Transarea. A Literary History of Globalization by Ottmar Ette (review)

Ottmar Ette's work feels at home within the Hispanic tradition, and most specifically, within Caribbean cultural and literary history. Although it recurrently searches around the world, it does so only to come back and reaffirm the archipelagic region as a point of encounter and intersection of global routes. In this sense, if the Caribbean seems to be Ette's intellectual niche, it is only so to the extent that the Caribbean highlights all too well that which seems to be a persistent motive in his intellectual drive: the idea that spaces are not static, but rather defined by the history of movements that occupy and intersect them. These concerns, which have appeared in some of his previous books, seem to have reached a maturity in his 2012 Transarea. Eine literarische Globalisierungsgeschichte. Now, four years later, translated with a smooth and engaging rhythm and clarity by Mark W. Person, Transarea. A Literary History of Globalization (2016) is available to English readers and, with them, to the academic fields of global and area studies, world literature, and Latin American academia.

In a moment where nationalisms are being dangerously reaffirmed, and immigration has been turned into the battleground of exclusive politics, Ette's Transarea departs by asking about the ways in which literature and art can become privileged forms of knowledge about diversity, plurality, and exchange. The book does this by proposing a study of globalization through literature. It is, in this sense, a historiographic exercise that delivers a history of the ways in which literature, from its early modern stages up to today, has been revealing a world that has developed through its connectedness. The point, though, is not so much to show globalization as a phenomenon always already present, but to highlight this evidence as a form of knowledge that transforms our understanding of the world. As Ette puts it, world literature and its evidence of an ever-connected world "make possible for us a complexity of sensory thinking and experiencing –that is neither reductive nor seeks to mask contradiction- of that which makes up the life of and upon our planet, life that is understandable only by multiple logics" (6). As a study of globalization in literature in a world of tense social and environmental circumstances, Transarea enters into a dialogue with other recent publications addressing similar matters, like Ursula K. Heise's ecocritical Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), Rachel Price's examination of Cuba in a global post-Fidel era Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (2015), and Hector Hoyos' reflection on globalization in Latin American literature Beyond Bolano: The Global Latin American Novel (2016), just to name a few.

Grounded in literature, Transarea is also successfully transdisciplinary as it performs its cultural criticism onto cartography, visual culture, plastic arts, and the electronic archive. Navigating through an incredibly diverse corpus of materials, mostly from the Spanish speaking tradition (hence the importance of this book for Hispanic studies), but also from all around the world, Ette consolidates a 21^st century field of study centered in the prefix trans. Along with the transdisciplinary, Ette's book highlights the transcultural, translinguistic, transtemporal, transmedia, and transpatial instances that denote movement and transformation. He proposes a shift from area and local studies into a conception of spaces that can only be adequately understood through the movements and dynamics that traverse and occupy them. We are invited to conceive of space as the sum of the movements that its history comprises, and history itself as a sum of movements. As its "Mission Statement" makes clear, Transarea Studies "point out mobile conceptions of spaces and places," "emphasize vectorial dynamisms and perspectives," and "analyze translocal, transregional, transnational, and transcontinental phenomena" (54). The objective is to generate an understanding of the world in which commonly conceived hierarchies become limiting and obsolete once they are understood through the relativity of their position. As an example, the Caribbean, as...