Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids ed. by Gene H. Bell-Villada, Nina Sichel (review)

The title of Gene H. Bell-Villada and Nina Sichel’s audacious and pioneering volume, Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids, betrays exactly how globally sprawling and autobiographically multitudinous a collection of essays the tome is. It is likewise telling of the volume’s innovative thrust that many of the title’s terms—“International Childhoods,” “Global Nomads,” and “Third Culture Kids”—are canonically defined, challenged, and reinvented throughout the collection. Writing Out of Limbo begins with David Pollock, Ruth Van Reken, and Norma McCraig’s definitions of these relevant terms and then globe-hops, landing by turns in the United States, England, France, China, Lesotho, Malawi, Taiwan, Hungary, Chile, Kazakhstan, and Venezuela, among others. [End Page e-6]

A collection of memoirs and personal tales about multiculturalism and growing up with one foot in a global superpower and one foot in the “periphery” and “elsewhere,” though ever insightful, is nothing new. What lends this volume its novelty is that Bell-Villada and Sichel choose to focus on childhood and adolescence. This framework treats all children of immigrants, no matter what their migration’s root cause or reason, the same. In reading the accounts presented in Writing Out of Limbo, it is easy to recognize that those that immigrate from global centers tend to do so to spread ideology—missionaries, ambassadors, members of the military—and that those that move in the opposite direction tend to do so for basic security and material well-being—political and economic refugees, minorities seeking human rights. And it would be facile for the volume to take a political turn at this point, which would cause it to lose its way. Political and theoretical analysis of geopolitical immigration is of the utmost importance, but it has been, and continues to be, done more exactingly by the many subfields embedded in the volume. By focusing on children, Writing Out of Limbo uses the intrinsic innocence of childhood to sidestep the heavy political weight wrought by global citizenship and simply lets the stories presented speak for themselves.

The result is a collection of testimonies, postulations and witnessing of difficult-to-place subjectivities, which, by all means, is political itself. By blinding the reader temporarily to the uncomfortable differences between a child that grows up in the South East Pacific as the daughter of a United States military family, for instance, and another that moves from South America to the United States out of political exile, some unexpected similarities arise by way of a shared, if broad, multiculturalism. This approach, while cognizant of its blind spots, is as sincere and honest as the children that could not choose to whom or in what country they were born.

This is not to say that the stories and assumptions accumulated in Writing Out of Limbo always sit easily, especially with those well versed in political and cultural theory. The act of compiling a global comparativist study always runs the risk of reducing highly complex and locally rooted cultural archives to the limiting perspective of central enunciation. Cultures, in such a study, are valued only according to their place in the semantic chain created by the writer. It could be easy to lose sight, moreover, of the fact that not everyone, in any culture, be it North American or Middle Eastern, enjoys the benefits of an inherent cosmopolitanism. In reading Writing Out of Limbo, for instance, one need set aside the problems of using Socrates to come to terms with growing up as a child of missionaries in Africa. This may make for a perfectly acceptable and inspiring account, but it necessarily leads to the questions that, no doubt, concerned the author in the [End Page e-7] first place: Do Africans need Christianity? Or perhaps, more important...