ENGE 2640

Introduction to World Literatures in English

Week 8 –
Theorizing Transnational Literature

INTRODUCTION
So, this week marks a change of focus for us – because we are now not so much interested in
literature as it emerges from a single place (like Hong Kong or South Africa), but rather the
kind of writing that emerges as populations travel between places. This kind of writing is
known as “transnational literature.” Important writers have said that this literature is actually
the dominant literature of the late twentieth century/twenty-first century for it is the writing
that captures the great movement of populations that has characterized this period of
history. As we shall see, there are many reasons why people in this day and age cross national
borders; but it is the effect of this movement that we are interested in. What, for example,
does this kind of movement do to our idea of “home” or “family”? What is the effect of such
movement on the way in which we think of ourselves? These are the kinds of questions that
transnational literature asks.

Now, I think the best way to get to grips with such questions raised by transnational
literatures is to dive into an area of cultural and literary criticism and theory known as
“diaspora studies.” Diaspora studies attempts to better understand the reasons,
mechanisms, and effects of the movement of people. This, then, will be our way into
recognising the significance of transnational literature.

ON DIASPORA
First, though, it is important to be clear what one means when we talk of “diaspora.” In order
to do so, I want to concentrate on two seminal essays – James Clifford’s important work on
diaspora taken from his book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century,
which was published in 1997; and Avtar Brah’s introductory to the concept of diaspora taken
from his book Cartographies of Diaspora, which was published one year earlier than

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Clifford’s, in 1996. Extracts of both texts are available on the course website, and you are
encouraged to spend a little time looking over them.

To start, then, I want to recall Brah’s etymology of the term “diaspora.” Brah tells us that the
word diaspora derives from the Greek words dia (which means “through”) and speirein (“to
scatter”). Taken together, the words have attained the meaning of “dispersion from,” hence,
as Brah writes, “the word [diaspora] embodies a notion of a centre, a locus, a ‘home’ from
where the dispersion occurs” (Brah 1996, 181). As with any kind of dispersion, the
trajectories travelled are multiple – which is to say, the locations that play host to diasporic
communities are just that, “locations” (with emphasis on the plurality of this term). The term
itself, then, gives us the most basic understanding of what we mean when we talk of
diasporic communities – people who have travelled from a “centre” (mostly commonly a
“national homeland”), and who have come to reside in many different places.

But, as you might expect, this simple understanding of diaspora does little to illuminate the
condition of the diasporic experience. For Brah, and many other writers, the key to beginning
to understand the diasporic experience is to begin to understand the reasons why people
have had to desert their homes, and go into exile. As Brah recognises, many have been exiled
from their homeland because of political or social persecution, as has been the fate of a
number of Jewish communities throughout history. Brah continues:

Or they may have been forced to flee in the wake of political strife, as has been the
experience of many contemporary groups of refugees such as the Sri Lankans,
Somalis, and Bosnian Muslims. Perhaps the dispersion occurred as a result of conflict
and war, resulting in the creation of a nation-state on the territory previously
occupied by another, as has been the experience of Palestinians since the formation
of Israel. On the other hand, a population movement could have been induced as part
of global flows of labour, the trajectory of many, for example, African-Caribbeans,
Asians, Cypriots, or Irish people in Britain. (1996, 182)

What is significant here is that diasporic communities are not the result of simply one kind of
movement – for example, political exile. Brah realises that people move for a multitude of

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different reasons. But, whether this movement is voluntary or, more often than not, forced
(either passively – such as the movement of labour; or explicitly forced – such as political
exile) the issues that face those who travel across borders are shared. That is to say, there is
always a sense of trauma in the movement, whether that is the trauma of being forced into
exile or the trauma of trying to reside in a strange new place. In each case, there are issues of
“loss” and “dislocation” with which to reconcile. And these are compounded with new and
often unexpected problems that arise around issues such as class, gender, race, sexuality,
cultural practices, and so on, and so on. For the cultural critic James Clifford, such issues arise
because of the particular nature of diasporic communities, which is to say the fact that they
become transnational cultures.

TRANSNATIONAL CULTURES
Now, one of the first difficult phrases you will come across when you read Clifford’s essay is
the phrase “transnational cultures.” What he means by this is that diasporic cultures are not
contained (or defined) by national borders or national identities. Rather, they are cultures
that are produced in the contact of two or more cultures (usually the home/mother culture
and the host culture). However, this introduces our first point of caution when trying to
locate the meaning of diaspora, because we need to be careful about confusing the diasporic
with other movements that describe the crossing of borders – such as travelling. That is to
say, it is important to recognise that the diasporic experience is not solely defined by one
population simply moving across a national border. As Clifford says:

borderlands are distinct [from diaspora] in that they presuppose a territory defined by
a geopolitical line: two sides arbitrarily separated and policed, but also joined by legal
and illegal practices of crossing and communication. (1997, 246)

Diaspora is usually about larger distances, and always about a particular kind of separation –
and this is really important –, a quality of separation that is more akin to exile than it is a
simple movement away from a “homeland.” Okay, so what do I mean by exile, here? Well,
bound up with the diasporic experience is a sense of a strong prohibition of the possibility of
returning “home.” That is to say, once exiled (imposed or self-imposed) there is a sense of
prohibition associated with return. Under such conditions, return to the homeland is

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something that cannot happen, or something that can only have the possibility of happening
in the very distant future.

Another important quality of diaspora is the fact that it connects dispersed communities. So,
when we speak of the African diaspora, for example, we are simultaneously speaking of those
Africans (and their descendants) who are currently resident in such nations as America,
Canada, France, England, and so on, and so on.

This, then, is already quite difficult to understand. So it is helpful that William Safran, in his
seminal essay “Diasporas in Modern Societies” (1991), offers a six point criteria for identifying
diasporas. He claims that they are always “minority communities” that are,

1. dispersed from an original “centre” (something like a “homeland”) to at least two

“peripheral” places;

Okay, so, there are two important things to note about this first element of Safran’s
definition of diaspora: that diaspora always refers to “minority communities” and secondly,
that it must describe a movement to at least two destinations. In saying this, Safran
disqualifies simple movements across national borders (borderlands).

2. such minority communities must maintain “a memory, vision, or myth about their
original homeland”;

Now, this is an incredibly important point, and one that we will be looking at specifically in a
couple of weeks. So, what we need to hold onto here is simply the fact that the concept of
“home,” of a “homeland,” is of paramount significance to these expatriate minority
communities.

3. these communities believe that they are not, and perhaps can never be, fully
accepted by their host communities;

So, note, here, the almost immanent sense of cultural dislocation in the diasporic experience.

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 4. diasporic communities see the ancestral home as a place of eventual return, with
the proviso that “the time is right”;

That is to say, along with a feeling of cultural dislocation and a constantly transforming
memory of home, there is an unending desire to return home, even if this “return” to the
homeland is perpetually deferred.

5. and intimately related to the previous point, is the recognition that such
communities are often committed to the maintenance or restoration of this
“homeland”;

In concert with the (constantly deferred) desire to return home is the desire to improve the
condition of the homeland, in the greatest extension of the term: the land considered as
“home.” In such a manner, there is a recognised potential here for the returning
communities to instruct a new kind of society that could never again produce the same kind
of conditions that led to their own exile.

6. is the recognition that such conscious concern with exile and an unapproachable
homeland that must therefore necessarily remain mythic, defines the solidarity of
the diasporic communities.

James Clifford sums up Safran’s six-point criteria like this:

a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host (bad

host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a
collective identity defined by this relationship. (1997, 247)

THE PROBLEM WITH SAFRAN’S CRITERIA

The problem with Safran’s criteria is that it is a centred model that relies on the concept of
origin and a teleology that is focused on the idea of return (“teleology” is merely the means
of explaining a phenomenon by its ends or purpose). As Clifford realises, if we think of

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diasporic communities along these particular lines then the African-American, Caribbean, and
British communities do not qualify as diasporic. Although each may mythologize the concept
of home, there is, generally speaking, only a limited desire to return to the land of their
distant ancestors. Similarly, the South (East)-Asian diaspora, because it is orientated on
recreating a culture in diverse locations rather than on a desire for a return to a specific
place, falls outside of Safran’s strict definition of diasporic community.

But, if we expand Safran’s definition of diaspora to include such diasporic communities as the
African-American, Caribbean, British, and South-Asian (as I think we should), then a
particularly interesting element of the diasporic experience emerges. Safran’s model of
diaspora, which is premised on a model of centre and marginalia, gives way to an emergent
model – or a model of “hybridisation,” to use Clifford’s term. In this model of hybridisation,
the concept of home (and the need to return to home) is replaced by other things. To be fair
to Safran, we should note that he too recognises that “home” is a malleable concept that
may equally refer to religious centres, say, as to a geographical place. But, as Clifford notes, in
such communities,

decentred, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a

teleology of origin/return. And a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering,
adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin.
(1997, 249 – 50)

What Clifford is saying here is that we should replace the need for a “homeland” with a
conscious interrogation of what it means simply to be a member of an expatriate minority
community. In short, we need to replace our incessant critical interest in cultural origins with
an interest in a contemporary ontology (or “way of being”). Put another way, diasporic
consciousness is not so much about recovering a past by looking back to points of origin, but
rather about understanding the condition of the present.

ON “RETURN” AND IMMIGRANT POPULATIONS

Nevertheless, the diasporic notion of return (of return to what is something that we shall
address later in other lectures) allows us to begin drawing distinctions between diasporic

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populations and other kinds of populations – say, immigrant populations. For immigrants,
those people who choose to leave one country in order to forge a new life in another, the
desire is always one to be assimilated into an all-embracing nation-state ideology – to
become Australian, or become American, or become English. For example, note the closing
lines of the inscription on America’s Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

This is perhaps the clearest call for a nation to be built on immigrant communities. And what
lies beneath this call is the sense of uniting such diverse populations into a single nation-state
(here, the “me” – “send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me”). So, the rationale of the
call goes something like this: take diverse populations and assimilate them into a single
nation-state. The nation-state demands this for a sense of homogeneity (“America” and not
“Americas”), and the immigrant communities want this because they want to feel as if they
belong to this new nation (they want to become “American”).

Now, although this kind of journey may lead such immigrant populations to feel elements of
the diasporic experience – which is to say, perhaps, feelings of loss and nostalgia for a
country and a people that they have left behind – the fact that they see their move as
permanent, and the fact that they wish to become recognised and integral elements of the
new society, distinguishes them from diasporic communities. Importantly, the fact that
diasporic communities harbour this sense of eventual return to that from which they have
been exiled means that they never seek to be fully integrated into the host society. Even
though they may spend their entire lives in a host society, because they have a notion of
return embedded in their psyches, diasporic communities live with a perpetual sense of the
temporary.

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However, as Clifford notes, this kind of temporariness must be distinguished from the kind of
temporariness experienced when, say, travelling. Even though diasporic communities live
with a perpetual sense of the temporary, the fact that they must live in a host country, the
fact that they therefore build relationships with others, and ultimately build and maintain a
sense of community means that diasporic discourse (and I’m using “discourse” here to mean
a particular way of seeing and thinking about the world) brings together a sense of roots and
routes – or one might equally say, a sense of home (“roots”) and a sense of travel (“routes”).
Together, this mix of home and exile, permanence and temporariness, of the stationary and
movement, describes a population that cannot be identified by national allegiance, but one
that can only be identified by its difference (and this is a key term here) to other populations.

THE “THIRD SPACE”

Now, this notion of difference is particularly important for you to understand because it does
not only mean that diasporic communities maintain a distinct identity from that of their host
nation, they also maintain a distinct identity from that of their “homeland.” That diasporic
communities are distinct to other communities resident in their host nation is, perhaps, not
that difficult to understand – for all the reasons I have already mentioned, diasporic
communities resist the assimilationist drive of nation-states; but understanding why they feel
distinct from communities of the place from which they are exiled requires a little more
thought.

Clifford highlights two particular kinds of claim to political legitimacy based on the
assumption of a binding cultural identity. The first is an indigenous claim, which highlights the
historical continuity of one community’s relationship with place. For example, since those
caught in diaspora cannot claim a continued residence in their homeland, those who have
remained behind claim an authority over place because they are still there, and can trace an
uninterrupted direct history, or residence upon it. The law, then, is simple: stay and retain
authority over place, or leave and leave behind any claim to the land. Of course, this kind of
thinking does not account for forced exile, hence the diasporic critique of this kind of
understanding of cultural identity. However, what is of more concern to diasporic
communities is the kind of autochthonous claims that have been made to place, which have
the effect of completely excluding diasporic communities from their “homeland.” What is

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important to understand, here, is the way in which autochthonous claims work in a different
way to indigenous claims. Now, autochthonous means “native to the soil” and therefore it
insists that one community’s claim to the land is more “natural” than the claims of another.
The autochthonous claim to place and cultural identity is therefore even more exclusive than
those that highlight historical continuity. In this discourse there is an essence that identifies
your cultural identity and thereby your claim to a “homeland.”

Because of such exclusive ways of thinking about the relationship between place and
community, diasporic communities are left as neither part of their host society nor a part of
their home society. Because they are perceived as “elsewhere” either physically (“overseas”)
or psychically (dominated by a belief in a “return home”) by both the host and home
societies, diasporic communities seem to tread an uncertain middle ground. It is Indian-born
postcolonial theorist and critic Homi Bhabha who offers the most influential theories of this
“middle ground.”

For Bhabha, the middle ground is the space of the “in-between” – his notable phrase being
“the third space” between “here” and “there” (The Location of Culture). If the exiled person is
neither defined by the identity of his host community nor the identity of his homeland, then
it is tempting to think of him or her in an impoverished condition – estranged from both
places. Yet, what allows us to think about this slightly differently is that while such people are
seemingly estranged from two places, Bhabha asserts that such people are simultaneously a
product of both. This has the effect of replacing the negative connotations of estrangement
with the more positive connotations of productivity. Let’s take an example. For Bhabha, the
Chinese exile to America is neither Chinese nor American. Nevertheless, at the same time,
Bhabha thinks of the Chinese exile to America as both Chinese and American. For Bhabha,
this is the “hybrid condition.” It is a site of production and proliferation, not limitation.
Bhabha would argue that the Chinese exile to America is not in a poorer cultural state
compared to those Chinese who are still in China; rather they are in a preferential cultural
state because their identity has expanded, it has grown to include “American-ness.” So, in
opposition to both indigenous and autochthonous claims to cultural identity, Bhabha states
that the hybrid position is not one of a diluted cultural identity, but rather one of an
expanded cultural identity. The hybrid, then, is “more” than the homogene. In going beyond

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the borders or the boundaries of a static identity (that is being simply “Chinese” or
“American”), Bhabha thinks of those who inhabit this “third space,” those who are in-
between certain identities, as privileged.

PROBLEMS WITH THE “THIRD SPACE”

That said, you may have already identified a potential problem with Bhabha’s model of the
“third space.” You might have thought to yourself, “Hang on a minute; Chinese? What’s
Chinese?” or you might have thought to yourself, “Hang on a minute; only two seconds
earlier Prof Hamilton was talking about the diverse immigrant constitution of America.
What’s American?” And, you’d be right to call the homogenising identifiers of “Chinese” and
“American” into question. The seeming problem with Bhabha’s “third space” is that it implies
that there are (at least) two other homogenous spaces from which it is distinct. That is to say,
to be a Chinese-American hybrid there needs to be an understanding of what it means to be
“Chinese” and what it means to be “American.” Of course, defining what “Chinese” signifies
is just as problematic as trying to isolate the meaning of “American.” Yet, this perceived
problem of Bhabha’s third space is not so much to do with the dynamics of the model itself
but rather our understanding of identity.

As you may know, the word “identity” comes from the Latin word “idem,” which means
“sameness.” To claim an identity, then, is not so much about claiming a difference from
something else (expressing your uniqueness), but rather allying yourself with a certain
position, or set of identifiers. As such, it is important to note that identity works through a
two-band process – reduction and simplification. That is to say, identity works by collapsing
the differences that lend to us our uniqueness, and thereby championing the similarities
between things. Understood in this way, identity is more of a limitation than a route to
freedom. Identifying yourself as, say, “Chinese” or “American” is useful in certain
circumstances but ultimately it is a restrictive characterisation of your being. Bhabha
understands that uniqueness is captured in difference, and so the model of the “third space”
works in terms of difference – one thing is different from another (here, China and America);
and the third space is a qualitatively unique form of difference located outside of either.
Therefore, we cannot really talk of a hybrid identity, of a hyphenated identity (Chinese-
American) with any great conviction. Rather, we can only talk of a non-identity – or, as I

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prefer, a “multiplicity,” which is recognition of the complex constitution of the hybrid
position.

MEMORY
Now, it is important to note that Clifford goes some way to outlining this complex
composition of diasporic communities. Key to this composition, Clifford claims, is an
immanent connection to a “homeland” that, “must be strong enough to resist erasure
through the normalizing processes of forgetting, assimilating, and distancing” (255).

What is at stake for diasporic communities, then, is the memory of a “homeland” – and again,
I’m using homeland, here, to refer to anything from which one can be exiled. Now, discussion
of memory and the significance it plays in writing from the diaspora is something that I want
to look at in greater depth a little later in the course, so I just want to make a couple of
cursory observations about memory here. As both Safran and Clifford know, memory plays a
crucial role in diasporic communities, because it ties dispersed communities to a homeland.
The problem with memory, though, is that it is something which is very easy to either distort
or even invent. Let’s leave aside the capacity to invent memories for a moment – or as Safran
and Clifford term it, “mythologize” –, our capacity to distort memory is well known.

In a fairly recent collection of essays called The Curtain (2006), noted author Milan Kundera
writes about the play of memory. For Kundera, there are always two operations that are
conducted on our memories (either consciously or subconsciously). The first is the act of
erasure, or forgetting, which Clifford notes is something that diasporic communities try
desperately hard to stop; and, the second, which is perhaps the most insidious operation to
be conducted on memory, is that of transformation – we always transform our memories.
Between these two operations of erasure and transformation, the memory of a homeland for
diasporic communities is necessarily compromised, and is woven together, most often, with
idealized inventions. Given the significance that memory plays in the diasporic experience of
the self, this has dire consequences for the possibility of return. In many cases the desired
return is impossible because the site of return, the homeland, either no longer exists or, in
the most severe cases, never really did exist. What is left behind after memory has played

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this cruel trick is an estranged people who can only exist in a community where a belief in the
“realness” of a homeland is still shared – a belief in imaginary homelands.

DIASPORIC CONSCIOUSNESS
This highlights the significance of diasporic communities; for they are places where a belief in
a homeland can continue to exist and, as such, they are places where a diasporic
consciousness can begin to take shape. In addition to this shared belief in a homeland,
diasporic consciousness is shaped in these communities by both negative and positive
elements. Clifford explains that diasporic consciousness is “constituted negatively by
experiences of discrimination and exclusion… [but] positively through identification with
world-historical cultural/political forces” (1997, 256–57).

What he is trying to say here, about the process of positive identification, is notoriously
difficult to express, but I think we can begin to understand it if we think about how a
Buddhist must feel when they recognise they belong to a global community of Buddhists, of
what an Egyptian must feel when the glories of Egypt are lauded around the world, and so
on, and so on. It is that sense of somehow belonging to something which is much greater
than yourself – to be part of an African diaspora that will return to reshape the continent… In
every case of this positive identification with the diasporic experience, the transnational
character of the phenomenon is emphasised. Diaspora cannot be defined by any one nation-
state, and it must necessarily extend beyond the borders of any one nation. Diaspora is
necessarily transnational. Diaspora is necessarily a global phenomenon.

CONCLUSION
So, what should we take away with us from today’s lecture? Well:

 Diaspora is a transnational phenomenon

 “Transnational community” refers to those who have undertaken some kind of border
crossing (be that full immigration, exiles, diasporic movement, or something else)
 William Safran offers us an (imperfect) way to distinguish between various kinds of
transnational communities (especially the way in which diasporic communities differ
from, say, immigrant populations)

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  Such communities exist in Bhabha’s “third space”
 But, it is the very sense of community that allows for the development of a “diasporic
consciousness”

Lastly, we should understand that “transnational literature” is the kind of writing that
responds to and captures this experience of moving populations.

FOR NEXT WEEK

You have to do homework for next week! Next week’s class will be a creative writing
workshop. In order for it to work properly, you will have to attend next week’s lecture with a
piece of creative writing that reflects some of the issues that we have discussed in this
lecture.

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WORKS CITED

Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge, 1996.

Bhabha, Homi K. “The Commitment to Theory” in The Location of Culture. London: Routledge,
1994.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1997.

Kundera, Milan. The Curtain. London: Faber & Faber, 2006.

Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return” Diaspora.
vol. 1 no. 1 (1991): 83 – 99.

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