Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature

Silvia Schultermandl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000390988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists' complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects.

The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

1Introduction

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging

American literary history is replete with narratives that challenge the nation-state and instead depict worlds characterized by mobility rather than stasis. Such narratives weave together compelling as well as contradictory stories about transnational subjects, cultural phenomena, social movements, and histories. Mesmerizing and potentially distressing at the same time, they call into question the ways in which readers think about the tight grip of the nation-state on hybridized and marginalized subjects. In turn, projects on fluid identities, transnational communities, and world citizenship have played a considerable part in shaping the field of American studies.¹

For almost two decades now, the transnational turn has productively reshaped the field imaginary of the discipline writ large. Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature adopts the field’s commitment to interconnected and palimpsestous histories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, which demand a purview beyond national borders but also wants to call out some persistent blind spots regarding the analytic practices of transnational American studies’ and the field’s complicated relationship with empire. I fully embrace these performative contradictions and theorize a notion of ambivalent transnational belonging that complicates how we think about transnationalism in American literature. If we want transnationalism to really “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” (Briggs et al. 627), we need to think more deliberately about the inherent ambivalences of the transnational in its full affective, aesthetic, and political range. One of the main aims of Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature is to show that the transnational turn in American literary studies has been characterized by a number of affective attachments that often reveal more about the politics of the reader than they do about the aesthetic strategies of the text. I will show that themes of liberalism, sentimentalism, and cosmopolitanism register these existing affective attachments to readers’ positionalities within the globalized world of today and index the political mood of specific historical moments.

My notion of ambivalent transnational belonging addresses the cruel optimistic attachment to transnationalism’s promises of a critical practice that allows us to imagine borderless worlds without succumbing to fantasies of global capital and empire or other fantasies we critics have about our relationship with our objects of study. According to Lauren Berlant, “All attachments are optimistic” (Cruel Optimism 23) because they promise to fulfill our desires, and what is cruel about these attachments is that the things to which we are attached—what Berlant terms “clusters of promises” (Cruel Optimism 24)—perpetuate the condition that makes us long for them in the first place. Optimism’s cruelty qua Berlant is applicable to critical political practices within contemporary theory via our recognition of the cluster of promises and fantasies we critics attach to our objects of study. This inspires many questions about the paradigms we reproduce in our intellectual labor: What fantasies do we invest into our objects of study and what do we hope to gain from our abilities to define this relationship on our own terms? How much is our choice of the objects we study already determined by our critical practices of studying them? Is our attachment to the object (text) or to the process (reading transnationally) and how does it become cruel? The cruel optimistic attachments to transnationalism’s cluster of promises materialize through various literary forms. In the texts I discuss in Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature, different narrative perspectives shape the complex transnational subjectivities that exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. These narratives about transnational ambivalent belonging illustrate the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks and therefore challenge sanguine assumptions about transnationalism’s subversive power. And by depicting transnationalism as an ambivalent sense of belonging, they tease out the entanglements of existing power dynamics within the transnational. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so that we may fully address the new conceptual challenges brought about by the transnational turn.

This book introduces the notion of ambivalent transnational belonging into the disciplinary practices of American studies, literary studies, new aestheticism, and affect theory. I am interested in how readers can learn something about their own politics through their own aesthetic responses to a text via its formal and aesthetic interventions. This book offers interpretive templates with the help of a select set of texts while, by necessity, omitting others from the focus of attention. Its historical range is determined by two significant events in American history: the time of the American Revolution and the events of September 11, 2001. These historical moments are characterized by a pronounced sense of nationalism to which American literary productions responded equally intensely, both by picking up ideas that challenge nationalist ideology and by the emergence of aesthetic forms able to address themes of transnational mobility. Similarly, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary productions address transnational mobility via formal experimentation. The paradigmatic examples I discuss here are Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789), Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Clarence: or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830), Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2006).While these texts have been firmly established within literary periods (early American literature, the Reconstruction period, American multiculturalism) or sub-canons and genres (the literature of the black Atlantic, the novel of manners, the novella, postmodern literature, ethnic American literature, 9/11, transnational American literature), they are also flashpoints—historical and textual moments by which we remember past events. As David Kazanjian’s adaptation of Benjamin’s idiom of the German aufblitzen emphasizes, texts can become flashpoints over time when we turn to them incessantly for cues about specific historical moments. In Kazanjian’s poetic quip, they resemble “individual frames of a film running too slowly to be sutured into a moving image” (1). While my book is motivated by a challenge to think about transnational ambivalence across various literary periods, the chapter sequence is not intended to represent a linear development. Instead, the complex narrative strategies employed by Equiano, Sedgwick, James, Kincaid, and Hamid depict specific historical moments while simultaneously interlacing the historical present with preceding social phenomena: Equiano’s narrative of the Middle Passage harks back to the beginnings of Western imperialism in Africa; Sedgwick’s depiction of the emergence of a New York City social elite of the 1830s harks back to the Jamaican plantation industry that enabled economic capital in the United States; James’s lives of Americans on the Grand Tour through Europe are a direct product of the economic advancement of the American North in the Reconstruction era; Kincaid’s tension at the center of the relationship between white US and black Caribbean women during the Civil Rights era in the United States is rooted in the legacy of colonialism affecting the lives of mid-twentieth century Antigua; and finally, Hamid’s depiction of 9/11 and its aftermath from the perspective of a Pakistani America man critically examines the pre-9/11 era of multiculturalism.

Transnational Ambivalence

The notion of ambivalence has been theorized at length in recent works in critical theory, including projects on typologies, projects in the field of aesthetics, projects on the sovereign modern subject, and postmodern and poststructuralist projects on identity taxonomies and ontologies. They foreground the aesthetic-political dimensions of ambivalence, especially in how normative orders of belonging impact the lives of marginalized subjects. For instance, in terms of a philosophical critique of Western modernity, the concept of ambivalence challenges the essentialist practices of assigning fixed labels to identities, and thereby overemphasizing one artificially directed category such as race, class, or gender. Within the context of transnational scholarship, ambivalence signifies not a default or disorder, but a driving force through which to reconceptualize social orders (Bauman) and an occasion to “think more of movement than of destination and direction” (Weisbrode 27). The ambivalence about the nation-state they describe has also become a baseline in American literary studies after the transnational turn in American studies. It engenders a sense of self with affiliations that go beyond the nation-state and refute the nation-state as a representational logic. These phenomena have been given ample attention in transnational American studies, especially in arguments about fluid identities, transnational communities, and world citizenship connected to the circulation of ideas, goods, and people signified by the transnational.

To be sure, such a notion of the transnational does not only apply to phenomena of border-crossings and transnational mobility, but also addresses the influence on state-based ideology on the individual in general. In Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007), Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlight the ambivalent and largely contradictory meaning of the “state”: state as a national entity with its legal boundaries and discursive paradigms versus state as the condition that describes the circumstances of their writing:

If the state is what “binds” us, it is also clearly what can and does unbind. And if the state binds in the name of the nation, conjuring a certain version of the nation forcibly, if not powerfully, then it also unbinds, releases, expels, banishes.

(Butler and Spivak 4–5)

This duality of the term “state” pertains especially to questions of national belonging, or any other discursively conscripted sense of belonging to a community:

So: how do we understand those sets of conditions and dispositions that account for the “state we are in” (which could, after all, be a state of mind) from the “state” we are in when and if we hold rights of citizenship or when the state functions as the provisional domicile for our work?

(Butler and Spivak 2)

By highlighting the incongruencies between these “states,” Butler and Spivak point to the ambivalence of hybridized, marginalized, and transnational subjects: the two states are onto-social conditions that encompass a sense of self, which results from interpellation through the nation-state and its effects on our feelings of belonging.

Stories that invite us not only to imagine different worlds but to imagine the world differently can become compelling alternatives to the tight borders, racial biopolitics, and anti-feminist backlashes that have emerged in the tow of globalized market economies and the transnationalization of capital.² In this context, ambivalence also indexes different interpretive communities’ aesthetic experience of and unease about their own positionalities towards the material realities depicted in literary texts. This has to do with literature’s polyvalence and ambiguity, but even more with the rootedness of ambivalence in specific cultural and political tensions and their various expressions. While the former is about ambivalence as a cultural phenomenon of modernity, the latter relates to ambivalence’s affective-aesthetic dimensions. This aspect of ambivalence pertains to the modes through which the transnational is configured as a feeling of ambivalence that readers can experience aesthetically. For instance, Butler and Spivak’s joint project characterizes ambivalence as a creative space for innovative textual performances. Their motivation to do so is first and foremost a political one, namely that “there can be no radical politics of change without performative contradiction” (66), but their textual performance is also an aesthetic project. Butler and Spivak’s book is a dialogue—actually a series of extended monologues that riff on each other. This particular form is strikingly befitting to their political project of countering a unified theory of postmodern states, of delineating the linkages between the nation-state and the perceived, embodied, and affective aspects of the state of mind. Their text’s disunity and improvisation, both in terms of content and style, illustrates this bifurcation of the dual meaning of the state and the privileging of subjective and affective responses in its place. Butler and Spivak’s conclusion, that “there can be radical politics of change without performative contradiction” (66) validates ambivalence as something that is not deficient, deplete, and deviating from an assumed norm, but rather a valuable aesthetic-political project.

To this end, Butler and Spivak’s dialogue raises questions about the state—in its dual meaning of nation-state and state of mind—via the state of its formal and aesthetic dimensions. Its own performative contradictions invite various interpretations of what it is they are actually doing here. This open format stages the vibrancy of their live talk, a talk that itself thrives on the spontaneity of improvisation. It is a compelling format, but one that stays clear of thesis-driven lines of argumentation: it is fragmented, anecdotal, and raw in the sense that many of the interlocutionary elements of public speech are also in the written text. This captures well the notion of ambivalence their text theorizes, and in turn allows readers to experience this notion of ambivalence in the reading process. Indeed, it entails doing difficult work to link the two long monologues into a coherent whole, to tease out the nuances of their individual arguments at various moments in the text, and to accommodate to the belatedness of their call-and-response patterns. Both the arguments about form and the aesthetic experience of this text require readers to abandon stable categories about the state. Butler and Spivak’s text, like many others discussed in Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature, allows readers to experience aesthetically the thought experiments about the many ways in which the state shapes identities. My argument here is not that this difficult work can ultimately battle racism and essentialism: as compelling as this idea may be, it overstates the agential potential of literary reading, as past and present examples of misreadings, misrecognition, and misuses of l...