Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (review)

Katarzyna Marciniak's Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference aptly begins with Edward Said's assertion, "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience." This quotation draws out many of the issues of the book, especially the split between theory and "reality" and the tendency to read the experience of exile as exotic or romantic. The internal split that accompanies the position of "Other" has been heavily theorized in studies of race, postcolonial condition, and even gender, but this text thoughtfully draws attention to the fact that so many of these studies of the "Other" are really still focused on the "One" and the ways we find ourselves reflected back to us through this Other. Otherness, or "alienhood," in this case, both challenges and sets limits of sanctioned selfhood and national identity. This positionality becomes useful in the theoretical realm, even as it glosses over some of the concerns with privilege and the difference between chosen and forced exile. At the center of Marciniak's work is the idea that in the era of celebration of the transnational—a theoretical freeing of the othered subject in the face of postmodern uncertainty—there is an ambivalence that drives the subjects who find themselves between identifications, yet without the privileged status needed to enjoy this freedom to move between (or among) spaces. Marciniak calls this a lack of "flexible citizenship," which is complicated by a lack of agency and mobility in the face of legal and social restrictions (24). As such, Marciniak notes that her mode of examination "contests the idea of a straightforward and transparent relationship between the self and the nation: it inspects a nation's 'ownership' over the self; it interrogates unquestioned discourses of belonging; it probes the issues of legitimacy and authenticity in relation to the very notion of national identity" (150).

Alienhood unpacks a wide variety of genres, moving from more broadly recognized texts to ones often overlooked, and the author consistently opens up these texts in innovative ways. The text effectively draws "parallels between different border regions," especially focusing on Latin and Caribbean America and critical "second world voices" (152). She moves from an initial discussion of "aliens" in the film Men in Black to the Mexican film El Norte, to Julia Alvarez's novel How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, to Eva Hoffman's memoir, Lost in Translation. She then discusses two lesser known international films, The Tenant and Before the Rain. The film chapters are the strongest, with a concentration on complex and nuanced visual language. The chapter about Alvarez's novel was the least groundbreaking, as it revisited somewhat clichéd arguments about double consciousness in Latina/o literature. On the whole, without becoming too abstract or obscure, she presents enough of a framework to set up her argument, but still leaves her theoretical touchstones for the endnotes. Instead, the chapters engage in concrete and intricate textual analysis that opens up complications within the texts, all the while developing support for her larger claims about the role of the "alien" within national space.

Marciniak develops the term "quivering bodies" or "ontologies" through each chapter to draw attention to the border crosser who does not move in any direct, secure direction. "Quivering ontologies" is the term she uses "to explore the intricacy—and the intimacy—of cultural mechanisms that put the exile on a precariously wavering border between being and not being a valid, culturally sanctioned subject" (27). She rethinks the revered label of multiculturalism in light of the homogenizing impulse that accompanies the term. The alien, she claims, is merely seen in relation to the normalized and is coded as acceptable and cleansed, or is otherwise excised from the nation. In some of the chapters she allows for a possible successful crossing into the norm, but this only occurs when a sense of self is offered up in exchange for the cleanliness of fitting into acceptable cultural parameters.

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