Transnational Literature

The Basics

Paul Jay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000362237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Lese- und Schreibfähigkeit

Transnational Literature: The Basics provides an indispensable overview of this important new field of study and the literature it explores. It concisely describes the various ways in which literature can be understood as being "transnational, " explains why scholars in literary studies have become so interested in the topic, and discusses the economic, political, social, and cultural forces that have shaped its development.

The book explores a range of contemporary critical approaches to the subject, highlighting howtopics like globalization, cosmopolitanism, diaspora, history, identity, migration, and decolonization are treated by both scholars in the field and the writers they study. The literary works discussed range across the globe and include fiction, poetry, and drama by writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jenny Erpenbeck, Aleksandar Hemon, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, Xiaolu Guo, Sally Wen Mao, Wole Soyinka, and many more. This survey stresses the range and breadth—but also the intersecting interests—of transnational writing, engaging the variety of subjects it covers and emphasizing the range of literary devices (linguistic, formal, narrative, poetic, and dramatic) it employs.

Highlighting the subjects and issues that have become central to fiction in the age of globalization, Transnational Literature: The Basics is an essential read for anyone approaching study of this vibrant area.

PART I

Conceptualizing transnational literature

The nation and beyond

Transnational

The term “transnational” is a relatively new one. According to The Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com), its usage dates from the second decade of the twentieth century. In general, the term means “extending or having interests extending beyond national bounds or frontiers.” It is important to underscore the fact that “transnational” is an adjective. That is, it is a modifying term. There is no such thing as transnational. Rather, the term refers to anything that can be thought of as having a transnational range, dimension, or character (companies, organizations, films, literary works, etc.). Transnational gets its main meaning from the prefix “trans,” which means “across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, from one place, person, thing, or state to another.” The prefix trans also implies the action of being “beyond, surpassing,” and “transcending.” It is also worth pointing out that “transgress” bears a relationship to the verb form of trans, as used in transgredi, which means to step across—and, transgressio, which refers to going over or transgressing the law.

This last point is important because transnational perspectives are often transgressive in the sense that they either challenge or contest altogether notions of purity and exclusivity often associated with nationalism. A transnational perspective shifts primary attention from the universal to the particular. Its concern is less with what is central than with what is thought of or treated as marginal. It is as interested in what makes people different as it is in what seems to make them the same. Where British, German, or Spanish literary studies may be primarily interested in how literary works express or shape forms of ethnic, racial, and cultural belonging that reflect a national character, focusing on literature from a transnational perspective orients the reader toward the other and focuses attention on understanding difference. And, while the study of national literatures understandably operates within the fixed borders of the nation-state, from a transnational perspective borders are understood as historically and existentially porous. For this reason, a transnational approach to literature starts from the premise that individual subjectivity is always intersubjectivity. That is, while it may be shaped by forces within the nation, those forces often have their origins outside it. This means that cultures and identities are never singular and pure. They are hybrid and syncretic. Understood from this point of view, a transnational perspective usually understands identity and culture in dialectical terms. As the critic Laura Doyle puts it in “Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism” (2009), “the power of transnational studies lies in its fundamentally dialectical approach,” an approach that “opens the way to a fresh consideration of the human or existential subject of history” understood not only in terms of “the movements of people and capital across national borders” but also as “other-oriented interactions between and among nations, making them mutually shaping and mutually contingent.”

To think of literature from a transnational perspective is to put an emphasis on transit—on mobility, migration, travel, and exchange, forms of experience that create bonds between people that, while fostering a sense of national unity, also connect people and their cultural practices across, over, and through geographic and human-made borders. However, we need to keep in mind that transnational forces also interact within the borders of a nation, that identities and cultural practices within nations are always forming and reforming across the differences we associate with race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and nation. In effect, transnational spaces form a kind of crossroads, whether they intersect through very different cultural geographies, as was the case, for example, with the Silk Road, or whether they occur within the territory of a nation-state.

A transnational perspective also insists that we think critically about concepts like universality, purity, and homogeneity, especially when those concepts derive from a specifically Western perspective. One example is Kwame Appiah’s insistence in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) that what we think of as national cultures are in fact the product of contamination by other cultures. He discounts the idea, for example, that forms of transnational exchange destroy cultural authenticity. Instead, he points out that cultures are always in flux, evolving through forms of cross-pollination that render the “authentic” fluid and changeable. From such a perspective, any strict distinction between purity and contamination is a fiction. And, Appiah points out, these processes are not new, a recent product of contemporary forms of globalization. In fact, they have a long history, one that has always shaped identities and cultures across national borders. As Homi K. Bhabha put it in The Location of Culture (1994), “the very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities—as the grounds of cultural comparativism—are in a profound process of redefinition.”

The term transnationalism is often invoked casually in discussions of transnational formations, be they political, cultural, or artistic. However, transnationalism carries with it some specific implications that distinguish it from the term transnational. While transnational suggests a set of relations and so usually refers to a condition, transnationalism implies a doctrine, and suggests either advocacy or rejection of something transnational. The distinction between the two terms, of course, turns on the ism in transnationalism. Feminine means one thing, feminism quite another. Like feminism, transnationalism implies some kind of doctrine, ideology, or politics that can be advocated or rejected. Critics differ on whether transnationalism is a destructive force because it encourages cultural homogenization and produces uneven economic effects, or whether it is a liberating force that enables new and resistant forms of subjectivity and syncretic cultural practices, that counter the negative forces of nationalism. For some, transnationalism suggests a set of humanitarian ideals advocating diversity, openness, inclusiveness, cooperation, and social justice. For others, however, it is associated with a set of economic and cultural practices linked to globalization that threaten the autonomy and integrity of nations and the ideals upon which they are founded.

Advocating transnationalism, finally, also runs the risk of marginalizing the local and the particular. From this point of view, transnationalism is, as the American critic Kenneth Burke put it in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1936), a way of seeing which can, paradoxically, become a way of not seeing. Paying attention to the transnational scope of literature, film, or any other cultural phenomenon has a real value, but it can distract us from the importance of understanding the local, particular roots of a social or cultural phenomenon. The best approach in this context is, again, a dialectical one: tracking the historically complex interaction of local, regional, national, and transnational forces in the production of everything from individual subjectivity to belief systems, ideological formations, and literary production. For, in the final analysis, the relationship between the local and the global is symbiotic. Transnational forces of every kind flow across localities, but they are absorbed by those localities in quite different ways that disrupt and mutate them as they continue to move through other places.

Nation

With this broad understanding of the term transnational in mind, then, thinking of literature in transnational terms requires exploring its origins and circulation in modes of production that extend beyond the nation, and the racial, ethnic, and religious groups that comprise it. From this perspective, it is important to note, the organizing of literary studies by nation looks rather arbitrary. It reflects the nineteenth- and twentieth-century consolidation of nation-states more than something that is intrinsic to literature itself. However, it is also the case that there can be no transnational literature without the concept of the nation, since nothing can be understood as transcending—or seeking to exceed or cut across—the nation without our having some grasp of the concept of the nation in the first place. This is no simple matter, however, since the term nation is both complicated and multifaceted. The Online Etymology Dictionary (https://www.etymonline.com/word/nation) notes that the word derives from the Old French nacion, which means “birth, rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland (12c.),” and also “from Latin nationem (nominative natio) ‘birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe,’ literally ‘that which has been born,’” with “derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.” As this etymology indicates, a nation can be defined in terms of birth, rank, descent, breed, species, cultural practices, and race; any seemingly inherent characteristic a group of people believe indicate they belong to the same genus.

It is important to note that there are key differences between nations and states. Nations are not necessarily states, as the etymology above indicates, since it makes no reference to either geographical or legal boundaries. Some nations are stateless, and some states are made up of more than one nation. While a nation is largely a cultural category, a state is a legal entity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a state is “a community of people living in a defined territory and government; a commonwealth, a nation,” or “the territory occupied by such a community.” A nation, although conflated in this definition with the state, is more a product of the imagination than the law, hence Benedict Anderson’s characterization of nations as “imagined communities” (in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1986), a phrase that stresses how a nation is shaped around socially constructed ideals, imagined by the community it names as sharing a set of shared characteristics, beliefs, and practices.

One way to think about the difference between considering the nation as a cultural entity, and thinking of it as a legal one, is to recognize that the cultural ideal of the nation is based on a set of ostensibly intrinsic qualities like “blood,” “race,” “ethnicity,” and language, while the idea of the nation as a state is based on purely extrinsic criteria, that is, the law. An intrinsic approach to national belonging is based on qualities that are supposedly inherent and immutable (and of course, often highly subjective), while an extrinsic one is based on largely objective legal criteria. Another way of thinking about this difference is in the context of the terms ethnic and civic. An ethnic approach to the nation is largely consistent with the idea that a nation is defined by intrinsic or inherent qualities shared by a an ethnic group, a race, or a tribe, while a civic approach to the nation envisions national belonging as rooted in the legal responsibilities that come with citizenship.

The approach to national belonging associated with the idea that the nation is based on a set of intrinsic characteristics people are born with often translates into a quasi-metaphysical conception of the nation. These are characteristics you either have by birth, or you don’t. For this reason, appeals to nationalism often traffic in idealist rhetoric about the blood of the nation, or the spirit or soul of the folk who make it up, rhetoric which sees national identity in homogenous terms. In the extreme, it can lead, of course, to virulent, dangerous, and even genocidal forms of nationalism. An extrinsic or civic approach to national belonging, on the other hand, understands the nation as a legal entity in which people of different races and ethnicities, and with very different languages, religious beliefs, and cultural practices form a national ideal based on heterogeneity and a commitment to equal justice under the law.

These differences call attention to the fact that the nation is less an objective than a political entity. This is obviously the case with regard to the conception of the nation as an essentially civic or legal entity, in which the rights and responsibilities of individual members are worked out and regulated by the state through a political process that shapes legally binding statutes. However, the cultural or ethnic concept of the nation is equally political, as it uses essentialist language about blood, race, and cultural practices to conceptualize the nation in ways that exercise power and therefore have political consequences. In either form, the nation has to be understood not as a purely descriptive category, but as something that shapes and regulates the identity and the behavior both of people deemed to belong to it, and those who are excluded from it. This shaping and regulating is perhaps most dramatically apparent in the educational systems nation-states develop, but it also takes place in religious and cultural institutions, including the media. National sovereignty plays a role, then, in shaping personal identity, and allegiance to the nation involves a level of subservience not just to its laws but to its ideals. This is one of the reasons why the term subjectivity has come to replace the term identity in discussions of the individual, since it is increasingly clear that individuality is not simply a state of freedom and autonomy in which inherent characteristics define individuals, but that individuals are subject to—and therefore subjects of—the legal, religious, cultural, and political discourses that shape them.

Since identity with respect to national belonging is defined by citizenship, it is important to note the pressure both globalization and transnationalism have put on the idea of citizenship. The term “citizen,” according to the OED, originated in the fourteenth century as a reference to the inhabitants of a city or town who had specific legal rights or privileges. Once states came into existence as legal entities, the term citizen came to refer as well to the inhabitants of those states and the legal rights and privileges that came with citizenship within them. To the extent the state became conflated with the nation, citizenship was then extended to the idea of national belonging, and the responsibilities and rights that come with it. Economic and cultural globalization, of course, have extended the parameters of citizenship even further to include the idea of global (or, for our purposes, transnational) citizenship. All of the forces associated with globalization we mentioned earlier have produced an extraordinary capacity for personal and mass mobility. Combined populations of immigrants and refugees have flowed out of their home countries and taken up residence (legally and illegally) in other countries. Here, as Rainer Bauböck has pointed out in “Stakeholder Citizenship: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?” (2008), we run up against a practical paradox:

Democracy is government accountable to its citizens, and states are territorial jurisdictions. International migration creates a tension between these two basic facts about our world because it produces citizens living outside the country whose government is supposed to be accountable to them and inside a country whose government is not accountable to them. The result is a mismatch between citizenship and the territorial scope of legitimate political authority.

As Bauböck notes, the increasingly transnational flow of people in an age of rapid globalization creates so much heterogeneity among national populations that the very idea of national citizenship turns into a kind of quandary. This is because the ideal of the nation as a relatively single and cohesive ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and cultural entity has increasingly given way, in the wake of decolonization, migration, globalization, and the ease of travel, to the creation of multi-ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, and cultural populations within nations that formerly thought of themselves as singular and cohesive. As we shall see, the concept of the nation, and the pressures ...