The Transnational in Literary Studies

WeltLiteraturen/
World Literatures

Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule

für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien

Herausgegeben von
Jutta Müller-Tamm, Andrew James Johnston,
Anne Eusterschulte, Susanne Frank und Michael Gamper

Wissenschaftlicher Beirat
Ute Berns (Universität Hamburg), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University),
Renate Lachmann (Universität Konstanz), Ken’ichi Mishima (Osaka University),
Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (EHESS Paris),
Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (University of Tōkyō), Janet A. Walker (Rutgers University),
David Wellbery (University of Chicago), Christopher Young (University of Cambridge)

Volume 17
The Transnational
in Literary Studies

Potential and Limitations of a Concept

Edited by
Kai Wiegandt
This project was funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments
and started at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. It
was co-funded by the Heisenberg programme of the German Research Foundation.

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Contents
Kai Wiegandt
Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 1

1 The Transnational amongst Related Concepts in Theory and

Marketing

Anna M. Horatschek
Mixed Attachments in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971) 21

Gesine Müller
Transnational Challenges for World Literatures: Publishing Caribbean
Writers 44

Cecile Sandten
“Transnational Decolonial Aesthetics”: The “Hottentot Venus”
Re-Configured 56

Cordula Lemke
Precariously Transnational: Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief 76

Lucia Krämer
The Discursive Construction of Transnational Fiction on Penguin Random
House Group Websites 89

2 Transnational Literary Histories

Jacqueline Dutton
Utopia, Limited: Transnational Utopianism and Intercultural Imaginaries
of the Ideal 107

Martina Groß
Travel Literature and/as Transnational Theatre History – Beyond National
Theatre Cultures 124
VI Contents

Laura Rivas Gagliardi

Transnationally Forged Nationality: Le Brésil littéraire and the Writing
of Literary History in the Nineteenth Century 142

3 Poetics and Politics of Transnational Genres

Lukas Lammers
Historical Horizons: The Historical Novel and Transnational Memory 169

Dobrota Pucherová
Re-centring European Geopolitics: Transnational Identities in the
Twenty-First-Century Hungarian-Language Novel from Slovakia 189

Kai Wiegandt
Transnational Migrant Fiction as World Literature: Identity, Translatability,
and the Global Book Market 206

Thomas Hunkeler
Translinguistic Theatre for a Globalised Stage? 226

Works Cited 239

Notes on Contributors 259

Index 263
Kai Wiegandt
Introduction: The Concept of the
Transnational in Literary Studies
In the last thirty years, the term ‘transnational’ has been used more and more fre-
quently in literary studies. It has been employed to describe avant-garde movements
such as Surrealism and Dada; to characterise literature marked by migration as it
makes use of diverse cultural influences; to analyse trans- and multilingual works by
contemporary writers such as Édouard Glissant, Junot Díaz, and Assia Djebar; and to
designate the hybrid identities of authors such as José Manuel Prieto, Shirley Lim,
and Kazuo Ishiguro. After two decades of such diverse uses, it would be naïve, even
parochial, to call for a homogenised use of the term. More surprising than the lack of
a general definition of the transnational is the relative lack of a critical discourse on
the term in literary studies. The number of phenomena the term has been applied to
is limited, and the applications themselves fall into a limited number of groups. Yet
no taxonomy of these applications in literary studies exists.
This volume seeks to clarify the meanings and applications of the concept of the
transnational and to identify areas in which it can be particularly useful. The intro-
duction will offer a taxonomy of the applications of the transnational and will sharpen
the concept’s contours by comparing it with rival concepts. The division of the volume
into three parts reflects areas which seem particularly amenable to analysis through a
transnational lens. The chapters in Part 1 present case studies in which the concept
replaces or complements traditionally dominant concepts in literary studies. The
chapters demonstrate, for example, why some dramatic texts and performances can
better be described as transnational than as postcolonial and how the transnational
underlies and complements concepts such as ‘world literature.’ Part 2 assesses the ad-
vantages and limitations of writing literary history with a transnational focus. The
chapters illustrate how such a perspective loosens the epistemic stranglehold of na-
tional historiographies, but they also argue that transnational and national agendas
of literary historiography are frequently entangled, and that the concept of the trans-
national poses a dilemma for the analysis of particular non-Western genres in a histor-
ical perspective. The chapters in Part 3 identify transnational genres such as the
transnational historical novel, transnational migrant fiction, and translinguistic the-
atre, and analyse the specific poetics and politics of these genres. A recurrent question
throughout these chapters is that of the novelty of transnational genres. In sum, the
volume’s explorations of the potential and limitations of the concept of the transna-
tional show why we need the concept. The concept allows literary critics to appreciate
characteristics of texts, of their marketing and reception, and of the identities of au-
thors and literary characters which other concepts do not illuminate or gloss over.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-001
2 Kai Wiegandt

1 Taxonomy
It is worth turning to a field outside literary studies to start rectifying the disci-
pline’s lack of a taxonomy of the transnational. The anthropologist Steven Vertovec
has pointed out phenomena to which the term can be applied.1 First, he argues, the
term can characterise social groups, such as ethnic communities scattered across
more than one nation – ethnic diasporas – which constitute a prominent example
of a phenomenon that has often been called transnational. According to Vertovec,
all diasporas share “the ‘triadic relationship’ between [. . .] globally dispersed yet
collectively self-identified ethnic groups; [. . .] the territorial states and contexts
where such groups reside; and [. . .] the homeland states and contexts whence they
or their forebears came.”2 Second, the term can designate a type of consciousness –
a phenomenon that is often related to a social group but not necessarily dependent
on it. In this sense, transnational individuals have de-centred attachments to more
than one nation or attachments that go beyond nationality as such. Third, ‘transna-
tional’ can signify a mode of cultural production: a “fluidity of constructed styles,
social institutions and everyday practices.”3 The hybridisation of styles associated
with particular nationalities produces transnational styles in literature, art, dance,
food, and fashion.
Vertovec’s distinction between social group, type of consciousness, and mode of
cultural production is useful for a taxonomy of the transnational in literary studies –
if it is modified and complemented, that is. As self-identification and identification
by others feed into each other, it seems more useful to group both under ‘identity,’
and to distinguish between two subcategories if necessary. In addition, we need to
add the categories of ‘reception,’ ‘marketing,’ and ‘critical perspective’ to cover virtu-
ally all uses of the term in literary studies. These uses tend to refer to one or several
of the following six categories:
1) Identity: the self-identification and/or identification by others of authors (e.g.
Tahar Ben Jelloun), literary movements (e.g. modernism, the avant-garde), and
of literary characters (e.g. Ifemelu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah)
2) Theme: literary works about diasporic individuals, migrancy, and/or other
events occurring across national borders (e.g. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao)
3) Aesthetics: works and genres whose poetics draw on aesthetic forms across na-
tional borders, including trans- and multilingual works (e.g. Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake or Assia Djebar’s Fantasia)

1 See Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 4–8.
2 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism, 4.
3 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism, 7.
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 3

4) Reception: a widely dispersed readership better defined by factors such as com-

mon interest, educational background, or a common reception attitude than by
nationality (e.g. the readership of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey but also of
Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology)
5) Marketing: the strategy of influencing reception and sales by highlighting the
transnational identity of authors and/or characters, and/or the transnational
theme, and/or aesthetics of particular works (e.g. the appraisal of Salman
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses as a world-spanning epic)
6) Critical perspective: reading, interpreting, and classifying literature without re-
gard for national affiliation (e.g. as represented by Ernst Robert Curtius,
Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach)

Categories such as identity, aesthetics, and theme do not exclude each other in the
analysis of the transnational in literature, and often overlap in the criticism of books
written by authors with a transnational identity. Criticism can take a transnational per-
spective on books that are transnational at the levels of form and content. According
to Fluck and Berman, this produces readings that are self-fulfilling prophecies.4 But
criticism can also apply this perspective to works that do not suggest such a focus.
While further overlaps are possible, each category is sufficiently distinct to identify
uses that refer to that category alone.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) can serve
as a touchstone for these categories, as it may seem transnational in most but not
all aspects. The book illustrates how the categories listed above can be combined in
analysis, but also how keeping them apart can allow us to tease out textual com-
plexity. Lahiri, an American author of Bengali descent, shares the transnational
identity of the Indian diaspora to which she belongs, and so do many of the stories’
characters. The stories are all, in different ways, about Indian-American as well as
Pakistani–Indian diasporic identities. This makes Interpreter typical of literature
about diasporic subjects and/or diasporic groups, most of which is written by au-
thors with a transnational identity.
The stories themselves demonstrate that the usefulness of the term ‘transnational’ –
the aspects that make it more than a mere synonym for ‘diasporic’ – becomes visible
only when we understand that the collective self-identification of a group (e.g. as
Indian-American) does not necessarily coincide with each member’s individual self-
identification, and that both collective and individual self-identification often differ
from the identity attributed to the group by other groups within society (other minori-
ties, sociologists, etc.). In Interpreter, most of the characters are Indian-Americans

4 See Winfried Fluck, review of Paul Jay, “Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary
Studies,” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012), 532–534, and Jessica Berman, “A Transnational
Critical Optic, Now,” College Literature 44.4 (2017), 477.
4 Kai Wiegandt

insofar as all of them share the country in which their forebears lived (India) and the
country where they live now (the United States). Some of them are first-generation mi-
grants and exclusively identify with India and feel in exile in the United States; some
from the ‘third generation’ exclusively identify with the United States. There are also a
few who are equally attached to India and America, and some who do not identify
with India or the United States although they are considered Indian-American. Those
characters feel as if they are beyond nationality as such, even though they are consid-
ered to be Indian-American by others. Interpreter illustrates that identity depends on
how a person thinks about herself, but that it is not independent of how others define
them either.
The fact that most of Interpreter’s characters are not beyond nationality as
such, and that critics and reviewers have nevertheless called the stories ‘transna-
tional’ or ‘cosmopolitan,’5 suggests that the transnational consciousness that is
commonly (and probably correctly) attributed to Lahiri is commonly superimposed
on her stories. Yet the stories themselves justify the use of the term. The disasters,
or “maladies,” of which Interpreter of Maladies tells, often spring from identifica-
tion with a single nation – India or the United States. The stories are transnational
insofar as they arguably aspire to create a transnational consciousness in the reader
by demonstrating the tragic consequences of national consciousness.
This does not mean that Lahiri’s stories employ hybrid aesthetic procedures
drawn from diverse nationally affiliated styles. Reviewers have – correctly, I think –
compared Lahiri’s uses of narrative techniques such as register and narrative voice,
and her handling of telling versus showing to Hemingway and Raymond Carver.6
Lahiri’s characters mix components of diverse cultures in unlikely combinations in
their cooking, dress, and even in their religion, but Interpreter’s poetics is firmly
grounded in the Anglo-American short story tradition. The stories’ various plots offer
themselves to transnational readings – much less so their form. Publishers highlighted
this combination by advertising the book to its predominantly European and North
American readers as one that conveys exotic otherness and is nevertheless highly ac-
cessible because it follows recognisable narrative conventions. Reviews of Interpreter
mirrored this double emphasis on the transnationalism of the stories’ characters and
themes on the one hand and on the stories’ formal and stylistic proximity to the
Anglo-American short story on the other. This kind of marketing and critical reception
arguably played as much a part in the book’s rise to bestseller status as winning the
Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

5 See Elizabeth Jackson, “Transcending the Politics of ‘Where You’re From’: Postcolonial
Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” Ariel 43.1 (2012),
109–126, and Susan Koshy, “Minority Cosmopolitanism,” PMLA 126.3 (2011), 592–609
6 See Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (London: HarperCollins, 2000), extracts from reviews
in front matter.
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 5

2 Critical discourse
The discourse on transnationalism in literary studies is more limited than, for exam-
ple, the discourses on world literature or postcolonialism. Depending on theoretical
leanings and epistemic interests, contributors have typically focused on one partic-
ular field of application while also gesturing towards several others. The following
is a survey – by no means complete – of some important examples:
1) Identity: In Nations Unbound (1994),7 Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and
Cristina Szanton Blanc were among the first to use the term to describe identi-
ties in between nationalities and their representations in fiction. Bill Ashcroft,
one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies, has championed the ‘trans-
national’ and ‘transnation’ as terms that have become better and better at cap-
turing the identities of diasporic subjects in recent decades than the notions of
exile and loss: ethnic affiliations have become more diverse, and there are
many writers who do not identify with any one nation.8 National identity is in-
creasingly being superseded within nations by the collective identity of what
Ashcroft calls the ‘transnation,’ beginning as a way of avoiding the state’s pres-
sures of conformity and especially visible in a country like India, where nation-
alism is being used to unify hundreds of languages and ethnic groups under
one national label, although people in fact live in informal and transnational
communities.9
2) Theme: Pramod K. Nayar’s The Transnational in English Literature10 and the ac-
ademic journal Transnational Literature11 are just two instances of the large
number of publications that focus on the transnational primarily as a theme. A
focus on the transnational at the thematic level also characterises books that
nominally focus on a method of reading rather than on content, such as Paul
Jay’s Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010). The liter-
ature under discussion comprises contemporary novels in English “that exem-
plify the transnational character of this new body of literature,”12 written by a
“transnational, multicultural group of writers, working in disparate parts of the

7 See Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational
Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (London: Routledge, 1994).
8 See Bill Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” Locating Transnational Ideals, ed.
Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 18.
9 Bill Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” 13, 23.
10 Pramod K. Nayar, The Transnational in English Literature: From Shakespeare to the Modern
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015).
11 http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/
12 Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2010), 92.
6 Kai Wiegandt

world, whose work explores the intersecting effects of colonialism, decolonisa-

tion, migration, and economic and cultural globalization.”13
3) Aesthetics: Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics may be the most represen-
tative monograph in the English language of an approach that focuses on the
transnational aesthetics of texts.14 Ramazani analyses the transnational poetics
of modernist and postcolonial poetry. Making a case for transnationalism as a
standard for literary history, his book shares affinities with critics (discussed
below) who champion a transnational perspective on literature. His main focus,
however, is on poetic qualities that can be found in poetry across national bor-
ders, for example when he examines how Ezra Pound and Sherman Alexie use
transnational juxtapositions of sound and image, demonstrates how elegy can be
conceived of as a transnational genre, or argues why modernism is a transna-
tional movement, not primarily because many of its canonical works were writ-
ten by expatriates living on the European continent, but because it comprises
works from former European colonies that employ modernist techniques.
4) Reception: The transnational reception of literary texts has been studied in
works such as Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women
Writers (2000).15 The qualifier ‘transnational’ here helps to make visible net-
works of reception that operate across national boundaries and are sustained
by gender roles, ideological outlook, economics, and religion. For example, the
existence of transnational feminism seems to determine the reception of
woman writers from the Global South more than national affiliations.
5) Marketing: ‘Transnational’ has come to serve as a marketing label and more
generally as a signifier of cultural value. The ‘transnational’ as a carrier of cul-
tural value is discussed in James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige (2005).
English explains how national systems of circulating cultural value have given
way to a transnational, global arena in which prize-winners from the Global
South have difficulty escaping the binary options of being branded either as im-
itator of Western styles and subjects or as ‘exotic’ representative of ‘indigenous’
traditions.16 The topic of exoticism and cultural value is discussed in Graham

13 Paul Jay, Global Matters, 91. In Jay’s view, globalisation is a phenomenon that increases rather
than reduces diversity, and a transnational perspective multiplies difference. The literary texts that
best illustrate the increase of diversity are those about transnational identities and developments,
and these texts are used by Jay to show, in a circular fashion, the superiority of the transnational
perspective of the critic, as Winfried Fluck has criticised (see Winfried Fluck, “Global Matters: The
Transnational Turn in Literary Studies,” 532–534).
14 See Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press,
2009).
15 Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (eds), Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third
World Women Writers (New York: Garland, 2000).
16 See James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural
Value (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 264–320.
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 7

Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), which focuses on authors of transna-

tional as well as postcolonial fiction (see the differentiation above).17
6) Critical perspective: Critics such as Winfried Fluck and Jessica Berman have
called for a transnational perspective in the sense of a critical approach to texts
as such: not a turn towards texts about transnationalism and its avatars of hybrid-
ity and migration, but a critical perspective that bypasses the national semantic
values that have traditionally been ascribed to texts by Hawthorne, Flaubert, or
any other author who does not belong to what other critics define as ‘transna-
tional literatures’ (see category above).18 Fluck identifies transnational premises
that should inform critical practice in his own field, American Studies: the cul-
tural fabric of America is not congruent with the borders of the USA; the fabric is
a hybrid due to new structures of self-formation. Diasporic identities, namely of
the black population, complicate the notion of American identity formerly seen
in a more homogenising way, as have processes of transculturalisation: the
‘Europeanisation of America’ as well as the ‘Americanisation’ of Europe, etc.19

Regardless of whether the term ‘transnational’ is used to refer to the identity and con-
sciousness of authors and characters, the themes and the formal qualities of texts,
the reception and marketing of texts, or a critical approach to them, the term ac-
knowledges the nation precisely by indicating that someone or something moves
beyond it.20 ‘Transnational’ does not imply that nations no longer play a role, but
recognises that nations remain decisive actors in a globalised world, regardless of
whether one characterises nations with Benedict Anderson as imaginary communi-
ties that define themselves through common language and culture21 or as institutions
of border management that inwardly ensure homogenisation through exclusion, as
Étienne Balibar emphasises.22 ‘Transnational’ marks the active movement of persons,

17 See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001).
18 See Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (eds), Re-Framing the Transnational
Turn in American Studies (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2011), and Jessica Berman, “A
Transnational Critical Optic, Now,” College Literature 44.4 (2017), 475–482.
19 See Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler, “Introduction: The Challenges of
Transnational American Studies,” REAL-Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature
23 (2007), 1.
20 Berman is right to argue that the prefix ‘trans-’ in ‘transnational’ must be understood in a strong
sense: “[N]ot just ‘across,’ ‘on or to the other side of’ but also ‘beyond, surpassing, transcending,’
the prefix represents a challenge to the normative dimension of the original entity or space, a cross-
ing over that looks back critically from its space beyond.” (Berman, “A Transnational Critical Optic,
Now,” 477–478)
21 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 2006), 9–36.
22 See Étienne Balibar, We, People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 11–50.
8 Kai Wiegandt

ideas, things, and money beyond nations and nationality, an overcoming of the force
fields of the nation. Yogita Goyal, in her introduction to a recent volume on transna-
tional American literature, presents a useful catalogue of the ways in which the trans-
national challenges the nation:

[A] transnational approach can unsettle nationalist myths of cultural purity, reveal through
comparison the interconnectedness of various parts of the world and peoples, and offer an
analysis of past and present imperialisms. It can help map the increasing awareness and
cross- cultural dialogue of the Information Age, where the diffusion of cultural forms through
immigration and the spread of capital and commodities is ubiquitous and dazzling in both
speed and reach. No longer viewing literature as the expression of a national essence, transna-
tional approaches radically reformulate the basic object and scope of literary analysis [. . .].
Because transnational frames do not argue for the demise of nations, but for a rethinking of
them, they can help counteract triumphalist discourses of globalization. Rather than simply
resorting to a premature celebration of a postnational or globalized world, transnationalism
becomes the occasion for the questioning of nation and alternative formations to the nation –
like world systems and world literature – by emphasizing flows and migration but also reveal-
ing the synergy of cultural and economic aspects of such histories.23

But is it not true that the concept of the transnational existed prior to the term? And
are there not other terms in existence that mean the same thing as the ‘transna-
tional’? Why do we need the term ‘transnational’ at all?

3 Term versus concept, comparison with rival terms

It is only since the recent phase of accelerated globalisation, arguably beginning
with the demise of the bipolar world order in 1989, that the career of the term ‘trans-
national’ in literary studies began. The following two decades saw a veritable
‘transnational turn’ in the Anglo-American academic world, leading literary critic
Donald E. Pease to conclude in 2011 that

the term ‘transnational’ has replaced ‘multicultural’, ‘postcolonial’, and ‘postnational’ as the
most frequently invoked qualifier. In acquiring this status, the ‘transnational’ has experienced
a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spa-
tial and temporal orientations to the object of study [. . .] within an encompassing geopolitics
of knowledge.24

23 Yogita Goyal, “Introduction: The Transnational Turn,” Cambridge Companion to Transnational

American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017), 6–7.
24 Donald E. Pease, “Introduction: Remapping the Transnational Turn,” Re-Framing the
Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011), 4.
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 9

However, the concept of transnationalism arguably existed in the arts and in writing
about the arts before the term gained currency in literary and cultural studies. As
early as the 1920s, Kurt Schwitters spoke of the Übernationalität (supranationality) of
art and literature which, according to a manifesto signed by him, would support the
emergence of a Weltnationalgefühl (world national feeling).25 There can be no doubt
that Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake follows a transnational poetics which involves self-
conscious reflexion on its own transnationalism. The “Manifesto for an Independent
Revolutionary Art,” co-authored by Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and André Breton in
Mexico City in 1938, spoke of overcoming national and linguistic boundaries, and en-
visioned modernism as a transnational movement without using the term.26
If there are transnational literary works and movements from before the time
when the term gained currency in literary studies, are there also transnational
works, genres, and literatures from before the emergence of the nation? Such an
application of the term would seem oxymoronic. However, works predating the
emergence of the nation are often retrospectively claimed as works that belong to
national canons. Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s plays and poems have
been celebrated as foundational texts of Spanish and English national literatures
respectively, with nationwide celebrations in Spain in 2005 on the 400th anniver-
sary of the publication of Don Quixote and national celebrations in Britain in 2016
marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The application of the term
‘transnational’ to Cervantes’ and Shakespeare’s texts can meaningfully designate
modes of reception, marketing, and critical consideration that resist dominant na-
tional frameworks.
The relationship between the term and the concept of the transnational is also
relevant in a synchronic perspective, as some meanings of rival terms seem to over-
lap with that of the transnational. The following sketch considers such overlaps
and the far greater number of differences between the transnational and other con-
cepts. To begin with, ‘international’ designates interactions and entities that exist,
occur, or are carried out between nations. ‘Transnational’ refers to processes or en-
tities that extend or operate across national boundaries. The United Nations is an
international organisation; globalisation is a phenomenon that, driven by transna-
tional companies and global flows of money and goods, takes place across national

25 See Benedikt Hjartarson, “Anationalism and the Search for a Universal Language: Esperantism
and the European Avantgarde,” Decentring the Avant-Garde, ed. Per Bäckström and Benedikt
Hjartarson (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 283.
26 See Hubert van den Berg, “‘Übernationalität’ der Avantgarde – (Inter)Nationalität der
Forschung. Hinweis auf den internationalen Konstruktivismus in der europäischen Literatur und
die Problematik ihrer literaturwissenschaftlichen Erfassung,” Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer:
Avantgarde, Avantgardekritik, Avantgardeforschung, ed. Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders
(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 264, and Mark Byron, “Introduction: Parallax Visions of
Transnational Modernisms,” Affirmations 4.1 (2016), 12.
10 Kai Wiegandt

borders. Any shift from the ‘international’ to the ‘transnational’ implies a shift of
agency from the nation to that which supersedes it.
Some critics propose that ‘transnational’ should replace the qualifier ‘postcolo-
nial’ and contend that the postcolonial paradigm perpetuates colonial discourse
and overemphasises the effects of colonisation on literature written in former colo-
nies. In these critics’ view, the concept of the transnational allows them to leave
behind the centre-periphery model that informs the postcolonial paradigm.27
However, the idea that the ‘transnational’ could replace the ‘postcolonial’ depends
on a distorted idea of postcolonial literature. I follow Neil Lazarus who, in The
Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), shows how the dominance of postcolonial theory
inspired by poststructuralism has led to a canon of ‘postcolonial’ works concerned
with hybridity, migrancy, and liminality. The most canonical of these works, such
as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, have repeatedly
been read as portrayals of migrancy, the malleability of history, and hybridity,
whereas works by authors writing in postcolonial societies and concerned with far
more local issues have been neglected.28 Lazarus observes that although most
works of postcolonial literature continue to explore and critique local rather than
transnational class relations and economic exploitation as late effects of colonial-
ism,29 criticism has continued to focus on novels that suggest class to be less impor-
tant in the formation of postcolonial subjectivities than hybrid cultural, linguistic,
and transnational affiliations. These novels by migrants from the Global South edu-
cated at European and North American universities can indeed much better be
described using the qualifier ‘transnational,’ as they are typically concerned with
migration and the emergence of what we have above defined as transnational con-
sciousness. The works legitimately referred to as ‘postcolonial literature’ have little
do with transnational themes or aesthetics, nor do their authors typically possess a
transnational identity.
The idea of a literature that transcends national and national-linguistic borders
is as old as Goethe’s proclamation that “[n]ational literature means little now, the
age of world literature has begun; and everyone should further its course.”30 The
renewed debate in the last two decades on the concept of world literature has coin-
cided with the emergence of the concept of the transnational in literary studies,

27 See, for example, Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” 17–22, for arguments
along these lines.
28 See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
21–23.
29 See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 40.
30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Some passages pertaining to the concept of world literature,”
Comparative Literature: The Early Years, ed. H.-J. Schulz and P. Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1973), 6.
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 11

and there are, in fact, overlaps concerning the reception of texts.31 This becomes
particularly clear in David Damrosch’s influential What is World Literature? (2003),
a book that revived the idea of world literature by defining it via reception instead
of focusing on the aesthetic attributes of texts. World literature, according to
Damrosch, are works that spread and are read beyond their place of origin.32 For at
least as long as nations have existed, these works have been received transnation-
ally either in translation or in their original language, a fact that is as true of One
Thousand and One Nights as it is of the novels of Michel Houellebecq. However, the
identity of authors of world literature, its themes and aesthetics, are not necessar-
ily, and not even frequently, transnational. Nor does a critical practice of ‘reading
for world literature’ overlap with ‘reading transnationally’: whereas criticism that
seeks to identify works of world literature will always produce a canon of works (ex-
cluding works that are not world literature), the critical practice of reading transna-
tionally, as proposed by Berman, Fluck, and others, can be applied to all texts
without establishing a canon.
Finally, the ‘transnational’ is sometimes used in ways similar to the term ‘cosmo-
politan’ (or its recently prominent subcategory ‘Afropolitan’). ‘Cosmopolitanism’ is a
notoriously vague term that, according to Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, can
stand for a socio-political condition, a philosophy or worldview, a political project for
creating transnational institutions, a political project that allows people to act upon
their multiple subject positions, the cultivation of an attitude, or the ability to deal
with others in the world.33 In his influential The Cosmopolitan Imagination (2009),
Gerard Delanty therefore makes a plea for a more concise definition of cosmopolitan-
ism. For him, cosmopolitanism is an attitude towards the world which problematises
one’s own assumptions as well the those of others vis-à-vis a perspective on the
world.34 Cosmopolitanism in Delanty’s sense overlaps with what I have described
as ‘transnational identities’ insofar as a particular self-identification is concerned,
but not with the identity of a group as it is known to others (for example, the
‘Turkish-German community,’ the ‘Indian-American diaspora,’ etc.). It is precisely

31 The first landmark work in the recent debate on world literature was Pascale Casanova’s The
World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), originally published in French in 1999 as La Republique Mondiale des Lettres (Seuil). Later
important contributions include David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
(London and New York: Verso, 2013), Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World
Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), and Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On
Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
32 See David Damrosch, What is World Literature? 4–5.
33 See Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and
Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–14.
34 See Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16.
12 Kai Wiegandt

for these social groups, migratory movements, and phenomena of cultural diver-
sity that Delanty reserves the term ‘transnational.’ Delanty argues that observable
transnational phenomena such as migration, hybridisation, and globalisation
“can be a significant precondition for cosmopolitanism, without being necessarily
a cause.”35 In contrast to the listed transnational phenomena, the ‘cosmopolitan’
attitude involves a normative dimension.36 Delanty is here by and large in agree-
ment with another sociological distinction between cosmopolitanism and transna-
tionalism proposed by Victor Roudemetof in 2005. The latter conceives of both in
terms of different layers, arguing that some ‘transnationals’ are inclined towards cos-
mopolitanism while others prefer localism: “the specification of a continuum that
consists of different degrees of attachment allows the researcher to view cosmopoli-
tanism and local predispositions as relationships of degree, and not as absolutes.”37
Delanty’s and Roudemetof’s notions of transnationalism coincide with uses of
the term in literary studies to describe the identity of hybrid social groups. Vice
versa, uses of the ‘transnational’ in literary studies to describe the self-identification
of authors and characters are similar to Delanty’s and Roudemetof’s notions of cos-
mopolitanism. Similar but not identical: a transnational self-identification is not
necessarily a cosmopolitan one, as it can be far more limited. Self-identifying as a
European, for example, would be a transnational self-identification without being a
cosmopolitan one. Goyal points out that ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘global,’ and ‘world’ are
more often wrongly applied to the phenomena they seek to describe than is ‘trans-
national.’ ‘Cosmopolitan,’ ‘global,’ and ‘world’ have a triumphant ring to them that
makes it hard for those who use them to take a critical position towards globalisa-
tion in its cultural and economic forms. By contrast, ‘transnational’ is more modest
and apt insofar as it checks optimism about a globalised future by reminding us of
the fact that nations and national boundaries are, for good or for worse, still power-
ful barriers to the global flow of people and ideas. Acknowledging the remaining
power of national frames is all the more important as theorisations of globalisation
in literary and cultural studies such as Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and
Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large have overlooked this remaining power by
welcoming globalisation as a process in which cultures become hybrid across na-
tional boundaries, in which culture supersedes the nation as provider of communal
ties.38 These theories too sweepingly claimed that globalisation entails the replace-
ment of national with cosmopolitan self-identification.

35 Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 83.

36 See Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 82.
37 Victor Roudometof, “Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Glocalization,” Current Sociology
53.1 (2005), 123.
38 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) and Arjun
Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008).
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 13

4 Criticisms of the transnational

However, the concept of the transnational has been accused of complicity with the
economic forces behind globalisation, too. Transnational corporations – or TNCs –
have for decades dominated the world’s economic system and were identified as the
driving forces behind globalisation and as the main example of transnationalism be-
fore the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transnationalism’ became popular in literary and
cultural studies towards the end of the twentieth century.39 The assumption that the
term ‘transnational’ owes its very existence to economic thought sounds plausible.
However, the first use of the term can be traced to an article entitled “Trans-National
America” published by Randolph Bourne in Atlantic Monthly in 1916, in which the
author argued that immigrants to America did not fully assimilate into Anglo-Saxon
culture (as the image of the ‘melting-pot’ suggested) but partly held on to their own
cultures, with the result that US society can be described as ‘trans-national’: as a so-
ciety in which the cultures of the world mix and potentially give rise to a cosmopoli-
tan outlook.40 The meaning of Bourne’s coinage is thus closer to present applications
of the term to individual and collective identities in literary and cultural studies than
it is to the term’s later economic applications.
Still, transnational corporations and globalisation stand for the circumvention
of national borders by capital and thus, among other things, for tax avoidance and
for blackmail politics that threaten to relocate capital and labour to low-wage areas
around the globe. There is an inner tension between cultural and economic mean-
ings in the term ‘transnationalism’ that has prompted some scholars to argue that
the academic discourse on transnationalism could help to reinforce neoliberal val-
ues. Postcolonial scholar Robert C. Young writes:

[T]he concept of “transnationalism” [. . .] has enjoyed something of an academic vogue in the

twenty-first century. Its valorisation of activities and networks that move across nations rather
than within them is certainly hostile to the nationalist values of the nation-state, which might
seem to be “progressive”. At the same time, however, one of the aims of globalization is also
to break down the power of the nation-state in order to facilitate ever greater transnational
flows of labor, commodities, and finance. Transnationalism holds no contrapuntal argument
of resistance to such processes at its core [. . .]. [T]ransnationalism, while challenging the
power of the nation-state, charts or facilitates the processes of globalization at the same time.
For the most part, discussions of cosmopolitanism also espouse a way of being that, whether
for the cosmopolitan elite or the cosmopolitan non-elite of the world’s millions of migrant
workers, constitutes the precise ideology of the global free-labor market that neoliberal capi-
talism desires.41

39 See, for example, Peter Dicken, Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity
(London: Paul Chapman, 1992) and Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (London: Prentice
Hall, 1995).
40 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (1916), 86–97.
41 Robert J. C. Young, Empire, Colony, Postcolony (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 127.
14 Kai Wiegandt

Young’s critique only holds force if not applied to all uses of the qualifier ‘transna-
tional’ (to describe identities, themes, aesthetics, reception, or marketing). His use of
the verb ‘valorisation’ and the ‘ism’ in ‘transnationalism’ signal that Young critiques
idealisations of the transnational which go beyond what I have described as a ‘critical
perspective.’ He reminds us that not all transnational activities are to be welcomed.
Few academics would object to Young’s claim that globalisation is transnational and
has highly problematic aspects. More disconcerting is the suggestion that one cannot
use the concept of the transnational to overcome national perspectives without im-
plicitly supporting neoliberal capitalism. Johannes Völz has warned that economic
and cultural forms of globalisation may not be as separable from each other as literary
critics often believe. The transnationalism of these critics, Völz argues, declares itself
to be a method of reading but also favours and focuses on transnational phenomena
such as migration and forms of hybridity (see Jay’s book). Even more pertinently, this
transnationalism is indebted to economic globalisation. For Völz, the upshot is not
that transnationalism as a method of reading is to be abandoned, but that it needs to
be used more self-reflexively.42 This demand is especially pressing in an age when
transnationalism marks a position in the divisive struggle between left and right, and
when right-wing politics are adopting formerly left-wing anti-globalist positions and
maligning proponents of transnationalism as advocates of economic globalisation.43
Besides the dangers of idealisation and of politically naïve use, a further danger
inherent to the concept of the transnational is its wide applicability. Like the concept
of world literature, the concept of the transnational is ‘presentist’ insofar as it de-
scribes literary phenomena that are far more common today than they were in the
past. In our era, which text does not travel beyond its place of origin? Which text is
not world literature? Which text does not have aesthetic features that can be de-
scribed as transnational or does not deal with themes that can be called so? The prob-
lem here is obviously that there are no sharp qualitative criteria for drawing these
distinctions and that quantitative measures are relative. No critic would deny that
some texts are better described using the term ‘transnational’ than others, but the
basic problem remains. As Yogita Goyal has argued, the concept’s inflationary use
can support an elision of historical differences and local specificities in support of
superficial comparisons and appraisals of hybridity that are vacuous due to their uni-
versality. The qualifier ‘transnational’ may also come to serve as a neutral cover for
Americanisation or Europeanisation – for example when the Euro-American canon,
with only few ethnic exceptions, is referred to as ‘the transnational canon.’44 Critics
must keep these dangers in mind.

42 See Johannes Völz, “Utopias of Transnationalism and the Neoliberal State,” Re-Framing the
Transnational in American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011), 356–373.
43 See Johannes Völz, “Transnationalism and Anti-Globalism,” College Literature 44.4 (2017), 522–526.
44 See Yogita Goyal, “Introduction,” 6.
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 15

One might finally object that the term ‘transnational,’ by encompassing the na-
tional, perpetuates the national even if negatively as a category to be overcome. This
form of critique has been familiar at least since the debates on the terms ‘postmod-
ern’ and ‘postcolonial,’ which allegedly perpetuate modernism and colonialism. The
answer must be that we cannot get rid of notions – and nations! – by keeping silent
about them. That which remains unspoken is allowed to go without saying and be-
comes an unquestioned framework of the critic’s mind.

5 Synopses of chapters
The following synopses indicate how the chapters of this volume explore the potential
and limitations of the concept of the transnational. Part 1 of this volume is dedicated
to “The ‘Transnational’ Amongst Related Concepts in Theory and Marketing.” In
“Mixed Attachments in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971),” Anna M. Horatschek ar-
gues that ‘transnational’ describes the play’s poetics far better than ‘postcolonial.’
While India’s Karnad is considered a postcolonial playwright in the West, his play’s
formal features are inspired by theatrical traditions from East and West, and its inter-
textual use of Thomas Mann’s (originally Hindu) story “The Transposed Heads” (Die
vertauschten Köpfe) draws on a transnational template of sources. It also resists clas-
sification as Indian ‘national’ theatre by adapting conventions of classical Sanskrit as
well as the oral Kannada Yakshagana folk theatre. Horatschek also points out a poten-
tially problematic aspect of transnational methods of reading when she demonstrates
how radically different her reading is from Indian interpretations of the play.
In her chapter “Transnational Challenges for World Literatures: Publishing
Caribbean Writers,” Gesine Müller shows that recent attempts to define ‘world litera-
ture’ and ‘literatures of the world’ have been characterised by implicit assumptions
of Western hegemony – even though these attempts critically address the institu-
tional, economic hegemony of the Global North vis-à-vis the South. Müller then en-
gages in a conceptual reconsideration of polycentric dynamics in the context of the
agenda of ‘literatures of the world.’ She argues that the concept of the transnational
is instrumental to overcoming the differentiation of centre and periphery, which
underlies even recent approaches to ‘world literature’ and ‘literatures of the world.’
The example of Caribbean literatures illustrates the potential of the concept as well
as the mechanisms of selection in globally active publishing houses.
Cecile Sandten’s chapter “‘Transnational Decolonial Aesthetics’: The ‘Hottentot
Venus’ Re-Configured” relates the concept of the transnational to the postcolonial
and to decolonisation and charts a “transnational decolonial aesthetics” (as suggested
by Walter Mignolo’s Transnational Decolonial Institute of Duke University) by discus-
sing artistic representations of the black female body as a transnational phenomenon.
Drawing on Mignolo’s notions of “decolonial thinking and doing” and “epistemic
16 Kai Wiegandt

disobedience” as subversive and counter-hegemonic writing strategies, Sandten offers

a decolonial reading of the historical narrative of Sarah Baartman as the “Hottentot
Venus” in early nineteenth-century England and France in conjunction with the dra-
matic rewrite in Venus (1997) by Suzan-Lori Parks, the art installation “Sa Main
Charmante” (1989) by Renée Green, the “Hommage à Sarah Bartman,” a live perfor-
mance by Teresa María Díaz Nerio (2007; 2012), and the live performance “The Painful
Cake” (2012) by Afro-Swedish queer artist Makode Aj Linde.
In “Precariously Transnational: Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief,” Cordula
Lemke examines how the narrator of Teju Cole’s novel both employs and questions a
colonising form of exoticism from a hegemonic, transnational perspective. Dealing
with the narrator’s temporary return to his homeland in the form of a travelblog, this
illustrated description reinforces its promise of authenticity by means of quasi-
autobiographical insertions which initially obstruct the reader’s view of the colonising
attributions of the narrative perspective, but then reinforce it. Lemke shows that only
the narrator’s meeting with his former girlfriend leads to the experience of a renewed
belonging to his hometown and to the fading of exoticising strategies. And yet, she
argues, the transnationalism of one’s own perspective becomes the object of negotia-
tion and the hegemonic construction of identity the precarious place of one’s own vul-
nerability, which the narrator can only evade through renewed spatial distance.
The world of publishing is the focus of Lucia Krämer’s chapter “The Discursive
Construction of Transnational Fiction on Penguin Random House Group Websites,”
in which she reflects on the term and the concept of the transnational as a marketing
instrument. Examining the websites randomhouse.de, penguin.co.uk, and knopfdou-
bleday.com in terms of the roles that the sites accord to the national and to trans-
nationalism as discursive concepts, Krämer shows that while all the publishers’
self-presentations contain at least implicit messages about their transnational scope,
the transnational novels in the portfolios are not foregrounded. Novels that contain
transnational story elements or themes, or whose authors’ biographies are marked by
transnationalism, emerge as a special kind of fiction nonetheless because they are
predominantly associated with the labels ‘world literature’ and ‘literary fiction’ rather
than ‘fiction.’ Transnationalism in authors’ biographies and as a topic in literary fic-
tion is thus constructed normatively as an indirect signal of literary quality.
Part 2 consists of chapters charting “Transnational Literary Histories” as a specific
field of transnational methodologies of reading. Jacqueline Dutton’s “Utopia, Limited:
Transnational Utopianism and Intercultural Imaginaries of the Ideal” starts with obser-
vations on the significant impact of Thomas More’s “Utopia” across European, North
and South American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Oceanian representations of the
ideal place in literature. The concept of utopia, Dutton argues, has been transnational
since the formal inception of the genre in 1516, but the existence of intercultural imag-
inaries of the ideal in literature and practice both predates and runs parallel to this
Judeo-Christian concept. Dutton explores the dilemmas of recognising literary genres
like “utopia” in transnational literatures and traces the potential and limitations of
 Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies 17

transnational utopianism in “non-Western” literatures through reference to ancient

and contemporary examples of French, Japanese, and indigenous Australian litera-
tures. She examines the ways in which traditional utopian genre dynamics play out in
the transnational field as intercultural imaginaries of the ideal.
Martina Groß’ chapter “Travel Literature and/as Transnational Theatre History –
Beyond National Theatre Cultures” points to an apparent contradiction between early
modern theatre practice and theatre historiography. Although the production of
knowledge about early modern theatre originated in travelogues (by actors, authors,
spectators, philosophers, etc.), theatre served as a medium of national culture and
led to the persistent omission of travel literature and travelogues in a mainly nation-
ally oriented theatre historiography. However, as Groß argues, early modern trave-
logues by Montaigne, Platter, and Voltaire can help to close the gap between early
modern theatre practice as a transnational phenomenon and the tradition of an es-
sentially national theatre theory and historiography. Groß demonstrates that, with re-
gard to both travel literature and the development of the theatre, these interferences
shed new light not only on theatre historiography from the late sixteenth to the nine-
teenth century. They also provide insights into the complex and ever-changing liter-
ary genre of travel writing and enrich current debates on cultural encounters by
questioning the concept of national theatre culture.
Laura Rivas Gagliardi’s chapter “Transnationally Forged Nationality: Le Brésil
littéraire and the Writing of Literary History in the Nineteenth Century” reads the
first history of Brazilian literature by Ferdinand Wolf (1863) as a result of the trans-
national relations between the Brazilian and the Habsburg Empires. Wolf locates
Brazilian literature within the pantheon of Weltliteratur, attributing literary, cul-
tural, and political autonomy to Brazil despite the fact that it remained a colonised
country until recently. In an analysis of the context of the book’s publication as
well as of some excerpts of the work, Gagliardi reveals the ideological purpose be-
hind the writing of literary history and how, even if it is a transnational process, it
can serve as an instrument in projects of nation-building and the formation of na-
tional identity.
The chapters in Part 3 focus on the “Poetics and Politics of Transnational
Genres.” Lukas Lammers begins his chapter “Historical Horizons: The Historical
Novel and Transnational Memory” with the argument that the enduring importance
of concepts such as ‘re-writing’ and ‘writing back’ testifies to the widespread under-
standing that postcolonial literature is a particular form of historiography. So far, as
Lammers argues, discussions of postcolonial historical fiction have largely reaffirmed
the traditional view that the historical novel is central to imagining a national com-
munity. Focusing on a historical period that is commonly associated with Eurocentric
and decidedly nationalist narratives – World War II – his chapter demonstrates that
the term ‘transnationalism’ helps throw into relief a spectrum of recent literary reac-
tions to a historical situation which pushed nationalist identifications to extremes.
Lammers analyses how, on the one hand, postcolonial historical novels recalibrate
18 Kai Wiegandt

nationalist narratives of the war and how they, on the other, draw attention to the
use and construction of transnationally shared historical memory.
Dobrota Pucherova’s chapter “Re-Centring European Geopolitics: Transnational
Identities in the Twenty-First-Century Hungarian-language Novel from Slovakia”
reads two postmodern historical novels from Slovakia by Hungarian-minority au-
thors as transnational texts: Nálunk, New Hontban (2001) by Lajos Grendel and
Határeset (2008) by Péter Hunčík. Set in southern Slovakia where state borders re-
peatedly shifted over the course of the twentieth century, both novels emphasise
the hybridity of identities in Central Europe, where many ethnicities have been
commingling in a relatively small space for centuries. By describing how nationalist
discourses have led to ethnic hatred, colonial practices, and genocide, Pucherova
argues, the texts point out the impossibility of writing a unified, chronological, pro-
gressive narrative of the nation and show the histories of European nations as
deeply entangled in transnational webs of meaning. By retelling twentieth-century
European history from the point of view of a historically, geographically, and cul-
turally marginal region, the novels rearrange European geopolitics and question
the idea of ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ in the European context. The chapter reads the
texts as paradigmatic of twenty-first-century literature from Slovakia that considers
the idea of the nation-state in the Central European context deeply problematic.
My chapter “Transnational Migrant Fiction as World Literature: Identity,
Translatability, and the Global Book Market” charts the genre of transnational mi-
gration fiction, in which the creation of migrant identities resembles a collage of
cultural elements from both the home and target cultures. Discussing Salman
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and Taiye
Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, this chapter demonstrates how the modelling of identity in
this genre is related to its function in the global book market: transnational migrant
fiction is read around the world because it provides insight into foreign cultures,
which makes it a particular kind of world literature as defined by David Damrosch.
I argue that the genre suggests a continuity between the world of the Western
reader and the foreign culture, creating the impression of a general human situa-
tion, the local characteristics of which remain translatable.
In the final chapter, “Translinguistic Theatre for a Globalized Stage?” Thomas
Hunkeler explores the links between transnationalism and translingualism in con-
temporary theatre. He argues that the rapid internationalisation and festivalisation
of the European theatre scene since the 1980s has brought forth new forms of trans-
national theatre in which language often plays a minor role. And yet, as Hunkeler
argues, some theatre directors and companies such as Milo Rau, Yael Ronen, and
the collective Rimini Protokoll seek to explore new forms of linguistic interaction
onstage. Their translinguistic theatre systematically exposes several languages on
stage, reflects on new forms of community, and thereby adapts theatre to the multi-
cultural world we live in.