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[8] laura bieger belonging and transnational american studies: reflections on a critical approach and a reading of richard powers’s the echo maker “Imaginary Homelands”: Belonging, Globalization, Transnationalism Time and again, modernization has generated states of uprootedness, alienation , and uncertainty, most recently in the wake of globalization and the rise of what is often called “second” or “liquid” modernity.1 As a social reality , globalization not only describes transnational flows of capital and labor, it also reconstitutes the horizons of collective expectations and individual lives as it demands high degrees of mobility and flexibility. Across professions, social strata, cultural formations, and national borders, longterm commitment and predictability have become increasingly porous and rare. As a consequence, questions of where and how one belongs have gained an enormous currency that has not left academic debates untouched.2 The topic of the American Studies Association’s annual meeting in 2009, “Practices of Citizenship, Sustainability and Belonging,” is but one highly indicative manifestation of this trend. Yet despite this recent currency, conceptual engagement with belonging is still much in its infancy.3 This essay is meant to make a contribution to this line of work, but instead of discussing what belonging means—whether it refers to a specific and beloved place, a reliable net of social relations; identity constructs like a neighborhood, a province , or a nation; feelings of familiarity and predictability that give (or promise to give) security; whether it is an ontological fact, an anthropological disposition, or an imaginary fabrication—I want to approach it by thinking about what belonging does: how it affects the construction of social realities and how it works as a social and cultural practice.4 In my understanding, belonging is first and foremost a practice of narrativization . As such, it reacts to (and promises to appease) an existential yearning for a familiar and predictable place: a “known world,” to borrow the title of Edward P. Jones’s recent novel.5 In its attempts to achieve this longed-for sense of place—a place that, because it is known, feels familiar and predictable—it emplots, personalizes, and mediates effects of unwanted [220] laura bieger or incomprehensible (i.e., traumatic) change; it fills gaps, soothes ruptures, aims to create coherence, and thus it weaves identities into places and places into identities. I should note that I understand place not as a fixed and stable entity (a state of “being”) upon which time acts as a force of change (of “becoming ”), but as a particular, location-bound, and dynamic network of social relations that produce ever-new sets of social effects.6 As Vikki Bell has aptly put it from a perspective like this, “the concern with dwelling in the world can take a more Foucaultian turn as part of the question: what makes us who we are within a particular social complex? How are we to understand ourselves, our desires and our passions as produced within this historical present?”7 The historical present that concerns me here has been subjected to rupture and change as an effect of globalization, but there is a deeper historic dimension that should not go unnoticed: from a perspective of longue durée, modernization and belonging are caught in a negative dialectic of creative destruction, and it is precisely this antagonism that is responsible for unleashing currencies of belonging like the most recent one. For Edward Soja, modernity is to social being what history is to time and geography is to space; together, they form an ever-changing set of relations in which modernization —for Soja “a continuous process of societal restructuring that is periodically accelerated to produce a significant recomposition of spacetime in their concrete forms”8 —manifests itself, becomes tangible and comprehensible . Belonging constitutes an immediate undercurrent to modernization , because as a practice of narrativization it constitutes the frames in which questions and desires for a “known world” can be felt, articulated, and negotiated. In this sense it is foundational to any state of social being. But it is also firmly situated within the specific geographies and histories which are affected by its drive towards recomposition, and which in turn provide the localities and narratives in which belonging can operate. Moreover, to return to Vikki Bell’s account, belonging “allows for an affective dimension—not just be-ing, but longing. The yearning implied within the term will also concern us here: what is identity without that affect implied more strongly in the term identification?”9 If longing...

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