Testing Transnationalism

The critical fortunes of "the transnational" have swelled in recent years, as it has made its way from disciplinary buzzword to become the banner for a genuinely rigorous and self-reflexive kind of geopolitical criticism. Along that path to widespread recognition and application, transnationalism has confronted its own procedural hurdles as an interpretive and epistemological framework, conceding potential frictions within its contentions—frictions implicit in decisions about which identifications and experiences might legitimately be celebrated or resisted. It's a state of affairs neatly summarized by Sallie Westwood and Annie Phizacklea, who point out that we have "[o]n the one hand the continuing importance of the nation and the emotional attachments invested in it, and on the other hand those processes such as cross-border migration which are transnational in form."¹ Examining these processes from an empirical angle, sociologists and political scientists like Steffen Mau have undertaken work that suggests that increasingly, "the social life of each individual is less and less limited to the nation-state territory" as it now "crosses borders and expands spatially, while integration into transnational networks becomes more and more routine."² So to what extent have modern and contemporary novelists offered stories about belonging that unsettle the outright celebration of perpetual relocation, complicating the model of global citizenship upheld by those of an economically comfortable cosmopolitan class who voluntarily "are able to move within different cultural contexts" (Mau 149)? By the same token, if fiction continues to show us how "transnationalism does not necessarily weaken nationalism," then we might wonder, as Nyla Ali Khan has quite rightly done, whether "dislocation enable[s] the regeneration of cultural forces," or does it "offer just two alternatives, transnational identity or a tenacious holding on to origins?"³

The two compelling books under consideration here provide refreshing and perceptive responses to such questions. Stephen Clingman's ambitiously wide-ranging study, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary, sets out to demonstrate a new way of combining and comparing different sites for "imagining the transnational" (3) by cutting across received literary-historical period boundaries. In an effort to reach beyond the usual monographic conventions, Clingman intends his book to embody in its very structure and sensibility the topic it explores. As he puts it toward the close of his substantial introduction, the main chapters structurally reciprocate what they describe, and thus they "should also be thought of, primarily, as exploration—essays in a specific sense as forays, travels, ventures, navigations." A sentence later, he repeats, "Primarily, they are meditations on aspects of the transnational, conducted in and through the novels" (31). These meditations pinpoint tropological elements in the primary works that simultaneously provide Clingman with his lines of inquiry. As represented in each chapter title, these framing tropes are either topographical or topological, enabling Clingman to fulfill what Susan Stanford Friedman has recently called an "extensive engagement with differences in narrative forms through time and across space."⁴ The spatial groupings are as follows: for Conrad, "Waterways of the Earth"; for Caryl Phillips, "Route, Constellation, Faultline"; for Salman Rushdie, "Combination, Divination"; for Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, and Anne Michaels, "Vertical and Horizontal"; for W. G. Sebald, "Transfiction"; and for J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, "Village, Empire, Desert." Early in the book, Clingman indicates that such tropes or locations, drawn from the internal structures and themes of his corpus, will in turn shape the "navigational approach" of this monograph (32). And so they do. For while Clingman admits that his choice of texts "is not in any way a curriculum," he organizes each of the six chapters so as either to address single authors or to stage more comparative discussions of two or more figures. It will no doubt strike readers familiar with postcolonial critics' preoccupation with, and...