the concepts and texts covered in the seminar this semester were new to me, so it’s difficult to point to one idea in particular that has made a bigger impression on my thinking than any other.  There are, however, a few concepts that have definitely made an effect on me that will last long beyond this seminar.  The ideas of between and created spaces that transcend existing borders are among them.  Throughout this semester I’ve found myself attempting to apply transnational definitions of space to readings and discussion in my other classes as well as in my personal life, a change that – while unexpected – has been welcome to me.

The creation of new spaces outside the nation-state or other physical or geographical boundaries can be accomplished through the mixed use of elements characteristic of already-existing spaces.  We examined this idea in practice in our handling of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which uses a combination of languages to convey the experiences of Chicano/a culture and heritage.  Anzaldúa uses dialects of English and Spanish to create a literary space as a means of separating her experiences from those which she problematizes.  She then uses this space to point out the borders, both visible and invisible, which have shaped and restricted those experiences.  La Frontera breaks down our sense of borders and spaces by combining languages in a manner that may be unfamiliar or even uncomfortable for the reader, in order to build and illuminate new ones better suited for understanding her perspective.

Despite having studied German for close to ten years now, I’d never really stopped to consider what can happen when you bring multiple languages together in a single text.  I’d mistakenly assumed Spanglish was a result of a lack of vocabulary similar to what eighth-grade me experienced when my German teacher asked me a question I couldn’t answer, and not a form of language in its own right, a tool one could intentionally use to both transcend and call attention to borders in writing.  This was my first experience with a piece of literature that unapologetically, purposefully did not translate everything into a single language, instead treating long passages in multiple languages as though they were all one continuous language.  This brought up other questions – how does such a work get translated?  Can it be translated without destroying its original intent, and is that possible?  We wondered the same thing about the varied languages in Orly – how does the language usage and the utilization of subtitles change based on the primary language of the viewer?

I remember receiving bonus points on conceptual physics exams in high school because my teacher liked how I always described motion from more than one perspective, typically both the perspective of the person involved in the action as well as that of an outside observer.  I’ve realized through our readings and discussions that a similar method is necessary to view human interaction and understanding through a transnational lens.  Viewing a culture or a people from a single perspective – which too often means viewing it from our own personal viewpoints, because that is what we know best – doesn’t often give you the full picture.  Kwame Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, which particularly struck me out of the books we’ve read over the course of the seminar, explains the need to acquire a sense of others’ views and understandings in many ways as an obligation.  Appiah discusses what is widely considered the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you wish done to yourself.  He points out that there is a flaw in applying this rule on a transnational or even international scale.  What you wish done to yourself may not be at all what someone in another culture wants done unto them, and someone you would never want to be done to you may be something their culture has (for reasons you may not ever even have considered) long held as of the utmost importance.  The creation and use of spaces can come into play here because we have to recognize that people do not all exist in the same space, nor do they always spend their lives in a single space.  Humanity is so much more complicated than that.

This semester, under Dr. Baer’s direction, I have been studying German science fiction through its relatively short history.  Most of the works I have read have involved either an alternate imagining of human history and culture, as in Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I’ll be here in sunshine and in shadow), which tells the story of a 100-year-long world war from the perspective of a black soldier in the (fictional) Swiss Soviet Republic, or an outside, alien species or planet, such as in Kurd Laßwitz’s novel Auf zwei Planeten (On two planets), which is about an invasion of Earth by well-meaning Martians attempting change mankind for the better.  I’ve spent a good amount of time considering these works as they fit into my understanding of the transnational, and what happens when the space created is a physical one that has been little influenced by human cultures and/or does not even exist on the same planet.  I’ve wondered what this can show us about humanity as a whole and how different cultures can be compared or understood via the introduction of a wholly fictional and foreign culture.  What happens when you remove Earth from the picture?  I think there’s a lot of potential for transnational discussion in science fiction that I’d like to explore further.

While not always successful, my attempts to reframe outside reading using transnational concepts have shown me that, despite sometimes thinking that the theory discussed in this seminar was going way over my head, I have actually picked up on a lot, and my thinking has definitely taken on a kind of transnational filter.  Though I don’t (currently) have plans to further my studies or research in Germanic Studies specifically, I expect that there will be many more instances where I find I can apply transnationalism to gain better understandings and new perspectives, and I’m glad to have gained the new level of understanding of the transnational that I have.

Based on our readings for this week, as well as discussion we’ve had previously about feminism on the transnational level, I think transnationalism is more effective in particularizing feminist ideals than in universalizing them; in fact I think looking at feminism through a transnational lens is a good way of seeing that we perhaps shouldn’t universalize it.  In “Global Identities,” Grewal and Kaplan give explanations of varying uses of the word ‘transnational’, one of which involves what they call the “NGOization of social movements” which leads to U.N. and other conferences on “transnational women’s movements” (665-666).  The problem with this use of ‘transnational’ as a synonym for ‘global,’ Grewal and Kaplan suggest, is that it allows for critical studies of intersectionality within movements such as feminism to be neglected or ignored – differences based around race, socio-economics, immigration and other factors are largely glossed over in favor of discussing a “global” feminist vision, which typically ends up being centered around the West.

Aili Mari Tripp’s piece on the evolution of feminism through the transnational lens also problematizes the idea of there being a global feminism meant to cover everyone.  Tripp describes how Western feminism has come to see itself as the forebearer for feminism in the rest of the world, and in less developed parts of the world especially, when in fact “the current consensus is a product of parallel feminist movements globally that have learned from one another but have often had quite independent trajectories and sources of movement” (51-52).  She gives many examples supporting this, such as the fact that abortion rights were first put into international law in Africa, and that there are now several nations that have specified that women must take up a certain percentage of governing seats.  These things did not come about solely because of Western feminism, Tripp explains, because feminism has evolved parallel to that in the U.S. and the West in other parts of the world, and has not always had the same ideals at the same time.  As an example, while the West focused closely on suffrage at the turn of the century, other regions were focused more on social equality in general.  Today, she says, women in the U.S. are way behind other parts of the world, yet somehow (through lack of media coverage or other factors) the U.S. and other Western nations continue to be seen as the models for feminism.  “Winning the right to vote for women in Europe and North America had taken the momentum out of many women’s rights movements in these countries,” she writes (57).

While reading Tripp’s piece, particularly the part with that quote, I was reminded strongly of the current status of LGBT rights, and especially of a headline I saw a few weeks ago.  The Daily Beast ran an article about Mike Michaud, the openly gay Democrat who was running for governor in Maine, with the headline, “America’s First Post-Gay Governor.”  The article argued that most voters didn’t seem to care that he is gay “in an era when gay people come out of the closet at younger and younger ages” and in light of the growing number of states with marriage equality, which seems fair enough, but I couldn’t help but be irked by the use of the term “post-gay.”  Are we really “post-gay”?  What does that even mean?

Similar to what Tripp suggests about suffrage having been the biggest cause in Western feminism in the past, marriage has been by far the most discussed LGBT rights issue in the U.S. for years now, despite being far from the only or even – arguably – the most pressing issue.  I personally know several people who seem to view these issues purely from a U.S.-centric perspective and assume that since it’s such a big deal here, marriage must be the focus in most other nations as well.  However, as with feminism, the goals of rights movements in other parts of the world will likely be based more on multiple, intersectional factors as suits different cultures and peoples (for example, look at the movements around the Ugandan bill that originally proposed the death penalty for homosexual acts; marriage was certainly not the center of discussion there).  Taking a transnational approach to studies of these movements rather than a global one allows these differences to be seen, as opposed to gathering up similar movements from around the world and averaging them, or even summarizing them with the ideals of one particular region and assuming that all other movements have stemmed from there.

(Note: I tried to post this earlier, but when I just came to read everyone else’s posts it wasn’t here anymore.  I’m not sure if it ever actually posted the first time.  Apologies, therefore, for the late post, or if this results in a duplicate post!)

Is global feminism really productive, or even global, if it reduces the real experiences of women outside the West to marginal notes?  Ella Shohat problematizes global feminism in her piece by claiming that too much focus on Western feminism, whether deliberate or not, has created an “overarching feminist master narrative” (1270).  There are two issues involved in the way global feminism is viewed, she suggests.  The first is this focus on the West, which is pervasive even if the West is geographically uninvolved in the area being discussed and uses the West as the baseline for feminist ideals in parts of the world that are completely different in many ways.  The second, she says, has to do with area studies and how they break the rest of the world up into regions and categories that may not reflect the people actually inhabiting certain spaces and may in fact allow for inaccurate generalization such as the idea that the “Middle Eastern” woman and the “third-world” woman are “passive victims lacking any form of agency” (1269).  From a transnational standpoint, such categorizations provide an incomplete picture of the people they are attempting to include not only because they generalize over (mostly) arbitrary geographical regions, but also because they ignore factors such as migration, immigration and intersectionality.  What about “Middle Eastern” women who live in United States, or for whom religion and race play a much larger role than is typical in Western discourse?  Shohat says she argues for “relational” feminism, which would allow for examination and discussion of feminism in specific parts of the world and in specific cultures as it relates to other “isms” and cultures, instead of invoking the West in all treatment of the subject.

Aihwa Ong puts it well when she describes anthropology’s organization of the world as “the West” and “the Rest” in Flexible Citizenship (30).  Ong’s book shows that some of what Shohat finds wrong with global feminism can also be applied to anthropology; specifically, both base their observations and expectations on Western ideals, which may have very little to do with what another culture wants for itself.  “Mass media continued to construct our world as a failed replica of the modern West,” she says of Malaysia (29).  “Although the comparative method is at the heart of anthropological knowledge, it has been a comparison that employs the West as a single measure of modernity against which other societies must be measured” (31).  While mass media and anthropology often seem to portray Southeast Asia as substandard because it is not as “modern” as the West, Ong suggests there is a fundamental difference in what Southeast Asia actually imagines as modern that may not have any bearing on Western ideals.  Not only is the region not conforming to those ideals, it may not even be considering them.  In this manner, utilizing the West as the cultural dipstick for how other parts of the world measure up is counter-productive and possibly even irrelevant, as Shohat suggests is also the case with modern global feminism.

In a quick search on transnational feminism I came across a 2009 TEDTalk given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a novelist from Nigeria.  The premise of the talk was “the danger of a single story,” the danger being that a single story can become an inaccurate or very limited view of a people, a country or a culture if it is repeated enough or remains the only story available.  While listening, I was reminded of Shohat’s remarks about the Eurocentric views of “Middle Eastern” women.  Frequently I think we do see these women generalized as so-called “passive victims” – debates over the hijab and whether or not it’s oppressive and degrading come to mind – or else somehow related to terrorists and radical Islam, and the problem with this is that their own personal stories and views are left out of the discussion.  “Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become,” Adichie says in her speech.

Adichie gives several examples of the “single story” being inadequate for understanding a culture or region, including a story about visiting the village of her family’s houseboy in Nigeria.  She talks about how she was constantly reminded by her parents that the boy’s family was poor and that they had nothing, but that upon meeting them she was shown a beautiful woven basket one of the sons had made, which took her by surprise.  “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor,” she says.  “Their poverty was my single story of them.”

One of the reasons I enjoyed Persepolis so much is because it allows the reader to see Iran not only from the perspective of a young person, but also from her parents’ perspective.  After being exposed to a lot about Middle Eastern women but not much from them, the scene where Marji’s parents react to her wearing nail polish with pride rather than anger in particular sticks in my mind as significant because it expands the “single story” I have of Iranian culture, as well as of the lives of women in that region.  Under the narrative of the oppressed Middle Eastern woman that I’m familiar with, Marji putting on nail polish would have been unacceptable not only to society but also to her parents; her father especially would have not allowed her to do it.  From examples such as this I would agree with Shohat that relative, transnational feminism is necessary for constructing more complete and useful stories that do not attempt to force “the Rest” into Western molds.

In Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Paul Jay refers to many previous works on transnationalism in order to compare and contrast them as a means of laying out his own definition and theory on the topic.  He boils others’ theories regarding the history of transnationalism and globalization and what is behind them down to conclude within his first few chapters that, “the process we call globalization is characterized by the conflation of cultural and economic forms” (34).  What he means by this is that, rather than being driven by the globalization of economic relations or cultural globalization, the transnationalist “trend” is driven by both, that the two are to a certain degree actually inseparable, and that one can therefore not consider globalization as being just “economic” or just “cultural”.

The question of whether culture and material economy should be considered separately or as connected seems largely dependent on the question of what constitutes “culture” to begin with.  Can culture be commoditized, and therefore contribute to the “material” globalization referred to?  When we think of culture we may think of language, traditions, belief systems, etc., and these things are difficult to count as material.  But what about art?  Literature?  Film?  If a painting for example is produced within one culture and then sold in another part of the world into a different culture, can it not be said to be cultural?  And in fact, Jay goes so far as to say that material and cultural forms of exchange “are becoming increasingly indistinguishable” (56).  I wouldn’t say that they overlap completely, but I do agree with Jay that the cultural can definitely be material and play a role in economy, and therefore the globalization that may arise from that.

Matters are further complicated when we take into account that globalization, or at least the movement or exchange of cultures and/or economies can be said to have been happening for a long time.  “It is hard to find a place on the globe where what we might want to celebrate as local or indigenous culture is either local or indigenous,” Jay notes (50).  Because culture is not tied down to particular nation-states or even general regions, but is instead free to be transported anywhere on the globe (whether as material goods or as traditions immigrants continue to practice or some other form), cultures may move, shift or merge with other cultures, and this isn’t necessarily a negative thing.  I found particularly interesting the idea described by David Harvey in Jay’s book that time and space are linked the way they once were – as technology has progressed, transportation has become much faster and easier, which understandably can aid globalization and the alteration of borders (37).

Reading Jay’s reasoning for saying cultural and economic forms are conflated within globalization, I was reminded of a quote from Laura Briggs, et al.’s “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis”.  In discussing the work of Aihwa Ong, they write, “If you theorize too far away from empirical work…you wander into a fantasy that is logical but wrong” (635).  This is also related to the reference Jay makes to feminist critic Caren Kaplan, who criticizes works on globalization for not including enough concrete evidence while including too much theory (69).  If, as Jay says, culture and material influences on globalization are closely linked and even overlap, then to consider one in one’s definitions of globalization would likely be inaccurate, because it would disregard the influence of the other.  “My argument here is that both culturalist and materialist positions, when they are articulated too narrowly, are mistaken,” Jay says.  “Culture is a set of material practices linked to economies, and economic and material relations are always mediated by cultural factors and forms” (45).  I completely agree with this viewpoint, because I don’t believe it is possible to have economies or material relations that are not in any way related to some form of culture.

Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick and J. T. Way. American Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3, Nation and Migration: Past and Future (Sep., 2008), pp. 625-648