Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature ed. by Elisabeth Hermann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner (review)

This ambitious collection charts out the concepts that inform the "transnational turn" in German literary studies through analyses that demonstrate the relevance of transnational approaches to contemporary German-language literature "beyond a focus on diasporic formations, hybridity or notions of center and periphery" (1). In an introduction, twelve chapters, and interview with Ilija Trojanow, the authors consider the potentialities of transnationalism, whether as methodology, or as analytical focus on the "plurality of intersecting, and crosscutting flows of products, ideas, and people back and forth over borders" (1). The topics are wide-ranging engagements with contemporary literature, from transnationalism as a definitional marker of contemporary literature (Elisabeth Herrmann and Katharina Gerstenberger), to discussions of contemporary home and travel (Gerstenberger and Christina Kraenzle), the complex interplay between nation and the transnational (Anke Biendarra, Lars Richter and Claudia Breger), and the ways in which the economic inflects the terms of participation in transnationalism (Maria Mayr and Breger).

The risks inherent in a project that emphasizes transnational perspectives while deemphasizing "diasporic formations" are many: the potential of recentering the nation, of suggesting that minoritized groups do not in some way exist in relationship to majority or dominant cultures, of depoliticizing the transnational, or of obscuring the workings of race in contemporary German culture. However, the collection negotiates these dangers effectively via a number of essays that explicitly engage the political valences of transnationalism. They emphasize transnationalism's uneven dynamics, including ongoing racialized/colonialist representational practices, challenges to such practices, as well as new configurations of power and marginalization produced by contemporary forms of globalization. The literature in these essays in particular, then, is either explicitly or implicitly understood in relationship to a tradition of world literature—both in terms of its border crossing as well as in terms of its relationship to cosmopolitan ethics.

Stuart Taberner, for example, seeks to theorize cosmopolitanism together with transnationalism as a world building project, rather than as an analysis of the unregulated flow of capital and its consequences. He calls attention to how transnationalism may gesture toward the potential of cosmopolitanism by evoking its utopian potential: "how [do] we inhabit proximate but also worldly spaces simultaneously? … How can we live with 'others,' both at home and globally?" (43–44). Diverse literary attempts to represent cosmopolitan transnationalisms function rather differently, as he shows by theorizing from a series of texts that depict transnationalisms that are moral (Terezia Mora), cultural (Christa Wolf), romantic (Feridun Zaimoglu), or kynical (Ilija Trojanow). For Taberner, Trojanow provides the most radical rejection of the polis for the cosmopolitical, and in doing so is notable for his investment in radical world building.

Claudia Breger's essay deploys transnationalism not as a descriptive term, but rather as a methodological perspective "that foregrounds a critique of nationalist ideologies" (107). By juxtaposing the cosmopolitanisms of Christian Kracht and Teju Cole, Breger not only acknowledges the ways in which transnationalism affects everybody (the stated goal of the editors), but specifically conceptualizes the uneven relationships to transnational forces occupied by those who exist in a range of racialized positionings. Her approach also reveals how Kracht reinscribes certain racialized mythologies of the nation, while Cole confronts the nation—and cosmopolitanisms—with the uneven histories of racialized violence (117). Thus her "reading of Cole's novel as a critically cosmopolitanism text simultaneously acknowledges the importance of cosmopolitan-ism's ethos of connection, which supplements transnationalism's analytical work on the historical contingency of the nation with an affirmative exploration of possible shared human futures" (121). Tanja Nusser brings texts by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Wolfgang Herrendorf into dialogue with one another to consider how the figure of the terrorist functions to signal transnational threat against the backdrop of sand, suggestive of shifting, transforming, and instable identities. Nusser suggests that these texts problematize the "investment into surveillance by various countries as a new form of colonialism" (259). This deployment...