The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept 9783110688726, 9783110688566

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The Transnational in Literary Studies

WeltLiteraturen/ World Literatures

Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien

Herausgegeben von Jutta Müller-Tamm, Andrew James Johnston, Anne Eusterschulte, Susanne Frank und Michael Gamper Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Ute Berns (Universität Hamburg), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University), Renate Lachmann (Universität Konstanz), Ken’ichi Mishima (Osaka University), Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (EHESS Paris), Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (University of Tōkyō), Janet A. Walker (Rutgers University), David Wellbery (University of Chicago), Christopher Young (University of Cambridge)

Volume 17

The Transnational in Literary Studies Potential and Limitations of a Concept Edited by Kai Wiegandt

This project was funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments and started at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. It was co-funded by the Heisenberg programme of the German Research Foundation.

ISBN 978-3-11-068856-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-068872-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-068882-5 ISSN 2198-9370 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939100 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Designed by Jürgen Brinckmann, Berlin, using a graphic by Anne Eusterschulte Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Kai Wiegandt Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies

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1 The Transnational amongst Related Concepts in Theory and Marketing Anna M. Horatschek Mixed Attachments in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971)

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Gesine Müller Transnational Challenges for World Literatures: Publishing Caribbean Writers 44 Cecile Sandten “Transnational Decolonial Aesthetics”: The “Hottentot Venus” Re-Configured 56 Cordula Lemke Precariously Transnational: Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief

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Lucia Krämer The Discursive Construction of Transnational Fiction on Penguin Random House Group Websites 89

2 Transnational Literary Histories Jacqueline Dutton Utopia, Limited: Transnational Utopianism and Intercultural Imaginaries of the Ideal 107 Martina Groß Travel Literature and/as Transnational Theatre History – Beyond National Theatre Cultures 124

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Laura Rivas Gagliardi Transnationally Forged Nationality: Le Brésil littéraire and the Writing of Literary History in the Nineteenth Century 142

3 Poetics and Politics of Transnational Genres Lukas Lammers Historical Horizons: The Historical Novel and Transnational Memory Dobrota Pucherová Re-centring European Geopolitics: Transnational Identities in the Twenty-First-Century Hungarian-Language Novel from Slovakia

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Kai Wiegandt Transnational Migrant Fiction as World Literature: Identity, Translatability, and the Global Book Market 206 Thomas Hunkeler Translinguistic Theatre for a Globalised Stage? Works Cited

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Notes on Contributors Index

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Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies In the last thirty years, the term ‘transnational’ has been used more and more frequently in literary studies. It has been employed to describe avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and Dada; to characterise literature marked by migration as it makes use of diverse cultural influences; to analyse trans- and multilingual works by contemporary writers such as Édouard Glissant, Junot Díaz, and Assia Djebar; and to designate the hybrid identities of authors such as José Manuel Prieto, Shirley Lim, and Kazuo Ishiguro. After two decades of such diverse uses, it would be naïve, even parochial, to call for a homogenised use of the term. More surprising than the lack of a general definition of the transnational is the relative lack of a critical discourse on the term in literary studies. The number of phenomena the term has been applied to is limited, and the applications themselves fall into a limited number of groups. Yet no taxonomy of these applications in literary studies exists. This volume seeks to clarify the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational and to identify areas in which it can be particularly useful. The introduction will offer a taxonomy of the applications of the transnational and will sharpen the concept’s contours by comparing it with rival concepts. The division of the volume into three parts reflects areas which seem particularly amenable to analysis through a transnational lens. The chapters in Part 1 present case studies in which the concept replaces or complements traditionally dominant concepts in literary studies. The chapters demonstrate, for example, why some dramatic texts and performances can better be described as transnational than as postcolonial and how the transnational underlies and complements concepts such as ‘world literature.’ Part 2 assesses the advantages and limitations of writing literary history with a transnational focus. The chapters illustrate how such a perspective loosens the epistemic stranglehold of national historiographies, but they also argue that transnational and national agendas of literary historiography are frequently entangled, and that the concept of the transnational poses a dilemma for the analysis of particular non-Western genres in a historical perspective. The chapters in Part 3 identify transnational genres such as the transnational historical novel, transnational migrant fiction, and translinguistic theatre, and analyse the specific poetics and politics of these genres. A recurrent question throughout these chapters is that of the novelty of transnational genres. In sum, the volume’s explorations of the potential and limitations of the concept of the transnational show why we need the concept. The concept allows literary critics to appreciate characteristics of texts, of their marketing and reception, and of the identities of authors and literary characters which other concepts do not illuminate or gloss over.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-001

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1 Taxonomy It is worth turning to a field outside literary studies to start rectifying the discipline’s lack of a taxonomy of the transnational. The anthropologist Steven Vertovec has pointed out phenomena to which the term can be applied.1 First, he argues, the term can characterise social groups, such as ethnic communities scattered across more than one nation – ethnic diasporas – which constitute a prominent example of a phenomenon that has often been called transnational. According to Vertovec, all diasporas share “the ‘triadic relationship’ between [. . .] globally dispersed yet collectively self-identified ethnic groups; [. . .] the territorial states and contexts where such groups reside; and [. . .] the homeland states and contexts whence they or their forebears came.”2 Second, the term can designate a type of consciousness – a phenomenon that is often related to a social group but not necessarily dependent on it. In this sense, transnational individuals have de-centred attachments to more than one nation or attachments that go beyond nationality as such. Third, ‘transnational’ can signify a mode of cultural production: a “fluidity of constructed styles, social institutions and everyday practices.”3 The hybridisation of styles associated with particular nationalities produces transnational styles in literature, art, dance, food, and fashion. Vertovec’s distinction between social group, type of consciousness, and mode of cultural production is useful for a taxonomy of the transnational in literary studies – if it is modified and complemented, that is. As self-identification and identification by others feed into each other, it seems more useful to group both under ‘identity,’ and to distinguish between two subcategories if necessary. In addition, we need to add the categories of ‘reception,’ ‘marketing,’ and ‘critical perspective’ to cover virtually all uses of the term in literary studies. These uses tend to refer to one or several of the following six categories: 1) Identity: the self-identification and/or identification by others of authors (e.g. Tahar Ben Jelloun), literary movements (e.g. modernism, the avant-garde), and of literary characters (e.g. Ifemelu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah) 2) Theme: literary works about diasporic individuals, migrancy, and/or other events occurring across national borders (e.g. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) 3) Aesthetics: works and genres whose poetics draw on aesthetic forms across national borders, including trans- and multilingual works (e.g. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Assia Djebar’s Fantasia)

1 See Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 4–8. 2 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism, 4. 3 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism, 7.

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4) Reception: a widely dispersed readership better defined by factors such as common interest, educational background, or a common reception attitude than by nationality (e.g. the readership of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey but also of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology) 5) Marketing: the strategy of influencing reception and sales by highlighting the transnational identity of authors and/or characters, and/or the transnational theme, and/or aesthetics of particular works (e.g. the appraisal of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses as a world-spanning epic) 6) Critical perspective: reading, interpreting, and classifying literature without regard for national affiliation (e.g. as represented by Ernst Robert Curtius, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach) Categories such as identity, aesthetics, and theme do not exclude each other in the analysis of the transnational in literature, and often overlap in the criticism of books written by authors with a transnational identity. Criticism can take a transnational perspective on books that are transnational at the levels of form and content. According to Fluck and Berman, this produces readings that are self-fulfilling prophecies.4 But criticism can also apply this perspective to works that do not suggest such a focus. While further overlaps are possible, each category is sufficiently distinct to identify uses that refer to that category alone. Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) can serve as a touchstone for these categories, as it may seem transnational in most but not all aspects. The book illustrates how the categories listed above can be combined in analysis, but also how keeping them apart can allow us to tease out textual complexity. Lahiri, an American author of Bengali descent, shares the transnational identity of the Indian diaspora to which she belongs, and so do many of the stories’ characters. The stories are all, in different ways, about Indian-American as well as Pakistani–Indian diasporic identities. This makes Interpreter typical of literature about diasporic subjects and/or diasporic groups, most of which is written by authors with a transnational identity. The stories themselves demonstrate that the usefulness of the term ‘transnational’ – the aspects that make it more than a mere synonym for ‘diasporic’ – becomes visible only when we understand that the collective self-identification of a group (e.g. as Indian-American) does not necessarily coincide with each member’s individual selfidentification, and that both collective and individual self-identification often differ from the identity attributed to the group by other groups within society (other minorities, sociologists, etc.). In Interpreter, most of the characters are Indian-Americans

4 See Winfried Fluck, review of Paul Jay, “Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies,” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012), 532–534, and Jessica Berman, “A Transnational Critical Optic, Now,” College Literature 44.4 (2017), 477.

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insofar as all of them share the country in which their forebears lived (India) and the country where they live now (the United States). Some of them are first-generation migrants and exclusively identify with India and feel in exile in the United States; some from the ‘third generation’ exclusively identify with the United States. There are also a few who are equally attached to India and America, and some who do not identify with India or the United States although they are considered Indian-American. Those characters feel as if they are beyond nationality as such, even though they are considered to be Indian-American by others. Interpreter illustrates that identity depends on how a person thinks about herself, but that it is not independent of how others define them either. The fact that most of Interpreter’s characters are not beyond nationality as such, and that critics and reviewers have nevertheless called the stories ‘transnational’ or ‘cosmopolitan,’5 suggests that the transnational consciousness that is commonly (and probably correctly) attributed to Lahiri is commonly superimposed on her stories. Yet the stories themselves justify the use of the term. The disasters, or “maladies,” of which Interpreter of Maladies tells, often spring from identification with a single nation – India or the United States. The stories are transnational insofar as they arguably aspire to create a transnational consciousness in the reader by demonstrating the tragic consequences of national consciousness. This does not mean that Lahiri’s stories employ hybrid aesthetic procedures drawn from diverse nationally affiliated styles. Reviewers have – correctly, I think – compared Lahiri’s uses of narrative techniques such as register and narrative voice, and her handling of telling versus showing to Hemingway and Raymond Carver.6 Lahiri’s characters mix components of diverse cultures in unlikely combinations in their cooking, dress, and even in their religion, but Interpreter’s poetics is firmly grounded in the Anglo-American short story tradition. The stories’ various plots offer themselves to transnational readings – much less so their form. Publishers highlighted this combination by advertising the book to its predominantly European and North American readers as one that conveys exotic otherness and is nevertheless highly accessible because it follows recognisable narrative conventions. Reviews of Interpreter mirrored this double emphasis on the transnationalism of the stories’ characters and themes on the one hand and on the stories’ formal and stylistic proximity to the Anglo-American short story on the other. This kind of marketing and critical reception arguably played as much a part in the book’s rise to bestseller status as winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

5 See Elizabeth Jackson, “Transcending the Politics of ‘Where You’re From’: Postcolonial Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” Ariel 43.1 (2012), 109–126, and Susan Koshy, “Minority Cosmopolitanism,” PMLA 126.3 (2011), 592–609 6 See Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (London: HarperCollins, 2000), extracts from reviews in front matter.

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2 Critical discourse The discourse on transnationalism in literary studies is more limited than, for example, the discourses on world literature or postcolonialism. Depending on theoretical leanings and epistemic interests, contributors have typically focused on one particular field of application while also gesturing towards several others. The following is a survey – by no means complete – of some important examples: 1) Identity: In Nations Unbound (1994),7 Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc were among the first to use the term to describe identities in between nationalities and their representations in fiction. Bill Ashcroft, one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies, has championed the ‘transnational’ and ‘transnation’ as terms that have become better and better at capturing the identities of diasporic subjects in recent decades than the notions of exile and loss: ethnic affiliations have become more diverse, and there are many writers who do not identify with any one nation.8 National identity is increasingly being superseded within nations by the collective identity of what Ashcroft calls the ‘transnation,’ beginning as a way of avoiding the state’s pressures of conformity and especially visible in a country like India, where nationalism is being used to unify hundreds of languages and ethnic groups under one national label, although people in fact live in informal and transnational communities.9 2) Theme: Pramod K. Nayar’s The Transnational in English Literature10 and the academic journal Transnational Literature11 are just two instances of the large number of publications that focus on the transnational primarily as a theme. A focus on the transnational at the thematic level also characterises books that nominally focus on a method of reading rather than on content, such as Paul Jay’s Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010). The literature under discussion comprises contemporary novels in English “that exemplify the transnational character of this new body of literature,”12 written by a “transnational, multicultural group of writers, working in disparate parts of the

7 See Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (London: Routledge, 1994). 8 See Bill Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” Locating Transnational Ideals, ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 18. 9 Bill Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” 13, 23. 10 Pramod K. Nayar, The Transnational in English Literature: From Shakespeare to the Modern (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015). 11 http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/ 12 Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 92.

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world, whose work explores the intersecting effects of colonialism, decolonisation, migration, and economic and cultural globalization.”13 3) Aesthetics: Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics may be the most representative monograph in the English language of an approach that focuses on the transnational aesthetics of texts.14 Ramazani analyses the transnational poetics of modernist and postcolonial poetry. Making a case for transnationalism as a standard for literary history, his book shares affinities with critics (discussed below) who champion a transnational perspective on literature. His main focus, however, is on poetic qualities that can be found in poetry across national borders, for example when he examines how Ezra Pound and Sherman Alexie use transnational juxtapositions of sound and image, demonstrates how elegy can be conceived of as a transnational genre, or argues why modernism is a transnational movement, not primarily because many of its canonical works were written by expatriates living on the European continent, but because it comprises works from former European colonies that employ modernist techniques. 4) Reception: The transnational reception of literary texts has been studied in works such as Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (2000).15 The qualifier ‘transnational’ here helps to make visible networks of reception that operate across national boundaries and are sustained by gender roles, ideological outlook, economics, and religion. For example, the existence of transnational feminism seems to determine the reception of woman writers from the Global South more than national affiliations. 5) Marketing: ‘Transnational’ has come to serve as a marketing label and more generally as a signifier of cultural value. The ‘transnational’ as a carrier of cultural value is discussed in James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige (2005). English explains how national systems of circulating cultural value have given way to a transnational, global arena in which prize-winners from the Global South have difficulty escaping the binary options of being branded either as imitator of Western styles and subjects or as ‘exotic’ representative of ‘indigenous’ traditions.16 The topic of exoticism and cultural value is discussed in Graham

13 Paul Jay, Global Matters, 91. In Jay’s view, globalisation is a phenomenon that increases rather than reduces diversity, and a transnational perspective multiplies difference. The literary texts that best illustrate the increase of diversity are those about transnational identities and developments, and these texts are used by Jay to show, in a circular fashion, the superiority of the transnational perspective of the critic, as Winfried Fluck has criticised (see Winfried Fluck, “Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies,” 532–534). 14 See Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009). 15 Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (eds), Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (New York: Garland, 2000). 16 See James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 264–320.

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Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), which focuses on authors of transnational as well as postcolonial fiction (see the differentiation above).17 6) Critical perspective: Critics such as Winfried Fluck and Jessica Berman have called for a transnational perspective in the sense of a critical approach to texts as such: not a turn towards texts about transnationalism and its avatars of hybridity and migration, but a critical perspective that bypasses the national semantic values that have traditionally been ascribed to texts by Hawthorne, Flaubert, or any other author who does not belong to what other critics define as ‘transnational literatures’ (see category above).18 Fluck identifies transnational premises that should inform critical practice in his own field, American Studies: the cultural fabric of America is not congruent with the borders of the USA; the fabric is a hybrid due to new structures of self-formation. Diasporic identities, namely of the black population, complicate the notion of American identity formerly seen in a more homogenising way, as have processes of transculturalisation: the ‘Europeanisation of America’ as well as the ‘Americanisation’ of Europe, etc.19 Regardless of whether the term ‘transnational’ is used to refer to the identity and consciousness of authors and characters, the themes and the formal qualities of texts, the reception and marketing of texts, or a critical approach to them, the term acknowledges the nation precisely by indicating that someone or something moves beyond it.20 ‘Transnational’ does not imply that nations no longer play a role, but recognises that nations remain decisive actors in a globalised world, regardless of whether one characterises nations with Benedict Anderson as imaginary communities that define themselves through common language and culture21 or as institutions of border management that inwardly ensure homogenisation through exclusion, as Étienne Balibar emphasises.22 ‘Transnational’ marks the active movement of persons, 17 See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 18 See Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (eds), Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2011), and Jessica Berman, “A Transnational Critical Optic, Now,” College Literature 44.4 (2017), 475–482. 19 See Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler, “Introduction: The Challenges of Transnational American Studies,” REAL-Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 23 (2007), 1. 20 Berman is right to argue that the prefix ‘trans-’ in ‘transnational’ must be understood in a strong sense: “[N]ot just ‘across,’ ‘on or to the other side of’ but also ‘beyond, surpassing, transcending,’ the prefix represents a challenge to the normative dimension of the original entity or space, a crossing over that looks back critically from its space beyond.” (Berman, “A Transnational Critical Optic, Now,” 477–478) 21 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 9–36. 22 See Étienne Balibar, We, People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 11–50.

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ideas, things, and money beyond nations and nationality, an overcoming of the force fields of the nation. Yogita Goyal, in her introduction to a recent volume on transnational American literature, presents a useful catalogue of the ways in which the transnational challenges the nation: [A] transnational approach can unsettle nationalist myths of cultural purity, reveal through comparison the interconnectedness of various parts of the world and peoples, and offer an analysis of past and present imperialisms. It can help map the increasing awareness and cross- cultural dialogue of the Information Age, where the diffusion of cultural forms through immigration and the spread of capital and commodities is ubiquitous and dazzling in both speed and reach. No longer viewing literature as the expression of a national essence, transnational approaches radically reformulate the basic object and scope of literary analysis [. . .]. Because transnational frames do not argue for the demise of nations, but for a rethinking of them, they can help counteract triumphalist discourses of globalization. Rather than simply resorting to a premature celebration of a postnational or globalized world, transnationalism becomes the occasion for the questioning of nation and alternative formations to the nation – like world systems and world literature – by emphasizing flows and migration but also revealing the synergy of cultural and economic aspects of such histories.23

But is it not true that the concept of the transnational existed prior to the term? And are there not other terms in existence that mean the same thing as the ‘transnational’? Why do we need the term ‘transnational’ at all?

3 Term versus concept, comparison with rival terms It is only since the recent phase of accelerated globalisation, arguably beginning with the demise of the bipolar world order in 1989, that the career of the term ‘transnational’ in literary studies began. The following two decades saw a veritable ‘transnational turn’ in the Anglo-American academic world, leading literary critic Donald E. Pease to conclude in 2011 that the term ‘transnational’ has replaced ‘multicultural’, ‘postcolonial’, and ‘postnational’ as the most frequently invoked qualifier. In acquiring this status, the ‘transnational’ has experienced a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spatial and temporal orientations to the object of study [. . .] within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge.24

23 Yogita Goyal, “Introduction: The Transnational Turn,” Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6–7. 24 Donald E. Pease, “Introduction: Remapping the Transnational Turn,” Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011), 4.

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However, the concept of transnationalism arguably existed in the arts and in writing about the arts before the term gained currency in literary and cultural studies. As early as the 1920s, Kurt Schwitters spoke of the Übernationalität (supranationality) of art and literature which, according to a manifesto signed by him, would support the emergence of a Weltnationalgefühl (world national feeling).25 There can be no doubt that Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake follows a transnational poetics which involves selfconscious reflexion on its own transnationalism. The “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” co-authored by Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and André Breton in Mexico City in 1938, spoke of overcoming national and linguistic boundaries, and envisioned modernism as a transnational movement without using the term.26 If there are transnational literary works and movements from before the time when the term gained currency in literary studies, are there also transnational works, genres, and literatures from before the emergence of the nation? Such an application of the term would seem oxymoronic. However, works predating the emergence of the nation are often retrospectively claimed as works that belong to national canons. Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been celebrated as foundational texts of Spanish and English national literatures respectively, with nationwide celebrations in Spain in 2005 on the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote and national celebrations in Britain in 2016 marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The application of the term ‘transnational’ to Cervantes’ and Shakespeare’s texts can meaningfully designate modes of reception, marketing, and critical consideration that resist dominant national frameworks. The relationship between the term and the concept of the transnational is also relevant in a synchronic perspective, as some meanings of rival terms seem to overlap with that of the transnational. The following sketch considers such overlaps and the far greater number of differences between the transnational and other concepts. To begin with, ‘international’ designates interactions and entities that exist, occur, or are carried out between nations. ‘Transnational’ refers to processes or entities that extend or operate across national boundaries. The United Nations is an international organisation; globalisation is a phenomenon that, driven by transnational companies and global flows of money and goods, takes place across national

25 See Benedikt Hjartarson, “Anationalism and the Search for a Universal Language: Esperantism and the European Avantgarde,” Decentring the Avant-Garde, ed. Per Bäckström and Benedikt Hjartarson (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 283. 26 See Hubert van den Berg, “‘Übernationalität’ der Avantgarde – (Inter)Nationalität der Forschung. Hinweis auf den internationalen Konstruktivismus in der europäischen Literatur und die Problematik ihrer literaturwissenschaftlichen Erfassung,” Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer: Avantgarde, Avantgardekritik, Avantgardeforschung, ed. Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 264, and Mark Byron, “Introduction: Parallax Visions of Transnational Modernisms,” Affirmations 4.1 (2016), 12.

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borders. Any shift from the ‘international’ to the ‘transnational’ implies a shift of agency from the nation to that which supersedes it. Some critics propose that ‘transnational’ should replace the qualifier ‘postcolonial’ and contend that the postcolonial paradigm perpetuates colonial discourse and overemphasises the effects of colonisation on literature written in former colonies. In these critics’ view, the concept of the transnational allows them to leave behind the centre-periphery model that informs the postcolonial paradigm.27 However, the idea that the ‘transnational’ could replace the ‘postcolonial’ depends on a distorted idea of postcolonial literature. I follow Neil Lazarus who, in The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), shows how the dominance of postcolonial theory inspired by poststructuralism has led to a canon of ‘postcolonial’ works concerned with hybridity, migrancy, and liminality. The most canonical of these works, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, have repeatedly been read as portrayals of migrancy, the malleability of history, and hybridity, whereas works by authors writing in postcolonial societies and concerned with far more local issues have been neglected.28 Lazarus observes that although most works of postcolonial literature continue to explore and critique local rather than transnational class relations and economic exploitation as late effects of colonialism,29 criticism has continued to focus on novels that suggest class to be less important in the formation of postcolonial subjectivities than hybrid cultural, linguistic, and transnational affiliations. These novels by migrants from the Global South educated at European and North American universities can indeed much better be described using the qualifier ‘transnational,’ as they are typically concerned with migration and the emergence of what we have above defined as transnational consciousness. The works legitimately referred to as ‘postcolonial literature’ have little do with transnational themes or aesthetics, nor do their authors typically possess a transnational identity. The idea of a literature that transcends national and national-linguistic borders is as old as Goethe’s proclamation that “[n]ational literature means little now, the age of world literature has begun; and everyone should further its course.”30 The renewed debate in the last two decades on the concept of world literature has coincided with the emergence of the concept of the transnational in literary studies,

27 See, for example, Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” 17–22, for arguments along these lines. 28 See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21–23. 29 See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 40. 30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Some passages pertaining to the concept of world literature,” Comparative Literature: The Early Years, ed. H.-J. Schulz and P. Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 6.

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and there are, in fact, overlaps concerning the reception of texts.31 This becomes particularly clear in David Damrosch’s influential What is World Literature? (2003), a book that revived the idea of world literature by defining it via reception instead of focusing on the aesthetic attributes of texts. World literature, according to Damrosch, are works that spread and are read beyond their place of origin.32 For at least as long as nations have existed, these works have been received transnationally either in translation or in their original language, a fact that is as true of One Thousand and One Nights as it is of the novels of Michel Houellebecq. However, the identity of authors of world literature, its themes and aesthetics, are not necessarily, and not even frequently, transnational. Nor does a critical practice of ‘reading for world literature’ overlap with ‘reading transnationally’: whereas criticism that seeks to identify works of world literature will always produce a canon of works (excluding works that are not world literature), the critical practice of reading transnationally, as proposed by Berman, Fluck, and others, can be applied to all texts without establishing a canon. Finally, the ‘transnational’ is sometimes used in ways similar to the term ‘cosmopolitan’ (or its recently prominent subcategory ‘Afropolitan’). ‘Cosmopolitanism’ is a notoriously vague term that, according to Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, can stand for a socio-political condition, a philosophy or worldview, a political project for creating transnational institutions, a political project that allows people to act upon their multiple subject positions, the cultivation of an attitude, or the ability to deal with others in the world.33 In his influential The Cosmopolitan Imagination (2009), Gerard Delanty therefore makes a plea for a more concise definition of cosmopolitanism. For him, cosmopolitanism is an attitude towards the world which problematises one’s own assumptions as well the those of others vis-à-vis a perspective on the world.34 Cosmopolitanism in Delanty’s sense overlaps with what I have described as ‘transnational identities’ insofar as a particular self-identification is concerned, but not with the identity of a group as it is known to others (for example, the ‘Turkish-German community,’ the ‘Indian-American diaspora,’ etc.). It is precisely

31 The first landmark work in the recent debate on world literature was Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), originally published in French in 1999 as La Republique Mondiale des Lettres (Seuil). Later important contributions include David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London and New York: Verso, 2013), Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), and Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016). 32 See David Damrosch, What is World Literature? 4–5. 33 See Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–14. 34 See Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16.

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for these social groups, migratory movements, and phenomena of cultural diversity that Delanty reserves the term ‘transnational.’ Delanty argues that observable transnational phenomena such as migration, hybridisation, and globalisation “can be a significant precondition for cosmopolitanism, without being necessarily a cause.”35 In contrast to the listed transnational phenomena, the ‘cosmopolitan’ attitude involves a normative dimension.36 Delanty is here by and large in agreement with another sociological distinction between cosmopolitanism and transnationalism proposed by Victor Roudemetof in 2005. The latter conceives of both in terms of different layers, arguing that some ‘transnationals’ are inclined towards cosmopolitanism while others prefer localism: “the specification of a continuum that consists of different degrees of attachment allows the researcher to view cosmopolitanism and local predispositions as relationships of degree, and not as absolutes.”37 Delanty’s and Roudemetof’s notions of transnationalism coincide with uses of the term in literary studies to describe the identity of hybrid social groups. Vice versa, uses of the ‘transnational’ in literary studies to describe the self-identification of authors and characters are similar to Delanty’s and Roudemetof’s notions of cosmopolitanism. Similar but not identical: a transnational self-identification is not necessarily a cosmopolitan one, as it can be far more limited. Self-identifying as a European, for example, would be a transnational self-identification without being a cosmopolitan one. Goyal points out that ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘global,’ and ‘world’ are more often wrongly applied to the phenomena they seek to describe than is ‘transnational.’ ‘Cosmopolitan,’ ‘global,’ and ‘world’ have a triumphant ring to them that makes it hard for those who use them to take a critical position towards globalisation in its cultural and economic forms. By contrast, ‘transnational’ is more modest and apt insofar as it checks optimism about a globalised future by reminding us of the fact that nations and national boundaries are, for good or for worse, still powerful barriers to the global flow of people and ideas. Acknowledging the remaining power of national frames is all the more important as theorisations of globalisation in literary and cultural studies such as Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large have overlooked this remaining power by welcoming globalisation as a process in which cultures become hybrid across national boundaries, in which culture supersedes the nation as provider of communal ties.38 These theories too sweepingly claimed that globalisation entails the replacement of national with cosmopolitan self-identification.

35 Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 83. 36 See Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 82. 37 Victor Roudometof, “Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Glocalization,” Current Sociology 53.1 (2005), 123. 38 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

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4 Criticisms of the transnational However, the concept of the transnational has been accused of complicity with the economic forces behind globalisation, too. Transnational corporations – or TNCs – have for decades dominated the world’s economic system and were identified as the driving forces behind globalisation and as the main example of transnationalism before the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transnationalism’ became popular in literary and cultural studies towards the end of the twentieth century.39 The assumption that the term ‘transnational’ owes its very existence to economic thought sounds plausible. However, the first use of the term can be traced to an article entitled “Trans-National America” published by Randolph Bourne in Atlantic Monthly in 1916, in which the author argued that immigrants to America did not fully assimilate into Anglo-Saxon culture (as the image of the ‘melting-pot’ suggested) but partly held on to their own cultures, with the result that US society can be described as ‘trans-national’: as a society in which the cultures of the world mix and potentially give rise to a cosmopolitan outlook.40 The meaning of Bourne’s coinage is thus closer to present applications of the term to individual and collective identities in literary and cultural studies than it is to the term’s later economic applications. Still, transnational corporations and globalisation stand for the circumvention of national borders by capital and thus, among other things, for tax avoidance and for blackmail politics that threaten to relocate capital and labour to low-wage areas around the globe. There is an inner tension between cultural and economic meanings in the term ‘transnationalism’ that has prompted some scholars to argue that the academic discourse on transnationalism could help to reinforce neoliberal values. Postcolonial scholar Robert C. Young writes: [T]he concept of “transnationalism” [. . .] has enjoyed something of an academic vogue in the twenty-first century. Its valorisation of activities and networks that move across nations rather than within them is certainly hostile to the nationalist values of the nation-state, which might seem to be “progressive”. At the same time, however, one of the aims of globalization is also to break down the power of the nation-state in order to facilitate ever greater transnational flows of labor, commodities, and finance. Transnationalism holds no contrapuntal argument of resistance to such processes at its core [. . .]. [T]ransnationalism, while challenging the power of the nation-state, charts or facilitates the processes of globalization at the same time. For the most part, discussions of cosmopolitanism also espouse a way of being that, whether for the cosmopolitan elite or the cosmopolitan non-elite of the world’s millions of migrant workers, constitutes the precise ideology of the global free-labor market that neoliberal capitalism desires.41

39 See, for example, Peter Dicken, Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity (London: Paul Chapman, 1992) and Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (London: Prentice Hall, 1995). 40 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (1916), 86–97. 41 Robert J. C. Young, Empire, Colony, Postcolony (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 127.

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Young’s critique only holds force if not applied to all uses of the qualifier ‘transnational’ (to describe identities, themes, aesthetics, reception, or marketing). His use of the verb ‘valorisation’ and the ‘ism’ in ‘transnationalism’ signal that Young critiques idealisations of the transnational which go beyond what I have described as a ‘critical perspective.’ He reminds us that not all transnational activities are to be welcomed. Few academics would object to Young’s claim that globalisation is transnational and has highly problematic aspects. More disconcerting is the suggestion that one cannot use the concept of the transnational to overcome national perspectives without implicitly supporting neoliberal capitalism. Johannes Völz has warned that economic and cultural forms of globalisation may not be as separable from each other as literary critics often believe. The transnationalism of these critics, Völz argues, declares itself to be a method of reading but also favours and focuses on transnational phenomena such as migration and forms of hybridity (see Jay’s book). Even more pertinently, this transnationalism is indebted to economic globalisation. For Völz, the upshot is not that transnationalism as a method of reading is to be abandoned, but that it needs to be used more self-reflexively.42 This demand is especially pressing in an age when transnationalism marks a position in the divisive struggle between left and right, and when right-wing politics are adopting formerly left-wing anti-globalist positions and maligning proponents of transnationalism as advocates of economic globalisation.43 Besides the dangers of idealisation and of politically naïve use, a further danger inherent to the concept of the transnational is its wide applicability. Like the concept of world literature, the concept of the transnational is ‘presentist’ insofar as it describes literary phenomena that are far more common today than they were in the past. In our era, which text does not travel beyond its place of origin? Which text is not world literature? Which text does not have aesthetic features that can be described as transnational or does not deal with themes that can be called so? The problem here is obviously that there are no sharp qualitative criteria for drawing these distinctions and that quantitative measures are relative. No critic would deny that some texts are better described using the term ‘transnational’ than others, but the basic problem remains. As Yogita Goyal has argued, the concept’s inflationary use can support an elision of historical differences and local specificities in support of superficial comparisons and appraisals of hybridity that are vacuous due to their universality. The qualifier ‘transnational’ may also come to serve as a neutral cover for Americanisation or Europeanisation – for example when the Euro-American canon, with only few ethnic exceptions, is referred to as ‘the transnational canon.’44 Critics must keep these dangers in mind.

42 See Johannes Völz, “Utopias of Transnationalism and the Neoliberal State,” Re-Framing the Transnational in American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011), 356–373. 43 See Johannes Völz, “Transnationalism and Anti-Globalism,” College Literature 44.4 (2017), 522–526. 44 See Yogita Goyal, “Introduction,” 6.

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One might finally object that the term ‘transnational,’ by encompassing the national, perpetuates the national even if negatively as a category to be overcome. This form of critique has been familiar at least since the debates on the terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘postcolonial,’ which allegedly perpetuate modernism and colonialism. The answer must be that we cannot get rid of notions – and nations! – by keeping silent about them. That which remains unspoken is allowed to go without saying and becomes an unquestioned framework of the critic’s mind.

5 Synopses of chapters The following synopses indicate how the chapters of this volume explore the potential and limitations of the concept of the transnational. Part 1 of this volume is dedicated to “The ‘Transnational’ Amongst Related Concepts in Theory and Marketing.” In “Mixed Attachments in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971),” Anna M. Horatschek argues that ‘transnational’ describes the play’s poetics far better than ‘postcolonial.’ While India’s Karnad is considered a postcolonial playwright in the West, his play’s formal features are inspired by theatrical traditions from East and West, and its intertextual use of Thomas Mann’s (originally Hindu) story “The Transposed Heads” (Die vertauschten Köpfe) draws on a transnational template of sources. It also resists classification as Indian ‘national’ theatre by adapting conventions of classical Sanskrit as well as the oral Kannada Yakshagana folk theatre. Horatschek also points out a potentially problematic aspect of transnational methods of reading when she demonstrates how radically different her reading is from Indian interpretations of the play. In her chapter “Transnational Challenges for World Literatures: Publishing Caribbean Writers,” Gesine Müller shows that recent attempts to define ‘world literature’ and ‘literatures of the world’ have been characterised by implicit assumptions of Western hegemony – even though these attempts critically address the institutional, economic hegemony of the Global North vis-à-vis the South. Müller then engages in a conceptual reconsideration of polycentric dynamics in the context of the agenda of ‘literatures of the world.’ She argues that the concept of the transnational is instrumental to overcoming the differentiation of centre and periphery, which underlies even recent approaches to ‘world literature’ and ‘literatures of the world.’ The example of Caribbean literatures illustrates the potential of the concept as well as the mechanisms of selection in globally active publishing houses. Cecile Sandten’s chapter “‘Transnational Decolonial Aesthetics’: The ‘Hottentot Venus’ Re-Configured” relates the concept of the transnational to the postcolonial and to decolonisation and charts a “transnational decolonial aesthetics” (as suggested by Walter Mignolo’s Transnational Decolonial Institute of Duke University) by discussing artistic representations of the black female body as a transnational phenomenon. Drawing on Mignolo’s notions of “decolonial thinking and doing” and “epistemic

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disobedience” as subversive and counter-hegemonic writing strategies, Sandten offers a decolonial reading of the historical narrative of Sarah Baartman as the “Hottentot Venus” in early nineteenth-century England and France in conjunction with the dramatic rewrite in Venus (1997) by Suzan-Lori Parks, the art installation “Sa Main Charmante” (1989) by Renée Green, the “Hommage à Sarah Bartman,” a live performance by Teresa María Díaz Nerio (2007; 2012), and the live performance “The Painful Cake” (2012) by Afro-Swedish queer artist Makode Aj Linde. In “Precariously Transnational: Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief,” Cordula Lemke examines how the narrator of Teju Cole’s novel both employs and questions a colonising form of exoticism from a hegemonic, transnational perspective. Dealing with the narrator’s temporary return to his homeland in the form of a travelblog, this illustrated description reinforces its promise of authenticity by means of quasiautobiographical insertions which initially obstruct the reader’s view of the colonising attributions of the narrative perspective, but then reinforce it. Lemke shows that only the narrator’s meeting with his former girlfriend leads to the experience of a renewed belonging to his hometown and to the fading of exoticising strategies. And yet, she argues, the transnationalism of one’s own perspective becomes the object of negotiation and the hegemonic construction of identity the precarious place of one’s own vulnerability, which the narrator can only evade through renewed spatial distance. The world of publishing is the focus of Lucia Krämer’s chapter “The Discursive Construction of Transnational Fiction on Penguin Random House Group Websites,” in which she reflects on the term and the concept of the transnational as a marketing instrument. Examining the websites randomhouse.de, penguin.co.uk, and knopfdoubleday.com in terms of the roles that the sites accord to the national and to transnationalism as discursive concepts, Krämer shows that while all the publishers’ self-presentations contain at least implicit messages about their transnational scope, the transnational novels in the portfolios are not foregrounded. Novels that contain transnational story elements or themes, or whose authors’ biographies are marked by transnationalism, emerge as a special kind of fiction nonetheless because they are predominantly associated with the labels ‘world literature’ and ‘literary fiction’ rather than ‘fiction.’ Transnationalism in authors’ biographies and as a topic in literary fiction is thus constructed normatively as an indirect signal of literary quality. Part 2 consists of chapters charting “Transnational Literary Histories” as a specific field of transnational methodologies of reading. Jacqueline Dutton’s “Utopia, Limited: Transnational Utopianism and Intercultural Imaginaries of the Ideal” starts with observations on the significant impact of Thomas More’s “Utopia” across European, North and South American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Oceanian representations of the ideal place in literature. The concept of utopia, Dutton argues, has been transnational since the formal inception of the genre in 1516, but the existence of intercultural imaginaries of the ideal in literature and practice both predates and runs parallel to this Judeo-Christian concept. Dutton explores the dilemmas of recognising literary genres like “utopia” in transnational literatures and traces the potential and limitations of

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transnational utopianism in “non-Western” literatures through reference to ancient and contemporary examples of French, Japanese, and indigenous Australian literatures. She examines the ways in which traditional utopian genre dynamics play out in the transnational field as intercultural imaginaries of the ideal. Martina Groß’ chapter “Travel Literature and/as Transnational Theatre History – Beyond National Theatre Cultures” points to an apparent contradiction between early modern theatre practice and theatre historiography. Although the production of knowledge about early modern theatre originated in travelogues (by actors, authors, spectators, philosophers, etc.), theatre served as a medium of national culture and led to the persistent omission of travel literature and travelogues in a mainly nationally oriented theatre historiography. However, as Groß argues, early modern travelogues by Montaigne, Platter, and Voltaire can help to close the gap between early modern theatre practice as a transnational phenomenon and the tradition of an essentially national theatre theory and historiography. Groß demonstrates that, with regard to both travel literature and the development of the theatre, these interferences shed new light not only on theatre historiography from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They also provide insights into the complex and ever-changing literary genre of travel writing and enrich current debates on cultural encounters by questioning the concept of national theatre culture. Laura Rivas Gagliardi’s chapter “Transnationally Forged Nationality: Le Brésil littéraire and the Writing of Literary History in the Nineteenth Century” reads the first history of Brazilian literature by Ferdinand Wolf (1863) as a result of the transnational relations between the Brazilian and the Habsburg Empires. Wolf locates Brazilian literature within the pantheon of Weltliteratur, attributing literary, cultural, and political autonomy to Brazil despite the fact that it remained a colonised country until recently. In an analysis of the context of the book’s publication as well as of some excerpts of the work, Gagliardi reveals the ideological purpose behind the writing of literary history and how, even if it is a transnational process, it can serve as an instrument in projects of nation-building and the formation of national identity. The chapters in Part 3 focus on the “Poetics and Politics of Transnational Genres.” Lukas Lammers begins his chapter “Historical Horizons: The Historical Novel and Transnational Memory” with the argument that the enduring importance of concepts such as ‘re-writing’ and ‘writing back’ testifies to the widespread understanding that postcolonial literature is a particular form of historiography. So far, as Lammers argues, discussions of postcolonial historical fiction have largely reaffirmed the traditional view that the historical novel is central to imagining a national community. Focusing on a historical period that is commonly associated with Eurocentric and decidedly nationalist narratives – World War II – his chapter demonstrates that the term ‘transnationalism’ helps throw into relief a spectrum of recent literary reactions to a historical situation which pushed nationalist identifications to extremes. Lammers analyses how, on the one hand, postcolonial historical novels recalibrate

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nationalist narratives of the war and how they, on the other, draw attention to the use and construction of transnationally shared historical memory. Dobrota Pucherova’s chapter “Re-Centring European Geopolitics: Transnational Identities in the Twenty-First-Century Hungarian-language Novel from Slovakia” reads two postmodern historical novels from Slovakia by Hungarian-minority authors as transnational texts: Nálunk, New Hontban (2001) by Lajos Grendel and Határeset (2008) by Péter Hunčík. Set in southern Slovakia where state borders repeatedly shifted over the course of the twentieth century, both novels emphasise the hybridity of identities in Central Europe, where many ethnicities have been commingling in a relatively small space for centuries. By describing how nationalist discourses have led to ethnic hatred, colonial practices, and genocide, Pucherova argues, the texts point out the impossibility of writing a unified, chronological, progressive narrative of the nation and show the histories of European nations as deeply entangled in transnational webs of meaning. By retelling twentieth-century European history from the point of view of a historically, geographically, and culturally marginal region, the novels rearrange European geopolitics and question the idea of ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ in the European context. The chapter reads the texts as paradigmatic of twenty-first-century literature from Slovakia that considers the idea of the nation-state in the Central European context deeply problematic. My chapter “Transnational Migrant Fiction as World Literature: Identity, Translatability, and the Global Book Market” charts the genre of transnational migration fiction, in which the creation of migrant identities resembles a collage of cultural elements from both the home and target cultures. Discussing Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, this chapter demonstrates how the modelling of identity in this genre is related to its function in the global book market: transnational migrant fiction is read around the world because it provides insight into foreign cultures, which makes it a particular kind of world literature as defined by David Damrosch. I argue that the genre suggests a continuity between the world of the Western reader and the foreign culture, creating the impression of a general human situation, the local characteristics of which remain translatable. In the final chapter, “Translinguistic Theatre for a Globalized Stage?” Thomas Hunkeler explores the links between transnationalism and translingualism in contemporary theatre. He argues that the rapid internationalisation and festivalisation of the European theatre scene since the 1980s has brought forth new forms of transnational theatre in which language often plays a minor role. And yet, as Hunkeler argues, some theatre directors and companies such as Milo Rau, Yael Ronen, and the collective Rimini Protokoll seek to explore new forms of linguistic interaction onstage. Their translinguistic theatre systematically exposes several languages on stage, reflects on new forms of community, and thereby adapts theatre to the multicultural world we live in.

Anna M. Horatschek

Mixed Attachments in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971) Abstract: In India, Girish Karnad is famous as a playwright, actor, poet, director, critic, and translator; in the West, he is considered a ‘postcolonial author.’ But his most famous play Hayavadana contests this normative definition of Euro-American provenance through the choice of genre, formal traits inspired by theatrical traditions from East and West, and intertextual references to Thomas Mannʼs – originally Hindu – story “The Transposed Heads” (Die vertauschten Köpfe) and to the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer. At the same time, by adapting the conventions of classical Sanskrit as well as oral Kannada Yakshagana folk theatre, the drama resists the concept of a homogeneous ‘national theatre’ in India, suggesting a transnational perspective. The concept of a nation is further undermined by the character constellation and the structure of the drama, staging intra-national struggles about highly politicised claims to interpretative authority between a classical Sanskrit and oral Bhasha traditions of culturally and politically marginalised tribes and lower castes, and along gender lines, with the only female character on stage being consistently suppressed in all respects. However, this reading contradicts the majority of interpretations from Indian academia, thus illustrating fundamental issues of ‘transnational hermeneutics,’ which are addressed at the end of this chapter.

1 Framing the conceptual field In India, Girish Karnad is considered “one of India’s brightest shining stars, earning international acclaim as a playwright, poet, actor, director, critic, and translator,”1 who is praised for “moulding legendary tales for the contemporary audience in an effort to forge a modern Indian theatre idiom” and “putting Indian theatre on the international map.”2 In addition to a number of awards for his films, Karnad won the Padma Shri in 1974 and the Sahitya Academy award in 1994. However, he is hardly known in German academia due to the reductive canonisation of a small body of texts as ‘Indian Literature in English’ for the Western literary market, which is focused on the novel with a predominance of diasporic novelists whose representations of India tend to affirm the expectations of Western readers.

1 Kaustav Chakraborty, “Introduction. Representative Playwrights of Indian English Drama,” Indian Drama in English (Delhi: PHI Learning Private Limited, 2014), 8. 2 Dattatreya Datta, “Hayavadana. A Theatre-Goer’s Response,” Indian Drama in English, 158, 171. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-002

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1.1 “Like other ‘isms’”: Postcolonialism Karnad’s dramas are grouped under the category of ‘post-colonial Indian theatre,’3 with or without “that potent hyphen.”4 However, there are many reasons against labelling Karnad as postcolonial author, many of them exposing problems of “the critical category of ‘postcolonial literature’ which [...] maps only imperfectly the literary terrain it is intended to describe,” in contradistinction to postcolonial literatures as cultural practice, an “internally varied and excitingly heterogeneous field.”5 ‘Postcolonial theory’ and ‘postcolonial studies’ from the 1980s onward have been re-signified to answer multiple challenges charted in detail by Vijay Mishra,6 because from their inception in the 1970s as an academic discipline by South Asian intellectuals, many of them in English departments or in newly created ‘postcolonial studies’ clusters in the United States, they were characterised by the imbalance of power between historically colonising and colonised cultures. The conclusions drawn from the discussions of the past decades are widely divergent. Thus, Farrier and Tuitt characterise the postcolonial project as a search for what Agamben refers to as potentiality, the “yet-to-be-realized paradigm,”7 while for Dengel-Janic and Reinfandt, postcoloniality is an outdated paradigm due to “the shift from intercultural relationships, postcolonialism and multiculturalism to (trans-)cultural studies (cf. Huggan 2004) and, more generally, from hybridity into transculturality that has been debated in the last decade or so (cf. for example, Welsch 1999, Schulze-Engler 2007, Schulze-Engler/Helff 2009, as well as the last section in Stilz/Dengel-Janic 2010, 215–40, entitled ‘Transcultural Perspectives’).”8 Among Indian intellectuals like Ashis Nandy, Ganesh Devy, Harish Trivedi, A. K. Singh, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Prakesh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, concepts of ‘postcoloniality’ are perceived as conceptual tools for scholarly analyses derived from a globalised vocabulary of Western origin and therefore 3 See for example Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011); Helen Gilbert, Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology (London: Routledge, 2001); Christopher B. Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Brian Crow and Chris Banfield, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What Was Postcolonialism?” New Literary History 36.3 (2005), 377. For the historically specific semantics of the version with or without hyphen, see Vijay Mishra, “Postcolonialism 2010–2014,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50.3 (2015), 369–390, esp. 369–371. 5 John McLeod, “Postcolonialism and Literature,” The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 451, 456. 6 Vijay Mishra, “Postcolonialism 2010–2014,” 369–390. 7 David Farrier and Patricia Tuitt, “Beyond Biopolitics: Agamben, Asylum, and Postcolonial Critique,” The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, 256. 8 Ellen Dengel-Janic and Christoph Reinfandt, “Voice and Perception in Transcultural Realities: The Case of India,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 61 (2013), Special Issue Voice and Perception in Transcultural Realities: Focus on India, 2.

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entrenched in asymmetries of political and economic power, and of social and cultural capital on a global scale. Accordingly, A. K. Singh sees postcolonialism as one of the greatest swindles in the history of contemporary criticism, to be matched only by postmodernism. [. . .] Like other ‘isms’, it comes to us by post or poste as part of the grand Western project that treats the rest of the world as the data or guinea pigs supplying the terms and criteria of measurement or evaluation of others. It is neither our category nor our agenda.9

In light of these conceptual problems, Huggan opts for “a ‘new’ postcolonialism that looks much more like the work being done in transnational cultural studies than in Commonwealth literary studies.”10 My chapter, however, proposes to discard the term ‘postcolonialism’ altogether in favour of ‘transnationalism’ with a view to Karnad’s drama Hayavadana.11 Regarding “the identity and self-perception of authors,” Karnad sees himself as part of that “generation [. . .] after India became independent of British rule [which] had to face [. . .] tensions between the cultural past of the country and its colonial past [. . .] and [. . .] between the attractions of Western modes of thought and our own traditions.”12 With Hayavadana, he has written a “trans- and multilingual work [. . .]” that has been translated into various Indian as well as non-Indian languages and that is “circulating beyond its place of origin.”13 Thus for example a German version of Hayavadana was directed by Vijaya Mehta at the German National Theatre, Weimar, in 1984. Additionally, and more importantly, however, the drama itself challenges notions of postcoloniality and nationality in terms of form as well as topic: Hayavadana contests normative definitions of ‘postcolonial literature’ of Euro-American provenance implicitly through the choice of genre, formal traits inspired by theatrical traditions from East and West, and intertextual references to Thomas Mann and the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer. At the same time, however, the concept of a unified Indian national literature is subverted on an intratextual level by formal devices of the Kannada Yakshagana, “a Dravidian theatre for the lower classes enacted by lower class people,”14 and – with a special focus on the title hero Hayavadana – by the constellation of exemplary characters, who represent specific subject positions in terms of caste, 9 Avadhesh Kumar Singh. “Towards an Indian Theory of Post-colonialism,” Revisiting Literature, Criticism, and Aesthetics in India (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 2012), 387. 10 Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34. 11 Girish Karnad, “Hayavadana,” Three Plays: Naga-Mandala. Hayavadana. Tughlaq (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 67–141. Page numbers in brackets after citations refer to this edition. 12 Girish Karnad, “Author’s Introduction,” Three Plays: Naga-Mandala. Hayavadana. Tughlaq, 2. 13 See Call for Articles “‘Transnationalʼ: Potential and Limitations of a Concept in Literary Studies,” issued in 2018 by the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, Freie Universität Berlin. https://www.fabula.org/actualites/call-for-articles-transnationalpotential-and-limitations-of-a-concept-in-literary-studies_82258.php 14 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture: A Study of the Post-Independence Indian Drama (Delhi: Authorspress, 2008), 117.

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gender, and cultural authority in India. In order to illustrate these theses, my chapter will at first interpret the significance of genre and the intra- and international intertextuality of Hayavadana as a critical comment on normative definitions of ‘postcolonial’ and ‘national’ literatures. I shall then address the negotiations of an Indian nationality in specific character constellations and the storyline of the drama, and finally I shall raise a few questions concerning problems of ‘transnational readings,’ “going beyond the nation [and] adopting a broadly comparative, transnational approach.”15 However, before turning to the analysis of the drama, I shall supply some information about and a summary of the plot of Hayavadana and its formal particularities.

1.2 The drama Girish Karnad published “his landmark play” Hayavadana (1971) in Kannada, and in 1975 translated it himself into – deliberately – Indian English,16 while retaining specific words from several Indian languages. The plotline negotiates German writer Thomas Mann’s short story “Die vertauschten Köpfe” (The Transposed Heads) (1940), a modernist philosophical and psychological treatment of a Hindu folk tale from an eleventh-century Sanskrit collection of frame stories, each story containing multiple short parables within it. Like the pretexts, Karnad’s intertext focuses on the triangular relationship between two young men – called Devadatta and Kapila in Karnad’s drama – and a young woman called Sita. Devadatta, a learned Brahmin’s son, has his friend Kapila, son of an iron-smith, woo in his stead for Sita. Though Kapila and Sita fall in love with each other, Sita marries the high-caste Devadatta and becomes pregnant. On a joint journey, Devadatta finds the temple of the goddess Kali and fulfils his former promise to sacrifice his head if he should win Sita. On finding his friend dead, Kapila also cuts off his head. When Sita, upon seeing husband and friend in their blood is about to stab herself, Kali grants her power to revive the young men. However, Sita attaches the wrong head to the wrong body, and in the ensuing debate with her newly composed companions about who now is her rightful husband, she obtains the person with Devadatta’s learned head and with Kapila’s beautiful body. Yet when Devadatta’s new body becomes slack from lack of exercise, Sita with her son escapes to the woods to stay with Kapila, whose new body from constant exertion has come to resemble his former body. After Devadatta discovers the lovers, the men decide to kill each other in a duel, and Sita resolves to become a sati and burn on the funeral pyre of her husband.

15 Graham Huggan, Australian Literature, 151, 145. 16 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 112, 168.

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This story is framed by the highly disruptive story of the title hero Hayavadana, a man with a horse head. He appears on stage while the character of the Bhagavata performs the traditional opening ceremonies of Indian theatre in praise of the god Ganesha, and interrupts these rituals with his noisy demeanor and uncouth language. Hayavadana tells of various attempts to get rid of the horse’s head, and counters the Bhagavata’s pious advice with derogatory comments and general resistance to the rules of an ordered theatre performance. Without this problem being resolved, the story proper starts, and after some metaleptic appearances of the Bhagavata as stage director in the embedded story, Hayavadana’s fate is picked up again when the funeral rites after Sita’s death signalled a fake ending. Hayavadana tells that in the interim the goddess Kali by mistake turned his entire body into a horse, except for his human voice. When his excessive laughter, enticed by Sita’s son who joins the all-male cast of the frame story, eventually turns into a horse’s neighing, the Bhagavata closes the drama with giving thanks to Ganesha for granting completeness to everybody. With this frame, Hayavadana is one of the first modern Indian plays to include conventions of theatrical performance laid down in the classical Sanskrit Natyashastra, traditions of oral folk theatre in India, and features of Berthold Brecht’s, Jean Anouilh’s, and Antonin Artaud’s drama theories.

2 Postcolonialism – Nationality – Transnationality Hayavadana – and this is my central thesis – by its genre, assembly of dramatic strategies, and the complex network of inter- and intranational intertextual constellations resists the category of ‘postcolonial literature’ and simultaneously subverts any attempts to subsume the play under the rubric of an Indian national theatre. My interpretation will start with an analysis of the dramatic genre as a critical comment on the Euro-American concept of ‘postcolonial literature,’ before turning to Hayavadana’s formal particularities, which expose any claim to a ‘national Indian theatre’ as an imaginary concept.

2.1 ‘Indian literature is a historian’s despair’: Genre and ‘postcolonial literature’ Mishra and Hodge correctly claim that “beneath post-colonial literature lies the might of the novel form,”17 imported via colonialism to India. In contradistinction, Karnad with the genre of the drama works in an art form which in India has been central for elite brahminical as well as folk traditions of cultural production for millennia. 17 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What Is Post(-)colonialism?” Textual Practice 5 (1991), 404.

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Hayavadana comprises both these traditions. On the one hand, the drama adheres to formal traits laid down in the Sanskrit Natyashastra, as it “opens with an offering of worship accompanied by singing to the god Ganesha by a narrator-figure called the Bhagavata, as the ritual worship and singing with which every Sanskrit play begins.”18 The Natyashastra up to today – erroneously – is considered the foundational text of Indian aesthetics. Due to the very selective studies and translation of Indian texts by nineteenth-century Indologists in Germany and England, whose general merits for opening up the occidental imagination to Indian traditions can hardly be overestimated, the widespread conviction arose that the only literary tradition in India was written in Sanskrit and always closely interrelated with religious texts. In contradistinction, Ganesh Devy points out that [t]he oldest among the living literary languages in India, Tamil, has a continuous history of three thousand years. The youngest among the literary languages in India, English, has a history [. . .] of not more than two hundred years. [. . .] Kannada has a literary history of fifteen hundred years, Marathi about eight hundred years, and Oriya five hundred years.19

Yet because of these occidental preconceptions, rare attempts to take into account Indian traditions of literary aesthetics20 privilege the classical Sanskrit tradition expounded in the Natyashastra, which was supposedly assembled before Aristotle’s Poetics by the sage Bharata Muni in a first compilation between 200 BCE and 200 CE, with estimates stretching from 500 BCE to 500 CE.21 The text offers a highly elaborate, normative system of rules for dramatic performance, their application to the analysis of prose texts was performed by the tenth-century Indian philosopher, mystic, and poetologist Abhinavagupta in the course of interpreting the Ramayana. On the other hand, Hayavadana utilises characteristics of the Yakshagana theatre of Karnataka, a traditional Indian folk drama, which Karnad witnessed as a child and which deeply impressed him.22 Like other oral theatre conventions, Yakshagana features the traditional Indian narration-oriented episodic style of the theatre rather than the western causation-character-conflict-based plotting of the action [. . .] with folk entertainment elements

18 K. L. George, S. J., “Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana Revisited,” Indian Drama in English (Delhi: PHI Learning Private Limited, 2014), 138. George at another place suggests that the Bhagavata might also be seen as a figure “from a typical Yakshagana play” (134). 19 Ganesh N. Devy, ‘Of Many Heroes’: An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography (Hyderabad: Orient Longman Limited, 1998), 1. 20 See for example M. S. Kushwaha (ed), Indian Poetics and Western Thought (Lucknow: Argo Publishing House, 1988); Edward C. Jr. Dimock, The Sound of Silent Guns and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Vijay Mishra, “Postcolonialism 2010–2014,” 369–390. 21 Cf. Wallace Dace, “The Concept of ‘Rasa’ in Sanskrit Dramatic Theory,” Educational Theatre Journal 15.3, (1963), 249. 22 Cf. Girish Karnad, “Author’s Introduction,” 1.

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such as the Muppet-horse and the talking marionettes, a pseudo-Grecian chorus [. . .] and physical actions (mime, mimetic dance, sword-fight) [. . .].23

Karnad’s focus on “traditional forms [. . .] to revitalize our own work in the urban context”24 redresses a central shortcoming of postcolonial approaches, which “ignore[d] the premodern, and define[d] the modern attitude as a largely European historical event (which the Enlightenment itself was).”25 Despite their theoretical interest in subalternity, even the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective, starting with Ranajit Guha in the 1980s, neglected the multilingual regional subcultures in India and literatures that “challenge the Sanskrit tradition, question religious beliefs, reform social attitudes, and reshape literary expression all over India.”26 Thus, with the choice of the dramatic genre and the adaptation of the Yakshagana theatre, Karnad underscores historically and socially central art forms of India, both of which have been neglected by postcolonial theory. The intense debates among Indian scholars about whether these Bhasha texts can be incorporated in the system of the classical Sanskrit tradition or whether they pose a threat to its premises27 hardly ever come to the attention of Western academics. The politically charged status of these disputes becomes obvious considering that ultimately “it is difficult to specify anything called folk forms. They all involve rigorous training under gurus that the classical forms possess as their feature.”28 Generically, as Vatsyayan illustrates, classical forms “developed within the framework of agricultural and other life functions and particular social organisations and [were] taken over in an urban milieu, though only after they have been dissociated from their original agricultural functions.”29 Taking these historical as well as social interminglings of classical and folk forms into account, Paranjape maintains that Indian texts in English need to be read alongside “con-texts written in the vernacular languages of India, [. . .] containing the contrary portrayals of India in juxtaposition to which Indian English literature is best understood.”30

23 Dattatreya Datta, “Hayavadana: A Theatre-Goer’s Response,” 158. 24 Girish Karnad, “Author’s Introduction,” 12. 25 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What Was Postcolonialism?,” 376. 26 Revathi Krishnaswamy, “Toward World Literary Knowledges: Theory in the Age of Globalization,” World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Malden and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 146. 27 Cf. Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred? Oppressive or Liberating? Dead or Alive? (Noida and London: Harper Collins Publishers India, 2016). 28 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 12. 29 Kapila Vatsyayan, Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams (New Delhi: National Book Trust of India, 1980), 4. 30 Makarand Paranjape, “Indian Anglophony, Diasporan Polycentrism, and Postcolonial Futures,” Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: India and Its Diaspora(s), ed. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn with Vera Alexander (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006), 108.

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Yet Karnad’s mixing of culturally diverse, competing dramatic forms in India points not only beyond canonised definitions of ‘postcolonial literature,’ but at the same time stages what I call intra-national transnationality, as it also questions assumptions of a homogeneous Indian literary tradition under the roof of an Indian national identity.

2.2 Trans-national ‘mixing’: The form is a message In Indian literatures, nationality has occupied centre stage, especially in Indian Literatures in English and in their critical reception. Anjaria allots an entire period of “a history of the Indian novel in English to the movement known as ‘progressive writing’ in the early twentieth century, when the novel was taken to the service of a range of nationalist visions,”31 and Ganesh Devy sees not only the Indian novel in English, but the general endeavour of writing literary histories in Europe implicated in the cultural work of nation building: All through the nineteenth century history, historiography and literary history developed rapidly in the world of European scholarship. Colonialism and nationalism provided the appropriate background for this development. [. . .] canon and nation were the two goals of European literary historiography.32

Gikandi perceives the entire discipline of English studies “as a field that was central to the life of the modern national subject, its institution of exegesis was wrapped up in some of the most essentialist forms of the national imagination (Baldick 1983; Doyle 1989; Viswanathan 1989; Court 1989; Gikandi 1996; Crawford 1998; Easthope 1999).”33 However, with 22 languages bound to specific cultural traditions officially acknowledged in India, and with 780 languages identified by Ganesh Devy in his 2011–2013 linguistic survey,34 “Indian literature is a historian’s despair,”35 as the concept of a ‘national literature’ cannot contain the wealth of narrative traditions. In this context, Karnad’s Hayavadana, through the extensive employment of Yakshagana drama conventions, subverts nationality by pointing towards the intracultural variety manifest in different theatrical traditions competing with each other in the imaginary community named ‘India.’ He undermines the concept of a homogeneous and unified nation by drawing 31 Ulka Anjaria, “Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures,” A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 32 Ganesh N. Devy, ‘Of Many Heroes’: An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography, 6 33 Simon Gikandi, “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” Literature and Globalization: A Reader, ed. Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 116. 34 https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/meet-ganesh-devy-the-man-whois-out-to-map-the-worlds-linguistic-diversity/articleshow/53025448.cms (accessed 16 June 2018). 35 Ganesh N. Devy, ‘Of Many Heroes’: An Essay in Literary Historiography, 1.

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attention to the intra-national diversity of competitive narrative and theatrical traditions in India, and to the international and intercultural embeddedness of the framed story of the Sanskrit tradition. The formal mixture of classical and folk traditions of theatrical performance in Hayavadana is the result of Karnad’s search to incorporate “a hundred crowded years of urban theatre” in India by looking for “a structure of expectations – and conventions – about entertainment”36 underlying Indian folk as well as elite Sanskrit theatre, Parsi productions, and Western imports like the proscenium stage, secular plots, and realistic plays. With this approach “the political agenda that is generally held to be of paramount importance for so-called postcolonial literatures and cultures” such as “vaguely oppositional, anti-colonial or even Marxist-inspired anti–imperialist notions of culture and society”37 is replaced by a perception of Western theatrical traditions and theories as enriching perspectives on indigenous traditions. Referring to Brecht and Indian folk theatre, Karnad remarks: The theatrical conventions Brecht was reacting against – character as a psychological construct providing a focus for emotional identification, the willing-suspension-of-disbelief syndrome, the notion of a unified spectacle – were never a part of the traditional Indian theatre. There was therefore no question of arriving at an ‘alienation’ effect by using Brechtian artifice. What he did was to sensitize us to the potentialities of nonnaturalistic techniques available in our own theatre.38

Karnad’s easy-handed ‘mixing’ of theatrical conventions in Indian and Western, elite and folk traditions illustrates Vinay Lal’s reminder that in much of the [. . .] world, the ground realities were such that there was always mixing, a term that has attracted none of the pompous posturing that [Western] cultural theorists have attached to hybridity. Mixing is characteristically unselfconscious; hybridity is always a stance, a postmodern form of self-performativity.39

Karnad’s transnational cultural merging rejects the ‘political radicalism’ considered to be a marker of ‘postcolonial literature’ as an “act of rebellion against the incorporating tendencies of European and American neo-universalisms,”40 and instead gestures towards a “global ecumene,” where “the interconnectedness of the world, by

36 Girish Karnad, “Author’s Introduction,” 11. 37 Frank Schulze-Engler, “From Postcolonial to Preglobal: Transnational Culture and the Resurgent Project of Modernity,” Towards a Transcultural Future. Literature and Society in a ‘Post’Colonial World, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis, Peter H. Marsden, Bénédicte Ledent, and Marc Delrez (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 51–52. 38 Girish Karnad, “Author’s Introduction,” 14–15. 39 Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London and Sterling: Pluto Press, 2002), 119. 40 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 120.

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way of interrelations, exchanges and related developments”41 transcends politically marked boundaries. This does not render the play unpolitical, rather its critique points in different directions. The mixed attachments of widely divergent dramatic conventions subvert India’s post-independence claim to subsume the vast diversity of existing cultural traditions under the rubric of ‘a nation.’ Whereas “[g]lobalization, supplementing [. . .] postcolonialism [. . .], has become the most recent banner under which [. . .] wilful misrecognitions and institutional antagonisms, many of them still heavily invested in the nation, are presented and played out,”42 intra-national ‘mixing’ in Hayavadana supplies a counterformation for analytical concepts like ‘postcolonial’ as well as a ‘national literature.’ This subversion of the imaginary community called India is complemented by the transnational intertextual boundary work performed by the Indian and German pretexts of the drama.

2.3 Inter-national attachments: Girish Karnad – Thomas Mann – Heinrich Zimmer – Somadeva Chakrabarty emphasises that “the mental world [of Indians] was transformed through its very interactions with the West”43 to such a degree that the Indian self-perception is imbued with heterostereotypes created by ‒ largely German ‒ Indologists in the nineteenth century. Karnad’s drama responds to this intercultural commerce in reciprocal auto- and heterostereotypes by choosing Thomas Mann’s long novella The Transposed Heads: An Indian Legend (1940) as a pretext. The plot of a young woman who transposes the heads of two men, both of whom she loves and desires, stems from the Vetal Panchavimshati, a Sanskrit collection of 25 narrations embedded in Somadeva’s eleventh-century Kathāsaritsāgara (around AD 1070), consisting of 350 mythical stories.44 In the original, a supernatural power called vetala tells the story of the transposed heads to a king, who carries the corpse possessed by the vetala to the cremation grounds. The king’s answer to the question, who should be Sita’s future husband after the wrong heads have been attached to the respective bodies, “affirms the superiority of the head over the body, the spirit over the flesh and the king over the common man. The story avoids any overt caste distinction.”45 However, Thomas Mann did not take this original as his pretext, but rather a summary rendered by the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943) in his “little book about Kali, the mother of the world in

41 Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press 1992), 217–267, 7. 42 Graham Huggan, Australian Literature, 147. 43 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4–5. 44 Cf. Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 115. 45 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 116.

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Indian mythology,”46 where Zimmer changes the rival of Padmini’s husband from her brother into the husband’s friend, and reads the tales as dreams preserved in the cultural memory of oral societies. Mann bases his modernist rewriting on Zimmer’s suggestively psychologising interpretation, yet individualises the characters through satirically hypostasised orientalising stereotypes of the breathtakingly beautiful Sita and her desirous admirers, the strapping Nanda and the erudite Shridaman. Karnad in turn reverts to Zimmer’s reading of the individual figures as symbols for collective entities, yet refocuses the story “to question social inequality and foreground and project the marginalised – the folk, the lower class, and women.”47 This resignification reappropriates an Indian Sanskrit tradition which has been overwritten by two European perspectives, and at the same time contextualises the classical tradition in a larger frame of Indian theatre by setting the story proper in a frame story informed by conventions of the oral folk theatre Yakshagana. Karnad, by explicitly acknowledging that it was Mann’s adaptation of Zimmer’s summary, and not the original eleventh-century Sanskrit tale that inspired his drama, forecloses any suggestion of retrieving a ‘pure’ Indian origin and thus evades what Partha Chatterjee calls “a framework of false Indian essentialisms.”48 However, Karnad negotiates questions of inter- and intracultural hegemony and authoritarian discourses not only through a network of intertextual references in terms of dramatic conventions and plot adaptations, but also in the storyline, the character constellation, and the structure of the drama.

3 Intratextual negotiations: Bhagavata – Hayavadana – Padmini My reading follows Behera’s interpretation of the play as an imaginative arbitration about the relation of culturally endorsed normative master narratives and specific (fictional) realities that are excluded and marked as ‘other.’ Hayavadana thus addresses a wide range of cultural politics, which is fundamentally concerned with the legitimisation of social relations of inequality and the struggle to transform them. Hayavadana works through various hierarchical oppositions such as [head and body representing] man/woman, upper class caste/lower class caste, the elite/the folk, even human/non-human subsumed under the

46 Todd Kontje, The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 96. The tale was retold in Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse – Tales of Soul’s Conquest over Evil (1948), a collection of adventure tales including among others the Arthurian tales and five stories from the Vetala tales. 47 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 116. 48 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Books, 1986), 134.

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head/body oppositions and repudiates the notion that the first components are identified with head, soul, spirit, reason and are superior and the second components with instinct, materiality, sexuality and are inferior. Also relating to and underlying them are another set of oppositions such as the west/the non-west, the Aryan/the pre-Aryan, the nation-state/community states, Sanskritic scholaticism [sic]/Bhasa [sic] literary traditions.49

The relationship between a socially and culturally authorised and institutionally implemented ‘metanarrative,’ which enforces an interested order of things and excludes or suppresses disruptive phenomena by various strategies, is dramatised in the relationship between the narrator-character of the Bhagavata, who moves in and out of the frame and the embedded story, Hayavadana, the title figure of the frame story, and Padmini, the woman who loves and desires Devadatta and Kapila and who transposes their heads in the encapsulated story proper. By focusing on the act of narration in the Bhagavata, the play contextualises his comments and negotiates the intranational struggles in India between a Sanskritic high culture claiming interpretative authority, the subversive comments of traditional folk theatre against these exclusive claims to national relevance, and women, who figure only as relational creatures in these discourses, both of which are steeped in patriarchal self-aggrandisement and self-deception. I shall at first analyse the function of Hayavadana as a critical comment on the Bhagavata, before turning to the Bhagavata’s relation to Padmini, and finally comment on the drama’s presiding deity Ganesha as a counter image for the Bhagavata’s discourse of ‘completeness.’

3.1 The Bhagavata and Hayavadana: Completeness by reduction For Karnad, [t]he energy of folk theatre comes from the fact that although it seems to uphold traditional values, it also has the means of questioning these values, of making them literally stand on their head. The various conventions – the chorus, the masks, the seemingly unrelated comic episodes, the mixing of human and nonhuman worlds – permit the simultaneous presentation of alternative points of view, of alternative attitudes to the central problem. To use a phrase from Bertold Brecht, these conventions then allow for ‘complex seeing.’50

The title hero Hayavadana, a man with the head of a horse, embodies this ability of folk theatre to question discourses of cultural authority – very effectively, as Datta’s critical response suggests: The last (joke) especially – singing the national anthem in order to erase the last traces of humanity from one’s existence – looks like a gratuitous insult offered to the Indian nation at large. Within a narrower perspective, it might even be interpreted as a snide comment on the

49 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 113–114. 50 Girish Karnad, “Author’s Introduction,” 14.

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Sanskrit-based language in which the song is written [. . .] However, since it won the play the prestigious Kamladevi Chattopadhyay award for the Best Indian Play, and its author the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (both in 1972), it is wiser for us to ignore the point.51

Datta’s remark concerns the last scene of the drama, where the title figure with his initially human body already transformed into a horse by Kali, enters the stage “singing the third stanza of ‘Jana Gana Mana’” (135). The ensuing banter between Actor I and Hayavadana, characterising the title figure’s affiliation with the sagacious Bhagavata as “Fellow-pilgrims!” [. . .] “But not fellow-travellers [. . .]” (135), refers to the previous stanza of the national anthem not quoted in the play, which starts with the line “The procession of pilgrims passes over the endless road rugged with the rise and fall of nations.” The entire anthem is addressed to “the ruler of the minds of all people, dispenser of India’s destiny,”52 mistakenly identified in the British press with King George V, at whose 1911 visit in India Tagore’s composition was sung. But Tagore, incensed by this reading, clarified in a letter: I should only insult myself if I cared to answer those who consider me capable of such unbounded stupidity as to sing in praise of George the Fourth or George the Fifth as the Eternal Charioteer leading the pilgrims on their journey through countless ages of the timeless history of mankind.53

However, the raucous laughter of Actor I about the suggestion that the Bhagavata, embodying the elite archive of Sanskrit wisdom, and the title figure Hayavadana, the figure from Yakshagana oral traditions, could indeed travel in the same coach, mark Tagore’s vision of all Indians as fellow pilgrims on their journey through human existence as a lofty ideal with no counterpart in the historical reality of the play. Datta’s incensed response to the dramatic exposure of this incongruity between the ideals voiced in the national anthem and social reality illustrates Huggan’s point “that many of the most fervent patriots have been not creative writers but literary and cultural critics.”54 This incident, placed at the last moment before Hayavadana becomes a complete horse by also losing his human voice, challenges the almost unanimous consensus of critical literature – nearly without exception of Indian origin – that the topic and aim of the drama is to approve the Bhagavata’s discourse of completeness as the ideal of any identity politics, be they national or individual. The topic of completeness is indeed introduced in the expository first scene of the frame narrative, when the Bhagavata sings: “Two friends there were / – one mind, one heart –” (74), namely

51 Dattatreya Datta, “Hayavadana: A Theatre-Goer’s Response,” 163. 52 Ranjit Makkuni, Eternal Gandhi. Design of the Multimedia Museum (Mumbai: Aditya Birla Group, 2007), 145. 53 Purvasa, Phalgun, 1354, 738; according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jana_Gana_Mana (accessed 22 June 2018). 54 Graham Huggan, Australian Literature, 5.

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Devadatta, “[c]omely in appearance, fair in colour, / unrivalled in intelligence, [. . .] the only son of the Revered Brahmin, Vidysagara” (74), and Kapila, “the only son of the iron-smith, Lohita. [. . .] he is dark and plain to look at.” (74) Apart from the performative signal that this eulogy is interrupted by the appearance of the title hero Hayavadanna on stage, the Bhagavata’s representation of the young men’s relationship is unmasked as unreliable when compared with the fictional reality dramatised in the play. In Karnad’s adaptation, Devadatta’s contempt for Kapila is far more pronounced than in Thomas Mann’s novella The Transposed Heads, and Kapila obviously has internalised this heteronomous view, because he insists on sitting at Devadatta’s feet, the spatial choreography mirroring the steep hierarchy between both men. Their caste-ridden mutual loathing is brutally exposed in their quarrels about Padmini after she has transposed their heads (cf. 106–108, 113). Additionally, the Bhagavata’s praise of Devadatta’s intellectual powers is undermined by the fact that it is Kapila who diagnoses Devadatta’s love sickness when his friend is still denying his emotional turmoil, and it is Kapila again who recognises that Devadatta will win but not be able to satisfy Padmini, the woman he loves. Perhaps most importantly, Kapila clearly sees through the tricks of his learned friend to exploit his Brahmin’s knowledge for his own interests: when Devadatta – adorned with Kapila’s body after the heads have been transposed – refers to Sacred Texts in order to justify his claim for Padmini as his wife, Kapila answers: “Don’t tell me about your Sacred Texts. You can always twist them to suit your needs” (107), just like Padmini wearily fends off her husband’s attempt to justify his physical passivity with reference to his duties as a Brahmin: “I’ve heard all that!” (116) Behera expounds: Devadatta, a learned pundit, is supposed to stand for the head but his knowledge is bookish and has little relation with life and reality. He describes Padmini parroting old similes and images, lines quoted from Kalidas and others. He is imitative, not creative.55

The expositions of Devadatta’s egotistical exploitations of his social status in the story proper comment on the equally learned Bhagavata’s self-delusions and his strategies to uphold the traditional patriarchal order of things in the frame narrative; both figures in combination stage the ubiquity of their authoritarian régime. Additionally, the Bhagavata’s pretence to supply an all-embracing explanatory worldview is undermined by frequent disruptions and critical questionings of his wisdom by Hayavadana, whose experiences it does not grasp and comprehend. Thus, “[t]he Bhagavata represents the ancient karmic wisdom in all his sayings and doings [and] habitually slips into the karma theory.”56 He is immersed in the horizon of an authoritative patriarchal philosophical tradition, thinking and talking in conventional images and set phrases with scant reference to the living present around him.

55 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 121. 56 K. L. George, S. J., “Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana Revisited,” 140. My emphasis.

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At the very end of the drama, Hayavadana’s incongruous appearance is harmonised by Kali, when he finally loses his human voice, thus erasing the last trace of those mixings, which do not fit the Bhagavata’s concept of completeness. Not surprisingly, the learned sage comments on Hayavadana’s transformation with the words: “So at long last Hayavadana has become complete” (138). Yet this praise becomes questionable when we consider that the story of Hayavadana’s mother, who preferred becoming a horse instead of a divinity, was marked as “a sad story” (80). Why is there no sadness voiced – neither onstage nor in the critical literature about the drama – when the male character prefers to become reduced to a ‘complete horse,’ whereas the analogous inclinations of his mother drew negative responses from the same characters who now praise Hayavadana’s transformation? The inaccurate panegyrics on Devadatta and Kapila together with the questionable comments on Hayavadana unmask the Bhagavata’s concept of completeness as a strategy of assimilation, which at the end of the drama leaves an assembly of structurally uniform male identities, segregated along discursively enforced boundaries of caste and the human/animal divide. They are the result of identitarian strategies which in analogy to “anticolonial nationalisms have [. . .] consolidated themselves in [. . .] postcolonial spaces, erasing in the process the myriad subnational, subaltern, and regional cultural formations fighting to assert their own identities.”57 Hayavadana, who for many critics represents the traditional folk theatre, thus on the one hand by his incongruous appearance with a horse’s head attached to a human body and, at the end of the drama, with a human voice speaking out of a horse’s body, exemplifies the ability of the folk theatre to subvert culturally dominant discourses and values, represented by the Bhagavata’s Sanskrit wisdom and his discourse of completeness. But on the other hand, the title hero’s ultimate adjustment to the Bhagavata’s discourse of completeness throws a sceptical light on the power of the cultural and political traditions he represents to withstand the authoritarian identity discourse in the fictional society of the play, reducing “difference and multiplicity to simple identity and presence.”58

3.2 The Bhagavata and Padmini: Completeness by exclusion The limiting and limited closure of the Bhagavata’s hermeneutic horizon is most radically exposed in his attitude towards Padmini. The relationship between him as “the traditional theatrical omniscient present on the stage,”59 and Padmini, who is confined to the enclosed story proper, exposes the glaring imbalance of power between the master narrator Bhagavata, legitimised through the cultural and institutional 57 Revathi Krishnaswamy, “Toward World Literary Knowledges,” 139. 58 Thomas Ellis, On the Death of the Pilgrim: The Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Jarava Lal Mehta (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, and London: Springer, 2013), 40. 59 Dattatreya Datta, “Hayavadana: A Theatre-Goer’s Response,” 166.

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power of the Sanskrit tradition, and a woman, who – according to Spivak’s differentiation – can talk, but not speak, because she is not heard and understood. The Bhagavata’s observations on her plight expose the incompatibility of his cultural grand narrative with the contingency of individuality and difference, both of which are fended off by strategies of gendered othering and male bonding. My analysis shall concentrate on the reciprocal comments between the outer frame story with the Bhagavata as the epic narrator/commentator steeped in the wisdom of Sanskrit traditions, and the encapsulated story proper with Padmini, the only woman – apart from the goddess Kali – in a world of seven male characters. By thus taking into consideration formal traits, my analysis also aims to redress the increasingly noted lack of attention to the literariness of postcolonial as well as transnational literatures for the sake of political analyses.60 Padmini is read nearly unanimously (and often in astoundingly similar diction) as a ‘modern and emancipated woman,’ because she voices her desire for her learned husband Devadatta and his sensual friend Kapila, and actively, if unawares, works towards its satisfaction by transposing their heads after both have committed suicide in the temple of the goddess Kali. What leaves me puzzled is that none of the critics is bothered by the young woman committing sati, interpreting her traditional Hindu widow’s sacrifice as a “celebration of the Shakti, who has fought against bondages.” They leave uncontested the Bhagavata’s and the female chorus’s exaltations after her death, praising Padmini as one of the great pativratas (132) of India, whose presence is preserved – according to a tribal legend – in the fragrance of “a full-blossomed tree of the Fortunate Lady” (132). Thus, Behera on the one hand reads “[t]he transformation of Parvati of Somadeva’s tale to Kali in Karnad’s [as a mark for] the changed situation of the empowerment of women, [which] is significantly related to the cult of Shakti in the matriarchal society of the pre-Aryans/tribals,” yet on the other hand he confirms the Bhagavata’s praise of Padmini’s transformation into a blooming tree, and interprets it as a sign for her being “an artist of life, who dissipates and combines life-realities into beautiful patterns.” From my Western perspective, these readings fall victim to her suggestive name, which “refers to the Padmini type, categorised by Vatsayana, an ancient sage and scholar, as the best of the six types of women. She is expected to be docile, graceful and faithful to be adored by men.”61 In contrast, I understand the intradiegetic celebrations of the young sati as dramatic irony – or stark sarcasm –, because the drama leaves no doubt that Padmini’s motif is not love for or dedication to the men, but desperation. Before her self-immolation, she clearly recognises that apart from social restraints, neither Kapila nor Devadatta will accept a ménage à trois

60 Cf. Eli Park Sorensen, Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 61 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 123, 119, 124, 120, 164.

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because they value their male bonding far more than Padmini, despite their professions of love for her: “You forgave each other, but again – left me out” (131). They reduce her to a relational creature by seeing her exclusively as lover, wife, and mother, so when they are dead, she has to erase herself, too, as there is no place for a single woman in the society of the fictional world. The Bhagavata enforces her image as a helpless dependant, addressing her consistently as “child” before her death (131). Additionally, Padmini, with her intelligence superior to that of any other character in the play, perceives the fatal machinery of reciprocal destruction inherent in adamant identity discourses of ‘completeness,’ be they individually or collectively bound to caste, class, or nation: “If I’d said, ‘yes, I’ll live with you both’, perhaps they would have been alive yet. But [. . .] I know in my blood you couldn’t have lived together. You would’ve had to share not only me but your bodies as well. [. . .] You could only have lived ripping each other to pieces” (130f). As the bodies and attitudes of Devadatta and Kapila were predominantly marked by caste, Padmini’s observation can plausibly be understood as a critical comment on ‘complete’ caste identities. Padmini’s fate dramatises the fact that the woman’s discursively unaccommodated wishes and desires, which manifest themselves in Padmini’s transposition of the heads and her late visit to Kapila in the jungle to consummate their desire, have no place in the patriarchal order of things. Thus on the one hand, “[t]he play begins with [. . .] hegemonic constructions [of normative images of womanhood] and moves gradually pulling them down.”62 But on the other hand, the play leaves no doubt that the prevailing society does not allot any place for a woman like Padmini. Padmini’s honesty about her situation aligns her with the goddess Kali – the second female figure in the otherwise all-male world of the drama – who, in psychoanalytical diction, incarnates the agency of the unconscious, because she grants each wish of her supplicants, especially their secret ones, before they have been pronounced. Refusing to be fooled by the noble declarations of Devadatta and Kapila at their first suicides, Kali exposes them as self-delusions: “The rascals! They were lying to their last breaths” (103). Similarly, Padmini spurns repression via cultural sublimation when she insists on voicing her desire for Kapila and asks him: “Why should one bury anything?” (126). In this respect, Padmini, like Thomas Mann’s Sita, might be considered as “a manifestation of the terrible goddess who represents the eternal process of creation and destruction beneath the deceptive surface of transitory appearances (Maya),” yet not as “another femme fatale who causes the death of her two lovers, following a pattern in Mann’s work,”63 but as the voice of an individualised character who will not submit to the maya of social regulations set up to direct desires along the differentiating lines of ‘complete’

62 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 120. 63 Todd Kontje, The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann, 98.

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identities. However, while it is the prerogative of the divinity not to bother with trifles of mundane existence, Padmini’s manifest desire for two men in defiance of caste and marriage rules is curbed by powerful discourses of misogynist gender stereotypes, male bonding between different castes, and institutionalised structures of monogamous heterosexuality, which make a ménage à trois impossible.

3.2.1 Gender and nation Datta in his biting critique of the play recommends that in order “to write an Indian play, it is better to explore India rather than look at Germany.” He advises reviving the motif of the sibling marriage of the original Vetala story, where the woman does not desire her husband’s friend, but her brother. This constellation points back to the practice of sibling-marriage in the Yama-Yami story of the Vedas, “[w]ith Yami desiring congress with her brother Yama according to the pre-Aryan matriarchal custom, and Yama rejecting her advances, imposing Aryan patriarchal strictures on her desire.”64 Taking this historical pretext into account, Karnad’s drama exposes the chauvinistic implications not only of the German Zimmer-Mann adaptations, but also of the Sanskrit version rendered in the Kathāsaritsāgara, where it is the prerogative of men to decide about the woman’s spouse. The stage instruction that the characters of Actor 1 and Actor 2, who exclusively figure in the frame narrative, may be played by the actors of Devadatta and Kapila in the encapsulated Padmini story (cf. 72), highlights the continuity of a patriarchal order of things between the frame related to conventions of Dravidian folk theatre and the encapsulated story from the Sanskrit tradition. Despite historical and actual struggles between classical Sanskrit and oral folk traditions and the respective communities they represent, both political and discursive groups are presently bound together by masculinist identity politics. The final all-male constellation of characters, all of whom subscribe to the Bhagavata’s model of – a paradox – masculine identitarian completeness, illustrates “the deep imbrication between discourses of nationality and the rigid binary system of gender that undergirds contemporary regimes of nation-state power.”65 The drama marks femininity as the absent ‘other’ in the concluding assembly of male representatives of various castes and a ‘complete’ male horse. Padmini’s death leaves an all-male world. With this background, the Bhagavata’s concluding speech forms a glaring example of a repressive discourse legitimised by cultural authority: “Unfathomable indeed is the mercy of the elephant-headed Ganesh. He fulfils the desires of all [. . .] How indeed can one describe his glory in our poor, disabled words?” (139). The drama leaves no doubt that Padmini’s desires have been fulfilled only partially,

64 Dattatreya Datta, “Hayavadana: A Theatre-Goer’s Response,” 168. 65 Jessica Berman, “A Transnational Critical Optic, Now,” College Literature 44.4 (2017), 476.

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and that she has been excluded as ‘the other’ of a patriarchal Indian identity discourse, which includes Sanskrit as well as Bhasha traditions. The only symptom of incongruous realities persisting despite and beyond the patriarchal order of narrativised events is the laughter of Padmini’s son, who laughs for the first time in his life when he sees the horse Hayavadana speaking with a human voice. According to the ‘Incongruity Theories’ on humour, which have superseded Freud’s ‘Relief Theories,’ laughter is motivated by the perception of something incongruous – something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. This approach was taken by James Beattie, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and many later philosophers and psychologists. It is now the dominant theory of humour in philosophy and psychology.66

According to this model, as in Freud’s Relief Theory, laughter helps to soften the shock of recognition, when an incongruous reality at odds with the order of things assumed in our everyday consciousness is perceived in a flash. The recognition of incongruity on the one hand presumes an affirmation of internalised authoritative discourses, because otherwise the deviation would not be detected, yet on the other hand it marks a moment, when the normative requirements of “a functional irreality (officially called reality)”67– in this case completeness and harmony – are exposed as cultural constructs. This laughter thus comprises both the knowledge of normative cultural rules and the recognition of their limited range of applicability. Yet it remains for the generation of the sons, pointing towards the future, to keep realities inside and outside of authoritarian discourses in view – like Ganesha, the presiding deity of the play.

3.3 Ganesha The counterpart of the Bhagavata’s concept of completeness is Ganesha, an Indian deity with a human body and an elephant’s head, who in the drama is represented by a mask. In Western plays, [. . .] [t]he face represents the real inner person while the mask represents the exterior image, which one wishes to present to the world. But in traditional Indian theatre, the mask is the face enlarged. Here the character represents not a complex psychological entity but an ethical archetype.68

66 John Morreal, “Philosophy of Humour,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/humor/ (accessed 10 July 2018). 67 Viviane Forrester, “Féminin Plurièl,” Tel Quel 74 (1977), 69. 68 George, K. L., S. J., “Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana Revisited,” 139.

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Thus the dark mask of Kapila and the light mask of Devadatta mark them not as individuals, but as representatives of specific castes with their respective value systems. Ganesha is not played by any actor, but the mask only represents this divinity, who is paid homage in the first scene of the play as advised in the Natyashastra, in order to ensure an auspicious beginning. The Bhagavata in his hermetic ideology recommends not to wonder about the rational paradox that a god with a human body and an elephant’s head is considered the representation of completeness, and simply to obey the rules, because divinity is beyond rationality: [. . .] whichever way you look at him he seems the embodiment of imperfection, of incompleteness. [. . .] Could it be that this Image of Purity and Holiness, this Mangalamoorty, intends to signify by his very appearance that the completeness of God is something no poor mortal can comprehend? Be that as it may. It is not for us to understand this Mystery or try to unravel it. Nor is it within our powers to do so. Our duty is merely to pay homage to the Elephant-headed god and get on with our play. (73)

Reading this recommendation – spoken by an unreliable narrator like the Bhagavata – against the grain, one might suspect that Ganesha embodies indeed a different kind of completeness, which can accommodate Padmini’s and Hayavadana’s lifeworlds and those of the respective groups they represent, namely the lower classes, who enact and attend the Drawidian theatre,69 and women. If compliance with the Bhagavata’s model of cultural order is shown to be reductive and exclusive, might not then a disruption of this kind of order open up possibilities of completeness in the first place? Ganesha according to myth was beheaded by his aggressive father when he refused him access to his mother, because she had ordered her son to ward off any intruder as she wanted to sleep. As his head was lost, ultimately, his father replaced it with an elephant’s head. Ganesha’s misunderstanding results from his ignorance of the cultural regulation of sexuality in marriage, which makes him take his mother’s command verbatim without considering the special rules concerning his father. Ganesha’s incongruous appearance with an animal’s head attached to a human body is thus an archive, a manifestation, and a symptom of worlds existing beyond the discursively regulated “functional irreality (officially called reality).”70 As such, he exemplifies the power of cultural rules as well as worlds existing beyond their horizon. He consequently embodies a more complete – in the sense of more comprehensive – reality than the Bhagavata’s reductive and exclusive norm of completeness. This more comprehensive sense of completeness, which overcomes incongruities by inclusive acceptance, is suggested by Padmini, when she convinces Kapila that in order to become complete, his head will have to experience the joys of having sex with her, which his body still knows from the time when he belonged to Devadatta. “Until that’s done, you’ll continue to be incomplete” (127). Behera points out,

69 Cf. Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 117. 70 Viviane Forrester, “Féminin Plurièl,” 69.

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Ganesh [. . .] was initially a pre-Vedic deity, and later on has been appropriated by the mainstream Hinduism resulting in the erasure of his pre-Aryan tribal origin from discourses. [. . .] Thus, [he] points to the traces of the primitive, the tribal, the subtext of the other in our culture, that we tend to ignore but the playwright wants to excavate.71

Ganesha thus indeed incarnates the spirit supreme of the play, questioning the validity of reductive and exclusionary concepts of ‘completeness’ – be they national identities, marriage rules, gender roles, or aesthetics – and offering the vision of a more comprehensive completeness in the guise of incongruity.

4 How to read transnational literatures? With central motifs of a Hindu adaptation of a pre-Aryan oral fable passed on in the literary Sanskrit tradition, Thomas Mann’s modernist rereading of Zimmer’s assimilated story, and formal as well as topical devices of the Yakshagana folk theatre, very different hermeneutic horizons are mixed in this play, opening up analogously dissimilar readings from diverse interpretative communities. Additionally, by translating his drama into English, Karnad transposes Indian realities and traditions into a Western horizon and vice versa, because language – as philosophers like Gadamer and experts on cultural translation like Bassnett, Trivedi, and Ganesh Devy worked out extensively – presupposes fundamental premises and conditions for culturally and historically specific ways of being-in-the-world. However, by retaining terms, forms, and topics of Sanskrit and Kannada theatre traditions, the drama deliberately remains a ‘marked translation,’ which instead of rendering the translator invisible, alerts (Western) readers and audiences to the fact that Hayavadana comprises culturally specific discourses, many of which are not known to a Western English-speaking audience. It thus gestures towards Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s admonition that in approaching postcolonial literature one should be aware “that something has not got across. This we call ‘the secret,’ not something that one wants to conceal, but something that one wants to reveal.”72 My reading is based on largely implicit assumptions of Western premises concerning for example gender roles and social hierarchies, modified by information about Indian traditions and cultures acquired during various visits and from written texts by Indians as well as Non-Indians. Yet the very fact that my reading differs in significant points from the vast majority of readings given by Indian academics in their respective journals as well as during a conference in India, where I discussed my reading, impressively highlights a problem which has been discussed for years

71 Guru Charan Behera, Appropriating Folk Culture, 118 72 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps (New York: Routledge, 1995), xxv.

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in the frame of postcolonial studies, and which is not alleviated by shifting the focus to ‘transnational’ literatures, namely how to read transnational literatures. How can one approach what Lawrence Venuti calls ‘humanistic translation’73 between different cultural horizons with their specific concepts of history, individuality, gender roles, and generation, without domesticating the translated texts by assimilating them to the critic’s hermeneutic horizon? Karnad himself illustrates this problem by describing the performance of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in Madras, when the Indian audience “chose to ignore [the element of incest] in the play” in order to perceive Eddie as his niece’s guardian, who fulfils his role as a surrogate father perfectly by betraying an illegal Italian immigrant to the authorities when the young man falls in love with his niece. The patriarchal violence towards his ward “fits an Indian archetype: the father figure aggressing toward its offspring,”74 and therefore did not catch the attention of the audience. Similarly, the readings of Padmini’s self-immolation as an emancipatory act by Indian critics answers the question “Are there in fact postcolonial audiences, readers and viewers who ‘receive’ books in particular ways?”75 absolutely in the positive. The “productive and largely undertheorized field”76 of transnational hermeneutics has been addressed in the 1970s by Indian philosopher Jarava Lal Mehta, who – strongly influenced by Martin Heidegger – opts for a self-reflexive transcendence of culturally evolved traditions of thought and values. In the words of William Jackson, Mehta recommends a hermeneutic awareness as the presupposition of appropriating a tradition, whether one’s own or alien [and] understanding the alien in terms of one’s own prejudgments and of understanding ourselves, in turn, in terms of the alien as thus understood, of finding concepts and the language for expressing this novel understanding, and thus of overcoming our naivety in understanding what is going on now.77

To get the ‘legitimate prejudices’ – in Gadamer’s sense – of all parties involved into view, what is needed is a dialogic form of knowledge production, and concepts, which generate transnational hermeneutics in the sense of “Compoetics”78 or a “poetics of Relation,” understood as the “relationship with the Other,”79 because only

73 Cf. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 33. 74 Girish Karnad, “Author’s Introduction,” 7f., 10. 75 Cf. Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson (eds), Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception (New York: Routledge, 2012). 76 Vijay Mishra, “Postcolonialism 2010–2014,” 383. 77 William Jackson in Thomas Ellis, On the Death of the Pilgrim, 36 78 Avadhesh Kumar Singh, “Towards a Compoetics in India: Alternative Frameworks for the Comparative Study of Poetics,” 225–246. 79 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11.

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in dialogue are the pre-given structures and legitimate prejudices of a specific text reinserted into the dynamics and the contingency of an event.80 Modifying Huggan’s comments on the reception of Australian literature, such “‘migratory readings’ [. . .] in which ‘the nation, nationality and national cultures are primary but not determining or autonomous indices’ (Whitlock 1999: 154)” might generate “new ways of thinking about the nation and the national, while also allowing for responses that ‘move beyond the boundaries of the nation [to] pursue a comparative approach’ (Whitlock 1999: 155).”81 Karnad’s ‘mixed attachments’ of heads and bodies, culturally and politically dominating discourses, and marginalised grassroots traditions in India illustrate in an exemplary fashion Ashcroft’s claim that national borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian constructors of identity that they have become [. . .]. Transnation is the fluid, migrating outside of the state (conceptually and culturally as well as geographically) that begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious in India where the ‘nation’ is the perpetual scene of translation.82

Transnationality thus will have to comprise the subversion of the concept of the nation not only by transcending national boundaries to an ‘outside,’ but also by imploding the term and exposing the intra-national diversity which is suppressed in the Bhagavata’s incantation of ‘completeness.’ According to Berman, if the prefix ‘trans’ in ‘transnational’ means “not just ‘across’, ‘on or to the other side of’ but also ‘beyond, surpassing, transcending’, the prefix represents a challenge to the normative dimension of the original entity or space, a crossing over that looks back critically from its space beyond.” It indicates not only that we “have moved from one side of a binary field to the other, but rather [. . .] ‘anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates and makes visible’ [. . .] ‘the categorical crossings, leakages and slippages’ in and around the term and [. . .] its capacity to ‘disrupt or unsettle conventional boundaries,’ disciplines, and ideas.” From this perspective, the ‘transnational critical optic’ “marks the struggle with the ongoing problematics of nation, empire, and globe while striving to open up a space of resistance to their hegemony, and to the other discourses of identity that undergird it.”83 But it takes Padmini’s courage to resist claims of cultural authority, voiced in her aggressively subversive question for the timid Kapila: “Why should one bury anything?” (126).

80 Cf. Leonard Lawlor, “The Dialectical Unity of Hermeneutics: On Ricoeur and Gadamer,” Gadamer and Hermeneutics: Science, Culture, Literature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 82. 81 Graham Huggan, Australian Literature, 146. 82 Bill Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” Locating Transnational Ideals, ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 13–14. 83 Jessica Berman, “A Transnational Critical Optic, Now,” 477–478, 480–481.

Gesine Müller

Transnational Challenges for World Literatures: Publishing Caribbean Writers Abstract: The debate about the concept of world literature, which has gained new intensity over the past decade, is one of those cultural studies controversies that are closely associated with questions about global interconnections in a polycentric world. While the current literature on the functions and symptoms of crisis in the current surge in globalisation focuses on the institutional, economic, and cultural hegemony of the Global North vis-à-vis the South, hegemonic implications continue to inform leading positions in the current world literature debate. This chapter briefly outlines this situation and then turns to a conceptual reconsideration of polycentric dynamics in the context of the agenda of literatures of the world, focusing on the example of Caribbean literatures. This approach therefore includes a discussion of the notion of transnationality as it relates to the problem of consolidating national categorisations and especially with regard to overcoming received logics of centre and periphery. I am particularly interested in drawing parallels between, on the one hand, the productive tension among various conceptual constellations and, on the other, the mechanisms of selection in globally active publishing houses. The debate about the concept of world literature, which has gained a new intensity over the past decade, is one of those cultural studies controversies that are closely associated with questions about global interconnections in a polycentric world. While the current literature on the functions and symptoms of crisis of the current surge in globalisation focuses on the institutional, economic, and cultural hegemony of the Global North vis-à-vis the South, hegemonic implications continue to inform leading positions in the current world literature debate. The following discussion briefly outlines this situation and then turns to a conceptual reconsideration of polycentric dynamics in the context of the agenda of literatures of the world, focusing on the example of Caribbean literatures. This approach therefore includes a discussion of the notion of transnationality as it relates to the problem of consolidating national categorisations and especially with regard to overcoming received logics of centre and periphery. I am particularly interested in drawing relations between, on the one hand, the productive tension among various concept constellations, and, on the other hand, the mechanisms of selection in globally active publishing houses. In the past, insufficient attention has been paid to Caribbean literatures as world literature. This is despite the fact that they fulfil, like almost no other literary tradition in the world, the criteria applied to the re-conceptualisation of the term literatures of the world, with their transnational implications. It is in this context

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-003

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that we can ascertain, at the practical level of publishing selection, an interaction between both concepts that requires further investigation.1

1 The debate about world literature and literatures of the world In a conversation with friends in 1827, including Eckermann, Goethe complained that Germans had not looked beyond the narrow confines of their own environment and recommended that they look around at foreign nations. Then he observed, with sententious determination, that “National literature does not say much; we are now upon the epoch of world literature, and everyone must work on accelerating this epoch.”2 As is generally known, the term world literature has had an intense history of reception since its coinage by Goethe. Erich Auerbach’s 1952 essay “Philology of World Literature”3 criticised Goethe’s concept, primarily for its eurocentric dimension and the possibility of a recursive reference to national literature.4 The cultural relations of colonialism, and the asymmetries that arose from its processes of appropriation, were not yet a subject in Goethe’s time. In the last 20 years, a new level of reception has established itself around the 250-year-old concept of world literature. This discussion, which is taking place principally at elite universities in the United States, examines the concept primarily at

1 On the following remarks, see also Gesine Müller, “Literaturen der Amerikas und ihre Rezeption in Deutschland. Weltliteratur als globales Verflechtungsprinzip,” Verlag Macht Weltliteratur, ed. Gesine Müller (Berlin: Edition Tranvía/Walter Frey, 2014), 117–132; Gesine Müller, “Einleitung,” Verlag Macht Weltliteratur, ed. Gesine Müller, 7–17; Gesine Müller, “Konstruktion von Weltliteratur und Verlagspolitiken. Der Lateinamerika-Nachlass des Suhrkampverlags,” Buchmarkt, Buchindustrie und Buchmessen in Deutschland, Spanien und Lateinamerika, ed. Marco Thomas Bosshard (Berlin and Münster: LIT, 2015), 147–160; Gesine Müller, “¿Literatura mundial o literaturas mundiales? Un estudio de caso de las letras latinoamericanas en la editorial Suhrkamp,” América Latina y la Literatura Mundial: mercado editorial, redes globales y la invención de un continente, ed. Gesine Müller and Dunia Gras (Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2015), 81–98. These articles contain, in relation to the theoretical foundations, some similar arguments as well as supplemental considerations that go further. 2 Cited in Dieter Lamping, Die Idee der Weltliteratur. Ein Konzept Goethes und seine Karriere (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2010), 17. 3 Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie, ed. Fritz Schalk and Gustav Konrad (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1967), 301–310. 4 Ottmar Ette, “Erich Auerbach oder Die Aufgabe der Philologie,” Traditionen der Entgrenzung. Beiträge zur romanistischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ed. Frank Estelmann, Pierre Krügel, and Olaf Müller (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), 22−23; Stephan Grotz, “Mimesis und Weltliteratur. Erich Auerbachs Abschied von einem Goetheschen Konzept,” Geistiger Handelsverkehr. Komparatistische Aspekte der Goethezeit, ed. Anne Bohnenkamp and Matías Martínez (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 225.

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the analytical-descriptive level and is being waged in controversial ways, whether by Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Emily Apter, or Pascale Casanova. However, this debate does not quite manage to fully escape from long-held traditional binaries. In her book The World Republic of Letters, which appeared in the original French in 1999 and has been the subject of much discussion since, Casanova for example did not give up dichotomies such as centre-periphery; quite the contrary. She viewed Paris as the centre of a literary world map, writing of a “geography [that] is based on the opposition between a capital, on the one hand, and peripheral dependencies whose relationship to the center is defined by their aesthetic distance from it.”5 The mapping of a (literary) history of the world in such dichotomies shaped the perception of ostensibly ‘peripheral’ literatures in a very long-term way, which is fundamentally important for literature from the Caribbean. Early in the new millennium, Franco Moretti at Stanford and David Damrosch at Harvard wrote comprehensive studies on the idea of world literature.6 In his essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” Moretti proceeded from his thesis that world literature was always a limited enterprise in the context of research in comparative literature; only today does it form a global system. At the epistemological level, however, dichotomies persist in these discussions: centre and periphery, source and target cultures, etc. – the transfer of knowledge and culture always flows in one direction; works and authors are obviously assignable to one of the two cultures, are positioned in opposing spaces. David Damrosch, even if he also remains stuck in the categories of ‘foreign’ and ‘own,’ was, in comparison to Moretti, substantially subtler in his considerations of circulation processes of (world) literature, as well as the meaning of translation and reception factors. Despite isolated attempts – particularly in the USA – to open up Goethe’s concept of world literature for discourses that affirm globalisation and subject it to the contemporary programme of globalisation, Damrosch’s proposal, which seems original at first glance, reinforces these bipolarities. For Damrosch, world literature always begins in a national literature of some form, always as a core of some sort, an essence, and this appears to be problematic if we think of the genesis of literature in our current phase of accelerated globalisation. If we also consider literatures from authors who cannot be clearly assigned to a national context, then we must dissolve the polarity of nation and world to establish a third space, a space that Damrosch’s model simply does not provide for. While Damrosch insists – and this is probably the most interesting aspect of his book – on the importance of processes of reception and translation, he still does not manage to question his own position, or to overcome this binary division between the West (“our 5 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 12. 6 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000), 54–68.

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values”7) and the rest (cultures that are then received by “us”). From the perspective of literary theory, the resolution of this dichotomy is a crucial idea for a truly universal, or at least border-crossing, analytical model for world literature. In this context, what is interesting is not the analytical-descriptive dimension, but rather the programmatic orientation of the idea of literatures of the world. This notion connects with the ‘classical’ idea of world literature, yet is based on a completely different foundation. It revolves around the claim to set aside, from a global perspective, the distinction between centre and periphery in literary productions, thus conceiving of the genesis of cultural production in transnational constellations. The notion of literatures of the world has emerged in Germany since 2000 in a variety of institutions working on literary and cultural subjects that are striving to expand their horizons. The House of Cultures of the World in Berlin is striving, with the plural cultures, to realise a programmatic approach to cultural and literary communication beyond the dictates of Western hegemony, particularly in the “literatures of the world” programme that has been running since 2001. The Goethe Institute has used the term to honour particular social achievements in the promotion of literature from Africa, Asia, and Latin America by supporting translations since the 1970s, thereby focusing on the inclusion of marginalised literary works and traditions in the German-language book market. Ottmar Ette, in an essay of 2004, formulated “five theses for a global consciousness and literatures of the world.”8 Working from Erich Auerbach’s “philology of world literature,” which Ette critically expands, Ette strengthens the idea of literatures of the world in juxtaposition to a eurocentric concept of world literature. Elke Sturm-Trigonakis identifies multilingualism and highly specialised nomadism as central categories of her similarly defined notion of new world literature.9 In the groundbreaking book Approaches to World Literature,10 Joachim Küpper further clarified the central problem of ethnographic points of access to the world literature debate and gathered essential contributions on the question of how world literary concepts can be made productive for the contemporary phase of globalisation. The concept of literatures of the world – unlike Goethe’s idea of world literature – is not implicated or intertwined in the standard-setting, centring function of Occidental antiquity or Europe. The idea of literatures of the world, according to Ette, invests the old idea of world literature with a completely new significance, an importance that lies unmistakably beyond both the national state and national literature,

7 David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, 70. 8 Ottmar Ette, “Wege des Wissens. Fünf Thesen zum Weltbewußtsein und den Literaturen der Welt,” Lateinamerika. Ordnungen und Orte des Wissens. Festschrift für Birgit Scharlau, ed. Sabine Hofmann and Monika Wehrheim (Tübingen: Narr, 2004), 169–184. 9 Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, Global Playing in der Literatur. Ein Versuch über die Neue Weltliteratur (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). 10 Joachim Küpper (ed), Approaches to World Literature (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013).

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even if these continue to maintain extremely important positions of authority with regard to production, reproduction, and reception. According to Ette, literatures of the world have lost their settledness and are becoming increasingly integrated, nomadic, mobile patterns of thinking, writing, and perceiving.11 If we juxtapose the notions of world literature and literatures of the world, then I believe we can identify five characteristics that are comparably binding to both concepts. We often focus on these five characteristics from diametrically opposed perspectives, so this is a call for a paradigm shift: 1) Multilinguality: While the number of extant translations counts for world literature, one criterion for literatures of the world is that multilinguality be staged in novels. 2) Movement: The presentation of movement functions in the world literature paradigm in a way that always refers back to a European perspective, while literatures of the world stand for a dissolution of centre and periphery. 3) Global – local: For advocates of world literature, the regional turn typically has the intention of representing a microcosm that serves to represent a macrocosm, while the specific presentation of regionality in literatures of the world emphasises particularity. 4) Non-settledness: The location of writing is an indirect yet not compelling requirement for allocation to one of the two concepts. Non-settled authors have more privileged prerequisites for being included in the canon of literatures of the world. 5) The dominance of Europe and the United States: Both concepts want to canonise universally authoritative literatures, although it is assumed that the West lays claim to an interpretive authority regarding world literature. Representatives of literatures of the world may declare these to be obsolete, yet nevertheless – in the face of real processes of institutionalisation – this is still the practice in the western and northern hemispheres. When comparing both concepts, I find it important to note that they stand for two possible paradigm formations in literary theory and cultural affairs. It is therefore not surprising that their criteria often overlap in major ways when selecting primary texts. These overlaps reveal in a special and meaningful way the international marketing and reception of Caribbean literatures. My thesis is that Caribbean literatures have privileged conditions for being included in the canon of literatures of the world because they fulfil such a number of the aforementioned criteria. At the same time, this stocktaking enables the identification of interaction between world literature and literatures of the world at the level of canonisation among publishing houses. To put it more precisely: the

11 Ottmar Ette, “Wege des Wissens,” 179.

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publishing industry, dominated by the West, creates a first-pass selection filter for literatures of the world when selecting international literatures from regions that have previously been labeled as peripheral. Literary texts that successfully pass through the eye of this needle then take a second step to become world literature.

2 World Literature from the Caribbean We can understand the islands of the Caribbean as a cohesive and yet heterogeneous, disparate space of movement that continues to be shaped in cultural terms to this day by its eventful colonial past. Since Columbus’s so-called discovery in 1492, the kaleidoscopic world of the Caribbean has brought different ethnic groups together. Indigenous, European, African, and Asian population groups have met here, and it is not for nothing that the Caribbean, around 1500, served as a site of the first phase of accelerating globalisation. This makes the region a fascinating point of departure for the examination of selection processes in world literature. Caribbean literatures have formed in complex, dynamic processes of transfer and circulation – both within the Caribbean as well as in exchange with Africa, both Americas, Asia, and of course with Europe. In the Early Modern period, phenomena and processes were already anticipated that have attained the highest currency in our modern societies: migration, circulation, and connections between widely disparate geographical spaces, yet also a sense of loss pertaining to orientation and the notion of homeland. Caribbean literatures – as Birgit Neumann among others has pointed out 12 – stand like hardly any other literary tradition for the interplay of deterritorialisation and topographic ascertainment, for transcultural processes of translation and transformation of epistemes and aesthetics, and for the literary modelling of trans-territorial connections. They therefore call for a method of observation appropriate to the many-layered, fluctuating, and discontinuous dynamics of geopolitical and geopoetical orders.13 In view of the 12 Gesine Müller and Birgit Neumann, “Weltliteraturen in den Amerikas: Die Karibik (englisch, französisch, spanisch),” Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Weltliteratur, ed. Vittoria Borsò, Schamma Schahadat (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming). 13 Ottmar Ette, “Islands, Borders and Vectors: The Fractal World of the Caribbean,” Caribbean Interfaces, ed. Lieven d’Hulst et al. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 109–152; Sarah Phillips Casteel, “The Language of Landscape: A Lexicon of the Caribbean Spatial Imaginary,” The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed. Michael Bucknor and Alison Donnell (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 480–489; Gesine Müller, Die koloniale Karibik: Transferprozesse in hispanophonen und frankophonen Literaturen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Birgit Neumann and Jan Rupp, “Sea Passages: Cultural Flows in Caribbean Poetry,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives 13.4 (2016), 472–490; Ralph Ludwig, “Littératures des mondes créoles – des débuts aux questionnements actuels,” Études Créoles, Nouvelle série 1 (2015), 92−141, http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~fulltext/ Etudes_Creoles/ludwig.pdf (28 June 2017).

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ineluctable limitations of global and local configurations, Caribbean literatures have always opened up attempts to refigure worlds in new and different ways – namely, from a subaltern perspective.14 The trans-boundary dynamic of Caribbean geopolitics corresponds to literary processes that model and anticipate transcultural networks in aesthetic terms.15 Caribbean literatures meet the criteria formulated for literatures of the world in an above-average way. At the same time, only relatively few texts by Caribbean authors have been received as world literature and circulated accordingly. The fact that the Caribbean is this kind of far-flung space of movement, which necessitates the crossing of established boundaries in research disciplines, lends another dimension to this encounter. Literary examples from the English-speaking Caribbean exemplify the aforementioned phenomenon of a major overlap between both concepts. World literature from the Anglophone Caribbean that has already become established reveals the relevance of reformulated criteria of non-settledness, of the presentation of movement in the dissolution of centre-periphery logics, and an emphasis on the particular, often on the archipelagic as well. One could indeed go so far as to say that it is precisely those texts from the Anglophone Caribbean that have been canonised as world literature which can comply with the change in perspective towards literatures of the world. We need only consider Derek Walcott’s postcolonial epic Omeros from the year 1990, a work that is in many ways paradigmatic of world literature – and less because it has been translated into other languages than because of its literarily executed stories of transfer and transformation, which make it a multilayered experimental space for a divided yet locally situated world consciousness.16

In the context of world literature logics and canonisation processes, whether a text has to be translated into the most important language for global circulation processes – English – plays a major role, which is why the Anglophone Caribbean has assumed a special position here. Texts worth mentioning that have been successfully canonised worldwide are Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants (1967–1973), Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While literatures from the Anglophone Caribbean are received as world literature and can simultaneously be pioneering for concepts of literatures of the world, canonisation in world literature for Hispanophone, and especially Francophone, Caribbean literature has only taken place in exceptional cases if at all. In my following remarks, I would like to focus on exceptional phenomena in world literature 14 Jörg Dünne, “Dynamisierungen: Bewegung und Situationsbildung,” Handbuch Literatur & Raum, ed. Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 41–54. 15 See Gesine Müller and Birgit Neumann, “Weltliteraturen in den Amerikas.” 16 Gesine Müller and Birgit Neumann, “Weltliteraturen in den Amerikas.”

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canonisation from this context, in order to then sketch and comment upon the formation of literatures of the world from the Hispano- and Francophone Caribbean.17 First, without a doubt, the poems of Saint-John Perse, born and raised on Guadeloupe, belong to the canon of world literature for the first half of the twentieth century (Eloges 1911; Anabase 1924; Exil 1942; Vents 1946; Amers 1957). His work is not oriented towards the realities of Caribbean life; instead, it follows the tradition of modern French poetry in the tradition of Arthur Rimbaud. Saint-John Perse received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. Second, authors from the Hispanophone Caribbean also found purchase in the original Francophone orientation of the négritude movement and its new ‘black’ self-awareness, which gained strength in the 1930s. The Cuban author Alejo Carpentier holds particular significance – at the full level of world literature – in this regard. His works must be categorised in his own version of real maravilloso. The term ‘magical realism,’ for which Latin American authors would later become world-renowned, refers to one of Carpentier’s formulations in the preface to his novel, El reino de este mundo (1949). Some of the reasons for which the ‘literary quality’ of Carpentier’s work was particularly well-received are its ability to connect with French Surrealism and a specific way of representing reality that stages mythic and magical practices as real, which resonated with European audiences as exotic. Third, Cuban literatures overall have served a model function since the Cuban Revolution of 1959 that was definitely received at the level of world literature. This has to do with the 1960s boom in Latin American literatures, which I won’t go into here. A brief example from Cuba, though: Guillermo Cabrera Infante develops his literary clout through a political (if anti-Cuban) dimension, as well as through affinities with experimental modes of writing that were shaped above all in the French nouveau roman. Cuba’s function as a model was affirmed by leading intellectual publishing houses in the European and US reception landscape from 1959 to the late 1970s.

3 Current Caribbean literatures: New modes of reception among publishers While these Francophone and Hispanophone authors could claim a certain reception in the context of a highly specialised group of readers and their compatibility with European, and especially French, traditions, the beginning of the 1990s saw the worldwide advent of a group of Francophone writers who, along with literary production, are able to refer to a philosophically motivated essayistic oeuvre informed

17 I would like to thank Marion Schotsch and Leonie Meyer-Krentler for their important suggestions, above all with regard to the following remarks.

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by their Caribbean experience. The concerns of the authors gathered around Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant from Martinique can be read as one version of the conceptual implication of multilingualism in literary texts, which I identified earlier as a feature of literatures of the world. Their affiliation with literatures of the world finds its strongest expression in the fact that it connects not at the level of content, but rather at the aesthetic level, to an act of rebellion against cultural assimilation, which represents an essential element of the literary debate of the Antilles. The success of this literary language may have consequences for standard French, because through the awarding of the great literature prizes – at least since 1992, when Patrick Chamoiseau was honoured with the Prix Goncourt for his novel Texaco – texts written in an oral French creole enter increasingly into a re-contoured literary canon that, in its traditional form, serves as the foundation for written French. Fabienne Kanor, a Martinican born in 1970, also writes in this vein in her novel Humus (2006). At the level of content, she counterposes a new perspective against a rigid politics of memory related to slavery: the novel, based on true events, deals with a group of female slaves in the eighteenth century, when 14 women rebelled before their ship left France for the Caribbean and jumped overboard in protest. Raphaël Confiant’s novel Adèle et la pacotilleuse from 2005 is set in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Caribbean, its diaspora, and in France. Using multidimensional polyphony, Confiant portrays an encounter between Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle with Celine, a Caribbean pacotilleuse, a grifter who plies her wares on the ocean between the islands. The pacotilleuses are particularly interesting figures; they stage the decentralised movement within the Caribbean archipelago and the particularities of the individual islands, as well as their connections to the broader world. Each island maintains a mysterious affection for a product, a commodity, a plant, a tool, magic potions and particular ointments, fabrics scorned elsewhere. However, much of this does not come from the Archipelago. The whole planet seems to be pouring its dreams into it.18

The pacotilleuses stand for a particular solidarité géopolitique with the peoples of the Caribbean and a solidarité anthropologique (or solidarité créole) with societies outside the Caribbean that have been shaped by similar conditions of colonisation and/or creolisation. They are archipelagic figures in the sense of Édouard Glissant.19

18 Raphaël Confiant, Adèle et la pacotilleuse (Paris: Mercure de France, 2005), 69. 19 See Édouard Glissant, Traîté du tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 31: “Archipelagic thinking suits the pace of our worlds. It borrows the ambiguous, the fragile, the derivative. [. . .] it is to agree with what is diffuse in the world yet precisely located in archipelagos, these kinds of diversities in the expanse, which yet rally from the shores and marry horizons. We realize what was continental, what was heavy and what weighed on us in the sumptuous system, thoughts that up to this day have governed the history of the humanities, and which are no longer adequate to our outbursts, our histories and our no less sumptuous wanderings.”

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In his novel Case à Chine (2007), which appeared two years later, Confiant broadened the specific literary space of the Caribbean to Asian dimensions by dedicating his efforts to the history of Chinese immigrants to Martinique in the nineteenth century. The novel tells of a basic experience of Caribbean identities from innovative perspectives in the form of the intersecting fates of three Chinese families and their attempt to escape from the hell of plantation life, integrate themselves into the urban life of Martinique, and adjust to a new culture and language. Édouard Glissant’s La terre magnétique: les errances de Rapa Nui, l’île de Pâques (2007), on the other hand, is part of a project entitled Les peuples de l’eau, which the author completed three years before his death. It does not just combine art and life in an avant-garde way; it also opens up new spaces of movement. In the context of this project, a three-masted vessel embarks from Corsica with 24 scholars on board, under UNESCO sponsorship, for a voyage around the world in 2004; they return in June 2007. Twelve expeditions lead to eight peoples who can only be reached via water because they live on remote islands, the banks of rivers, or coastlines, such as the Yuhup on the Amazon and the Rapa Nui on the Easter Islands. Writers and journalists selected by Glissant each take part in one of the expeditions and write about the project’s effects and influence, the impact of which cannot be measured by the number of translations of these works; the authors include Régis Debray, Patrick Chamoiseau, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Antonio Tabucchi, and André Velter. Let us now turn to classical French institutions that have been decisive for international processes of canonisation. 1992 was a crucial year, a year when the prestigious Prix Goncourt prize was awarded again, for the first time in 70 years, to an author from the Antilles. René Maran had last won with the novel Batouala in 1921, an event that went down in history as the first time that a “black” author received a significant French literature prize. After an astonishingly long pause, a delay that seems unfair to literary production in the Antilles, Patrick Chamoiseau received the prize in 1992 for Texaco, a novel that, as I mentioned earlier, can serve as the paradigmatic example of literatures of the world. Among this author’s recent novelistic work, Un dimanche au cachot (2007) particularly stands out; it also received the French literature prize of the Prix du Livre RFO 2008. As is so often the case within contemporary Caribbean literature, the story issues from a realistic event – a girl has hidden herself in the basement of an orphanage and refuses to leave – and Chamoiseau unfolds a story about the past of these basement walls that goes back to the age of slavery. Topics such as the loss of identity within repressive orders, survival strategies, and processes of searching for identity play a central role in a text that evinces strong intertextual elements from Faulkner to Perse and Glissant. After Chamoiseau, another Prix Goncourt has not been awarded to a Caribbean author, yet the Prix Médicis awarded in 2009 to now Montreal resident Dany Laferrière for L’enigme du retour also qualifies as a key moment for Caribbean literary production and its international standing. Shaped by an exterior perspective, the novel conveys a family history between Haiti and Canada in which the protagonist, a

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Haitian writer in exile, returns to Haiti to attend his father’s funeral. The phenomenon of the non-resident writer, which so often surfaces in the literatures of the world, also plays a central role in the works of the multiple award-winning Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert, both in literary and biographical terms to the point that he [Dalembert] does not seem to belong to a specific place but to all places at once. His vocation as a vagabond writer, unable to take root anywhere, is reflected in his poetic and novelistic work from his first publications, and physical tramping also becomes a literary wandering through genres and languages.20

His latest novel scrupulously deals with this idea of tramping as an existential phenomenon related to every individual from the Caribbean who writes, as in Les Dieux voyagent la nuit (2006). This autobiographically influenced novel begins with the narrator’s participation in a voodoo ritual in New York and focuses on a journey back to the Haiti of his childhood, where participation in such practices was forbidden. The novel presents a dream-laden atmosphere and alternates between creole and Parisian French. Such appreciations of Caribbean authors through the system of renowned literature prizes remain exceptional instances. It is interesting, however, to see that the publishers at Gallimard, which were the first to publish Glissant, Confiant, and Chamoiseau, have represented authors from the Francophone Caribbean with increasing frequency. Previously, Gallimard had a strong tendency to represent authors from Cuba, such as Alejo Carpentier. We should also note that these ‘new’ Gallimard authors from the Francophone Caribbean are very strongly aligned with the literatures of the world criteria. The initial spark may have been the oft-cited manifesto published by Gallimard in 2007, entitled Pour une littérature-monde. Many renowned authors were involved in this manifesto, including Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, Fabienne Kanor, and Dany Laferrière, and it turned decisively against the centre-periphery logic of the Francophonie concept.

4 Summary/Outlook Caribbean literatures are predestined for inclusion in the canon of literatures of the world. At the same time, in view of this brief inventory of Gallimard’s authors, there is an increasingly established interplay between the world literature criterion of the number of extant translations and literatures of the world emerging at the level of publishing house canonisations. This has already applied for a long time to literatures in the Anglophone Caribbean, and we can currently see the same thing on the

20 Alessia Vignoli, “Louis-Philippe Dalembert, ‘vagabond jusqu’au bout de la fatigue,’” Il Tolomeo 18 (2016), 29.

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French book market, namely that the criterion ‘literatures of the world’ is becoming increasingly important in the publishing industry for the selection of Caribbean authors. Along with the transnational dimension of this criterion, a certain dissolution of the centre–periphery dynamic is taking place (in terms of content, literary language, and to some extent in cultural politics). Literary texts that have successfully passed through this first selection filter then have to go through the authorities that are decisive for international canonisation, which are still located primarily in the Western world, in our case in France. This finding of increased international circulation of literatures of the world due to specific publishing policies and politics is an observation that requires further systematic investigation. This is a development that we can welcome with regard to the potential of the concept of literatures of the world. A new world literature, oriented towards literatures of the world, must shake off eurocentric perspectives, incorporate new dynamics, new spaces of reception, and considerations related to the theory of power in order to interpret a highly complex system of global selection and circulation processes for our time and to enable critical reflection on their asymmetries. We can continue to hope that the publishing industry is motivated by more than just sales figures. Publishing houses do themselves a service if they position themselves not just economically, but also in terms of ideals. At the level of production and distribution processes for Caribbean literatures on the global book market, there is no sign that the hegemony of the North is being revoked, as is postulated in many fields of research on global interconnectedness. However, a programmatic re-orientation is emerging among globally active publishing houses, one that is assigning new value to literary traditions formerly relegated to the periphery.

Cecile Sandten

“Transnational Decolonial Aesthetics”: The “Hottentot Venus” Re-Configured Abstract: The concept of ‘transnational literature’ has been discussed in various cultural, national, and historical academic contexts. Drawing on the notion of “transnational decolonial aesthetics” proposed by the Transnational Decolonial Institute, in my chapter I will propose a theoretical and methodological approach that will examine the notion of the black female body as a transnational phenomenon that has elicited a wide range of representations in a variety of texts, contexts, and time periods. With “decolonial thinking and doing” and “epistemic disobedience” (Walter Mignolo) as subversive and counter-hegemonic writing strategies, I will offer a decolonial reading of the historical narrative of Sarah Baartman as the “Hottentot Venus” in early nineteenth-century England and France in conjunction with Suzan-Lori Parks’ dramatic rewrite Venus (1997); the art installation “Sa Main Charmante” (1989) by Reneé Green; the “Hommage à Sarah Bartman,” a live performance by Teresa María Díaz Nerio (2007; 2012); and the live performance “The Painful Cake” (2012) by Afro-Swedish queer artist Makode Aj Linde. The play and the art works will be explored as transnational literature and artworks, as they critically respond to the misrepresentations of the black female body in (neo)colonial Europe.

1 Introduction: The metaphor of the ocean as a global swimming pool In 2014, Canadian literary scholar Diana Brydon addressed the notion that borders are difficult to maintain by applying a quote from Canadian poet Jeff Derksen to her argument. In his epic poem Dwell, which metaphorically speaking implies staying or being put, Derksen mockingly assumes that when the nation state is perceived in the singular and separate, “[t]he fish instinctively know where the international boundaries are.”1 This induces Brydon to express what I have adopted as the heading of this introduction, namely that boundaries in global waters, and in a global world for that matter, do not exist.2 Nonetheless the ideology of single nation states and single cultures has prevailed in the European history of culture. Yet, in

1 Jeff Derksen, Dwell (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1993), 1. 2 Diana Brydon writes: “There can be no such thing as a ‘no peeing section’ in the global swimming pool” (“Students and Researchers as Global Actors: Developing New Learning Cultures,” https://dianabrydon.com/2014/02/05/students-and-researchers-as-global-actors-developing-newlearning-cultures (13 October 2016)). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-004

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different fields of study, the idea of autochthonous cultures has continuously been revealed as a myth by various scholars. Among them is Edward Said, who claims that “[p]artly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.”3 With such a theoretical framework in mind, it is impossible to envision a nation state as one society with one culture. Applied to the question of the potential of the category of the transnational as a literary paradigm, my interrogation is led by the inquiry of how Anglophone literatures can be discussed under the auspices of the ‘transnational.’ To be more precise, I will propose a theoretical-methodological approach that will help to examine the notion of the black female body as a transnational phenomenon since it has elicited a wide range of representations in a variety of contexts and time periods. Therefore, the question is how, in this context, it is feasible to comprehend attributions of meaning to the black female body in global and local, that is, transnational contexts? How is it possible to fashion a category that will neither ignore nor negate epistemic differences and/or cultural and linguistic specificities which exist in literary texts and art, and can nonetheless be used to discuss the colonial past and postcolonial presence? Generally, quite a number of literary texts could easily be classified as transnational in style, outlook, or form as they cross boundaries (author, protagonist) and address transnational topics (e.g. migration, diaspora, identity formation) or audiences (mainstream, English-speaking, educated). These aspects might finally help do away with a postcolonial reading altogether. However, I maintain that the colonial legacy, which in many ways is still present at several levels of production and consumption today, has to be acknowledged in concepts that attempt to centre on boundary-crossing, hybridity, and fusion at a global level, a focus which scholars in the field of postcolonial, transcultural, and transnational studies have set out to encompass.4 Therefore, I will argue for the concept of a “transnational decolonial

3 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), xxix. 4 Cf. Nina Glick-Schiller, Iain Chambers, and Christina Blanc-Szanton, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” Transnationale Migration, ed. Ludger Pries, Soziale Welt, Sonderband 12, 1997, 121–140; Sissy Helff, Unreliable Truths: Indian Homeworlds in Transcultural Women’s Writing. Cross/Cultures (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013) and “Shifting Perspective: The Transcultural Novel,” Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Sissy Helff and Frank Schulze-Engler, Cross/Cultures 102, ASNEL Papers 12 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 77–89; Sissy Helff and Frank Schulze-Engler, Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities. Cross/Cultures 102, ASNEL Papers 12 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009); Wolfgang Klooss (ed), Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English, Cross/Cultures 32, ASNEL Papers 3 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1998); Bernd Peter Lange and Dirk Wiemann, Transcultural Britain. Journal for the Study of British Cultures 15.1 (2008); Gunilla Lindberg-Wada (ed), Studying Transcultural Literary History (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2006); Alastair Pennycook, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (London: Routledge, 2007); Andreas

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aesthetics” in literature and art as a form of political intervention. Consequently, I will concentrate on this concept, as suggested by Walter Mignolo,5 as it will help me to read postcolonial texts in conjunction with the category of the transnational. A few examples from literature and art about the historical, performative, and contemporary narratives and narrations of the so-called “Hottentot Venus” will support my argument to illustrate what exactly is implied by the conjunction of transnational literature and decolonial aesthetics. My readings of the selected examples will show that transnational literature as a category needs to be specified when applied to a certain body of literature and visual art that relates to particular historical, national, and cultural eras based on race, ethnicity, and gender. More specifically, I will offer a decolonial reading of the historical narrative of Sarah Baartman as the “Hottentot Venus” in early nineteenth-century England and France. My examples are the dramatic rewrite6 and ‘decolonial’ response to the colonial misrepresentations of Baartman as presented in the play Venus (1997), by African-American writer Suzan-Lori Parks. Subsequently, the art installation “Sa Main Charmante” (1989) by Reneé Green, the “Hommage à Sarah Bartman,” a live performance by Teresa María Díaz Nerio who “dressed up” as Baartman (2007; 2012 Berlin), and a live performance by Afro-Swedish queer artist Makode Aj Linde who performed in blackface, acting as the screaming head of an edible cake caricature of Sarah Baartman, entitled “The Painful Cake” (2012), will be explored as transnational critical responses to the misrepresentations of the black female body in (neo-)colonial Europe. Thus, I will examine how the category of a “transnational decolonial aesthetics” can be employed, on the one hand, to challenge white male colonial practices of representation, and on the other, to revisit, reimagine, and reconfigure the racialised and sexualised black female body. I argue

Reckwitz, Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien (Weilerwist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000); Cecile Sandten, Martina Schrader-Kniffki, and Kathleen Starck (eds), Transkulturelle Begegnungen (Trier: WVT, 2007); Frank Schulze-Engler, “Transcultural Modernities and Anglophone African Literature,” Matatu 36.1 (November 2009), 87–101; or Roy Sommer, Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des Zeitgenössischen Interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien (Trier: WVT, 2001). 5 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 6 Examples of further rewrites and reconfigurations can be found in diverse transnational and time-spatial contexts, that share, generally speaking, similar goals in that they redress and reassert the historical figure of Sarah Baartman. Among others there is South African writer Zoë Wicomb with her fragmentary and historical novel David’s Story (2000), a text which is set immediately after apartheid and the new nation-building of South Africa, and African-American writer Toni Morrison with her novel Beloved (1987), which has frequently been read as a Baartman rewrite. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s fictionalised story Hottentot Venus, a Novel (2003) and Chmurdalia (2010) by the successful Polish writer Joanna Bator should be mentioned along with artists such as Renee Cox, Joyce Scott, Lorna Simpson, Cara Mae Weems, Willie Little, and Deborah Willis, who in their art works have drawn extensively on the “Hottentot-Venus” narrative and iconography.

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that the playwright and artists use subversive humour, ‘the body in pain,’ and a form of recontextualisation in order to enact a reversal of power structures between the former white male coloniser and the former female African ‘object,’ and show how they thus reconfigure dominant narratives of Western modernity in transnational and “trans-diasporic”7 contexts. In addition, I claim that the literary and visual aesthetics is also highly influential for contemporary discussions of the black female body in art and literature in a transnational framework.8

2 Approaching “transnational decolonial aesthetics” By acknowledging transnational and transcultural realities, postcolonial criticism has not only denoted a repositioning of European epistemologies but has tried to make transparent the long history of imperial interference as well as the irreversible consequences that the colonial ‘others’ have had to face. Despite many efforts by quite a number of scholars in postcolonial studies to refashion the field with regard to a replacement by the transcultural paradigm,9 the change has not fully taken place yet. Apart from Gayatri Spivak’s claim for “transnational literacy” and 7 The term “trans-diasporic” is meant to relate to writers and artists of African descent across the globe, a notion that already affirms a highly transnational context due to the transatlantic slave trade and its long-term effects, as well as the long-lasting migratory movements of people of African descent. In contrast to the concept of diaspora which addresses primarily specific diasporic ethnic groups (e.g. the South Asian or Caribbean diasporas in England), the African diaspora, even though it is mainly located in North America, has spread globally. 8 In this frame, black pop-icon Grace Jones should be mentioned who evidently showcased the stereotype of the black woman displaying animal sensuality and sexuality. In her famous photograph from 1981, Jones allowed her former husband Jean-Paul Goude to take a picture of her in a cage with a piece of raw meat placed in the cage, and a sign above the cage that reads “Do not feed the animal” (1981) (http://autodo.info/pages/g/grace-jones-cage/). Similarly, Armenian descendant Kim Kardashian’s photos on the cover of the 2014 Paper Magazine edition, again taken by JeanPaul Goude, shows Kardashian, a U.S. American reality-show participant, model and entrepreneur, present herself firstly with a champagne glass placed on her extended buttocks which is filled by an overflowing bottle of champagne, and secondly half nude, presenting her extended back (bottom) area. (https://nypost.com/2015/09/12/meet-the-man-who-helped-kim-kardashian-break-theinternet/). Whether both presentations can be interpreted as forms of objectification and, thus, are in complicity with the existing stereotype of the black or coloured female body, or whether these are forms of presentation in line with the concept of “decolonial thinking and doing,” is open to interpretation. However, I would rather opt for the first interpretation. 9 See the works of scholars such as Nina Glick-Schiller, Iain Chambers and Christina BlancSzanton, Sissy Helff, Wolfgang Klooss, Bernd-Peter Lange and Dirk Wiemann, Gunilla LindbergWada, Alastair Pennycook, Andreas Reckwitz, Cecile Sandten, Martina Schrader-Kniffki and Kathleen Starck, Frank Schulze-Engler, or Roy Sommer (for more details see also footnote 4).

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planetary comparative literature,10 it is also Homi Bhabha, who, with regard to the concept of “world literature” based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s conceptualisation, suggests that “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or the political refugee – may be the terrains of world literature.”11 In this frame, Bhabha’s ideas can be taken up as a starting point for the discussion of the notion of a “transnational decolonial aesthetics,” as Bhabha also envisions the ‘other’s’ textual productions to form what might be called transnational or “world” literature. Generally, the concept of the ‘transnational’ has primarily been applied in social or political science, law, economics, medicine, biology, and even engineering. Most of the studies, however, that address aspects related to issues such as the crossing of borders, fluidity, hybrid identities, difference, ‘othering,’ interculturality, and transculturality12 are conducted within the context of postcolonial studies. In particular, related to the ‘transnational turn,’ American Studies scholars Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, and Yogita Goyal, primarily focus on American literature.13 Generally, however, the discussion of the ‘transnational turn’ dates back to the text “Trans-national America,” written in 1916 by American journalist Randolph Bourne.14 In his essay, Bourne puts forward the idea that because of America’s history of immigration, there cannot be anything such as a single American culture in the sense of a single culture concept.15 However, like the term postcolonial, in which the colonial legacy is always present, also in the notion of the transnational, the concept of the nation as an establishing concept is always implied, often in line with fictional and historical narrations, stereotypes, or borders pertaining to the nation state. Accordingly, Donald E. Pease writes: the term ‘transnational’ has replaced ‘multicultural’, ‘postcolonial’, and ‘postnational’ as the most frequently invoked qualifier. In acquiring this status, the ‘transnational’ has experienced

10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 81, 73, 84, 101–102. 11 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2010 [1994]), 16, 17. 12 For a discussion and conceptualisation of “transculturality” as a leading theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies, see Wolfgang Welsch, “Auf dem Weg zu transkulturellen Gesellschaften,” Differenz anders denken: Bausteine zu einer Kulturtheorie der Transdifferenz, ed. Lars Allolio-Näcke, Britta Kalscheuer, and Arne Manzeschke (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2004), 314–341; Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” Spaces of Cultures: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), 194–213. 13 See Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011); Yogita Goyal, The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); see also Winfried Fluck, “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies),” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Studies 23 (Tübingen 2007), 59–77. 14 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1916, 86–97. 15 See Winfried Fluck, “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies),” 59.

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a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spatial and temporal orientations to the object of study – including multicultural American studies, borderlands critique, postcolonial American studies, and the more general turn to American cultural studies – within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge.16

Apart from Fluck, Pease, and Rowe, who put American issues in the foreground, Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani read the term ‘transnational’ in conjunction with the concept of ‘diaspora.’ In their edited volume, the authors create an all-encompassing concept of transnationality, since they focus on broad fields such as anthropology, politics, urban studies, migration studies, postcolonialism, media communication, slavery, social aspects, specific cities and metropolises, aesthetics, gender studies, economy, and concepts of identity formation.17 However, study and research centres that highlight transnational issues often use terms such as “Global Studies and the Humanities” in their denominations. One institute, though, that employs the term ‘transnational’ in its title is the “TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute,” among whose members are Alanna Lockward and Walter Mignolo, and whose goal it is to “Explor[e . . . ] the Formation and Transformation of the Darker Side of Modernity: Coloniality.”18 Accordingly, the members of the institute have issued a manifesto in which they state: Transnational identities-in-politics have inspired a planetary revolution in knowledge and sensibility. The creativity of visual and aural artists, thinkers, curators and artifices of the written word have affirmed the existence of multiple and transnational identities, reaffirming themselves in their confrontation with global imperial tendencies to homogenize and to erase differences.19

Even though the term ‘transnational’ is not defined any further, the Argentinian literary scholar and head of the Center for Global Studies at Duke University since 1993, Walter Mignolo, in his trilogy about decolonial aesthetics and practice,20 has developed a theoretical-methodological framework for the repositioning of European systems of epistemology by employing terms such as “decolonial thinking and doing,”21 “decolonial options,” and “epistemic disobedience.”22

16 Donald E. Pease, “Introduction: Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies,” ReFraming the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), 4. 17 Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalisms (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 18 TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute 2013. Emphasis in original. 19 TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute 2013. Emphasis in original. 20 See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), and The Darker Side of Western Modernity. 21 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs and The Darker Side of Western Modernity. 22 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity.

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Since art does not exist in a vacuum and since the artists often use their own bodies as part of their art works and performances, philosopher and feminist Rosi Braidotti noticed that the body executes both “a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affect.”23 While performance art has long been incorporated by artists and activists as a means of challenging political and social constraints, and socially established normativity (see in particular works by such artists as Yoko Ono, Barbara T. Smith, and Marina Abramovic),24 more recently, transnational and diasporic black and queer performance artists have acutely addressed issues such as ethnicity, gender, and the body in art and the body in pain,25 through live and visual performances and embodiments. In the late 1980s but also in recent work in art and performance studies, artists have also focused on the politics of racism,26 particularly its role in propagating the sustained subjugation and sexualisation of people of colour within white (and primarily male-dominated) Euro-American cultural realities. Scholars have uncovered the ways in which Eurocentric notions of ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ sexualities have conditioned modern sexuality by objectifying racial, gendered, sexualised, and colonised subjects through the power of normativising, the white imperial gaze, and the colonial treatment of sexuality.27 More recently, this debate has found resonance in discussions of the notion of “decolonial thinking and doing,” more specifically in Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011). In his study, Mignolo traces the European structure of power back to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Christian theology, and shows how, on the one hand, two forces, “de-westernization” and “decoloniality,” shift knowledge, economics, and politics to the East (or the global South), and, on the other, how “decolonial options” or “decolonial thinking and doing” enact a delinking from the colonial matrix of power which is underlying Western modernity, in order to end

23 Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 135. 24 See Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic’s autobiography Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (New York: Crown Archetype, Random House, 2016). 25 See, among others, Tracey Warr’s study The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon Press 2011), in which the most important twentieth-century art forms and artists that have used the body as part of the artist’s performance and where the body has become the art piece itself are compiled chronologically and examined. For the concept and examples of the body in pain in contemporary art, see Chapter 11: “Schmerz als Mittel für politische oder soziale Stellungnahmen” in Helge Meyer’s study Schmerz als Bild: Leiden und Selbstverletzung in der Performance Art (Münster: Transcript, 2008), 244–280. 26 See Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text 4.10 (1990), 61–78; Kobena Mercer, “Perforations: Mapping the Blk Art Group into a diasporic model of art history by looking at ‘translations’ of the US Black Arts Movement ideas and the prevalence of a cutand-mix aesthetic,” Black Art Group Research Project 2012, “Reframing the Moment: Legacies of the Blk Art Group Conference,” University of Wolverhampton, 27 October 2012, Video documentation: http://www.blkartgroup.info/conferencevid.html. 27 See Anna Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

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exploitation and, consequently, racialised misrepresentations. To illustrate this idea, Mignolo claims that If you are getting the idea of what shifting the geography of reason and enacting the geopolitics of knowledge means, you will also begin understanding what decolonial option (in general) or decolonial options (in each particular and local history) means. It means, in the first place, to engage in epistemic disobedience [. . .]. Epistemic disobedience is necessary to take on civil disobedience (Gandhi, Martin Luther King) to its point of no return. Civil disobedience, within modern Western epistemology (and remember: Greek and Latin, and six vernacular European modern and imperial languages), could only lead to reforms, not to transformations. For this simple reason, the task of decolonial thinking and the enactment of the decolonial option in the twenty-first century starts from epistemic delinking: from acts of epistemic disobedience.28

Applying Mignolo’s ideas to my own analysis of the transnational narratives of Sarah Baartman and the contemporary reconfigurations of her story in literature and art performances, I will explore how “epistemic disobedience” as a “fundamental component of decolonial thinking and doing” and a “body-politics of knowledge,” which participates in the “decolonial options,” offers transgressive forms of intervention and resistance as well as reconfigurations of ways of seeing, reading, and performing.29 Mignolo’s terms underline the possibility of critically intervening and acknowledging “pluriversality as a universal project,”30 since “[d]ecolonial thinking cannot be contained in cohesive macro-narratives because it emerges in diverse local histories entangled with Western civilization.”31 Thus, the concept of decolonial thinking assists in reconfiguring and decoupling contemporary art, performance, and literature from the influential experiences of colonisation. In spite of the fact that Mignolo, and postcolonial theory in general, considers colonisation as a Western-European instrument of subjugation and oppression, the transnational potential of his approach lies in the notion of epistemological disobedience. To be more precise, this method fosters a critical questioning of colonial history and especially the effects of the legitimisation of colonisation’s specific defining mechanisms. It also enhances a necessary diversification of perspectives, a critical repositioning, as well as an acknowledgment of difference, in order to promote an epistemic “delinking” from power relations which have subsumed the (colonial) ‘other.’32 As a result of the development of nation states, primarily at the end of the eighteenth century,33 the nation excluded the ‘colonial other’ by putting forward semantics related to 28 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 139. 29 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 139, 140. 30 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 208. 31 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 89. 32 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 139. 33 The nation state, as Benedict Anderson has adequately demonstrated in his seminal study Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983),

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‘dangerous otherness,’ ‘fascinating exoticism,’ or as most recently in the debate around refugees, ‘invasion.’ Accordingly, the ‘other’ is simultaneously made into an object of fear and desire, which by way of imagination is constructed by the national ‘subject.’ Transnationalism can therefore be defined as a system of multiple coding within a society that is perceived as plural. The concept thus offers analytical instruments that help to analyse multiple coded complex identities. This definition of the ‘transnational’ describes the more complex acts of national and/or cultural ‘transgression,’ ‘diffusion,’ or ‘difference’ that are set into motion when the concept of identity is used to challenge dominant homogenising discourses in which postcolonial subjects are interpellated.34 Moments of transgression or fracture seem to be a fundamental necessity. Correspondingly, transnationalism should be perceived as a process of stepping out of the concept of the single nation state, in which already existing structures are transformed and thus defined and created in other or new ways, a process that might also be described with Mignolo’s idea of “declolonial thinking and doing” and as a way of “epistemic disobedience.” Therefore, the analysis of my literary and art examples will show that drama, art work, and performances which all centre on the same narrative over time and space, are principally transnational. I will use this theoretical approach as a conceptual framework to explore how the issue of the black female body has been presented in a selection of works that pertain to a transnational35 body of literature and art. The decolonial strategies of reconfiguration show modes of resistance to the colonial culture of modernity and how individual but also collective cultural identities are examined, renegotiated, and reconfigured in and through literary texts, art, and performance forms.

3 “Transnational decolonial aesthetics”: The “Hottentot Venus” figured and reconfigured In what follows, the narrative of Sarah Baartman as “Hottentot Venus” will be explored in relation to Renée Green’s art installation “Sa Main Charmante” (1989),

is a fictional construct which is created through national narrations (e.g. newspapers; national literature; the novel), which has nonetheless concrete effects on societies. In contrast, nationalism, as Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso 1993) has shown with his subtle reading of narrative texts, has shifted towards imperialism through colonial expansion. 34 See Elisabeth Bronfen and Benjamin Marius, “Hybride Kulturen. Einleitung zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte,” Hybride Kulturen: Beiträge zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius, and Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997), 7. 35 It is also possible to use the term trans-diasporic for the selection of texts and art pieces, since they all address the African diaspora.

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Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Venus (1989/1995), Teresa María Díaz Nerio’s art performance “Hommage á Sarah Bartman” (2007), and Makode Aj Linde’s art performance “The Painful Cake” (2012). I argue that these representations are forms of expression of a transnational decolonial aesthetics – of the black trans-diaspora – as part of the cultural legacies of colonialism and as transnational decolonial counter-narratives. “Hottentot Venus” is an oxymoron (like Aphra Behn’s “Royal Slave” in her 1688 novella Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave). Venus was the Roman goddess of love and epitomises a beautiful woman, whereas the term “Hottentot” contradicts it, as it was used derogatively by German and Dutch colonialists for the South African tribe of the KhoiKhoi. “Hottentot Venus” was, in actual fact, a caricature of a real person, named Sarah or Saartjie Baartman, of whom little is known as only a few documents have entered the official archive. Yet, her story and narratives about her life have been continuously repeated, and retold.36 Sarah Bartmann (1790–1815), or Saartjie Baartman as she was called in Afrikaans, was a woman from the ethnic tribe of the Khoisan (named “Hottentot” after Western ethnographers) from the Cape region of South Africa. When still very young she lost her father and her husband and worked as a “nursery maid” on a farm of a “free black”37 slave-owner. This man, named Hendrik Cezar, earned his living as a servant to the British ship surgeon Alexander Dunlop. When Dunlop lost his position, he and Cezar had the idea of exhibiting Sarah Baartman in England as the “Hottentot Venus” and thus earn a living – owing to her then perceived exceptionally extended “buttocks.” In the eighteenth century, as the British colonised the Cape region, the gaze focused on the Khoisan female body – “creating an enduring image of the African woman before the world, reduced to a bodily part, she existed only to be known, named, categorized and taken.”38 Hence, a certain exoticising language and iconography developed around the fabricated “Hottentot apron” and the extended “buttocks” of these women. In this frame, they were defined as being primitive, hypersexual, dirty, ugly, exhibiting depravity, and having an abnormal, grotesque body – exemplified by and culminating in the exhibition of Sarah Baartman in

36 For a discussion of Sarah Baartman’s history, see among others, Natascha Gordon-Chipembere (ed), Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Rachel Holmes, African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus (New York: Random House, 2007); Sabine Ritter, Facetten der Sarah Baartman: Repräsentationen und Rekonstruktionen der ‘Hottentotvenus’ (Berlin and Münster: LIT, 2010); and Deborah Willis, Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010). 37 A descendent of slaves from South Asia. 38 Yvette Abrahams, “The Great Long National Insult: Science, Sexuality and the Khoisan in the 18th and Early 19th Century,” Agenda: Race, Identity and Change 32 (1997), 42.

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Europe. Thus, Baartman allegedly consented to be taken to London, and in the entertainment area of Piccadilly she performed as the “Hottentot Venus,” in many ways buying into the then stereotypical images and obsessions with the “exoticised” and “feared” as well as caricatured ‘other.’ Her “Hottentot apron” (her supposed extended labia which were believed to be longer and typical of the Khoisan women)39 led to the derogatory and stereotypical assumptions and fantasies about the black female body and sexuality. In 1810, Baartman arrived in England, which resulted in a court case about the question of whether she was held a slave on English soil. After this court case, she went – or was taken – underground and was toured along the English countryside. She reappeared briefly in December 1811 in Manchester, where she was baptised. This is the moment at which her name became anglicised: Sarah. Eventually, she re-appeared in Paris in 1814. By that time, she was owned by a French animal trainer of the name Réaux. Apart from daily exhibitions, Baartman also began to be shown in private salons, as very wealthy Parisians would book her. In France, however, soon medical scientists became interested in her body, in particular Napoleon’s surgeon, Georges Cuvier, a professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, who, for three days, codified the allegedly racial difference and used Baartman’s perceived “abnormal” sexuality – found in the study of her genitals – to establish European body norms. Janell Hobson notes: “Baartman became the preeminent example of racial and sexual alterity because of her ridiculed and pathologized buttocks.”40 After Baartman’s death in late December 1815, Cuvier received (unofficial) permission to dissect Baartman’s body at the Jardin du Roi. He had Baartman’s entire body cast in plaster, with her genital organs and anus modeled separately. He dissected her cadaver and brain, which were preserved along with dinosaurs and other animals in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Her body cast, skeleton, and the other body parts were exhibited in the Musée de l’Homme till 1982. Eventually, on 9 August 2002, after long-term negotiations between the new South African government and the museum, Baartman’s bodily remains were given back and buried near Cape Town. She was eventually honoured with the title of “national” heroine.41

39 See Natascha Gordon-Chipembere, “Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp,” Representation and Black Womanhood, ed. Natascha Gordon-Chipembere (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 8. 40 Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark, 57. 41 This could be read critically, as Baartman’s bodily remains were used, again, however in this context for the purpose of contributing to the narrative of the new South African nation.

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4 Contemporary transnational decolonial performance practices The relatively well-known art installation “Sa Main Charmante” (1989) by AfricanAmerican artist Renée Green42 is made of a ladder-like scaffolding which entails a hand-stamped and fragmented text from two sources. The commentaries from George Cuvier’s dissection report are juxtaposed with Baartman’s torturous life story. Moreover, the art work is equipped with a soap box, a peep box, and a Klieg lamp which are all ordered around the scaffolding. Through this fragmentation of the different parts of the installation, Green epitomises the ruptured, fragmented, and disembodied presentation of Baartman. In addition, through the peep box, the spectator of the installation is invited to view a nineteenth-century print caricature of Baartman, titled “La belle Hottentote” which implies, on the one hand, that he/ she is in direct interaction with Green’s art work, while, on the other hand, the viewer becomes, like the viewers in the caricature itself, an observer and thus curious onlooker, spotlighted by the Klieg lamp. Accordingly, the spectator becomes an object of her/his observation, and at the same time an accomplice of the white male European gaze. Cuvier’s comments direct the viewer to the “(SINUS PUDORIS OR ‘CURTAIN OF SHAME’ OF HOTENTOTS)”43 which Green has stamped on one of the slats to highlight Baartman’s supposedly elongated labia minora and thus her characters of anomaly. Solely “her charming hand” (“sa main charmante”) was commented on in a positive way by Cuvier in his report,44 which Green has chosen as the title of her artwork. Taking account of the various factors that the installation addresses in a juxtaposed and fragmented way, this revision and reconfiguration of the narrative of Baartman engenders a “transnational decolonial aesthetics,” as the fragmentation in the representation of Sarah Baartman’s narrative shows in relation to the shattering of her own fragmented historical life, and the representation of a black woman of African descent more generally. Her dissection and exhibition after her death is an example of the handling by nineteenth-century Western Eurocentric scientists in the context of colonialism, national narrations, stereotyping, exoticising, voyeurism, taxonomy, and natural sciences. With her transnational and trans-diasporic

42 Renée Green, “Sa Main Charmante,” E. Shepherd. Allan Memorial Art Museum “Art Since 1945” http://www2.oberlin.edu/amam/Green_Charmante.htm. 43 E. Shepherd, “Art Since 1945,” “Renée Green (American, b. Cleveland 1959), Sa Main Charmante, 1989. Mixed media installation (stage light, paper, paint, and ink on wood), approx. 70 x 88 x 63 1/2 in. (177.8 x 223.5 x 161.3 cm), installed. Ruth C. Roush Fund for Contemporary Art, 1991, 1991.12a-f.” Allen Memorial Art Museum, College and Conservatory, Oberlin, 1990. Emphasis in original. 44 The title of the art work is based on George Cuvier’s observations which were published as: “Extrait d’observations faite sur le cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentote.” Mémoires du Muséum d’histoire naturelle 3 (Paris 1817), 263.

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art piece, Green aesthetically decolonises European epistemological hegemonies. To be more precise, Green takes the image and narrative of Baartman from a European cultural historical context and carries it over to a contemporary AfricanAmerican setting, thereby changing the commonly known statements about this image and narrative, the authorising views of it, and describing and teaching it45 in a subversive and, thus, transnational decolonial mode. Against the “Euro-centered concepts of arts and aesthetics that have been imposed on them,”46 Green engages “in transnational identities-in-politics, revamping identities that have been discredited in modern systems of classification and their invention of racial, sexual, national, linguistic, religious and economic hierarchies.”47 She thus reconfigures Baartman’s image and narrative in conjunction with the African-American female diasporic experience which was primarily viewed with regard to derogatory sexual representations. Addressing a reflection on the ambiguity of race, history, the colonial imagination, sexuality, and theatrical performance itself, Susan-Lori Parks’ play Venus (1989/1995) – written in Brechtian, that is, in epic and fragmented fashion, and with a chorus such as found in Greek theatre – picks up on the narrative of Baartman, which Parks transforms in order to turn it into a play that is a fictional account of the “real” life of Baartman.48 On the one hand, she thus gives Baartman a voice of her own, which was actually never there, at least not in the official documents; on the other, the playwright shows Baartman as a rather naïve character, who was lured into going to England, becoming a dancer (in a freak show), and entering into a relationship with a white, married, dishonest doctor who falls in love with her and keeps her as his mistress and who eventually imprisons her until her death so that he can dissect her. As Parks explained, “most of it is fabricated [. . .] It’s questioning the history of history [. . .] It embraces the unrecorded truth.”49 Introducing a Chorus, which takes on different names throughout the play, and beginning from the end (scene 31), in which the death of the “Venus Hottentot” is

45 Cf. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage, 1978), 3. 46 TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute 2013. 47 TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute 2013. Emphasis in original. 48 Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus is a hybrid postmodern play that features a play within a play, a reallife historical character who is fictionalised, excerpts from various historical accounts ranging from musicals to legal and medical documents as well as two glossaries on the meaning of Latin medical terms and types of chocolates, which Venus devours. This formal heterogeneity resembles a printed reproduction of a museum exhibit through which Parks questions the authenticity, selection and representation of the archives of history. Thus, the numerous fragmented and multi-generic documentations of Sarah Baartman do not create a single uniform history for her as an individual but stand as incongruous patches of a text that draws attention to the blurred borders between fact and fiction, national narrative and transnational adaptation. 49 Suzan-Lori Parks in Philip C. Kolin, Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010), 79.

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announced, and ending with scene 1, in which the death of the “Venus Hottentot” is announced again, as in a mise en abyme, a circular and repetitive structure of racism and of colonial history is implied. Contrary to Aristotle’s classical definition of the tragedy in his Poetics in which the change from good to bad fortune is mandatory for the protagonist,50 the Venus is placed in perpetual bad fortune. The Ouverture of the play begins with the Negro Resurrectionist announcing “The Venus Hottentot!”,51 which implies that she is called from the dead, and after the characters from the play announce each other in a circus manner, the Resurrectionist proclaims her dead. The Ouverture is repeated in a slightly revised manner in Scene 1 (at the end of the play) and in contrast to the beginning, the Venus speaks a monologue in the third person in order to make her demise and museum exhibition public. Her words, however, are not her own, as she repeats the Brother’s monologue from the Ouverture.52 This is one of the numerous instances when the Venus is silenced and repeats ‘official’ framings and definitions of her body and history. With increasingly non-fluent language, the Venus and the Mother Showman invite the audience to visit the Venus’ corpse in the museum, which demonstrates that exposure not only “killed her”53 but will inevitably follow her after death regardless of her own will. The dead Baartman has no control over the posthumous exhibition of her corpse as a museum curiosity. The frame story of Venus thus presents the black female subject’s enslavement into eternal overexposure. An alternative reading of the reverse scene order is provided by Brandi W. Catanese who interprets it as an exploration of the “palimpsestic nature of history” where Parks is “sifting through accretions of information from the past in an effort to understand the mechanisms of historical narrative.”54 In addition, Parks’ Venus ends with the notion of the spirit of Venus imploring her audience: “Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me Kiss.”55 Thus, Venus lives on, longing for what has been denied her: love and recognition as a person and black woman. Parks’ device of listing the scenes in reverse suggests that she also inverts the meanings and representation. She calls for a “reversal” of Baartman’s narrative, in order to highlight the spectacle of performance and the absurdity of theatre: The character Venus invites the audience to look at her “oddity”; she encourages the Baron Docteur (Cuvier) to “touch me down there,”56 when historical records, which the play inserts in its script,

50 Cf. Aristotle, “On the Art of Poetry,” Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism, ed. and trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 42, 46. 51 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989, 1995) 9. 52 Cf. Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus, 13. 53 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus, 11, 161. 54 Brandi W. Cantanese, The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 123. 55 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus, 162. Emphasis in original. 56 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus, 104.

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indicate that Baartman refused to have scientists examine her, and it was not until her death that Cuvier had access to her body. However, this fictive Venus suggests to Cuvier: “You could be whatshisname: Columbus . . . You could discover me.”57 Such lines parody the quest of science and the legacy of colonialism and racism. Thus, Parks uses the space of her play to conjecture creatively in experimental forms on the suggested horror of Baartman’s exhibition. With the costume – Venus in padded breasts and buttocks – Parks emphasises the caricatured nature of the Hottentot Venus in nineteenth-century iconography. Therefore, the play reminds the audience that the Hottentot Venus is a fabrication, a caricature character. In Mignolo’s terms, the play can be interpreted as “decolonial thinking and doing,” as the African-American playwright reimagines and thus questions Sarah Baartman’s history by, on the one hand, depicting the location of her body in the “colonial matrix of power”58 and, on the other, addressing racism and giving Baartman a voice, however caricatured. Therefore, by delinking her “from the coloniality of knowledge and being,”59 Parks also reconfigures Baartman in a contemporary and transnational context of Euro-African race and gender. By depicting Baartman’s personal story and experiences as fictitious, the playwright contributes to the process and progress of historical and transnational revisioning and reconfiguring. Parks identifies and simultaneously disidentifies with the nineteenth-century European culturally perverse public discourse about the black woman and her body, and generates a form of revision of imposed systems of ethnic and racial definition in an African-American setting. Her play illustrates and exposes fabricated and caricatured depictions of black female sexuality prevalent in the dominant European culture’s imagination and, like Green, by way of identification, transports it to an AfricanAmerican context. Since in the play the character of Venus is depicted as rather innocent, it seems that this is the reason why she is silenced, mistreated, prodded, kicked, laughed at, and eventually killed, dissected, and exhibited. But, the act of complete silencing of the black female subject and her subjugation to her own objectification can be read, according to Priscilla Netto, as a replication of the coloniser’s voices and thus as an act of striving to displace the gaze and disrupt the imposed authority.60 I would therefore argue that the constant repetitions and revisions that Venus performs in the play61 can be interpreted as the only way in which she is able to gain 57 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus, 104, 108. 58 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 208. 59 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 208. 60 Cf. Priscilla Netto, “Reclaiming the Body of ‘Hottentot,’” European Journal of Women’s Studies (2005), 154. 61 Venus extensively incorporates Parks’ “Repetition and Revision” strategy, “a concept integral to Jazz aesthetic in which a composer or performer will write or play a musical phrase once and again and again; etc. – with each revisit the phrase is slightly revised,” as Suzan-Lori Parks puts it in The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1995), 8. In this context, Deborah Geis in her monograph Suzan-Lori Parks (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,

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agency and convey the tragedy of her own voicelessness. For Parks as an AfricanAmerican playwright, the term “re-memory,” a writing strategy coined by Toni Morrison, can be taken into consideration here as it underlines the need for rerepresentation of the forgotten “other”: the African-American woman. Morrison developed this concept as her own style of writing, which would enable her to re-memorise human beings who would otherwise be forgotten such as the African people on the slave ships from Africa to the Caribbean/USA during the Middle Passage, or the slave woman who would rather kill her child than have it live as a slave. Morrison adds: “But memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of [. . .] people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.”62 Collectively, therefore, the voice of the Venus in Parks’ play performs an act of ‘cultural haunting,’ situating the poetics of re-memory not in the past, but in what Lauren Berlant calls the “historical present,”63 a present that continues to bear witness, in palimpsestic fashion, to the horrors of slavery, and more specifically, the subjugation of the black woman as a sexual object in a transnational system of racial dehumanisation which Parks as an African-American playwright identifies with and discusses across space and time, transnationally. To argue with Berlant, it is vital to look at “generalization: how the singular becomes delaminated from its location in someone’s story or some locale’s irreducibly local history and circulated as evidence of something shared.”64 Berlant’s method is thus “to track the becoming general of singular things, and to give those things materiality by tracking their resonances across many scenes.”65 Therefore, there is, as Berlant puts it, the “logic of adjustment,”66 which is “an account of how narratives involving the education of embodied intuition in a transforming world situation can be said to capture the drama of their historical present.”67 “Here, the affective work of memory is just one among many forces that together constitute what gets refracted as the present: memory and the past emerge in mediated zones of visceral presence distributed across scenes of epistemological and bodily activity.”68 In conjunction with Mignolo’s idea of “decolonial thinking and doing,” Parks’ play Venus incorporates a multitude of voices to represent the silence of the black woman across time and space. Its intricate dramatic composition challenges

2008), 16, maintains that this technique which is exemplified in the repetitions of e.g. “Diggidydiggidy-diggidy” (Parks, Venus, 3, 162) or “”Drum, Drum” (e.g. Parks, Venus, 12) recounts the African oral tradition. 62 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 111. 63 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 52. 64 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 12. 65 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 12. 66 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10. 67 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52. 68 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52.

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any attempt at single interpretation and thereby rejects the imposition of a single dominant narrative and ideology. The spotlight on Venus in a padded costume draws attention to the artificial construction of her supposed deformity. It also contributes to disturbing the border between fiction and reality, as it alludes to a real figure while it represents a caricature. Parks’ reliance on interfigurality69 and transnationalism thus reaches back to history, fictionalises and dramatises it, and exposes its misconceptions and subverts them by showing the systematic transnational injustice towards Sarah Baartman, and more generally, the black woman and her ‘oversexualised’ body. Queer Afro-Swedish artist Makode Aj Linde reconfigures the “black face” into new historical narratives and thus furthers indiscernible prejudices to an exaggerated level as a form of “in-yer-face.” In his art, Linde has presented blackface images in different contexts. Thus, in April 2012, in Stockholm, when the “Artists Organisation of Sweden” was celebrating its 75th anniversary, the organisers invited two artists to design birthday cakes. Linde chose the “Painful Cake,” which he designed in the form of the torso of a naked African woman. With his own head in blackface sticking out of a hole in the table, thus making it look as though it were connected to the cake-torso, and with the cake’s body on a plate – epitomising Sarah Baartman – the cake was to be cut. However, as part of the performance, Linde began to scream as if in pain, to render the horrific effect of an actual black woman being cut open from her genitals upwards. The scene was filmed with a video camera and the effect was amplified by the fact that the person slicing the first piece of cake was the Swedish Minister of Culture, Lena Adelsohn Lijeroth. After the filmed scene was made public, the Afro-Swedish community demanded that the Minister resign.70 Linde, however, claimed that, with the act of cutting off the cake’s body parts and eating them, whereby the artist changes the roles of coloniser and colonised in the sense that in early modern travelogues, in particular, the latter were always associated and depicted as cannibals,71 the cake symbolised the way in which white people consumed black people. He did not hold the Minister responsible for this act, since the cake was meant to be eaten and the cutting-up of the sculpture was a condition for the piece and part of the live performance.72

69 Cf. Wolfgang G. Müller, “Interfigurality: A Study on the Interdependence of Literary Figures,” Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1991), 101–121. 70 Makozewe, “Artist Makode Linde is a Confused Racist Mulatto,” Kenya Stockholm Blog, 21 April 2012, https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/missing-ingredient-sweden%E2%80%99sracist-misogynist-cake (4 August 2017). 71 Cf. Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello, and bringing to light,” Women, “Race” & “Writing” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendrick and Patricia Parker (London and New York: Routledge 1994), 74–100. 72 Makode Aj Linde in R. Mackey, “Interview with Madode Linde,” 18 April 2018, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=gedEAfjmIzc, 7 August 2017.

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Linde, as a gay artist and the child of a Swedish mother and a West-African father, continuously questions images of gender, blackness, and oppression in his art. As a satire on prejudice, his art installation the “Painful Cake” can be interpreted as a relevant example of an art piece that disengages and delinks from colonial and imperial thought production (Western hegemonic epistemology). Applying Mignolo’s ideas to this performance, Linde, through the actual screaming when the cake was cut, can be said to “think from the silences and absences produced by imperial modern epistemology and epistemic practices”73 and to symbolically put forward the pain that black people had to endure throughout history.74 With his art piece, through an act of “decolonial thinking and doing”75 that he imposed on the participants in the performance, he changed the terms of the conversation and performed a form of “epistemic disobedience.” Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, a country in which, according to Teresa María Díaz Nerio, everyone is in denial of their blackness,76 Díaz Nerio’s research often focuses on subjects informed by the history of colonial and neocolonial invasions in the Global South, challenging the hegemonic Eurocentric and U.S.-centric notions of defining. In 2007 and at a performance at Be.Bo 2012 Black Europe Body Politics in Berlin, this visual and performance artist, who also currently works as a researcher in Amsterdam, first performed as the Hottentot Venus in a piece entitled “Hommage à Sarah Bartman” – a live performance in which Díaz Nerio “dressed up” as Baartman and stood erect, like a statue on a pedestal, to be viewed by the museum audience. As the onlookers viewed her performance, they necessarily realised that they were experiencing a performance by someone whose costume clearly indicated ‘otherness,’ and a surprising, perhaps even embarrassing, mode of familiarity. As part of a predominantly white European audience, the viewer is immediately reminded of his/ her Western hegemonic colonial history – and like Linde, Díaz Nerio’s performance is a form of “in-yer-face.” In this context, the artist’s work is a deliberate critical engagement with the display of ‘otherness’ in institutions such as art galleries and ethnographic museums. In addition, her performance piece is an intervention into processes of collecting and displaying, of curating and exhibiting ‘non-Western’ (African, Indigenous) art and material cultures that echo the European colonial history of subjugation and oppression, slavery, ethnographic, anatomic science of the nineteenth century, and the exhibition throughout Europe of looted art pieces. Díaz Nerio confronts

73 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 206. 74 Even though Linde only performs pain and does not use pain on himself while performing with and in his own body, the performance can nonetheless be interpreted as decolonial aesthetics, since the presentation of pain in art produces a political, moral, and ethical intervention. See Helge Meyer, Schmerz als Bild: Leiden (Münster: Transcript, 2008), 244. 75 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 206. 76 María Teresa Díaz Nerio, “ExcuseMeExcuseUs,” curated by Josefina Báez, 17 July 2011, https:// excusemeexcuseus.wordpress.com/ (8 February 2018).

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the viewer with her arresting posture and, through this gesture, allows Baartman to “gaze back” at her audience. Unlike Linde’s piece, the “Painful Cake,” where the performer was, metaphorically speaking, “in touch” with the audience and also presented his/her supposed pain while being cut through the screaming, Díaz Nerio’s “Hommage à Sarah Bartman” made the viewer aware of the materiality of the cultural artefact, i.e. the statue/padded dress that separated living bodies in the act of close encounter with the art piece and thus transformed Díaz Nerio herself into an art work. The inability of the viewer, due to the black dress/suit, to see the artist/performer’s true body and face (apart from her eyes, hair, and mouth) also caused the art piece to contribute to a moment of ambiguity and uneasiness. The absence of physical movement and direct interaction contrasts with Linde’s interactive performance pieces, in which the audience heard the painful screams of the black body being cut and also saw Linde’s head and mouth move, stimulating an affective-psychic intensity that transmitted from the performer/mask (black face) to the viewer/participant through the act of cutting. By placing her own body within Baartman’s, Díaz Nerio repositions the black female body in the context of a decolonial and thus reconfigured and revised trans-diasporic historical narrative.

5 Conclusion The playwright and the three artists discussed in this chapter show decolonial acts of resistance, of what Mignolo terms “epistemic disobedience,” by also taking, remasking, and disrupting Baartman’s colonial history through “interfigurality,” a mode of textual interrelation that exists between characters of different texts,77 whereby the adoption of the character from the source text to the rewrite “create[s] tension and conflict.”78 In Parks’, Green’s, Linde’s, and Díaz Nerio’s performances, the viewer’s experiences become part of the artworks themselves, which, in turn, become a constructed social and cultural environment (the theatre and the museum) situated in and against a longer political-historical narrative of colonialism, slavery, and racialisation. It is precisely these works of art that pursue an examination of the demands that a transnational decolonial aesthetics makes on the reader, viewer, or audience to critically evaluate acquired normative interpretations79 that were shaped by colonial epistemologies across time and space. As counter-narratives that challenge and seek to confront colonial and neocolonial histories, these texts, art works, and

77 Wolfgang G. Müller, “Interfigurality,” 101. 78 Wolfgang G. Müller, “Interfigurality,” 103. 79 Cf. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine; Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Boston, MA: Beacon Press 2012), 27.

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performances are part of a larger contemporary archive of art and literature that partakes in the important project of “decolonising the mind,”80 a mode of thinking and unlearning that has not come to a close, yet, as globalisation and neo-imperialism as well as racism prevail in contemporary politics and cultures. All four examples, I argue, put forward forms of representation that render the racial and gendered body as ‘other’ and simultaneously – by using the body as “the site par excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning or what social discourse prescribes as normal”81– contest and rupture constructions of race, gender, and otherness, and thus produce a different archive for Sarah Baartman which underlines its transnational and trans-diasporic frame. In this context, the play, the art installation, and the performance pieces raise awareness of the possibility to renegotiate existing cultural stereotypes. In other words, these works invite “unlearning”82 or performing a “contrapuntal reading”83 or “border thinking”84 as part of a critical and dialogical transnationalism. Spivak’s “enabling violation”85 shows that processes of colonisation were primarily destructive, yet have also opened up new ways for articulation. In Death of a Discipline she indirectly pleads for a revision of the canon in literary studies, respectively cultural studies, in the direction of transnational cultural studies, which, in consequence, meets the challenges of (neo-)colonialism.86 Therefore, the notion “transnational literature” should, as exemplified in my analyses, be conjoined, conceptualised, and further developed in the framework of “transnational decolonial aesthetics.” I suggest that the interplay of postcolonial theory and the concept of transnational literature provide tools to appropriately analyse the complex formations and constellations of the long colonial and ongoing (neo-)colonial mentality which Anglophone literatures and cultures have striven to deconstruct. Eventually, the transnational reconfigurations of Baartman’s narrative question contexts of text and art production and reception and challenge Eurocentric practices of representation.

80 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford and Portsmouth: James Currey, 1981). 81 Nelly Richard, “Margins and Institutions: Performance of the Chilean Avanzada,” trans. Paul Voss and Juan Davila, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, ed. Coco Fusco (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 188. 82 Gayatri Spivak, “An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak boundary 2 20.2 (Summer 1993), 24. 83 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 66–67. 84 Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” 85 Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, “Bonding in Difference: Interview with Alfred Artega (1993–1994),” The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Gayatri Spivak and Donna Landry (New York: Routledge, 1996), 19. 86 Cf. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

Cordula Lemke

Precariously Transnational: Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief Abstract: In my chapter, I examine how the narrator of Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief both employs and questions a colonising form of exoticism from a hegemonic, transnational perspective. Teju Cole’s first novel deals with the narrator’s temporary return to his homeland in the form of a travel blog, which presents the actual events at the beginning of the narrative almost in the form of a travel guide. The promise of authenticity in this illustrated description is reinforced by quasiautobiographical insertions, which initially obstruct the reader’s view of the colonising attributions of the narrative perspective, but then reinforce it. It is only a meeting with his former girlfriend that leads to the narrator experiencing a sense of renewed belonging with his hometown and to the fading of exoticising strategies. Still, the transnationalism of one’s own perspective becomes the object of negotiation and the hegemonic construction of identity the precarious place of one’s own vulnerability, which the narrator can only evade through renewed spatial distance. Teju Cole’s novel Every Day Is for the Thief comes across as a truly transnational text. The nameless narrator was born in Lagos to a Nigerian father and a white, probably American, mother. At the beginning of the novel, he lives in the United States, but returns to Nigeria to visit his aunt and uncle. He has successfully made the transition from Nigeria to America where he now works as a psychiatrist. His CV sounds like a typical migration tale of a young African from a well-to-do family who can make it anywhere in the world and is not afraid to do so. It is an Everyman story of a nameless cosmopolitan at home anywhere in the world. And it is in his global mobility that this everyman stands united with the key force that sustains him: art. Just like him, art travels and paves the way for a smooth arrival and a warm welcome. Art prepares the citizens of one nation for the arrival of the citizens of another nation with all their quirks and differences. It supports an exchange that is necessary for the creation of a global community. As the narrator states: [. . .] it is vital [. . .] to have a meaningful forum for interacting with the world. So that Molière’s work can appear onstage in Lagos, as Soyinka’s appears in London. So that what people in one part of the world think of as uniquely theirs takes its rightful place as a part of universal culture.1

African art needs to become part of universal culture, so that Africa can be put on the map. Only for the narrator it is less a question of bringing African culture to the

1 Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief (London: Random House, 2014), 87. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-005

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world, something Soyinka achieved with his plays being staged in London, but of giving a hand to Africa; of giving Nigerian citizens an opportunity to catch up with the world and sample world culture just as the Europeans do. He taps into the colonial myth of a backward Africa that needs to be saved by the cultural productions of the Global North even if it is now in exchange for African art. Yet the story the narrator tells also points to the precarious situation of his own cosmopolitan success. It is a story about inclusion and exclusion, about appropriation and the hierarchical forces of a hegemonic world order; a story about the precarious state of a person caught in a transnational maelstrom of being and not being a citizen of the world, a person on the brink of leading what Judith Butler calls a “grievable” life.2 The everyman part of the narrator’s story seems to be reserved for a chosen few and thus has to be defended at all costs. In this chapter, I will take a closer look at how his life as a transnational citizen of the world shapes the narrator’s gaze on Lagos, how his former home unsettles his cosmopolitan attitude, and the way he deploys narrative strategies in order to deflect the disruptive pull of the in-betweenness of the transnation. The very term ‘transnational’ leads a precarious life. Closely connected to notions of border crossings, it carries the perks of crossing in the promise of a new start, of shedding old baggage, but it also retains this old baggage by straddling the border. In defiance of taking sides, in suggesting a smooth transition, the term offers a state beyond borders only to find itself torn between the two sides of a border. In contrast to the term globalisation and its allegedly all-encompassing take on the world, the transnational operates on a much smaller scale. It engages with ambivalent power structures that emerge in hybrid spaces and opens up topics like migration, diasporic structures, violence, and social justice. As a literary term, the transnational has served two main goals: it acts as an alternative to notions of World Literature and it describes a certain genre of literature that deals with migratory processes from a more or less postcolonial point of view. Christoph Martin Wieland’s term ‘World Literature’ has been made to serve colonial agendas. Although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to open the concept of world literature towards many different cultures, especially the Chinese, its strong bias towards European literatures cannot be denied. From the nineteenth century on, the dominance of cultural products from Europe over the rest of the world has been ingrained in the term world literature. And even though Goethe’s various attempts at coming closer to the concept suggest that Europeans can learn from other cultures, this learning process will ultimately benefit Europe on its way to more advanced cultural productions while it is seen as a given that other cultures lag behind.3 These

2 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: 2006), xiv. 3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Le Tasse,” Ästhetische Schriften 1824–1832. Über Kunst und Altertum V–VI, (Frankfurt: 1999), 357.

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notions of primitivism are, however, no longer part of world literature today, as theoretical approaches try to avoid the pitfalls of colonisation. As David Damrosch argues, world literature should no longer be read as a Western canon of literature that determines the rest of the globe, but as literatures of the world, as productions from all parts of the world that are approached as equals and that open up a conversation across the globe.4 Laudable in theory, there is, however, a strong hint of exoticism in practice. Including productions from non-Western countries often prioritises notions of origin and identity over aesthetics. Novels by European or American white men are still more likely to be analysed for their poetic merits than novels by writers from other parts of the globe. Here, the focus often lies on questions of authenticity, of how a novel conveys cultural ‘truths’ about the ‘other,’ the ‘unknown.’ As Teju Cole shows in his jab at the narrator’s pride in the very much Westernised MUSON Centre,5 exchanging art works is more about art being a straightforward cultural ambassador than leading to an aesthetic engagement with various art forms, albeit culturally determined. It is at this point that the transnational makes an appearance. Carrying less baggage than the term ‘World Literature,’ it has opened up the field of literatures of the world by asking new questions. While world literature is still very much occupied with canonisation in the anglophone world and thus with concepts of exclusion, transnational literature usually comes without capital letters and values more inclusive approaches. Yet, the term ‘transnational literature’ struggles with different issues. As can for instance be seen in Paul Jay’s approach, ‘transnational literature’ acts as a reading strategy just like ‘world literature’ only that it prides itself on being truly inclusive albeit not in the unifying hegemonic way often found in critiques of globalisation.6 It looks at literature beyond national constraints that are often at the heart of canons of world literature. But, again like world literature, it also generates its own kind of literature. As Damrosch states, world literature addresses a global readership and cannot be too specific regarding its culture of origin.7 This is where transnational literature differs: it plays with ideas of alterity. Although it is supposed to include all kinds of literature, it has come to focus mainly on issues of migration, including the migration of literature itself.8 In close alliance with theories of postcolonialism, it seems as if currently transnational literature has taken up those aspects of postcolonialism that deal with moving across borders, negotiating differences, and creating a cosmopolitan audience that engages with alterity on a daily basis.

4 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 142. 5 Cf. Nancy Kang, “Review of Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole,” Callaloo 37.5 (2014), 1261. 6 Paul Jay, Global Matters. The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 2. 7 David Damrosch, World Literature, 139. 8 Paul Jay, Global Matters, 21–22.

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Teju Cole’s novel Every Day Is for the Thief plays with all of these aspects of the transnational and its counterparts. It interrogates both the transnational and world literature by addressing notions of authenticity, reader expectations acquired through yellow press infotainment, the colonial baggage of world literature or art, and the fuzzy edges of definitions of the transnational as such. The novel begins with a scene typical of a transnational lifestyle: the US-based narrator has to go to the Nigerian embassy in order to extend his passport. In the course of the novel, he then describes his visit to Nigeria, a country he has to discover anew after 15 years of absence. Readers expecting a journey down memory lane with all its ups and downs will however be disappointed, as the first pages of the novel already show that the narrator’s engagement with his home country is rather fraught. At the embassy he displays his discontent with the Nigerian government that cannot stem corruption even on American soil. His visit to the embassy is marked by a strong feeling of alterity. Although the narrator tries to distance himself from other visitors by foregrounding his ethnic belonging (“[. . .] there are also unexpected faces: a tall Italian-looking man, a girl of East Asian origin, other Africans”)9 it becomes clear that he is unable to support his ethnic claims to an African identity with cultural knowledge. His home country has become a source of otherness to him. Just like all of the “unexpected faces” he is yet to be placed. Like any other tourist, the narrator has to be introduced to the Nigerian way of doing things – here in the form of all-encompassing corruption. What starts at the embassy is then continued at the airport. With his arrival in Nigeria, corruption takes its toll. Bribes are demanded at baggage claim, at his entry into Nigeria, and at leaving the airport. Nothing works without a little extra; an intolerable transgression in the eyes of the narrator. Although his relatives attempt to explain the situation of the lower classes and their insufficient salaries, he remains aloof and highly critical. On the following six pages of the novel the narrator works himself up into an almost intoxicating state of hysteria: “I encounter three clear instances of official corruption within forty-five minutes of leaving the airport,”10 or “Money dished out in quantities fitting the context is a social lubricant here,”11 or “For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms – the categories are fluid – is not thought of in moral terms,”12 and so on. He sets the corruption of the upper classes against his relatives’ argument of bad salaries and finally states that Nigerians themselves are to blame for this insufferable state:

9 Teju Cole, Every Day, 3. 10 Teju Cole, Every Day, 16. 11 Teju Cole, Every Day, 17. 12 Teju Cole, Every Day, 17.

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The systems that could lift the majority out of poverty are undercut at every turn. Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, to get anything done is to take another shortcut.13

The practice of speeding things up by yielding to bribes undermines all efforts to fight corruption. The narrator’s charge of his fellow Nigerians is moral indifference. This kind of indifference could be perceived as a necessity of daily life, if it were not for the context. The chapter ends with a power cut shortly after his arrival at his relatives’ house. The last paragraph of the chapter describes the whole city sinking into darkness. Indifference is explained by backwardness. The narrator draws a dividing line between Nigeria as a developing country and himself as a representative of Western civilisation. In the manner typical of a budding colonialist, he passes a clear value judgement: Nigerians are morally indifferent, and as the following text shows, violent, uneducated and unbearably proud while he features as a highly educated person with the force of moral superiority on his side. He is a sophisticated, urban cosmopolitan who is full of generous advice for an allegedly underdeveloped Lagos. The narrator’s thoughts are shaped by colonial notions of supremacy. His suggestion of how to fight corruption is nothing but a condescending judgement of the people around him. He points to abstract ‘systems’ that he does not dwell on but that suggest to readers that there is a simple and rather obvious solution to the problem. The narrator withdraws into a Western perspective that condemns Nigerians by putting forth the notion that Nigerians are fond of their self-inflicted chaos. Thus he suggests that the West should simply turn away from this barbarian country which is no home to the values and accomplishments of Western civilisation, as is shown in the following quote: I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy – certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process – and in that sense I have returned a stranger.14

He has become alienated in a way that he can only look at his home country in a distanced and unsympathetic manner. His home country is presented as a heaven for thieves where petty crime thrives on moral indifference. In the eyes of the narrator, the citizens of Lagos get what they deserve. This colonial take features most strongly in the narrator’s depiction of his visit to the national museum. As a true cosmopolitan he compares the museum to other national museums across the globe, and dwells on Nigerian art he has seen in London, Berlin, and New York: “The West has sharpened my appetite for ancient

13 Teju Cole, Every Day, 19. 14 Teju Cole, Every Day, 16–17.

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African art. And Lagos is proving a crushing disappointment.”15 In the West, Nigerian art is displayed perfectly whereas the museum in Lagos only holds a few pieces that are badly handled by the staff. This is further emphasised by his perspective on the museum, where the narrator vents typical colonial prejudices: he criticises that the Nigerian population is not equipped to look after their own art works, but they would be in a better state in the West. Now they only serve as a means for enriching the person at the top.16 He states that the Nigerian population does not have a sense of history17 and the role played by Nigeria during slavery is mainly documented by researchers outside Nigeria: According to Alan Burns in his History of Nigeria, Spanish, Portugese and Brazilian ships often sailed under American colours until they were out of the range of British ships. This history is missing from Lagos.18

And he quotes a British art historian who lamented the fact that one of the Nigerian directors of the museum was too superstitious to handle pieces of tribal art.19 The novel thus opens one can of worms after the other, but all issues have the same thrust. They all confirm the worst kind of Western colonial prejudice: the Nigerian population is depicted as backward, as in desperate need of another round of ‘civilising’ influence from the West. Like colonial historians, the narrator justifies the colonial robbery of art by claiming that Nigerians only live in the present. He completely disregards the question of the role art plays in the religious rituals and whether this specific use can turn a carefully designed object into a work of art. He is only concerned with the value of art in a cosmopolitan and very much Western sense. This is just another moment in the novel where the narrator’s perspective is staged as highly colonial. It becomes clear that his gaze that was educated in the West only allows him to paint an oversimplified image of his home country. And something else becomes clear too: there is a debate about the authenticity of the depiction of Nigeria in the novel that strongly leans to the side of more rather than less authentic. Readers are probably willing to prioritise the narrator’s take on his home country and regard it as highly authentic, given that he was born in Nigeria. Yet, readers also get the impression that the narrator’s perspective might be biased. The narrator looks at his home country in an openly colonising manner that panders to the prejudices of the West and does not allow any alternative image of a Nigeria that does have problems but has more to offer than bribes and petty crime. Although the nameless narrative voice has frequently been linked to Teju

15 16 17 18 19

Teju Cole, Every Day, 74. Teju Cole, Every Day, 77. Teju Cole, Every Day, 79. Teju Cole, Every Day, 114. Teju Cole, Every Day, 75.

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Cole himself, as there are indeed biographical overlaps,20 the structure of the novel suggests that it is an intricately woven narrative that foregrounds the narrator’s limited perspective of which it is highly critical. In his obsessive way of dealing with his home country’s deficiencies, readers are subtly led to focus on the shortcomings of the narrator rather than of Lagos. Here, the novel engages with Taiye Selasi’s concept of afropolitanism. As Taiye Selasi writes in her seminal essay “Bye-Bye Babar,” afropolitans are “lost in transnation.”21 They find themselves confronted with an alluring cosmopolitan offer of defining bits and pieces of various cultural backgrounds that are then assembled in a process of bricolage. In this new afropolitan frame, anyone can become anything. Selasi thus argues for a new community of African cosmopolitans who share a mutual feeling of caring for ‘Africa,’ for their home countries and their well-being. She infers that this leads to a less simplified engagement with African countries as a result of personal attachments. Those afropolitans serve as the postcolonial consciousness of the whole world. Although Selasi laments that afropolitanism is an effect of the brain drain of African countries and asks afropolitans in a rather utopian vision to return to their home countries, she mainly celebrates the importance of afropolitanism for a new image of self-confident Africans proud of their homes. As Henning Steinfeld argues, the novel was written in reaction to Selasi’s theory and Teju Cole provides a more critical take on the afropolitan movement and its neoliberal tendencies than Selasi.22 I would like to add that the novel foregrounds the hegemonic structures in Selasi’s afropolitan bricolage. What Selasi identifies as fusion, as an easy-going engagement with other Africans and other cultures in general, generates a feeling of colonising exoticism in the novel. As the visit to the museum shows, art exists for art’s sake. It is placed within a global notion of what art is and does and a cosmopolitan take on how it should be displayed. This approach only leads to a further distancing of the narrator from his home country and a staging of his colonial attitudes. The narrative strategies create an everyman situation that is presented as typical of the afropolitan way of life. Yet, an alleged expert on all things Nigerian, the narrator has roots in Nigeria but is alienated from the present situation of the country. He no longer recognises the ways of life in Nigeria as his own and feels threatened by the country’s non-Western problems. Rather than caring for Africa and making valuable suggestions for a better life as Selasi demands, he increases his distance from his own home country by showering it with a coloniser’s critique. This feeling of alterity goes even further when the narrator is confronted by the so-called area boys, the local gangs. The boys demand a share of the goods the 20 Cf. Aleksandar Hemon, “Teju Cole,” BOMB 127 (2014), 72. 21 Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar,” The Lip March 3 (2005), www.the lip.robertsharp.co.uk. 22 Henning Steinfeld, Afropolitan Space Invading between Neoliberalization and Africanization, https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/86485, 13.

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narrator’s aunt had shipped to Lagos for her school and their threatening stance causes him to return their violence: I feel like a tuning fork, vibrating with an unfamiliar will to violence. There is nowhere to run and I have no desire to run. I can no longer bear the violence, the caprice, the air of desperation. If they attack, I say to myself, I will crush their throats. I think of myself as a pacifist but what I want now is to draw blood, to injure, even to be injured. Crazed by the situation and by the need for an end to it, I no longer know myself.23

Not only does he feel a distancing alterity, but he is infected by an insufferable atmosphere that he explains with his disdain for gratuitous violence, amoral behaviour of bribes and scams and a general Nigerian carelessness for things that matter. To him, the things that matter can be summed up in a Western lifestyle. Up to now, his feeling of being surrounded by evil could be kept at bay by his colonial attitude, an attitude that makes him denigrate the area boys as animalistic beasts.24 Yet, in his encounter with them he notes that his own behaviour does not differ. He too is infected by this feeling of violence; their animalistic attitude has left traces in his own behaviour. The appearance of the area boys unsettles the narrator in such a way that he does not know himself any longer. From then on, Nigeria is not only an unspeakably backward country, but poses a danger for the narrator’s mental stability. Like any true coloniser’s fear of first contact, the narrator experiences a feeling of ‘going native,’ of catching the virus of barbarism, if he stays in this apparently uncivilised land. Like all colonisers before him, he tries to remedy this feeling by installing strong boundaries of colonial supremacy. His desire to leave the country and rid himself of this danger is increased by his catching malaria, a literal virus, at the end of the novel. In good colonial fashion, the danger of engaging with the other is foregrounded by notions of illness and infection, of the other invading and destroying the cosmopolitan body. Through illness, the other fights back. This reversal of power structures is again rendered as a story of backwardness by the narrator. He relates that his friend avoids malaria by not speaking the name, but that he himself does not believe in such irrational superstition due to his superior knowledge of biological facts. Nigerian approaches are again couched in a narrative of backwardness, irrational barbarism, and superstitious belief in fate. The narrator selects those events of his stay that reinforce an unfavourable image of Nigeria. Rather than act as an intermediary figure, the narrator introduces an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality that serves to ensure his own position on the side of Western culture. His act of colonial distancing also governs the genre of the novel. For his return to his home country, the narrator does not engage in writing his memoirs or similar

23 Teju Cole, Every Day, 109. 24 Cf. Henning Steinfeld, Afropolitan Space Invading, 32.

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forms of life writing that would relate what appears as personal experience. Although the narrator quotes Michael Ondaatje’s novel Running in the Family as an intertext twice,25 he chooses not to follow the same direction. Where Ondaatje’s protagonist takes the reader on a ride down memory lane by introducing his family, albeit in a very much postmodern fashion, Cole’s narrator ensures that the distancing effect remains strong through his desire to not talk about his parents. Instead, he chooses the travelogue in its new form of a travel blog.26 His entries follow the internet conventions of jotting down shorter or longer vignettes illustrated by a number of photographs. Most of these photographs do not reflect the story of the vignettes, but underline the general notion of being on the road, of passing through, of capturing the activity of the tourist, as they mainly capture images of cars and of driving, but also exoticise the beauty of the land27 or the habits of the people28 and even propose the aesthetics of squalor of slum tourism.29 A car is a tourist bubble and from inside this safe haven, the narrator is able to create the distance necessary to criticise without being affected himself. He becomes a tourist in his own country. Even the deceptively simple solutions he devises for the problems Nigeria is facing carry the weight of the tourist who becomes an expert just by being in some place far from home. And the short vignettes in which he tries to capture the population of his home country read like distanced reflections of a tourist’s travel blog. This strategy of a merely tourist involvement and careful self-distancing can also be seen in the narrator’s engagement with occurrences of violence that verge on the personal but ultimately remain distancing. The narrator begins with encounters with violence that emerge in his family context. At a party, he is told stories of robberies and a murder that happened to his family and their friends. Despite the presence of the victim’s widow, the narrator sees the stories as mere tales among a plurality of stories that only cater to his prejudices. This chapter, however, shows a slight turn in the narrator’s perception of his home country. The stories about death in his family evoke his memories of his father. But those memories only live on in his life as a bunch of old, faded photographs. They belong to stories, but have no place in his life. What began as a more personal account has faded into oblivion like the photographs. The second occurrence of violence is the story of an eleven-year-old thief that tells another tale of Nigerian barbarism, but also of his own humane approach. The murder of this boy by a lynch mob causes outrage in Nigerian media, but it is soon turned into a media spectacle of violence that hardly registers in the life of the Nigerian population. For the narrator, however, this event becomes a moral stepping

25 26 27 28 29

Teju Cole, Every Day, 22, 41. I thank Amira Elmasry for drawing my attention to this genre. Teju Cole, Every Day, 63. Teju Cole, Every Day, 70. Teju Cole, Every Day, 56.

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stone that allows him to create a “grievable life,” as Judith Butler would have it. He feels deeply affected in his humanity, gives a face to the boy, and turns his narrative into a kind of obituary. But even here, the narrator’s handling of the story demonstrates his Western gaze. During his childhood, the stories were part of his everyday life: “I’ve seen it before. [. . .] I was still a child when I learned to stitch the various vignettes into a single story.”30 At his return, this story acquires the face of an individual human being that is told in the context of the narrator’s new moral attitudes. Finally, the story is drowned in a wave of tourist indifference: “For my part, I need to find the danfo that goes from here to Yaba.”31 The narrator needs to stick to his schedule and cannot afford to be too involved morally. The occurrence merely offers a good story that is now over and done with. His tourist gaze erases his apparent moral high ground. Only when he meets his former lover does the narrator leave his tourist bubble and step into a transnational space that seems open for a genuine engagement with and negotiation of different cultural backgrounds; or as Selasi puts it: “What distinguishes this lot [the true Afropolitans] is a willingness to complicate Africa; namely to engage with, critique and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to us.”32 Here, violence is a trigger of an encounter that is very much personal. The hand of his former girlfriend was mutilated in an accident with a food processor, an accident that could have happened anywhere but is the result of a sudden surge of electricity during one of the power cuts that are common in Lagos. Although power cuts were at the heart of the narrator’s disdain before, in this instance the power cut is not simply a sign of Nigerian backwardness, but leads to a new awareness of personal loss in the narrator’s story. The story speaks of human suffering that affects the narrator directly. For the first time, the narrator offers a story of shared humanity, of similarities and relationships that he does not dismiss immediately. His former girlfriend has changed after her accident and so has the relationship of the narrator to her. He is forced to engage with his memories, with the similarities and differences these evoke between him and his home, on a basis that is free from his usual patronising colonial attitude which dominates his relationship to his family and friends. This is the first instance where his home country has had the power to move him emotionally, to drag him out of his tourist bubble. He has become affected by his home country in that it has become a place of memory. It has become a tangible presence that cannot be dissolved in cosmopolitan supremacy, but has a local anchor to it. Thus, on leaving the country the narrator states shortly before take-off: “The word ‘home’ sits in my mouth like foreign food. So simple a word, and so hard to pin to

30 Teju Cole, Every Day, 52. 31 Teju Cole, Every Day, 62. 32 Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar.”

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its meaning. We have not left yet, and already there is something drawing me back to this city, this country.”33 Although the narrator has felt a stranger in his home country, at the end of the novel he leaves with a strong sense of belonging. In the end, the cosmopolitan narrator seems to have become a transnational traveller along the lines which Selasi describes in her essay. He is at home in two places and has the ability to criticise from a position of someone deeply involved in two worlds. The narrator feels that he belongs to Nigeria although he is a very harsh critic of his home country. Yet, the last sentence of the chapter seems to question this development: The plane sheds ballast and rises above the city, rises above the cloudless small dots of light that are scattered like stars across the landscape, rises slowly into the cloudless harmattan night, easing the compression, rises deep into the ether, until there is nothing visible in the darkness below except for the earth’s dark curve.34

The cosmopolitan traveller who travels the whole globe seems to gain ground again when the ballast that the plane loses during take-off is turned into a symbolic gesture of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Here, the narrator reduces Lagos to a city amongst many. His bird’s eye view again allows him to shed his engagement with the city and begin anew without the ballast of his own biography. However, the novel does not end with the narrator’s take-off. The very last chapter sums up his journey to Lagos and comes to an unforeseen conclusion. In the manner of an epilogue it describes the narrator’s memories of a labyrinthine episode in which he acts as a flaneur who drifts into unknown places. In contrast to his former planned journeys to specific places or people he leaves the well-trodden paths of his travel blog and lets himself drift through new parts of the city. He is no longer steered by his expectations of places but drifts to where unforeseen experiences allow him to come away with new impressions of the city that will help him find new connections to his home country devoid of the baggage of those memories that he had consigned to oblivion before he made the trip to Lagos in the first place. In order to belong, he was in need of new experiences beyond the wellknown paths of undesirable memories; he had to create a new image of the city that would replace his former memories and that allowed him to create a future relationship with his home country. The final image of belonging speaks of death. The narrator encounters a small community of undertakers that he stops to watch for a while. Life and death are closely intertwined in this community. The vivid image of children playing, the men’s deeply focused engagement with their work, and women cooking are all closely connected to the workings of death. Everyday life is situated alongside the daily routine of death. Here, the narrator locates meaning in his labyrinthine

33 Teju Cole, Every Day, 157. 34 Teju Cole, Every Day, 157.

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wanderings. As he states, he has not been caught in a maze with a multitude of dead-ends, but he deals with a labyrinth whose centre gives meaning to the way that leads to it: “I’m in a labyrinth. A labyrinth, not a maze. I hadn’t really thought about the difference before, but it has become clear. A labyrinth’s winding paths lead finally to the meaningful center.”35 This is a memory that cannot be captured in a photograph but that affects his relationship to Lagos as it affects his own life: I want to take the little camera out of my pocket and capture the scene. But I’m afraid. [. . .] afraid that I will bind to film what is intended only for the memory; what is meant only for a sidelong glance followed by forgetting.36

The narrator’s engagement with death at the end of the novel comes across as a very personal moment that is described as an almost life-changing experience. Yet at a closer look it is expressed in the novel’s habitual genre of an everyman story. While the games of the children around him suggest a highly individualised atmosphere, the narrator’s thoughts on death run along well-trodden paths: it is the last journey, Charon is conjured up when he mistakes the coffins for boats and life is presented as a journey towards a new state of mind. Death as the incomprehensible and unnameable state at the other side of the border of life can only be confronted in clichés. The narrator resorts to texts of world literature, like Greek myths, in order to express a phenomenon that cannot be captured in thought processes. He is in need of the force of all literary production across the globe to convey his experience. And despite the use of world literature that he had employed before to assert his own supremacy, here world literature serves another purpose. The clichés he deploys are no longer part of his colonising cosmopolitan stance, they no longer result from a manoeuvre of distancing the ‘other,’ in this case his fellow Nigerians, and they are not upheld by his previous hegemonic strategies of making sense of his surroundings. In the face of death, it is no longer relevant which cliché is used to make sense of the world and one’s life as long as it helps to make sense at all. This return to the wealth of world literature is encapsulated in the final photograph. The photograph displays allusions to a variety of rites and myths about death. The black boat recalls black Venetian gondolas reserved for the dead and on board there is a child clad in white both symbolising purity and the colour of mourning not just in Nigeria but in many countries outside Europe. In photographic representation, myths and rites of death of the Global North and the Global South here join forces with notions of world literature in a globalised attempt of expressing the absolute other of death. The transgressive ‘trans’ of death is in need of the unifying conversation of art and literature and thus the conjoining, border-crossing ‘trans’ of life. The afropolitan dilemma that the novel locates between the poles of hegemonic Western notions of globalisation and transnational efforts of communication is

35 Teju Cole, Every Day, 159. 36 Teju Cole, Every Day, 160–161.

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brought to a conclusion by the universal leveller, by death. Here, the notion of crossing, of ‘trans’ is pushed to the fore while hegemonic power structures are relegated to the background in the only passage of the novel that portrays the narrator’s engagement with the different worlds he lives in on a level of equality. Thus, the afropolitan dilemma is finally resolved in favour of the precarious state of the transnational.

Lucia Krämer

The Discursive Construction of Transnational Fiction on Penguin Random House Group Websites Abstract: Transnationality has become a central organisational and business strategy of large publishing groups, and transnational novels, i.e. novels that contain transnational story elements or themes, or whose authors’ biographies are marked by transnationality, appear particularly well suited to exploiting the publishers’ transnational distribution networks. This chapter examines whether and how this manifests itself discursively in the self-presentation of selected publishers and the presentation of the fiction portfolios on their websites. An analysis of randomhouse. de, penguin.co.uk, and knopfdoubleday.com in terms of the roles that the sites accord to the national and to internationality and transnationality as discursive concepts shows that while the role of the national in the publishers’ presentations of themselves and their books has declined, internationality is emphasised. However, while all the publishers’ self-presentations contain at least implicit messages about their transnational scope and/or reach, the publishing houses do not foreground the transnational novels in their portfolios. They emerge as a special kind of fiction nonetheless because they are predominantly associated with the categories of world literature and literary fiction, rather than (general) fiction. Transnationalism in authors’ biographies and as a topic in literary fiction is thus constructed normatively as an indirect signal of literary quality.

1 Introduction The developments most affecting the publishing industry since 1990 have been digitisation, which has also driven a revolution in book retailing (exemplified most notably by Amazon), and the older but ongoing trend of corporatisation. Many formerly independent publishing houses either merged into publishing groups in order to combine their strengths and become more competitive, or they have been incorporated into larger media conglomerates, often both.1 The conglomerates’ stronger profit orientation in comparison to more traditional models has drastically influenced the publishing landscape. Because of their focus on potential bestsellers

1 Cf. Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd edition (Mahwah/NJ, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 51; Christina Banou, Re-Inventing the Book: Challenges from the Past for the Publishing Industry (Amsterdam: Chandos, 2016), 5–6. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-006

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and bestselling authors as well as the principle that, ideally, each book should make a profit, the so-called ‘midlist’ has come under pressure. Generally, it has also become more difficult for emerging writers of fiction to be picked up by a publisher and, as used to be the case more regularly in the past, nurtured over several books until their eventual (financial) breakthrough.2 Some of the exceptions to this trend seem to be writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (e.g. Americanah), Taiye Selasi (e.g. Ghana Must Go), and Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing), to name only three examples. These writers’ biographies and works straddle different countries and cultures and open up access points to readers from different cultural backgrounds by offering both familiar elements and the exotic allure of cultural difference.3 For large media conglomerates and their book publishing divisions, which are, as a rule, active on several continents, even though they are mostly based in the ‘West,’ transnationality has become a central business strategy; so much so that at present all elements of the literary system, from the production to the distribution and reception of literary texts, are suffused by it. This chapter examines if and how publishers’ self-presentations on their websites reflect this.4 The analysis will focus on the discursive role of transnationality on the websites. The aim is to discover how the publishers’ engagement with the category of the transnational and, relative to this, the national, contributes to how they represent themselves as well as authors and their books, and which image of transnational fiction and its readers they implicitly create by doing so. The chapter therefore complements the existing research on transnational literature by engaging with an aspect of marketing.5 Even though the analysis is, due to the limited scope of the chapter, far from representative, it provides some insights into whether and/or how

2 André Schiffrin, “How Mergermania Is Destroying Book Publishing,” The Nation, 28 November 2012; Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 37–38. 3 For a theorisation of the marketing of cultural difference, cf. Graham Huggan’s concept of the postcolonial exotic. (Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins [London: Routledge, 2001]). 4 While some of the mechanisms described in this chapter also apply to publishers specialising in non-literary works, this chapter does not engage with publishers like Pearson, the RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), or ThomsonReuters that specialise in the educational market, science publications, or the provision of services and media on specialist topics like finance and law (see Jim Milliot, “The World’s 54 Largest Publishers, 2018,” Publishers Weekly, 14 September 2018). This exclusion is entirely due to restrictions of length for this chapter, since transnationality is a fundamental business model also for these publishers. It manifests itself discursively in a different way than in the marketing of fiction, however, due to the international and transnational nature of the academic and business worlds these publishers predominantly address and due to the fact that the cultural origins of a book and its author’s biography tend to play a more prominent role in reviewers’ descriptions and the marketing of literary texts. 5 Cf. Claire Squires, Marketing Literature, 3.

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selected publishers functionalise transnationality for promotional purposes in their presentation of themselves and their portfolios.6

2 Transnationalism and literature Before we come to the analysis proper, however, a few words about terminology are necessary because despite the ‘transnational turn’ identified by Paul Jay in his book Global Matters (2010),7 scholars still use the terms ‘transnational,’ ‘transnationality,’ and ‘transnationalism’ in multiple ways and reflect on them to various degrees of depth. At the shallow end of the spectrum, we find, for example, a German anthology on Literarische Transnationalität from 2015 that works with a very reduced version of the term and seems to call ‘transnational’ any cultural or literary transfer involving more than one national culture or literature.8 In the same year, Pramod K. Nayar published a book – The Transnational in English Literature – about the representation of the Other in English texts, where the term ‘transnational’ is initially simply used to signify ‘from another nation’ before then serving to describe English literature as being defined by its encounter with cultural difference.9 In Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin hinted at the term’s instability by suggesting that ‘transnational literatures’ is an alternative term used synonymously with both ‘post-colonial literatures’ and ‘diasporic literatures.’ In their view, ‘transnational literatures’ usually designates literature by migrants, literature written in a second language, or literature with “a cross-cultural theme” whose authors moreover tend to be more mobile and prosperous than those writers who are primarily perceived as diasporic writers.10 As Herrmann, Smith-Prei, and Taberner have pointed out in the introduction to their anthology Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, [l]iterary scholars working with concepts of globalization and transnationalism have been most influenced by postcolonial studies [. . .] and they tend to be most interested in what have

6 My heartfelt thanks go to all participants of the conference Transnational – Potenzial und Grenzen einer literaturwissenschaftlichen Kategorie at FU Berlin (15/16 Sept. 2017) who commented on an earlier draft of this chapter and thereby helped shape its argument. 7 Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 8 Karin Hoff, Anna Sandberg, and Udo Schöning (eds), Literarische Transnationalität: Kulturelle Dreiecksbeziehungen zwischen Skandinavien, Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015). 9 Pramod K. Nayar, The Transnational in English Literature: Shakespeare to the Modern (London: Routledge, 2015), 5. 10 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd edition, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 214.

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typically been described as minority, exogenous, or diasporic authors. Indeed, minority writer and transnational writer are often used interchangeably to describe, say, German-language authors of Turkish provenance or Chicano and Chicana authors [. . .].11

These are authors whose biographies contain, in the widest sense, diasporic features. Postcolonial studies investigates transnational literature in colonial and neocolonial contexts by concentrating, among other things, on questions of unequal power relations and resistance12; cultural appropriation and hybridity; diaspora and identity13; Eurocentrism and exoticisation. Any investigation of international publishing should consider these questions and phenomena and keep them in mind. However, it must also realise that the model of centre and margin long favoured by postcolonial studies may suffice for analysing international publishing relations, i.e. relations between individual nations, yet is insufficient to fully capture truly global or transnational publishing ventures in the sense in which this chapter understands the term. For these do not occur between two or more nations but are marked by multiple poles and multidirectional flows across several nations,14 whose borders appear porous in the process. In this chapter, transnationalism is thus understood as “a plurality of intersecting and crosscutting flows of products, ideas, and people back and forth over borders.”15 It must be noted, however, that although borders seem to become porous in the face of these transnational flows, they nonetheless remain an integral element of transnationalism – and with them the concept of the nation. With this concept of transnationalism, practically all elements within the literary system can render literature ‘transnational.’ Often the label derives from authors’ 11 Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, “Introduction: Contemporary German-Language Literature and Transnationalism,” Transnationalism in Contemporary GermanLanguage Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner (Rochester and New York: Camden House, 2015), 3. 12 See e.g. the introduction to Goebel and Schabio’s collection Locating Transnational Ideals, where the ‘transnational’ seems to be understood as the neo-liberal version of the ‘cosmopolitan,’ with the cosmopolitan being a utopia that has not (yet) been achieved: “As long as the cosmopolitan utopia is not achieved and we live in a world of neo-imperial coercion ordered by transnational flows of capital and labour, the particular, the national and the ethnic can be regarded as repositories of alternative options and of cultural memories which can and must contribute to the formation of intercultural exchanges. To discard them too rashly [. . .] would reduce the number of our cultural alternatives and open doors for forms of coercive globalization, possibly in the guise of new transnationalisms” (2010, 2). (Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, “Introduction,” Locating Transnational Ideals, ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio [London: Routledge, 2010], 1–9). 13 See e.g. Lewis, who investigates African, African-British, British, and Anglo-African literature historically as literatures “made possible by a shared language promoted by transnational publishing enterprises” (3) and asks which African and British identities are constructed by the examined texts. (Simon Lewis, British and African Literature in Transnational Context [Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2011]). 14 Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, “Introduction,” 3. 15 Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner,“Introduction,” 1.

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biographies. In this case, transnational literature is literature created by writers whose lives have been marked by migration and who therefore unite two or more national and cultural affiliations within themselves. A literary text itself may also be called transnational based on story elements and themes that evoke the phenomenon of transnationalism. This happens, for example, when a novel’s setting spans several countries and its characters move between various nations and cultures – be it for travel or in the shape of forced or unforced migration – or are in other ways interconnected across nations and cultures. Story elements like this can evoke the theme of multiculturalism or address questions of identity formation, the challenges of intercultural communication, and neocolonial power relations between nations, all of which are topics that typically point towards the topic of transnationalism. It is of course possible that writers without first-hand experience of migration create such works. After all, as Hermann, Smith-Prei, and Taberner have pointed out, in today’s age of globalisation the lives of all people, and not only those with diasporic backgrounds or experiences, are in some ways permeated by transnationality.16 Yet when a transnational writer’s biography combines with transnational themes or subject matter in their works, this endows the book with an aura of perceived authenticity, which for many consumers seems to function as a badge of quality. Since contemporary book marketing tends to centre on the figure of the author – with the author’s name as brand label – and therefore also tends to emphasise the life of the author,17 such surface links between an author’s life and book are easy to establish. In the current age of intensified globalisation, the readership of books, too, is increasingly interconnected and transnational in the sense that readers can access books from more and more national literatures more easily. Moreover, ever more readers, especially from the middle classes that have, globally, become increasingly mobile, have experienced intercultural encounters and move across cultural and national borders in their professional and private lives. Transnational readers, writers, and books are serviced by a book industry which is itself growing more and more transnational in many respects. The Western publishing houses, for example, nowadays routinely outsource editing and printing processes to countries where labour costs for these tasks are cheaper, so that the actual production of books has become increasingly transnational. The same applies to book dissemination. Translations are a long-established means of making books accessible to readers from other nations and cultures. Yet it has also become much easier for readers nowadays to access books both in their original or translated versions because of book retailers – with online giant Amazon as the most obvious and influential example – that operate transnationally and ship their goods internationally.

16 Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, “Introduction,” 4. 17 Claire Squires, Marketing Literature, 38–39.

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Large publishing groups, as mentioned earlier, usually operate on several continents. The largest publishing group dealing in fiction at the moment is Penguin Random House (PRH), the book publishing division of Bertelsmann AG, which holds more than 250 imprints and brands on six continents and whose revenues in 2017, despite a clear focus on the United States and Western Europe, were equally international (55.3% from USA, 11.6% UK, 7.4% Germany, 0.5% France, 8.3% from other European countries, 16.9% from other countries).18 A similar picture emerges when we look at Hachette Livre, a subsidiary of Lagardère Media, which holds more than 150 imprints and “is present either directly or indirectly in more than 70 countries across all of its business lines,” with notable investments in quickly growing markets like China, Russia, and India.19 Other examples would be Grupo Planeta, “the leading Spanish-language publishing group in Spain and Latin America, with further strong holdings in Portugal and in France;”20 Scholastic, “the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books,” which in 2017 published books in 47 languages, operates on five continents, and distributed its books in 147 countries21; or HarperCollins, which holds more than 120 imprints, operates in 18 countries across the world, and distributes its works globally in 17 languages.22 All these examples illustrate the strategic trend towards larger publishing groups. The plan behind it is to generate synergy effects, not least in the field of distribution, and thus develop greater economic clout than an individual independent publisher could.23 Within large media conglomerates, the publishing divisions moreover contribute to the firms’ horizontal integration and create synergies with other media branches. In addition, the trend towards larger publishing groups opens up possibilities of product diversification. Subsidiaries that specialise in different kinds of media – or, within the conglomerates’ publishing branches, different kinds of books (e.g. specialist literature, educational literature, non-fiction books, children’s literature, fiction) – can cater to diverse consumer preferences, even though less lucrative niche markets are generally still avoided and left to independent publishers. In the case of fiction, the transnational extension of publishing groups means more potential markets for individual books. For example, in May 2016 the young

18 “Global Publishing Leaders 2018: Bertelsmann.” Publishers Weekly, 14 September 2018. 19 “Global Publishing Leaders 2018: Hachette Livre.” Publishers Weekly, 14 September 2018. 20 “Global Publishing Leaders 2018: Grupo Planeta.” Publishers Weekly, 14 September 2018. 21 “Global Publishing Leaders 2018: Scholastic.” Publishers Weekly, 14 September 2018. Scholastic has a strong specialist field in the educational market but also holds the American rights for the Harry Potter and The Hunger Games series. 22 “Global Publishing Leaders 2018: HarperCollins.” Publishers Weekly, 14 September 2018. The trend is also manifest in large Chinese publishers’ operations in African countries. 23 This is not a purely Western phenomenon: the principle of strength through numbers also underpins the African Books Collective, for example, a marketing and distribution outlet for books from 154 independent and autonomous publishers based in 24 African countries (cf. African Books Collective, “About Us,” http://www.africanbookscollective.com/about-us).

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adult novel Unrivaled by US author Alyson Noël was published by HarperCollins simultaneously in more than 200 countries (and 16 languages) in order to turn the author into a recognisable “global author brand.”24 In a context like this, novels that also contain transnational story elements or themes and therefore possess cultural access points in a variety of markets, appear particularly well suited to exploiting the publishers’ transnational distribution networks. Whether and/or how this manifests itself on publishers’ websites is the question at the heart of the following discursive analysis. The aim is to determine how both the national and the transnational feature in publishers’ representations of their authors and portfolios and what consequences this has for their construction of transnational fiction and, indirectly and by extension, of its readers.

3 The transnational on Penguin Random House websites 3.1 Selection of websites and focus of analysis Given the vast number of potential publishers’ websites on the one hand and the restricted length of this chapter on the other, this analysis obviously needs to be selective. I have therefore decided to concentrate on websites relating to the largest publishing group for fiction, namely PRH, including the German Verlagsgruppe Random House, which “is part of the Penguin Random House operating division” even though it “is not part of Penguin Random House from a legal point of view.”25 The analysis focuses on the publishers’ presentation of their fiction catalogues; besides non-fiction books (cf. footnote 4) it also excludes the categories of drama and poetry. This selection is motivated by the fact that the novel has been the most prominent genre for transnational themes (and transnational authors) in recent years. The chapter also addresses the examined publishing groups’ self-representation in terms of transnationality. Visitors can easily find information about PRH’s spread across several continents in the “About Us” section on penguinrandomhouse.com, for example. The various Penguin websites also all mention Penguin’s international presence. Self-presentations like this clearly signal a publisher’s transnational organisation structure and can easily be found by website users who actively search them out, even though the websites’ primary focus is the publisher’s portfolio of books. PRH’s web presence is relatively easy to handle and search due to the simple reason that the imprints belonging to Penguin, which merged with Random House

24 “Global Publishing Leaders 2016: Harper Collins.” Publishers Weekly, 26 August 2016. 25 “Global Publishing Leaders 2018: Bertelsmann.”

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in 2013, are all listed and their books combined into one catalogue on the websites penguin.co.uk (for Penguin Random House UK), penguin.com (for Penguin Group USA), and penguin.com/au (for Penguin Random House Australia,26 which, like Penguin Random House Canada, also distributes books from the sister imprints in the US and the UK).27 In my analysis of PRH websites, I will focus on randomhouse. de, i.e. the website of Verlagsgruppe Random House, as well as penguin.co.uk and knopfdoubleday.com (for the largest fiction imprints of PRH in the US). I will also mention penguinrandomhouse.com and penguin.com and include a brief nod to megustaleer.com, which presents the books of PRH’s imprints in Spain and South America.28 This selection of PRH websites is partly due to the fact that they are in languages I am able to speak or understand, but it is really primarily motivated by the fact that the US, the UK, and Germany have been and are the key markets and sources of profit for PRH. The seemingly disproportionate Western focus that results from this selection does not contravene the research interests underlying this chapter, however: anglophone novels and authors who are perceived as transnational writers and internationally marketed as such, commonly only achieve this status after being signed by publishers in the US or UK.29 Given Britain’s colonial past as well as the US’s role as hegemonic global purveyor of cultural commodities, one question asked in this chapter’s analysis of websites is therefore whether websites of publishers addressing customers in the US and UK deal differently with the transnational and national than websites in other languages than English.

3.2 The national on the publishing groups’ websites Until very recently, a comparison of the Verlagsgruppe Random House website with the anglophone websites selected for analysis here would have suggested that the answer to this question was a resounding yes, because the national played a very different role on randomhouse.de. Until late 2018, randomhouse.de presented fiction first and foremost in national and international terms. The website’s search subcategories within the larger category of narrative texts strongly emphasised the 26 This is admittedly another, purely pragmatic reason why this chapter concentrates its analysis on PRH websites. The hachette.com homepage, for example, contains a link called “Our websites,” which in turn opens up a list of links to the various Hachette Livre imprints’ websites, which must then all be searched individually. The Penguin websites are far more user-friendly in comparison. 27 It should be noted, however, that this combined catalogue is not a feature of all Penguin websites. The website for Penguin India, for example, does not even list the entire Penguin Classics catalogue but only selected Indian classics in English translation; in fact, the catalogue on this site is fully dominated by Indian books and underlines Penguin India’s status as the largest English language trade publisher in the subcontinent. 28 Most importantly those of publishers Plaza & Janés, Alfaguara, and Sudamericana. 29 The same is true of transnational francophone writers and publishers in France.

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international range of the books on offer: besides the categories of “Erzählungen & Kurzgeschichten” (tales and short stories), “Romanbiographien” (fictional biographies), “Humorvolle Unterhaltung” (humorous entertainment), and “Junge Literatur” (young literature), all other search subcategories related to the geographical, often national origin of the fictions. The website thus firmly espoused and foregrounded the concept of national literatures. The search categories included Dutch literature, French literature, English literature, Italian literature, literature from Spain and Latin America, Greek literature, North American literature, literature from Russia and Eastern Europe, Indian literature, African literature, and literature from the Far East.30 Nation (and original language) and, beyond European literature, (cultural) region therefore clearly beat genres as the key search categories on the website. The different regions and countries listed in the search categories evoked linguistic and cultural variety as well as cultural specificity. Overall, the search categories indirectly characterised Verlagsgruppe Random House as a publishing group with a cosmopolitan outlook in a positive sense: they created the image of a gatherer of fictions from all over the world for its (German-speaking) customers. The texts are made accessible and comprehensible through translation, which contributes to the transcending of cultural distance. On randomhouse.de, cultural particularity was thus absorbed into an implied greater and universal category of ‘good books.’ Randomhouse.de was not alone in following this strategy. On megustaleer.com, which lists the titles of Spanish-language PRH imprints, there is a search category called “Literatura de otros países” (literature from other countries), which clarifies that books from non-Spanish national literatures can also be found on the site. Though not to the same degree as formerly on randomhouse.de, megustaleer.com uses the concept of national literatures while constructing an international realm of good books in which PRH is a key actor by distributing foreign titles in translated versions. In sharp contrast to this, the English-language websites under discussion in this chapter do not explicitly employ countries or national literatures as classifying categories. Due to this difference, one could establish an opposition between randomhouse.de and megustaleer.com on the one hand, and the anglophone sites on the other hand, based on the greater significance the former ascribed to the national as a reference category in the context of the literary system’s transnationalism. Yet, as I hinted above, and as my usage of the past tense in the last paragraphs indicates, this difference no longer exists, for the simple reason that Verlagsgruppe Random House has, as of early 2019, fundamentally restructured its website, including the catalogue search. The national/linguistic and regional search categories have disappeared; instead, users can search the group’s literature and entertainment titles (“Literatur & Unterhaltung”) by a plethora of different genre labels. In this respect the site now resembles the search possibilities within the field of

30 Verlagsgruppe Random House, “Genre: Romane und Erzählungen” (15 November 2018).

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narrative fiction on penguinrandomhouse.com, penguin.co.uk, and penguin.com, even if the number of search categories on the German site is larger. Since ‘transcultural fiction’ or related terms like ‘globalisation novels’ or ‘diasporic fiction’ are critical categories but decidedly not genre labels that would be recognisable to general readers, however, novels with story elements or themes relating to transnationality are not directly searchable as such on any of the publishers’ websites examined for this chapter. As we will see below, they tend to be subsumed instead under the label of ‘literary fiction’ and related to the category of ‘world literature.’ At present, the national thus plays no or only a minor role as a classifying category for fiction on the examined websites. Moreover, even though randomhouse.de and penguin.co.uk signal their national affiliation in their domain name – and in the case of randomhouse.de in the site’s language (there is no English version) – the publishing groups’ self-presentation on the websites conveys a different image. This becomes clear when one peruses the “About Us” pages on the two websites, which both position the publishing groups as exceeding the frame of the national, yet also reveal that the two sites engage rather differently with the category of the transnational.

3.3 Transnationality and internationality on randomhouse.de On several pages under “Über die Verlagsgruppe Random House” (About Verlagsgruppe Random House) on randomhouse.de, users can find basic information on, for example, the publishing group’s history, the current management, as well as “Zahlen und Fakten” (facts and figures) concerning, among other things, the authors whose works are published by Verlagsgruppe Random House. The reader learns that: Among the authors are international heavyweights like George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, Stephen King and Michael Crichton; well-known names in world literature and contemporary literature including Nobel prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, António Lobo Antunes, Salman Rushdie, Stefan Heym, Ernst Jandl and Walter Kempowski; bestselling authors like Dörte Hansen, Jonas Jonasson, E. L. James, Wladimir Kaminer, Charlotte Link and Maja Lunde; also popular authors of children’s and young adult fiction like Ingo Siegner, Ute Krause and Christopher Paolini; strong contemporary voices like Georg Büchner prize winner Terézia Mora, Thea Dorn, Juli Zeh, Saša Stanišic, as well as great personalities like former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Frank Schirrmacher or the former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama.31

31 My translation. The German original reads as follows: “Zu den Autorinnen und Autoren zählen internationale Größen wie George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, Stephen King und Michael Crichton; bekannte Namen der Weltliteratur ebenso wie solche der zeitgenössischen Literatur, darunter Nobelpreisträger Kazuo Ishiguro, António Lobo Antunes, Salman Rushdie, Stefan Heym, Ernst Jandl und Walter Kempowski; ebenso Bestseller-AutorInnen wie Dörte Hansen, Jonas Jonasson, E. L. James, Wladimir Kaminer, Charlotte Link und Maja Lunde; außerdem beliebte Kinder- und

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Although many of the mentioned authors are German (e.g. Helmut Schmidt, Juli Zeh, Stefan Heym), the site’s focus is obviously not strictly national or restricted to Germany. As the reference to Austrian author Ernst Jandl illustrates, it addresses German-language speakers in general, and unsurprisingly so. Anything else would be a clear break with the established understanding of German literature as being German because of the language in which it is written rather than the nationality of its authors. This traditional concept of a German literature beyond the boundaries of Germany does not translate into an explicit evocation of transnationality, however. In fact, the German-language authors mentioned in the passage whose biographies would most obviously fit the category of the transnational, namely Wladimir Kaminer (a Russian-German writer), Terézia Mora (a Hungarian author living and writing in German), and Saša Stanišic (who came to Germany from Bosnia and Herzegovina as a refugee in 1992 and writes in German) are not characterised as transnational writers at all, but are either labelled ‘bestselling author’ (Kaminer) or ‘strong contemporary voices’ (Mora, Stanišic). Their transnationality is completely naturalised and therefore remains unstressed. This representation can, on the one hand, be interpreted as seamlessly incorporating the three writers into German literature. To German-language users of the website who are not aware of the three authors’ works or biographies and do not know that they write in German, on the other hand (the website only provides this information in the short texts in the authors section), the writers’ rather foreign-sounding names may evoke the category of international writers mentioned earlier in the quoted passage. Neither the national, as we have seen previously, nor transnationality is therefore currently evoked on the website of Verlagsgruppe Random House. However, internationality is, and in two forms. The website makes a categorical distinction between authors of world literature on the one hand and “international heavyweights like George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, Stephen King and Michael Crichton” on the other. While in the above-quoted passage the latter category is exemplified exclusively by ‘popular’ bestseller writers from the US, the former is reserved for critically acclaimed writers who come predominantly from other cultural contexts. Two of the names that are mentioned as examples, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie, could, at the very least in a biographical sense, be classified as transnational writers. Yet, as in the case of Kaminer, Mora, and Stanišic, this aspect is not foregrounded in the text or on the website generally in any way. The passage thus establishes and explicitly mentions the international scope of the literature on offer from the publishing group, but it largely elides the aspect of transnationality in the group’s self-presentation and portfolio.

JugendbuchautorInnen wie Ingo Siegner, Ute Krause und Christopher Paolini; starke Stimmen der Gegenwart wie Georg-Büchner-Preisträgerin Terézia Mora, Thea Dorn, Juli Zeh, Saša Stanišic sowie große Persönlichkeiten wie Altbundeskanzler Helmut Schmidt, Frank Schirrmacher oder die ehemalige First Lady der USA Michelle Obama.” (Verlagsgruppe Random House, “Über die Verlagsgruppe Random House” [19 January 2019]).

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3.4 Transnationality and internationality on penguin.co.uk The “About Us” overview on penguin.co.uk gives a little more room to the national than randomhouse.de because it explicitly presents Penguin Random House UK as a force shaping the UK’s “cultural life” and “national conversation.”32 Yet, as the passage from which these quotations are taken shows, this is only one aspect of the publishing group’s self-image: We exist to connect the world with the words that matter, through books that spark thoughts, dreams, conversations and learning. [. . .] We are part of Penguin Random House, the world’s leading trade publisher. We champion the world’s most brilliant voices, bringing them to life in compelling and dynamic ways for audiences everywhere. [. . .] Our books shape the broader cultural life of our society and inform the national conversation. Our brands – from Ladybird to Penguin – accompany people of all ages on their journey of discovery of the greatest stories, the smartest thinking and the best ideas. [. . .] We are Penguin Random House UK.33

At the beginning of this statement, and therefore in prominent position, the text emphasises the group’s global relation-building: it is part of “the world’s leading trade publisher”; publishes “the world’s most brilliant voices”; and aims to reach “audiences everywhere” in order to “connect the world with the words that matter,” which also suggests that “the words that matter” have the power to connect people across the globe. Much more explicitly than in the case of the randomhouse.de website, this mission statement on penguin.co.uk suggests transnational aspirations, by characterising the publisher as a platform intended to “connect” writers and readers “everywhere.” The stress on the publishing group’s global reach characterises it as a mediator between authors, their words, and readers across the globe. In contrast to Verlagsgruppe Random House, whose reach is restricted to German-language speakers, it can rely on the lingua franca English in pursuit of this aim. Since the contemporary reach of the English language stems from the British Empire, this transnational agenda cannot escape strongly postcolonial overtones. The substantial body of transnational fiction in the PRH UK portfolio, which includes novels by authors like Rushdie, Ishiguro, Anita and Kiran Desai, Hari Kunzru, and Yaa Gyasi, to name only a few examples, is not directly searchable on the website, i.e. transnational novels are not foregrounded or classified as such in any way. As on randomhouse.de, the descriptions of novels reveal transnational story elements

32 Penguin Books Limited, “About Us” (17 January 2019). 33 Penguin Books Limited, “About Us” (17 January 2019). Emphasis in original.

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or themes, and the short authors’ profiles on the site include information about transnational aspects in writers’ biographies. Yet, this information is only available to users who actively search for it and check out the individual book descriptions and authors’ profiles. It takes a knowing reader to find the transnational fiction on the website. While transnationality features heavily in the group’s self-presentation, it therefore plays a decidedly minor role in the presentation of the portfolio. Internationality is such a central and obvious feature of this portfolio that there is no need for PRH UK to foreground it. In contrast to randomhouse.de, it therefore does not even name the concept of ‘world literature,’ even though it is possible to search the portfolio by the phrase. At the time of writing, this yields a list of 174 titles of fiction, which comprises mostly canonical works from many different national literatures and time periods, including texts by writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, Rabindranath Tagore, Mo Yan, Gabriel García Márquez, Homer, Dante Alighieri, Miguel Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison as well as classics of English literature.34 The search result shows that PRH UK conceives of world literature first and foremost in a rather traditional and elitist way as canonical, significant texts from all over the world, which may also include transnational fiction. The ‘world-ness’ of the works resides not only in their origin, but predominantly in the scope of their reach: they have exerted influence far beyond their cultural home, due to their intercultural or transcultural relatability and/or an alleged universal literary excellence (which is, however, really a notion of literary excellence shaped on the base of European literature since antiquity).35

3.5 Transnationality and internationality on knopfdoubleday.com The website of Knopf Doubleday does not employ or conceptualise the term ‘world literature,’ and it also conveys a more muted transnational agenda than PRH UK on its “About” page: the publishing group’s transnational scope is never explicitly stated but manifests indirectly in the list of the imprints it comprises. Most of them were founded in the US, but some also originated in the UK (Everyman) or Germany (Pantheon, Schocken). The publishing group’s portfolio moreover comprises a very 34 The relatively large number of books on the First World War that appear in the search results is presumably due to the word ‘world’ in the search phrase. Why E. L. James’s novel Fifty Shades of Grey is among the search results remains to be answered. It certainly is not canonical in the sense that the above-mentioned authors’ works are, but has had a very broad reach. 35 The more recent concept of ‘literatures of the world’ is present via the transnational fiction on the randomhouse.de and penguin.co.uk, but ultimately submerged by the traditional concept of world literature. For ‘literatures of the world’ cf. Gesine Müller, “Einleitung: Die Debatte Weltliteratur – Literaturen der Welt,” Verlag – Macht – Weltliteratur. Lateinamerikanisch-deutsche Kulturtransfers zwischen internationalem Literaturbetrieb und Übersetzungspolitik, ed. Gesine Müller (Berlin: Ed. Tranvía, Verl. Frey, 2014), 7–17.

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international group of authors that includes, besides US authors, writers like Arundhati Roy, Ian McEwan, Paulo Coelho, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, and many others, whose works Knopf Doubleday makes available (in translation in the case of non-English language titles) to US readers for purchase via penguinrandomhouse.com. Like in the cases of Verlagsgruppe Random House and PRH UK, this representation conveys the group’s international outlook while also characterising it as a force of (trans)cultural mediation. Like Verlagsgruppe Random House and PRH UK, the Knopf Doubleday portfolio features several writers whose works and/or biographies can be classified as transnational in the sense established earlier, such as Kevin Kwan, author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yaa Gyasi, Esi Edugyan (The Second Life of Samuel Tyne), Amitava Kumar (Immigrant, Montana: A Novel), Kazuo Ishiguro, Rohinton Mistry, and V. S. Naipaul. Excepting Kwan, all these writers feature not only in the website’s ‘Fiction’ category but are also classified as writers of ‘Literary Fiction.’ As on other publishers’ websites, most of which distinguish between fiction or general fiction on the one hand, and literary fiction on the other, the latter category contains the more critically acclaimed texts, i.e. ‘Literature’ (with a capital L) with a perceptible artistic impetus and clear authorial vision by internationally renowned and often award-winning writers, rather than the more popular, formulaic, and generic works by authors like Dan Brown or Michael Crichton, which are classified as ‘merely’ fiction.36 This echoes the distinction between ‘international heavyweights’ and ‘well-known voices in world literature’ on randomhouse.de and evokes the normative connotations of ‘world literature’ on both randomhouse.de and penguin.co.uk. The distinction between literary fiction and general fiction establishes an obvious hierarchy, where literary fiction is the more exclusive and prestigious category. The most important consequence of this for the purposes of this chapter rests on the observation that almost all the transnational fictions and authors are included in the category of literary fiction. This means that on the Knopf Doubleday website transnationality functions as an index of literary quality and prestige, even though, as on the other websites, it is never explicitly named.

3.6 Summary of analysis Our examination of randomhouse.de, penguin.co.uk, and knopfdoubleday.com thus shows that the nation is no longer used as a category to classify literature on these websites. The national origins of authors (and works) play a negligible role in their presentation. The intensely international character of the groups’ portfolios,

36 For a discussion of various definitions of the term ‘literary fiction,’ see Claire Squires, Marketing Literature, 4–5.

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in contrast, is inescapably present, not least in the discursive construction of world literature on the Verlagsgruppe Random House and PRH UK websites as a normative category of taste that unites critically esteemed and canonical works from all periods and from across the world. The same is true of the category of literary fiction, into which most of the transnational works and authors presented on the websites are slotted. While the websites examined for this chapter never actually use the terms ‘transnational,’ ‘transnationality,’ or ‘transnationalism,’ all the publishers’ self-presentations contain at least implicit messages about their transnational scope and/or reach, most obviously so in the case of PRH UK. Transnational works in the portfolio are not foregrounded, however. Visitors can theoretically find information about transnational elements in authors’ biographies from the writers’ portraits that are provided on the websites. They may also find out about transnational story elements and themes in novels from the books’ descriptions. Yet overall, there is a lack of explicit ascriptions of transnationality to authors and works. This is presumably due to the fact that the term has not yet crossed over from the realm of criticism and reviewing into becoming a marketing tool and genre label. Transnational novels nonetheless emerge as a special kind of fiction on the websites because they are predominantly associated with the category of literary fiction, rather than (general) fiction. Transnationalism in authors’ biographies and as a topic in literary fiction is thus constructed normatively as an indirect signal of literary quality.

4 Conclusion: Constructing the readers of transnational fiction The connotations of cultural value and prestige that the websites indirectly ascribe to the categories of world literature and literary fiction (and thus to the latter’s implicit subcategory of transnational fiction) also affect the image of both the readers and publishers of these kinds of books. A transculturally and transnationally valid cosmos of important books is constructed on the websites, whose member texts share the family resemblance of literary quality independent of their national or cultural origin. The publishers thus present themselves as guardians of good literature whose quality is independent of an author’s nationality and the original language in which a book is written. By enabling the international reception of these books, the publishers themselves become purveyors and gatekeepers of literary quality. Those who read the world literature or literary fiction from the websites are also validated by this representation. Compared to readers of mere ‘fiction,’ they must obviously have different and implicitly better reading skills and critical knowledge in order to be able to appreciate the more literary texts, and they must not be deterred by cultural alterity. Through this representation, readers of world literature

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and literary fiction in general, and of transnational fiction in particular are implicitly characterised (and flattered) as being interculturally savvy and cosmopolitan in the sense that they represent a global community based on exchange and the transgression of borders. The strongly normative connotations of value that the term ‘transnational’ confers on authors, literary texts, readers, and publishers alike ultimately renders the concept problematic as an analytic category in the field of literary studies, unless it is regarded, as in the present chapter, from a meta-level. This does not lessen the potential of the transnational as a descriptive and conceptual category, however. This potential lies in the fact that transnationality conveys the simultaneity of two oppositional and contradictory tendencies: one, the tendency of transgressing borders and evoking, if not universality, then at least the elision of differences; two, the tendency of evoking the particular, since even when borders are transgressed, they do not completely disappear.37 The strength and topicality of the concept of transnationality lies in its ability to get to the heart of and conceptualise these contradictory tendencies.

37 Cf. Karin Hoff, Anna Sandberg, and Udo Schöning, “Einleitung,” Literarische Transnationalität: Kulturelle Dreiecksbeziehungen zwischen Skandinavien, Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Karin Hoff, Anna Sandberg, and Udo Schöning (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015), 15.

Jacqueline Dutton

Utopia, Limited: Transnational Utopianism and Intercultural Imaginaries of the Ideal Abstract: Five hundred years ago, Thomas More wrote a transnational text in Latin called Utopia, a fictional projection of an ideal society on a faraway island, where order, hope, harmony, and desire were fulfilled. His book established an enduring literary tradition for imagining alternative ways of being in the world and had a significant impact across European, North and South American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Oceanian representations of the ideal place in literature. The concept of utopia has been transnational since the formal inception of the genre in 1516, but the existence of intercultural imaginaries of the ideal in literature and practice both predates and runs parallel to this Judeo-Christian concept. In this chapter, I build on my work on comparative utopian studies to explore further the dilemmas of recognising literary genres like ‘utopia’ in transnational literatures, especially in French, Japanese, and Indigenous Australian literatures. This chapter traces the potential and limitations of transnational utopianism in ‘non-western’ literatures, or literatures from other cultural traditions, through reference to ancient and contemporary examples of French, Japanese, and Indigenous Australian literatures. It examines the ways in which traditional utopian genre dynamics play out in the transnational field as intercultural imaginaries of the ideal.

1 Introduction Five hundred years ago, Thomas More wrote a groundbreaking text in Latin called Utopia, a fictional projection of an ideal society on a faraway island, where order, hope, harmony, and desire were fulfilled. His book established an enduring literary tradition for imagining alternative ways of being in the world, which has evolved into various branches including dystopias (negative representations of imagined societies) and uchronias (fictive societies set in the future or past). More’s founding work was also transnational in many senses, even though its Renaissance casting predated the rise of the nation state and the development of transnational terminology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether one attributes the epithet ‘transnational’ to German linguist Georg Curtius in his 1862 inaugural lecture at Leipzig University,1 in which he questioned

1 Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Transnational,” The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1047–1055. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-007

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the apparently obvious national characteristics of language, or to New York writer Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-national America” in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1916, heralding the multi-ethnic transcendence of national identities in a new cosmopolitan belonging, it is clearly a term that evolves in response to the growing flux of people and ideas countering the notion of the cohesive nation. Yet like many other neologisms – including ‘utopia’ itself 2– ‘transnational’ encapsulated a contemporary theory that had already existed for centuries. Just as John A. Armstrong and Benedict Anderson point out that imagined communities performed similar socially and politically structuring roles as the nation-state before its nineteenth-century propagation,3 scholars of transnational history recognise premodern people, practices, and phenomena as displaying the same kinds of interconnected and entangled influences identified in late twentieth-century criticism.4 Literary specialists do likewise, citing John Florio’s and Samuel Daniel’s descriptions of Montaigne’s Essais as transnational in the 1603 English translation.5 Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard review the range of old and new terminology used to describe variations on global history but fail (understandably) to distinguish effectively between international, world, connected, croisées, and transnational methodologies.6 What seems clear, however, is that the ‘transnational turn’ in the 1990s opened avenues for rethinking not just social sciences,7

2 The roots of the concept stretch much further back, whether in western antiquity with Plato’s Republic and Saint Augustine’s City of God, or during the Chinese Jin dynasty (317–420) with Peach Blossom Spring by Tao Qian. Many scholars include the western examples as generic precursors to More’s text, but the existence of literary forms that project visions of human communities where life is more harmonious and enjoyable for all are found in most cultures around the world, both predating and running parallel to Judeo-Christian utopias. 3 John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 4 See for example Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woolacott (eds), Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) for examples of premodern transnational trajectories on an individual scale, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) for a collective imperially oriented interpretation. 5 Warren Boutcher, “Intertraffic: Transnational Literatures and Languages in Late Renaissance England and Europe,” International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 343–373. 6 Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées: un changement d’échelle historiographique,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 5, 54–4bis (2007), 7–21. 7 In his 1999 article “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism” (Ethnic and Racial Studies 22.2, 447–462), Steven Vertovec summarised recent research into six categories influenced by transnationalism: social morphology, consciousness, cultural representation, avenues of capital, political engagement, and reconstructing place.

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history,8 and literatures9 in their oscillations and exchanges across (national) boundaries. It also enabled inherently interdisciplinary fields like utopian studies to draw on all of these methodologies to explore interconnectedness in new and diverse ways, underpinning research on peace programmes and ecotopias,10 as well as framing historical analyses of the literary genre.11 Returning to the particular context of More’s work, Utopia’s transnationality firstly flows from its conception by a cosmopolitan author in a non-national language: it can therefore be defined drawing on social sciences and historical methodologies – involving ideals that cross borders within Europe, as well as oceans via imperial exploits. Transnationality is also represented in the textual imaginary, as travellers cross boundaries to find realms manifesting qualities that extrapolate on and respond to their dissatisfactions in lived reality. This transnationality is by extension generic, essential to every literary utopia (and uchronia) where the status quo is critiqued implicitly or explicitly and the portrait of an improved fictional society is based upon remedies transferred across space or time from the ‘known nation’ to the ‘unknown nation’ presented in the text. The transnational credentials of More’s Utopia will be described in more detail in the following section of this chapter, outlining the diverse influences that underpin the narrative, then tracing its pathways into various literary traditions through translation, and demonstrating its significant impact in European, North and South American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Oceanian representations of the ideal place in literature. While the spread and uptake of the utopian literary genre reinforce its relevance across national divides, there are fundamental impediments to considering transnational utopianism as an adequate frame for conceptualising speculation on better societies and improved environments in non-European societies. Although utopia crosses national borders in both form and content, it is nonetheless a western, Judeo-Christian construct that has sometimes, but not always, been adapted to accord with other worldviews and belief systems when integrated into different languages and cultures. Utopia is therefore limited by its Eurocentric foundations, as well as the definitions that subsequently influence identification of utopian texts, binding them to particular aesthetics, value systems, and practices. The norms and bounds of utopia are 8 Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 9 Yogita Goyal, “Introduction: The Transnational Turn,” Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1–17. Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 10 Hoda M. Zaki, “From Montgomery to Tahrir Square: The Transnational Journeys of Nonviolence and Utopia,” Utopian Studies 26.1 (2015): 203–219. 11 Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson with Paola Spinozzi (eds), Histoire transnationale de l’utopie littéraire et de l’utopisme (Paris: Champion, 2008).

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skewed to privilege western paradigms and are rigorously defended by certain scholars, including Krishan Kumar and Frank and Fritzie Manuel.12 If utopia is only recognisable as radiating out from a Eurocentric heartland, then even its transnational embrace cannot transcend such a conservative generic purview: its limits are clear. Yet there is potential for recalibrating the scales to allow more even recognition of non-European influences and traditions if we recast the terms, overriding utopia to focus on its ubiquitous essence: intercultural imaginaries of the ideal. I have adopted this approach in previous work on comparative utopian studies,13 and in this chapter I will explore further the relative limits and potential of transnational utopianism and intercultural imaginaries of the ideal as theoretical frames for understanding how any and all combinations of cultures can and do speculate on better societies and improved environments in literary fiction. Drawing on examples of French, Japanese, and Indigenous Australian uptake of utopianism will demonstrate the limits of the genre despite its transnational features. Finally, I will look to a more inclusive intercultural paradigm to analyse imaginaries of the ideal in French, Japanese, and Indigenous Australian literatures that engender new figures for utopia.

2 Utopia as a transnational text The creation, characters, and content of Utopia can all be considered transnational, criss-crossing national borders and interests through realistic contemporary critiques and imaginative projections. English lawyer, civil servant, and author Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) began writing his master work while on a commercial mission for King Henry VIII in Flanders during the summer of 1515. Composed in Latin, the transnational language of Humanists, the text’s full title suggests its ambitious scope: De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula utopia, libellous vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus clarissimi disectissimique viri Thomae Mori inclytae civitatis Londinensis civis and Vicecomiti. Yet the compact neologism “utopia” is much more efficient in revealing the dual emphases of the author. Its Greek origins allow for a double etymology, ambiguously oscillating between ‘no-place’ (ou-topia) and ‘happy place’ (eu-topia), blurring together the non-existent impossibility with the dream of a better existence. 12 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987); Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the western World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979). 13 Jacqueline Dutton, “Non-western Utopian Traditions,” Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 223–258; Jacqueline Dutton and Lyman Tower Sargent, “Introduction: Utopias from Other Cultural Traditions,” Utopian Studies 24.1 (2013), 2–5.

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First published in Louvain in 1516, Utopia clearly captured the European imagination, with subsequent editions appearing in Paris, Basel, Venice, Florence, Cologne, Amsterdam, and many other cities within the next decade or so. The text is divided into two sections: Book I is a blistering critique of England under the rule of Henry VIII with all its political, economic, and moral injustices, contrasting with the ideal land described in Book II, where government, finance, and society are reformed to encourage communal living and more egalitarian practices. In the introduction, the principal characters are presented, including More the narrator who is travelling to Flanders on the King’s diplomatic orders, his friend Peter Giles whom he meets in Antwerp, and a Portuguese philosopher-traveller Raphael Hythloday who recounts his voyages with the famous Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci that result in discovery of the island of Utopia. The interweaving of reality and fiction underscores the nexus of desire and impossibility inherent in the utopian genre, while also developing the shift from real national interests (More’s role as a negotiator for the King of England) to imaginary transnational encounters which end up dominating the narrative. Despite the outward-looking exchanges indicated above, and the implicit erosion of nationally focused agendas through its critique of England, Utopia has been both credited and decried as a precursor to the Westphalian nation-state.14 The autarky traditionally associated with this and other utopias supports an interpretation of More’s island as an identifiably coherent nation. Indeed, consensus and coherence are at the base of utopian enlightenment. In addition, it is clearly stated that the founding ruler King Utopus, who severed geographical connections with the mainland, also subdued the Indigenous inhabitants of Abraxa, effectively colonising the population in order to create a better society for his own followers.15 Islands have been defined as classical representations of a colony, given that they resemble a smaller entity to be possessed by a larger one.16 Utopia conforms to such instinctive desires for domination but instead of becoming an extension of another power, it is “othered” as an “endotopia, an idealised space of contained wish-fulfilment.”17 In this way, King Utopus is both colonised and coloniser, oppressed by the rest of society and oppressor of the previous inhabitants.

14 Phillip E. Wegner, “Utopia and the Birth of Nations,” Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and Spatial Histories of Modernity, ed. Phillip E. Wegner (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 27–61. 15 Darren Jorgensen calls this More’s “original hypocrisy” in “The Utopian Imagination of Aboriginalism” Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan, and Robert Savage (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2006), 178–190. 16 See for example Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (eds), Islands in History and Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) and Maeve McCusker and Anthony Soares, Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011). 17 Godfrey Baldacchino, “Lingering Colonial Outlier Yet Miniature Continent: Notes from the Sicilian Archipelago,” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Studies 9.2 (2015), 92.

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One of the earliest social experiments based on More’s Utopia was another colonial project, though not located on a geographical island, nor completely separated from other nations. The Castilian missionary Vasco de Quiroga left Spain in 1530 at the age of 60, sent by Emperor Charles I to settle the turmoil created by Nuño de Guzmán during the Primera Audiencia in New Spain. Imbued with the message of More, Vasco de Quiroga led the Segunda Audiencia, becoming Bishop of Michoacan in Mexico. The Bishop founded two utopian communities between 1531 and 1535, both called “Hospital-Pueblo de Santa Fe” (Hospital-Village of the Holy Faith), protecting the Indigenous peoples against abuse and attempting to improve their living conditions through application of More’s reforms. Clearly a coloniser like the fictitious King Utopus, and accused of stereotyping the Indigenous peoples, Vasco de Quiroga was nevertheless progressive in his mixta policia (mixed policy) promoting justice for all in the ecclesiastical courts, education, health, social welfare, and non-segregated society.18 The transnational trajectory of More’s text begins in the early sixteenth century, encompassing Old World nations and New World colonies, bringing English, European, and Indigenous peoples into conversation, in both imaginary and lived contexts. Hegemonic tendencies are in evidence, though influences and ideals of the “other” are appreciated and integrated into the vision of a society that is better than the nation known as home.

3 Translating the transnational As word of More’s text spread around the world, and the transnational lingua franca gave way to various national languages, translations began to appear, initially in Europe, then farther afield. With the search for linguistic parallels came cultural equivalences and competing priorities. The French were certainly the most ardent and prolific, though not the first – that honour went to the Italians in 1548.19 As Marie-Claire Phélippeau suggests, “Utopia must have exercised a special hold on imaginations in France,” with four complete translations appearing in the two centuries following its publication.20 Jean (or Jehan) Le Blond’s 1550 edition bore the

18 Juan Miguel Zarandona, “The Biography of Vasco de Quiroga (1470–1565), Bishop of Utopia, by Benjamín Jarnés (1888–1949),” Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal 3 (Autumn/Winter 2006), 69–83. 19 Landi, Ortensio, trans. La Republica nuovamente ritrovata, del governo dell’isola Eutopia, nella qual si vede nuovi modi di governare stati, reggier popoli, dar leggi a i senatori, con molta profondita di sapienza, storia non meno utile che necessaria. Opera di Thomaso Moro cittadino di Londra (Venezia: Anton Francesco Doni, 1548). 20 Marie-Claire Phélippeau, “The French Translations of Thomas More’s Utopia,” Utopian Studies 27.2 (2016), 300–307.

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elegant flourishes expected for a French readership, including introductory summaries, picturesque woodcut illustrations, and Le Blond’s own poetic homage to More’s text: “dixain du translateur à la louenge de la saincte vie des Utopiens” (“a ten-line poem from the translator in praise of the saintly lives of Utopians”).21 In contrast, the first English translation by Ralph Robinson, dated 1551, is deemed by Reed Edwin Peggram to be sloppier, aesthetically unappealing, and “characterized by straightforward Anglo-Saxon frankness, without much care for good taste.”22 He concludes that the more correct, ultra-refined Utopia of Le Blond, designed to suit the tastes of cultured aristocracy, pales in comparison to Robinson’s popular vibrancy that brings More’s scholarly Latin to life for the English bourgeoisie. In this way, not only national but class concerns infiltrate the translated text yet its transnational idealism remains relevant across cultures. The greatest quantity of French translations and editions appeared during the Enlightenment and Revolutionary years, when authors adapted More’s text to their own political priorities, effectively harnessing their national versions of order and justice to the transcendental imaginary of a different way of being in the world. Thomas Rousseau’s 1780 translation, republished in 1789, introduced Hythloday as a more compelling political orator whose messages and vocabulary aimed to indoctrinate readers into the new universalism.23 French translations returned to more scholarly style with Marie Delcourt in 1966, who subsequently published a bilingual edition (Latin-French) in 1983, followed by Guillaume Navaud’s modernised version in 1992. The French penchant for writing and rewriting more or less nationally inflected interpretations of Utopia indicates an appreciation for both its inherent transnational values and its alignment with Frenchstyle universalism. All across Europe, Utopia was translated and celebrated, and naturally enough also often banned. Widely read in Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was not published in European Portuguese until 1946 by Agostinho da Silva, almost ten years after the Brazilian Portuguese version by Luiz de Andrade appeared in 1937.24 There are fascinating insights on such transnational endeavours in the two special issues of Utopian Studies journal compiled to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of More’s text. Over 25 articles attest to the global reach

21 Reed Edwin Peggram, “The First French and English Translations of Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia,’” The Modern Language Review 35.3 (July 1940), 331. 22 Reed Edwin Peggram, “The First French and English Translations of Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia,’” 333. 23 Jacques Gury, “Thomas More traduit par Thomas Rousseau ou une Utopie pour le Club des Jacobins,” Moreana 49 (1976): 79–86. 24 Fatima Vieira, “Portuguese Translations of Thomas More’s Utopia,” Utopian Studies 27.3 (2016), 546–557.

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of the text and the genre, tracing its journey into the literature and scholarship of Central Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, China, and Australia.25 One area not covered in these volumes that has nevertheless been extensively studied26 is the Japanese utopian tradition. As Japan was essentially closed to western influences until the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry and his ships in 1853, neither the term nor the western concept of utopia was part of literary or political thought. When western writings began to enter the country, novels that proved popular in Japanese translation tended to be political, by Benjamin Disraeli or Samuel Bulwer Lytton, with around 23 utopian texts numbering amongst them by the end of the nineteenth century, according to Alfred Aldridge.27 Part of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels appeared in Japanese in 1880 and More’s Utopia in 1881. Japanese texts did not translate the title of his novel, retaining the English pronunciation and using Katakana, the Japanese alphabet used for ‘borrowed’ words: ユートピア (Yuutopia). In contrast, Chinese intellectuals had integrated and translated the western concept of utopia into Mandarin as 烏托邦 (Wū Tuō Bāng) in the 1860s, well before More’s Utopia was first published in Mandarin in 1935 in Taiwan.28 The original transnational content of the text was retained in Japanese versions, which emphasised its use value as a guide for understanding political ideology during the reforms of the Meiji period (1868–1912). According to Shunichi Takanayagi, Utopia and utopia were associated with the revolutionary histories of France, England, and America rather than with the Renaissance period from which it emerged,29 rendering Japanese perceptions of utopia even more transnational. There is no Australian English translation of Utopia, nor an Indigenous Australian one.30 Even more than in most other postcolonial cultures, Australia – including Indigenous Australia – is dominated by English language and literatures. The apparently overwhelming linguistic diversity encountered by British settlers on arrival in the country meant that very few texts were translated, apart from the Bible. Despite the disappearance of more than 50 percent of Indigenous languages, over 120 are still

25 Utopian Studies 27.2 and 27.3, 2016. 26 Seiji Nuita, “Traditional Utopias in Japan and the West: A Study in Contrast,” Aware of Utopia, ed. David Plath (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 12–32; Yoriko Moichi, “Japanese Utopian Literature from the 1870s to the Present and the Influence of western Utopianism,” Utopian Studies 10.2 (1999), 89–97; Angela Yiu, “Atarashikimura: The Intellectual and Literary Contexts of a Taisho Utopian Village,” Japan Review 20 (2008), 203–230. 27 Alfred O. Aldridge, “Utopianism in World Literature,” The Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asia and the West, ed. Masayuki Akiyama (Tokyo: Nanundo, 1985), 161–205. 28 Yi-Chun Liu, “Translating and Transforming Utopia into the Mandarin Context: Case Studies from China and Taiwan,” Utopian Studies 27.2 (2016), 333–345. 29 Cited in Yoriko Moichi, “Japanese Utopian Literature from the 1870s to the Present and the Influence of western Utopianism,” 91. 30 Andrew Milner and Verity Burgmann, “Utopia and Utopian Studies in Australia,” Utopian Studies 27.2 (2016), 200–209.

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spoken, with new dictionaries, grammars, and lexicons being recorded to preserve this endangered heritage.31 Government policy documents and a few children’s books are really the only texts considered for translation into Indigenous languages now. The word ‘utopia’ does have particular resonance in Indigenous Australia, however, as the name of a region extending over 3 500 square kilometres, located around 250 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs. European pastoralists first came to the area in the 1920s, naming this arid land ‘Utopia’ either ironically or hopefully, like so many other grazing stations called ‘Arcadia,’ ‘Eden,’ or ‘Paradise.’ Another theory suggests that ‘Utopia’ was a European interpretation of the place name in local Alyawarre and Anmatyerre languages: part of the region was called uturupa, meaning big sand hill. The site of Utopia is well known in Australia for several reasons: it was one of the first successful Indigenous land claims in 1976–1980,32 it is one of the best-known artist communities in Australia,33 and it is the challenging subject of John Pilger’s 2013 documentary about the issues facing Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.34 Utopia has remained the name of this frontier land, where two Indigenous nations meet, where two radically different cultures collided, and which now might be considered a transnational hub where international art dealers and Indigenous artists create a narrative that translates country and practice. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Indigenous literatures have emphasised the dystopian in their portrayal of Australia as a post-apocalyptic, post-colonial society.

4 The limits of transnational utopianism in postcolonial contexts Through translation and interpretation of Utopia the text and utopia the genre in France, Japan, and Indigenous Australia, it is clear that both have maintained their transnational origins and evolved in contact with new translators, writers, and readers. This tendency is reinforced in the erudite 1 360-page tome Histoire transnationale de l’utopie littéraire et l’utopisme, with contributions from over 100 (mainly

31 For more information, see the Research Unit for Indigenous Language: https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/ indiglang. 32 Anmatjirra and Alyawarra land claim to Utopia Pastoral Lease / report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Toohey, to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and to the Administrator of the Northern Territory. 1980. 33 Emily Kame Kngwarreye, her adopted daughter Barbara Weir, Kathleen Petyarre, Gloria Petyarre, Ada Bird, Edie Holmes, Michelle Holmes, Gloria Ngal, Poly Ngal, and Minnie Pwerle are among the artists who have contributed to the celebrated status of Utopia as an artistic centre. www.utopianaboriginalart.com.au. 34 http://johnpilger.com/videos/utopia.

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European) utopian studies specialists. However, it is interesting to note the divergence in theoretical approach and practical application with regard to the transnational emphasis of the volume. In the editors’ introduction, the term is defined more as a universalising concept rather than as a distinct methodology for analysing historical interconnectedness or understanding creative congruence: . . . transnationale met en lumière « l’au-delà », c’est-à-dire la possibilité de transcender les identités nationales et culturelles singulières en vue de développer des comparaisons, de confronter divers pays et d’embrasser les continents où la tradition européenne a retardé l’émergence d’une tradition utopique aborigène, autrement dit les Amériques, l’Australie et la Nouvelle Zélande, et où l’immigration massive a engendré des problèmes de fusion et d’assimilation entre les différents groupes ethniques. [transnational throws light on what is above and beyond, the possibility to transcend singular national and cultural identities with a view to developing comparisons, confronting diverse countries and taking in continents where European traditions slowed the emergence of an aboriginal utopian tradition, in other words in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, places where massive immigration engendered problems with fusion and assimilation between different ethnic groups].35

The use of ‘transnational’ instead of ‘international’ is explained as a means for developing comparisons with more diverse countries, implying that the volume may thus avoid historical hierarchies, casting light on those lesser-known places where European colonisation decimated Indigenous cultural expressions, though it is not presented in exactly such terms. In practice, there is no privileged presence of the highlighted “Australian and New Zealand” experiences – just one excellent entry, the final one in the book, by Robyn Walton on utopia and dystopia in postcolonial literature.36 The Eurocentric emphasis of the volume is declared in the introduction,37 though not justified nor excused: the partial coverage is not indicated in the title either, unlike the 1970s text with which it has been compared, Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the western World (1979). Both the features and flaws of this monumental work have been underscored in several reviews,38 and the contributions and analysis of western works across the centuries from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment are clearly the most compelling. The overviews at the end of each section entitled “Le Paysage utopique: les aires dominantes” (Utopian landscape: Dominant spheres), place England, Italy, and Germany in the prime positions for the Renaissance, while France heads the list from the end of the Renaissance to the Enlightenment period. The United States enters the list in second place during the nineteenth century, with South

35 Histoire transnationale de l’utopie littéraire et l’utopisme, 24. 36 Histoire transnationale de l’utopie littéraire et l’utopisme, 1179–1193. 37 “On observera l’absence de l’Asie et de l’Afrique, évidemment regrettable” (The absence of Asia and Africa is obviously regrettable), 24. 38 Peter Fitting provides a comprehensive analysis in Utopian Studies 21.2 (2010), 348–357.

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America and Québec appearing in the twentieth century. France disappears entirely after the Enlightenment. There is no mention of any other non-European areas. Due to its flaws, the text is extremely useful in this argument to demonstrate the limits of the transnational when analysing utopian literatures from non-European traditions. It shows the difficulties in using either transnational or utopian terminology to analyse imaginaries of the ideal in postcolonial narratives because these expressions may arise from completely different worldviews, contact zones, or genre dynamics, and therefore may be hardly recognisable as either transnational or utopian. Scholars of postcolonial utopianism such as Ralph Pordzik highlight the conundrum of searching for a model that is imposed, not Indigenous in The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures (2001). Like Nicholas Brown in Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (2005) and Bill Ashcroft in Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2017), Pordzik focuses on postcolonial literatures written in English. Pordzik’s coverage is very broad – examining literatures from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as referring to India; African and North American examples dominate in Brown’s study; Ashcroft invites the reader to consider texts from the Caribbean, Chicano North America, and Oceania as well. Lyman Tower Sargent’s chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2010) on “Colonial and Postcolonial Utopias” is one of his many publications on the topic presenting background and bibliography to prove interest in scholarship and a rise in literary production. The overwhelming message from all of these texts and others is that postcolonial literatures in English are renewing the utopian genre with innovative critical utopias and critical dystopias that call into question and confront western paradigms for better societies. In my own work, I have argued for an epistemological challenge to utopia as a western genre. I have endeavoured to show the wealth of research on imaginaries of the ideal in other cultures as evidence that examples of non-western, Indigenous, parallel narrative traditions to utopias do exist both without and with reference to the western model. In considering the limits of transnational utopianism, it is therefore necessary to reconsider imaginaries of the ideal in intercultural and postcolonial contexts, not only in English language literatures, but also in other languages.

5 The potential of intercultural imaginaries of the ideal As stated above, France was a leader in the uptake of More’s Utopia in translation, as well as a major contributor to literary production of utopias until the end of the Enlightenment, including the classical Antipodean utopias by Gabriel de Foigny, Denis de Vairasse, Tyssot de Patot, and Rétif de la Bretonne, and the first uchronia

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by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.39 The transfer of utopia’s power from literary fiction to political action – from the French Revolution of 1789 through the nineteenth century and twentieth century until May 1968 – signals its withdrawal from Histoire transnationale de l’utopie littéraire et l’utopisme. Even if the ideological shift in narrative does not seem compatible with transnational literary agendas, the transcontinental reach of Etienne Cabet’s Icarus communities and Fourier’s phalansteries in the United States, Saint-Simonian projects in North Africa, the Middle East, and New Caledonia, and the worldwide youth manifestations of 1968 must nevertheless be recognised as diasporic utopianism, transcending national borders and ambitions. The 1970s saw French utopian and dystopian literature reappear with a specific transnational thrust related to postcolonialism and the perceived threats of migration. Following decolonisation of most of France’s African colonies and Indochina, the Algerian War, and the concurrent spike in post-war migration to France, the country and its cultures were rapidly evolving with an assimilationist agenda. French language literatures such as the futuristic dystopia Les Soleils des indépendances (The Suns of Independence) (1968) by Ivoirien author Ahmadou Kourouma garnered attention and prizes, and Franco-French responses by Jean Raspail in Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints) (1973) showed how Catholic right-wing crusaders could maintain their own utopia by keeping migrant hordes at bay. Another wave of futuristic fiction and film that extends from the beginning of the third millennium until the present illustrates the importance of the migrant trope in contemporary narratives in French, paradoxically making the nationalistic theme a transnational one. Djibouti author Abdourahman A. Waberi’s Aux EtatsUnis d’Afrique (In the United States of Africa) (2006) and Beninese actor and filmmaker Sylvestre Amoussou’s Africa Paradis (Paradise Africa) (2007) both present a future pan-African continent transformed by utopian inversion to become the desirable but dystopic destination for European migrants fleeing poverty and persecution.40 Migrant themes persist in post-millennial novels that have taken up the ‘Grand Remplacement’ (great replacement), introduced in Raspail’s novel, and theorised by Renaud Camus (2011), including La Mémoire de Clara (The Memory of Clara) (2014) by Patrick Besson, Les Evénements (The Events) (2014) by Jean Rolin, and Dawa (2014) by Julien Suaudeau.

39 Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre Australe connue (1676); Denis de Vairasse, Histoire des Sévarambes (1677); Tyssot de Patot, Voyages et avantures de Jacques Massé (1710); Rétif de la Bretonne, La Découverte australe par un homme volant (1784); Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771). 40 In contrast, several futuristic African novels and films in English focus on climate change as a transnational trope, such as Pumzi (2009) by Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahui, or dictatorial governments in Monsoons Over the Moon (2015) by Dan Muchina/Abstract Omega. See also my article “Flipping the Script on Africa’s Future: In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi,” Spaces of Utopia 2nd series, no. 1 (2012), 34–55.

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In recent times, the most notorious utopian/dystopian novels to appear in French are Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (Submission) and Boualem Sansal’s 2084: La Fin du monde (2084: The End of the World), both published in 2015. The ‘great replacement’ is Muslim and mainly Arab in these works. Houellebecq’s France in 2022 has voted in the Muslim Brotherhood party, followed by alliances with Muslim parties in Belgium and all around the Mediterranean. Sansal’s fundamentalist Islamic Algeria extends all over the known world by 2084. Transnational utopianism is clearly an appropriate way in which to interpret both of these texts, but it can also be argued that they each present distinct versions of transnationalism which can be attributed to the specific worldviews exposed in these novels. Soumission critically engages with the transnational present of France in 2015, and 2084 extrapolates on the lack of transnationalism in Algeria. The authors’ religious and cultural worldviews provide complex foundations upon which their future worlds are imagined: Houellebecq’s secular education promoting curiosity about Catholicism but no faith and Sansal’s ambivalent relationship with Islam being eroded by Islamism. Houellebecq can therefore imagine a dystopian future that may be transformed for the better by an Islamic State, whereas Sansal can envisage a dystopian future ruled by Islamic State that can only be transformed by a step back into transnationalism born of imperial outreach, or beyond into a pre-colonial or borderless future. Interpreting these texts in French according to their relative intercultural and postcolonial imaginaries of the ideal extends the potential of transnational utopianism to encompass the specificities of material and immaterial experiences in each author’s cultural heritage. Japanese narratives depicting imaginaries of the ideal developed in harmony with the country’s archipelagic geography and foundational belief system, Shinto. Tokoyo no kuni was the Indigenous designation for an ideal time and place, a kind of Golden Age that evolved into the projection of an island paradise in the East called Ise, as well as an association with the eternal divine lineage of the Emperor. Ancient literary texts mentioning tokoyo no kuni include the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, as does the Manyoshu. The glaring difference between representations of this Japanese imaginary of the ideal and ancient western models of Plato’s Republic or Virgil’s Golden Age is the inherent mutability and ambiguity of tokoyo no kuni – the latter can be found in either life or death, in divine or human realms, as a geographical place or in the person of the Emperor.41 Japanese imaginaries of the ideal were obviously more influenced by neighbouring Asian cultures prior to western exposure, integrating concepts from Buddhism and Confucianism, to develop a messianic notion of miroku as a time and place when humans are liberated from suffering. The floating world of ukiyo is another incarnation of Japanese ideals of ambiguity, a time and

41 For more detail on the roots and evolution of tokoyo no kuni, see my article “ Non-western Utopian Traditions” in the Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2010).

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place in between the material and immaterial worlds, where happiness, pleasure, and beauty are treasured precisely because of their impermanence and mutability. Wit, charm, extravagance, hedonism, and transgression were the norms in this imagined parallel universe, as depicted in popular woodblock prints and poetry, opposing the obligations and hard work of everyday life in the repressive years of Edo period Japan under Tokugawa shogunate rule (1603–1868). Following the ‘opening’ of Japan, utopian-style novels began to appear, such as Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Kappa (1927), an allegorical satire set on an amphibious island (like tokoyo no kuni) that also bears some resemblance to Gulliver’s Travels. It is a depressingly dystopian place where the critique of contemporary Japanese society is performed but the protagonist does not appreciate the substitute society where imperialism and productivity reign, and even cannibalism is acceptable when workers are no longer needed.42 Many of Japan’s most famous novelists have written their own ideal societies, from Yukio Mishima’s Utsukushii Hoshi (The Beautiful Star) (1962) to Haruki Murakami’s Sekai no Owari to Hadoboirudo Wandarando (HardBoiled Wonderland and the End of the World) (1985) to Nobel laureates Kazuo Ishiguro’s Ukiyo no gaka (An Artist of the Floating World) (1987) and Kenzaburo Oe’s Chiryoto (1991). Each of these texts follows a transnational utopian model to some extent, but also features Indigenous Japanese tropes such as ambiguous parallels that render unclear the divisions between utopia and dystopia, the real world and the imagined one. Murakami’s more recent master work 1Q84 (2009–2010) is not so much a rewriting of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a complete recasting of the genre as a trilogy of hybrid realities where memories are displaced across different dimensions for exaggerated mutability and ambiguity. Hāmonī (ハーモニー) (Harmony) (2008) by Keikaku Itoh (aka Project Itoh) is another recent ambiguous utopia which, like Oe’s Chiryoto, is a medical utopia where all diseases and injuries can be cured or prevented, but there is no freedom of choice and, ultimately, no human soul or consciousness. The 2015 anime film adaptation of the novel has been viewed by non-Japanese audiences as clearly dystopian, but Japanese audiences are less categorical. The author’s own view of such a medical utopia is equally ambiguous, not least because he was editing the novel in hospital, dying of cancer at the age of 34. Understanding the Indigenous or ‘pre-utopian’ tropes of Japanese imaginaries of the ideal allows for much deeper acknowledgement of the intercultural biases in these contemporary novels. The transnational is still relevant, but cannot accommodate the kind of thinking required to negotiate the complex hermeneutics at play. Indigenous Australian imaginaries of the ideal are so fundamentally different to western utopian models that it is often difficult to recognise conceptualisations

42 Yoriko Moichi, “Japanese Utopian Literature from the 1870s to the Present and the Influence of western Utopianism,” 89–97.

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of better human societies. In many Indigenous languages there are not necessarily words expressing hope or harmony, though desire and order are generally found. The transnational is everywhere and “everywhen”43 in Indigenous Australian cultures, where hundreds of different groups coexisted prior to the arrival of European settlers. Indigenous songlines still criss-cross the island-continent; these dreaming tracks reconnect the initiated traveller to the country and reinscribe their body and beliefs in the complex system of altcheringa (dreaming) through singing and seeing the landmarks recognisable from shared creation stories. The project and exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 15 September 2017–25 February 2018) brings together the stories, arts, artefacts, and experiences from three deserts and five peoples: the Martu, the Anangu, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, and the Ngaanyatjarra, deconstructing the western reading of Indigenous peoples as separated and differentiated rather than connected and in harmony through some of their transnational dreaming stories.44 In his contribution to the catalogue, Darren Jorgensen, like Bruce Chatwin and Ted Strehlow before him, describes the dynamic nature of songlines, the dreaming, and art – always unfinished, and never completely comprehensible or explained.45 This incomprehensible, continuing, and fragmentary vision that underpins Indigenous worldviews is counterintuitive to western ideals of place, space, and teleological time that prevail in utopianism. In his other work on art, literature, and utopia,46 Jorgensen foregrounds the postapocalyptic element as part of the lived experience of Australian Indigenous peoples – and many other colonised peoples. Evident in novels like Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the End of the World (1983) by Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) and Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) by Archie Weller, the projection past the present allows for future positive interpretations of Indigenous society in Australia. A similar strategy is employed in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), though the future described is rather more bleak. Wright interweaves ancient beliefs and modern issues, ranging from environmental destruction, poverty, and dispossession, to Indigenous women like the protagonist Oblivia and their ways to self-empowerment in a place of degradation and violence. All of these works subscribe to some western utopian

43 W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 24. 44 http://songlines.nma.gov.au. 45 “The Last Songs of Tjapartji Bates,” Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, ed. Margo Neale (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2017), 182–183. 46 Darren Jorgensen, “Martian Utopias, Land Rights, and Indigenous Desert Painting,” Australian Cultural History 23 (2004), 105–119; “The Utopian Imagination of Aboriginalism,” Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan, and Robert Savage (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2006), 178–190; “On the Utopianism of Aboriginal Art,” Journal of Australian Studies 32.2 (2008), 197–205; “Aboriginal Art and Australian Modernism: An Althusserian Critique,” The Blackwell Companion Guide to Globalisation and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 398–408.

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tropes, but their essential worldview is Indigenous, blurring temporalities, reality, and metaphor in a kind of dynamic, ongoing narrative that is never completely explained. Science fiction depicting Indigenous Australian futures retains some of these intercultural tropes. Australian Terry Dowling’s Rynosseros (1990) stories tell of a future that is divided – the Ab’O nation rules the interior of the country, the colonials the cities, but their visions and fantasies are somehow aligned. American Marlo Morgan wrote the bestseller Mutant Messages Down Under (1990), which has both raised ire due to its “lost tribe on the verge of extinction” narrative and met with some approval for its dreamy telepathic strategies for communication. Different types of projections come through in poetry, like Indigenous writer Lionel Fogarty in “Farewell Reverberated Vault of Detentions” (1996) contrasting the horrors of incarceration with the potential joys of past, present and future: Today my people feel precious as human beings burials and birth Mankind demands imperative love for all, And my people never wants to escalating barbarous century. For now Today up home they free, Tonight they learn to fight consciences.47

Beginnings and endings are one in the imaginary outside the cell, free and unencumbered by the struggle for rights or retribution which may lie in the future, just happy in their own precious present. In another medium, Indigenous artist Julie Dowling paints portraits in a social realist style with a palette that varies from natural earth tones to vibrant shades of pink and blue, as well as imaginary allegorical portraits that critique social, historical, and cultural issues. Her methods incorporate artefacts of colonialism including health manuals and bibles, integrating Indigenous and Christian symbolism, reaching back into the past to show a different way to the future.48 Her work expresses intercultural imaginaries of the ideal in a completely different way from the artists from Utopia community in the Northern Territory, drawing on her own multicultural heritage as well as her Indigenous roots.

6 Utopia, limited The Gilbert and Sullivan musical comedy entitled Utopia, Limited (1893) satirises many undesirable elements of British imperialism, mocking almost every aspect of 47 The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, ed. Peter Porter (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 266. Cited in Bill Ashcroft, Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (Routledge, 2016), 39. 48 Judith McGrath, “Julie Dowling: A Different Way to the Future,” Australian Art Collector 19 (Jan–March 2002), 38–40.

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contemporary British society. The island paradise called Utopia is corrupted by the arrival of British “Flowers of Progress” who quickly transform it into a model of England. The “Limited” in the title refers to limited liability company laws that reduce the legal obligation for company owners to pay out their creditors if the company is bankrupt, which came into effect around 1855. Essentially, the King of Utopia decides to make his island a limited liability corporation, and despite opposition from a few recalcitrant citizens, can do whatever he likes without retribution, and the island becomes just like England with all its flaws. This farcical portrait of utopia is far from the project presented by Thomas More, but the imperial trope nevertheless reveals an important parallel between the two texts. In theoretical and practical terms, utopia is limited by its own epistemology, its Eurocentric founding mythology and even by its transnationalism. As the French, Japanese, and Indigenous Australian examples proposed here have shown, neither transnational nor utopia are suitable terms to use when attempting to take account of non-western projections of better societies or critiques of worse ones. Intercultural and postcolonial imaginaries of the ideal do not necessarily comply with the norms of utopia; they may be transnational in some senses, but they are inherently partial, evolving, dynamic. They are not less than utopian, nor more, just running along a different track that leads from an independent and original worldview to a different way of being in the world.

Martina Groß

Travel Literature and/as Transnational Theatre History – Beyond National Theatre Cultures Abstract: Travel literature is an understudied yet essential material for theatre historiography. Although the production of knowledge in early modern theatre originated in travelogues (by actors, authors, spectators, philosophers, etc.), theatre served as a medium of national culture and led to the persistent omission of travel literature and travelogues in a mainly nationally oriented theatre historiography. However, early modern travelogues by Montaigne, Platter, and Voltaire can help to close the gap between early modern theatre practice as a transnational phenomenon and the tradition of an essentially national theatre theory (and historiography). Regarding both travel literature and theatre development, these interlinkages not only shed new light on theatre historiography from the late sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, but can also provide an insight into the complex and continuously changing literary genre of travel writing. Furthermore, they can enrich current debates on cultural encounters by questioning the concept of national (theatre) culture. The gap between early modern theatre practice as a transnational phenomenon, especially exchanges occurring across national borders, and the tradition of an essentially national theatre theory (and its respective historiography) has been widely debated in the field of theatre history in recent years.1 Although the production of knowledge in early modern theatre originated from travel (of actors, authors, spectators, philosophers, etc.) and travel reports, the fact that especially drama-based theatre served as a medium of national culture nevertheless led to the persistent omission of travel literature and travelogues in a mainly nationally orientated theatre historiography. Regarding recent multidisciplinary research, the potential of considering travel literature in the field of theatre history seems more than obvious.2

1 See, for example, Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (eds), Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008) and Stefan Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung als kulturelle Praxis. Wie Wissen über Theater entsteht (Zurich: Chronos, 2007). 2 The works from different disciplines alluding to the topic of “travel literature and/as theatre history” are varied and include anthropology, ethnology, geography, history, literary studies, philosophy, performance and theatre studies. As representative examples, see Friedrich Wolfzettel, Reiseberichte und mythische Struktur: Romanistische Aufsätze 1983–2003 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003); Loïc P. Guyon and Sylvie Requemora-Gros (eds), Voyage et Théâtre (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011); John Urry and Jonas Larsen (eds), The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2011); P. A. Skantze, Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle (New York: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-008

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This chapter addresses travel literature as an understudied but essential material for theatre historiography. First, I seek to explore travelogues and their specific perception of theatre forms and models in the early modern period, like those of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1580/1581), the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter (1595–1600), and the French philosopher Voltaire (1732). In order to emphasise the potential of travelogues, not only for an alternative theatre history that questions nationally orientated theatre concepts but also for the complex literary genre of travel writing,3 I will add to my contribution an example of a theatrical travelogue4 appearing during the heyday of travelogues in the nineteenth century. Gerard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient (1851) can be seen as an example of interlinkages between travel literature and theatre history. Nerval uses theatre as a descriptive model of cultural encounters while questioning the French national theatre model of the nineteenth century. I want to argue that these travelogues form a genre of transnational theatre history. In this regard, the interlinkages between travel literature and theatre development not only shed new light on theatre historiography from the late sixteenth to nineteenth century, as I will demonstrate with the aforementioned examples, but can also enrich current debates on cultural encounters by questioning the concept of national (theatre) culture.

1 Early modern theatre practice: Transnational production and (its) documentation In his edited volume Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, Robert Henke underlines that “[e]arly modern theater was the agent as well as site of transnational exchange”,5 referring to historical as well as material reasons. Accordingly, Henke’s argument is not limited to the well-known English and Italian itinerant acting companies, but also extends to the concept of ‘nation’ that in this period “well before the nineteenth-century elaboration of the nation-state, [. . .] was still capacious enough to

Punctum Books, 2013); Michael Maurer, “Reiseberichte als Wissensspeicher”, Wissensspeicher der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Frank Grunert and Anette Syndicus (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2015), 391–411; Christopher Balme and Nic Leonhardt, “Theatrical Trade Routes. Introduction”, Journal of Global Theatre History 1 (2016): 1–9; and Gabriele Brandstetter and Holger Hartung (eds), Moving (Across) Borders: Performing Translation, Intervention, Participation (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017). 3 See Peter J. Brenner (ed), Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989). 4 Cf. Frank Estelmann, “Vom Theater der Fremde zur Komödie Kairos”, Estelmann, Sphinx aus Papier: Ägypten im französischen Reisebericht von der Aufklärung bis zum Symbolismus (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2007), 250–264. 5 Robert Henke, “Introduction”, Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, ed. Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 1–15, here 1.

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include the sense of ‘race’ or ‘people’.”6 The various contributions of the aforementioned volume demonstrate that “national identity in the early modern period was often porous, hybrid, and dialogically developed in concert with ‘foreign’ national/ regional identities – and that theater was a particularly rich medium for exploring transnational and multiple national identity.”7 This applies especially to theatre in production, which is “relatively more material than literary texts that can be accessed through print or manuscript, notwithstanding the fact that books crossing borders surely generate their own material histories.”8 Bringing together the historical and the material argument, Henke alludes to a key issue of theatre historiography regarding this gap between early modern theatre practice as a transnational phenomenon and the tradition of an essentially national theatre historiography. The latter is in most instances and crucial parts based on literary theatre or theatre texts – often subsequently written and differing from the performance itself.9 Undoubtedly, the ‘theatre’ (forms, texts, authors, actors) that we find in theatre history is always a specific part, a canon, that responds to a certain idea and function of theatre, which depends on national and/or cultural purposes. Especially studies that endeavour to avoid a certain idea of ‘classical’ or canonical theatre, like the anthology of French tragédie sanglante (bloody tragedy) and the Theatre of Cruelty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France edited by Christian Biet, demonstrate the lack of documentation in historical theatre practice.10 This applies even more in light of eighteenth-century-based modern theatre associated with national-cultural attempts. For the last three centuries, European theatre has been primarily concerned with the stage enactment of dramatic texts. Theatre history books demonstrate the predominance of dramatic form, based on speech and dialogue, character-oriented dramaturgy, and the convention of mimesis and the fictive world. As in most world theatre, the human being remained the principal element of the production. But in European drama-based theatre that human figure was primarily characterised not through any physical or vocal portrayal but through speech and a dialogical structure. That structure was determined by and founded upon the pre-existing dramatic text in a particular national language. Theatre forms and accordingly their documentations, which did not fit with this narrow notion of theatre, were either not recorded or not reflected in most

6 Robert Henke, “Introduction”, Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, 3. 7 Robert Henke, “Introduction”, Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, 3. 8 Robert Henke, “Introduction”, Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, 1. 9 Concerning the discrepancy between the stage performance and the subsequently written texts in early modern period, see Guy Spielmann, “Problématique de l’iconographie des spectacles sous l’Ancien Regime: le cas des frontispices du Théâtre de la foire (1721–37)”, Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre 237 (I/2008), 77–86. 10 Cf. Christian Biet, Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Bouquins, 2006).

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nationally orientated theatre historiographies – even though they were omnipresent in early modern varied social and cultural life. This may explain the aforementioned gap between early modern theatre practice as a transnational phenomenon and the tradition of what is essentially just a national theatre historiography. To approach the rich forms of this early modern theatre practice, beyond national or literary e.g. dramatic theatre concepts, one needs to address the large number of travelogues showing the entire spectrum of what has been perceived as spectacle. Obviously, this simultaneously shows and requires a more extensive notion of theatre – one comprised of festivities, games, and cultural performances – which the modern European eighteenth-century-based idea of institutionalised theatre offers. Travelogues have always functioned as an important medium of the production of knowledge and consequently as repositories of knowledge.11 Thus, the German architect Joseph Furttenbach (1591–1667), a key figure of European knowledge transfer, who travelled to Italy between 1610 and 1620, witnesses the circulation of knowledge in early modern theatre architecture. His 1627 travel report Newes Itinerarium Italiae emphasises the crucial connection between transnational travels and knowledge production and focuses on theatre and stage construction.12 This crucial connection explains why travelogues are considered an important source of cultural history. However, precisely here lies the problem regarding the complex genre of travel literature. As the Romance philologist Friedrich Wolfzettel argues concerning the functional change of travelogues within the traditional systems of science and literature, travelogues constitute a special form of ‘historia’ (historiography) and are often regarded as the empirical maidservant of historiography, geography, and cartography [“empirische ‘Magd’ von Geschichtsschreibung, Geographie und Kartographie”13]. Similarly, the Swiss theatre scholar Stefan Hulfeld pleaded that travel reports should not only be recognised as “sources of” but rather as a precursor

11 Michael Maurer, “Reiseberichte als Wissensspeicher”, 391. 12 Joseph Furttenbach, Newes Itinerarium Italiae: In welchem der Reisende nicht allein gründtlichen Bericht, durch die herrlichste namhaffteste örter Italiae sein Reiß wol zubestellen, sonder es wirdt jhme auch [. . .] beschrieben, was allda [. . .] an fürstlichen Hoffhaltungen [. . .] denckwürdig zu sehen [. . .] (Ulm: Saur 1627), foreword, unpaginated: “allda nit allein ihre vernünfftige discursi zuhören/ sonder auch ein Muht zu fassen/ ob ich durch derselben befürderung/ die Werck selber führen unnd zu end bringen möchte.” For the English translation, see Jan Lazardzig and Hole Rößler (eds), Technologies of Theatre: Joseph Furttenbach and the Transfer of Mechanical Knowledge in Early Moderne Theatre Cultures (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2016), 274: “not only to hear the learned discourses there, but also to see if the latter would enable me to carry out and complete the work myself.” For further reading, see Martina Groß, “Le Spectateur en vue: les voyages européens de Joseph Furttenbach, Andreas Gryphius et Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz”, Voyages, rencontres, échanges au XVIIe siècle. Marseille carrefour, ed. Sylivie Requemoras-Gros (Tübingen: Narr, 2017), 453–466. 13 Friedrich Wolfzettel, “Beschreiben und Wissen: Überlegungen zum Funktionswandel der Deskription im französischen Reisebericht”, Grenzgänge 7 (1997), 59.

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to theatre historiography.14 In this regard, both Hulfeld and Wolfzettel refer to the literariness of travelogues in all their manifestations. In addition, I would argue that travel reports are not merely ‘empirical maidservants’ or precursors to theatre historiography, but also form a special genre of theatre historiography through their own forms of perception. This applies of course only for those travelogues that: a) Originated in a (transnational) theatre practice or were composed by travelling theatre practitioners (here: Voltaire) b) Document or comment on theatre productions or the perception of theatre and spectacles in a broader sense (here: Montaigne and Platter) c) Use theatre as a descriptive model of cultural encounters (here: Nerval’s ‘theatrical travelogue’).

2 Theatre in multiple forms: Itinerant spectators and their forms of perception The traversal of national boundaries by travelling actors, authors, and spectators correlates with a general increase in travel in the early modern period. Fundamentally, the impetus for travel is deeply rooted in the history of humanity as proves the notion of homo viator,15 referring to the innate human curiosity and eagerness for new experiences. Travel as a central theme of human experience applies in particular to the age of discovery, the Renaissance16: “Numerous récit de voyage tell of travels to the New World and encounters with the other while the imaginary voyage to utopia as a means for social criticism was developed.”17 It is within this context that the French essayist Michel de Montaigne undertook his own voyage of discovery. In June 1580, he set out for a 17-month journey across France, via Switzerland, Germany, and Austria down to Italy, where he spent the majority of his time and wrote a significant part of his Journal de voyage. Montaigne’s travel diary addresses present research interest in two ways: it not only gives an insight into the multiple forms of spectacle in early modern theatre but, due to Montaigne’s specific nature of discovery, also leads to a theatre wherein the ‘Other’ is explored: “The world is theatre to him, but not in the sense of a spectacle which he faces impassive; it is a theatre in which he

14 Stefan Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung, 30. 15 For further reading, see George Hugo Tucker, “Homo Viator”: Itineraries of Exile, Displacement and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Geneva: Droz, 2003). 16 Concerning travel literature related to the age of discovery, see Peter Whitfield, Travel: A Literary History, (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), 39–78. 17 Melinda A. Cro, “Montaigne’s Italian Voyage: Alterity and Linguistic Appropriation in the Journal de voyage”, South Atlantic Review 78.3/4 (2013), 150.

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participates with all his affectivity.”18 [“Le monde lui est théâtre, mais non au sens d’un spectacle auquel il serait indifférent; c’est un théâtre auquel il participe de toute son affectivité.”19] Eva Kushner highlights in her article on “Subjectivité” et “altérité” chez quelques voyageurs du XVIe siècle that Montaigne partakes in this ‘theatre of the Other’ while doubly being a spectator and a participant: “Témoin et acteur à tour de rôle.”20 An impressive scene, which illustrates Montaigne’s dual role as a spectator as well as a participant, is when he is invited to kiss the Pope’s feet: On December 29th M. d’Abein, our ambassador, a learned gentleman and a long-standing friend of M. de Montaigne, advised him to go and kiss the feet of the Pope. M. de Montaigne and M. d’Estissac went in the coach of the ambassador, who, after he had been granted an audience, caused them to be called by the Pope’s chamberlain. [. . .] After taking a step or two into the chamber, in a corner of which sits the Pope, the incomer, whoever he may be, kneels and waits for the Pope, to give him benediction. This done, he will rise and advance to the middle of the room, but a stranger rarely approaches the Pope by going direct across the floor, the more ordinary practice being to turn to the left on entering, and then, after making a detour along to approach his chair. But when the stranger has gone half the distance he must kneel again on one knee, and, having received a second benediction, next advances as far as the thick carpet spread out some seven or eight feet in front of the Pope. Here he must kneel on both knees, while the ambassador who presents him kneels on one, and moves back the Pope’s robe from his right foot, which is shod in a red shoe with a white cross thereupon. The kneeling stranger must keep himself in the same posture until he is close to the Pope’s foot, and then bend down to kiss it. M. de Montaigne declared that the Pope raised the point of his foot a little. They all kissed it one after the other, making room for each other after the ceremony was done.21 [Le 29 de décembre, M. d’Abein, qui était lors ambassadeur, jantil home studieus & fort amy de longue mein de M. de Montaigne, fut d’advis qu’il baisât les pieds au pape. M. d’Estissac & lui se mirent dans le coche dudict ambassadur. Quand il fut en son audiense, il les fit appeller par le camerier du pape. [. . .] Après un pas ou deus dans la chambre, au couin de laquelle ledict pape est assis, ceus qui antrent, qui qu’ils soyent, mettent un genouil à terre, & atendent que le pape leur donne la benediction, ce qu’il faict; après cela ils se relevent & s’acheminent jusques environ la mi-chambre. Il est vray que la pluspart ne vont pas à luy de droit fil, tranchant le travers de la chambre, eins gauchissant un peu le long du mur, pour donner, après le tour, tout droit à lui. Etant à ce mi chemin ils se remettent encor un coup sur un genouil, & reçoivent la seconde benediction. Cela faict, ils vont vers luy jusques à un tapis velu, estandu à ses pieds; sept ou huict pieds plus avant. Au bord de ce tapis ils se mettent à deus genous. Là l’ambassadur qui les presantoit se mit sur un genouil à terre, & retroussa la robe du Pape

18 Eva Kushner, “‘Subjectivité’ et ‘altérité’ chez quelques voyageurs du XVIe siècle”, Maria Alziro Seixo, Travel Writing and Cultural Memory/Écriture du voyage et mémoire culturelle (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 292. My translation. 19 Eva Kushner, “‘Subjectivité’ et ‘altérité’ chez quelques voyageurs du XVIe siècle”, 292. 20 Eva Kushner, “‘Subjectivité’ et ‘altérité’ chez quelques voyageurs du XVIe siècle”, 293. 21 Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581, trans. and ed. by W. G. Waters (London: John Murray, 1903), vol. 2, 80–81.

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sur son pied droit, où il y a une pantouffle rouge, à tout une croix blanche audessus. Ceus qui sont à genous se tienent en cete assiete jusques à son pied, & se panchent à terre, pour le baiser. M. de Montaignc disoit, qu’il avoit haussé un peu le bout de son pied. Ils se firent place l’un à l’autre, pour baiser, se tirant à quartier, tousiours en ce pouint.22]

Montaigne’s description shows his capacity to analyse performance, which characterises the Journal de voyage as a whole. When he is witnessing the public execution of a criminal in Rome, we can see an example of public performance corresponding to Christian Biet’s studies on French tragédie sanglante and the Theatre of Cruelty, “when Tragedy in France and all over Europe re-emerged on stage in a sort of rebirth.”23 Referring to the connection between the cruelty on the scaffold and the poetic distance on stage, Biet argues that “tragic theater became an alternative scenery for social action, a virtual scene for experimental lives, but also another judicial court for the audience, taking place inside theaters.”24 While Biet focuses on the tragedies and accordingly on the literary texts, Montaigne offers us a closer view of the public spectacle: On January 11th, in the morning, as M. de Montaigne was leaving the house on horseback to go to the bank, he met Catena, a famous robber and banditti chief, whom they were taking away from the prison. This man had raised a panic all through Italy, monstrous tales of murder being told about him; notably concerning two Capuchins, whom he forced to deny God, and promised to spare their lives on this condition. But he slew them afterwards without any motive either of gain or of vengeance. M. de Montaigne halted to behold the spectacle. Over and beyond the escort customary in France, they let precede the criminal a huge crucifix draped with black, at the foot of which went a great crowd of men wearing cloaks and masks of cloth, and these were said to be of the chief gentlefolk of Rome, a confraternity sworn to accompany criminals to execution and corpses to the grave. Two of these or two monks in similar garb helped the condemned man into the cart and preached to him, one of them letting him kiss continually a picture of our Lord. This they did so that those in the street might not see the man’s face. At the gibbet, which was a beam upon two posts, they held this picture before his face till he was thrown off the ladder. He died as criminals commonly do, without movement or cry; a dark man of thirty or thereabout, and after he was strangled they cut his body in four quarters. It is the custom amongst these people to kill criminals without torture, and after death to subject the body to very barbarous usage. M. de Montaigne remarked that he had written elsewhere how deeply people are moved by the cruelties practised upon dead bodies, and on this occasion the crowd, who had not felt any pity at the hanging, cried out in lamentation at every stroke of the axe. As soon as he was dead divers Jesuits or other churchmen went up to a high place and cried to the people on all sides that they should take to heart this example.25

22 Michel de Montaigne, Journal du voyage de Michel de Montaigne en Italie, par la Suisse et l’Allemagne en 1580 et 1581 avec des notes par M. de Querlon (Rome: Le Jay, 1774), tome 2, 92–95. 23 Christian Biet, “French Tragedy during the Seventeenth Century: From Cruelty on a Scaffold to Poetic Distance on Stage”, Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy, ed. Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 295. 24 Christian Biet, “French Tragedy during the Seventeenth Century”, 295. 25 Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels, 89–91.

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[L’onsieme de janvier, au matin, come M. de Montaigne sortoit du logis à cheval pour aller in Banchi, il rancontra qu’on sortoit de prison Catena, un fameus voleur, & capitaine des banis, qui avoit tenu en creinte toute l’Italie, & duquel il se contoit des murtres enormes, & notammant de deus Capucins ausquels il avoit fait renier Dieu, prometant sur cete condition leur sauver la vie, & les avoit massacrés après cela, sans aucune occasion, ny de commodité, ny de vanjance. Il s’arresta pour voir ce spectacle. Outre la forme de France, ils font marcher devant le criminel un grand crucifix couvert d’un rideau noir, & à pied un grand nombre d’homes vetus & masqués de toile qu’on dict estre des jantils homes & autres apparans de Rome, qui se vouent à ce service de accompaigner les criminels qu’on mene au supplice & les cors des trespassés, & en font une confrerie. Il y en a deus de ceus là, ou moines, ainsi vetus & couvers, qui assistent le criminel sur la charette & le preschent, & l’un d’eus lui presante continuellemant sur le visage & lui faict baiser sans cesse un tableau où est l’Image de Nostre Seigneur. Cela faict que on ne puisse pas voir le visage du criminel par la rue. A la potence, qui est une poutre entre deus appuis, on lui tenoit tous-iours cete image contre le visage, jusques à ce qu’il fut élancé. Il fit une mort commune, sans mouvemant & sans parole; estoit home noir, de trante ans ou environ. Après qu’il fut estranglé, on le detrancha en quattre cartiers. Ils ne font guiere mourir les homes qued’une mort simple, & exercent leur rudesse après la mort. M. de Montaigne y remerqua ce qu’il a dict ailleurs, combien le peuple s’effraïe des rigurs qui s’exercent sur les cors mors; car le peuple, qui n’avoit pas santi de le voir estrangler, à chaque coup qu’on donnoit pour le hâcher, s’écrioit d’une voix piteuse. Soudein qu’ils sont morts, un ou plusieurs Jésuistes ou autres, se mettent sur quelque lieu hault, & crient au peuple, qui deça, qui delà, & le preschent pour lui faire gouster cet exemple.26]

With this perhaps ethnographic view – critical and curious at once – Montaigne also witnesses different sorts of games and festivities, like, for example, a cart race, which pleased him the most of all sights in Italy, “on account of its resemblance to the ancient races”27 or a public procession for the Grand Duke in Florence. Montaigne describes “a gilded car made in form of a theater, in which were four little children, and one in the garb of a friar, who represented Saint Francis, holding his hands as the Saint is depicted, and bearing a crown over his cowl.”28 Perceiving the scenic character, he adds: “Some children were dressed as warriors, amongst whom was Saint George, and when they entered the piazza they came upon a huge dragon which was clumsily borne along by some men concealed. The dragon rushed forward, belching fire from his mouth and roaring, whereupon the young Saint George made at him with sword and lance and cut his throat.”29 The theatre historian Stefan Hulfeld emphasises that Montaigne deserves our attention in particular for his ethnographical qualities showing that the early modern period had no established concept of theatre, but on the contrary proves the variety of divergent ideas and perceptions.30 The same applies to the Swiss traveller

26 27 28 29 30

Michel de Montaigne, Journal du voyage, 105–109. Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels, vol. 3, 98. Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels, vol. 3, 95. Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels, vol. 3, 96. Stefan Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung, 31f.

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Thomas Platter, journeying to London in 1599, for whom one of Shakespeare’s plays aroused the same fascination as the cockfights and the bear-baiting next door.31 If we follow Peter von Matt’s argument, Thomas Platter’s report of his travel to London’s places of entertainment allows us to draw important conclusions concerning theatre life and the daily business of theatre practitioners in the Elizabethan era.32 We learn from him about performance schedules and the audience’s behaviour: Thus daily at two in the afternoon, London has sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators.33 [Unndt werden also alle tag umb 2 uhren nache mittag in der statt Londen zwo, bißweilen auch drey comedien an underscheidenen örteren gehalten, damitt einer den anderen lustig mache; dann welche sich am besten verhalten, die haben auch zum meisten zuhörer.34]

Even though this is still discussed controversially,35 most of the theatre and cultural historians recognise in the following quote from Platter’s diary not only a description of a random performance, providing information about the schedule, actors, and costumes, but also a visit to the newly opened Globe Theatre to see Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: On September 21st after lunch, about two o’clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar, with a cast of some fifteen people; when the play was over they danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women.36 [Den 21. septembris nach dem imbißeßen, ettwan umb zwey uhren, bin ich mitt [. . .] meiner geselschaft über daß waßer gefahren, haben in dem streüwinen dachhaus die tragedy vom ersten keyser Julio Caesare mitt ohngefahr 15 personen sehen gar artlich agieren; zu endt der comedien dantzeten sie ihrem gebrauch nach gar überauß zierlich, ye zwen in mannes undt 2 in weiber kleideren angethan, wunderbahrlich mitt einanderen.37]

31 Cf. Thomas Platter d. J., Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande 1595–1600, ed. Rut Keiser (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co., 1968), vol. 2, 791ff. 32 Cf. Peter von Matt, “Thomas Platter d. J.: ein Basler in Shakespeares Globe Theatre”, Figurationen: Gender, Literatur, Kultur, ed. Barbara Naumann and Lorena Silos Ribas, vol. 11/1 (Britannia/Helvetia), (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2010), 35–36. 33 For the English translation, see Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 166. 34 Platter d. J., Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande, 792. 35 For further reading, see Gabriel Egan, “Thomas Platter’s Account of an Unknown Play at the Curtain or the Boar’s Head”, Notes and Queries 245, 53–56. 36 For the English translation, see Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, 166–167. 37 Platter d. J., Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande, 791.

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With respect to the connection between travel and theatre, there is an astonishing passage, also mentioned by von Matt,38 in which the traveller Platter concludes with an explanation of Londoners’ passion for theatre: With these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad; indeed men and womenfolk visit such places without scruple, since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.39 [Mitt solchen unndt viel anderen kurtzweilen mehr vertreiben die Engellender ihr zeit, erfahren in den comedien, waß sich in anderen landen zutraget, unndt gehendt ohne scheüchen mann unndt weibspersonen an gemelte ort, weil mehrtheils Engellender nicht pflegen viel zereysen, sondern sich vernügen, zehauß frembde sachen zeerfahren unndt ihr kurtzweil zenemmen.40]

It is noticeable that neither Montaigne nor Platter in their extensive descriptions of a wide spectrum of theatrical performances are referring to ‘typically’ French or English characteristics. As Stefan Hulfeld has argued, neither the French nor the Swiss traveller had a particular pride in a “French” or a “Swiss” theatre, whose prevalence would have been to be defended, so they are focused on variety rather than valuation.41 Their reflections and their observations on that wide spectrum of theatrical forms prove exemplarily that the transnational notion is inherent to early modern theatre practice, which – as mentioned above – is in most instances either not recorded or not reflected in most of national orientated theatre historiographies. Both travel reports of the late sixteenth century provide information about divergent theatre forms not bound to language, drama concepts, or specific theatre norms as subsequently paradigmatic with the advent of eighteenth-century-based modern theatre associated with national-cultural attempts.

3 (Trans-)National Shakespeare: Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation How different is Voltaire’s report on his travel to England, where the national comparison, inherent to the title, marks the beginning of his theatre observations! Thus his eighteenth letter Sur la tragédie (On tragedy) starts: “THE English as well as the Spaniards were possess’d of Theatres, at a Time when the French had no more than moving, itinerant Stages. Shakespear, who was consider’d as the Corneille of the

38 Peter von Matt, “Thomas Platter d. J.: ein Basler in Shakespeares Globe Theatre”, 36. 39 For the English translation, see Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, 170. 40 Thomas Platter d. J., Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande, 794f. 41 Stefan Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung, 34.

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first mention’d Nation, was pretty near Cotemporary with Lopez de Vega, and he created, as it were, the English Theatre.”42 [“Les Anglais avaient déjà un théâtre, aussi bien que les Espagnols, quand les Français n’avaient que des Tréteaux. Shakespeare, qui passait pour le Corneille des Anglais, fleurissait à peu près dans les temps de Lope de Vega. Il créa le théâtre.”43] The encounter with Shakespeare’s theatre challenges the foundations of Voltaire’s own theatrical work, based on French classical theatre and the heritage of Corneille and Racine.44 He is fascinated and horrified at once. Shocked, he refers to the “monstres brilliants de Shakespeare”,45 characterising the English playwright’s work as uneven: “Shakespear boasted a strong, fruitful Genius: He was natural and sublime, but had not so much as a single Spark of good Taste, or knew one Rule of the Drama.”46 [“Il avait un génie plein de force et de fécondité, de naturel et de sublime, sans la moindre étincelle de bon goût et sans la moindre connaissance des règles.”47] Voltaire continues his introduction to the English theatre by opposing its qualities and deficiencies to his French compatriots: “Their dramatic Pieces, most of which are barbarous and without Decorum, Order or Verisimulitude, dart such resplendent Flashes, thro’ this Gleam, as amaze and astonish.”48 [“(L)eurs pièces, presque toutes barbares, dépourvues de bienséance, d’ordre, de vraisemblance, ont des lueurs étonnantes au milieu de cette nuit.”49] Although Voltaire’s attitude towards Shakespeare is marked by a profound ambivalence, he is considered as the one who familiarised the continent with Shakespeare. Even the biggest critics grant this merit to the pugnacious Enlightenment philosopher.50 Voltaire is convinced that European eighteenth-century theatres and especially French theatre need

42 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: C. Davis in Pater-Noster-Row and A. Lyon in Russel-Street, Covent-Garden, 1733), 166. Voltaire’s series of essays based on his experiences during his travels to England between 1726 and 1729 was published first in English in 1733 and then in French the following year. In France, it was regarded as an attack on the French political system and was rapidly suppressed. 43 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Félix Guirand (Paris: Larousse, 1972), 100. 44 Cf. Martina Groß, “Übersetzung und Kritik: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Lessing”, Theater als Kritik, ed. Olivia Ebert et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 397–408. 45 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 104. 46 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, 166. 47 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 100. 48 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, 177. 49 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 103. 50 Concerning Shakespeare on the continent, see Norbert Greiner and Felix C. H. Sprang, “Europäische Shakespeare-Übersetzungen im 18. Jahrhundert: Von der Apologie zum ästhetischen Programm”, Übersetzung, Translation, Traduction. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung, ed. Harald Kittel et al., (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2011), 2454. For additional reading, see Roger Paulin, “Ein deutsch-europäischer Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert?” Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Roger Paulin (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 7–35.

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Shakespeare’s genius despite Shakespeare’s disregard for theatrical conventions – “The shining Monsters of Shakespear, give infinite more Delight than the judicious Images of the Moderns”51 [“Les monstres brillants de Shakespeare plaisent mille fois plus que la sagesse moderne”52] – and posterity proved him right. Unlike Montaigne and Platter, Voltaire refers to national differences and exposes ‘typical’ French and English theatre characteristics. At the same time, however, it should be noted that between Montaigne’s and Platter’s travels in the late sixteenth century and Voltaire’s journey to England in the 1720s Europe underwent the Thirty Years’ War. This resulted in the political reorganisation of Europe and, in terms of theatrical development, the institutionalisation and exploitation of theatre for political, and consequently national, purposes.53 Voltaire does not so much defend the prevalence of French theatre, as attempt to enhance the quality of predominant French theatre. Therefore, the tragedy Zaïre, staged in 1732, is a direct result of Voltaire’s encounter with Shakespeare – especially with Othello, realising, as the chapter On Tragedy in his Letters Concerning the English Nation elaborates, that it is impossible to simply translate Shakespeare’s play into French. In this context, Lessing later argues that Zaïre is only a mediocre version of Shakespeare’s Othello.54 Although Lessing deeply criticises Voltaire’s most successful tragedy, he falls back on exactly this play for his well-known Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise). Accordingly, one could draw a direct line from Shakespeare’s Othello via Voltaire’s Zaïre to Lessing’s Nathan.55 While the strong national focus within each nation’s theatre history may obscure the full breadth of the original development, Zaïre was not based solely on French theatre culture and accordingly Nathan is a product of Lessing’s critical analysis of French and English theatre aesthetics. Voltaire’s travelogue and his encounter with Shakespeare’s theatre reveals the transnational development of European modern theatre, an evolution that interconnects the ‘English’ Othello, the ‘French’ Zaïre, and the ‘German’ Nathan. Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation, especially the letter On Tragedy and Zaïre which originates from his travel experience, serve in this regard as a hinge.

51 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, 180. 52 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 104. 53 Starting in late sixteenth-century Italy, the process of institutionalisation of theatre passes through early modern Europe. For a closer examination, see Barbara Marx and Christoph Oliver Mayer (eds), Akademie und/oder Autonomie. Akademische Diskurse vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009). Regarding the Thirty Years’ War and its implication on European artists and intelligentsia, see Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 54 Cf. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 83–84. 55 For further reading, see Martina Groß, “Übersetzung und Kritik: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Lessing”.

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The example of a ‘transnational Shakespeare’ reveals the importance of a transnational and comparative approach in theatre historiography. Travelogues or more broadly travel literature, here Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation, provide a significant source for different perspectives – beyond national narratives. Furthermore, this example demonstrates the eminent importance of translations or rather ‘travelling texts’ regarding theatrical development.56

4 Interlinkages between travel literature and theatre history: Nerval’s Voyage en Orient To give an example of the interlinkages between travel literature and theatre history, it is useful to look at the nature of Nerval’s travelogue. As mentioned before, Nerval’s Voyage en Orient, which includes the author’s travels from Paris to Constantinople via Geneva, Constance, Vienna, Cerigo (Cythera), Cairo, and Beirut, appears in the mid-nineteenth century and is an example of the French Romantic travelogue. Unlike Enlightenment travel reports, Romantic-era travel writing increasingly abandoned an instructional focus, becoming more novelistic and autobiographical.57 Thus Nerval resumes his request: “What I wrote, I saw, I felt it. Was I wrong to report in a naive way the thousand little incidents, ordinarily ignored in picturesque or scientific travel narratives?”58 [“Ce que j’ai écrit, je l’ai vu, je l’ai senti. Ai-je eu tort de rapporter ainsi naïvement mille incidents minutieux, dédaignés d’ordinaire dans les voyages pittoresques ou scientifiques?”59] Seen from a postcolonial perspective, Nerval’s Voyage en Orient is inscribed in the popular genre of exotic travel literature and cannot be separated from the subject of colonialism.60 Nerval, and respectively his travelogue, is given a special

56 For further reading see Martina Groß, “Le Spectateur en vue”, and Martina Groß, “Übersetzung und Kritik: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Lessing.” 57 As my contribution does not provide a detailed definition of travel literature, see for a closer reading the extensive studies by Peter Whitfield, Friedrich Wolfzettel, and C. W. Thompson. Cf. Whitfield, Travel: A Literary History; Wolfzettel, Reiseberichte und mythische Struktur; and C. W. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 58 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois (Paris: Folio classqiue, 1988), 790. My translation. 59 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 790. 60 Edward Said’s readings of Chateaubrind, Lamartine, Flaubert, and Gérard de Nerval are considered as a standard reference to the exoticism of nineteenth-century discourses on the Orient. Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Claire Lindsay provides an introductory overview of travel writing and postcolonialism in “Travel Writing and Postcolonial Studies”, The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Carl Thompson (London: Routledge, 2015), 25–34.

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status among other nineteenth-century travel writers that Edward Said includes as proponents of European Orientalism, like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Flaubert: More truthful than mere picturesque voyages, such as the ones written by Chateaubriand and Lamartine that use the Orient as an object of style, more real than scientific accounts because it incorporates the subjective experiences of its narrator, the Voyage en Orient attempts to portray the perfect balance of ethnographic literature, anticipating Leiris and Lévi-Strauss by almost a century.61

By reading the Voyage en Orient, especially the chapter Les Femmes du Caire (The Women of Cairo), it becomes obvious that Nerval transcends categories and genres to deconstruct not only the ‘orientalist discourse’ but also the image of the ‘Orient’ himself. In a very critical manner, Nerval perceives the Europeanisation of the Ottoman Empire, which, according to him, is accountable for the denaturation of the Orient, visible in the old city of Cairo: “That Cairo lies beneath ashes and dull; the spirit and the progress of modern life have triumphed over it like death. In a few more months, the European streets will have cut right through the old dumb dusty city which now crumbles peacefully upon the fellahs who live in it.”62 [“Ce Caire-là gît sous la cendre et la poussière; l’esprit et les progrès modernes en ont triomphé comme la mort. Encore quelques mois, et des rues européennes auront coupé à angles droits la vieille ville poudreuse et muette qui croule en paix sur les pauvres fellahs.”63] Aware of the limits of his knowledge, Nerval rejects the predominant idea of an “immobile” Orient and a “progressive” Occident.64 According to Ali Behdad, the positivistic belief that a full understanding of the ‘Other’ is possible through immersion as an extended experience characterises the travel author’s discursive practice: “Unlike his romantic precursor, Nerval always searches beyond the surface to find what has been ignored by other travellers.”65 Taking up this idea, Sarga Moussa underlines that the Nervalian traveller [“voyageur nervalien”] is not a spectator in search of a superficial exoticism [“un spectateur en quête d’un exotisme superficiel”], but on the contrary is longing for affiliation and immersion.66 Thus it may be exactly this longing for immersion that questions the assumption of a civilised, superior Europe and adopts the point of view of the ‘Other’,

61 Patrick M. Bray, The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 65. 62 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 311. My translation. 63 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 311. 64 Cf. Sarga Moussa, “Le Voyage en Orient de Nerval, ou la possibilité d’un orientalisme hybride”, Orient – Zur (De-)Konstruktion eines Phantasmas, ed. Véronique Porra and Gregor Wedekind (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 156. 65 Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 22. 66 Sarga Moussa, “Le Voyage en Orient de Nerval”, 156–157.

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which leads to a “cross-cultural gender play.”67 Nerval, obsessed with theatre and pervasively using theatrical imagery, applies various kinds of theatrical vocabulary to every aspect – the spectacle, the stage, the play, the idea of the play, the scene, opera, comedy, costume, spectator, actors, masks etc. Especially the often-cited ‘dressing scene’ in which Nerval describes the beautiful clothes on sale in the bazaars of Cairo, and in which he dresses in Arab robes, theatricalises the traveller in his position as an inside-outsider: “I am certainly not inclined to delay in assuming the Oriental costume”68 [“(M)ais assurement, je ne veux pas tarder à prendre l’habit oriental”69]. Consequently, in his study on francophone travelogues of travels to Egypt, the Romance philologist Frank Estelmann analyses Nerval’s Voyage en Orient as a ‘theatrical travelogue’ (“theatrale[r] Reisediskurs”70). He argues that the media-historical transition from the picturesque to the theatrical discourse characterises in particular Nerval’s chapter on Egypt.71 In fact, the innovative poetics of theatrical enactment [“innovative Poetik der theatralen Inszenierung”72] is closely linked to Nerval’s efforts to immerse himself in the foreign culture which confronts him in various ways with the familiar and the attempt to transform the readers of his travelogue into spectators. His entire travel to Syria, for example, is depicted as a play: “In the second act, I saw Moustaï-Pacha appearing [. . .] Following the play, I finally understood [. . .]”73 [“Au second acte, je vis paraître (. . .) En suivant la pièce j’ai fini par comprendre (. . .)”74]. Also the passage of “Druses and Maronites” owes much to theatre techniques, with “mis-en-scène”, a “play within the play”, elements of comedy and farce and coups de théâtre.75 However, the interlinkages between travel literature and theatre history are not limited to the use of theatre as a descriptive model of cultural encounters. Following Frank Estelmann’s argument, theatre history itself is an important background to understanding Nerval’s travelogue as he is constantly referring to the European theatre tradition. Thus the arrival of a caravan from Mecca reminds him of an Opéra comique, or the pyramids inspire him to stage Mozart’s The Magic Flute.76 In addition, in

67 Dúnlaith Bird, Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women’s Oriental Travelogues, 1850–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 138. 68 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 204. My translation. 69 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 204. For further reading, see the works cited by Dúnlaith Bird, Sarga Moussa, and Frank Estelmann. 70 Frank Estelmann, “Vom Theater der Fremde zur Komödie Kairos”, 240. 71 Frank Estelmann, “Vom Theater der Fremde zur Komödie Kairos”, 239–242. 72 Frank Estelmann, “Vom Theater der Fremde zur Komödie Kairos”, 242. 73 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 143. 74 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 143. 75 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 412–564. 76 Cf. Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 145–311. See also Frank Estelmann, “Vom Theater der Fremde zur Komödie Kairos”, 251–252.

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Vienna Nerval admires the variety of theatre spectacles: they give him the impression of a performative laboratory, which he would not find in France.77 It is noticeable that Nerval evokes on the one hand all well-known and current theatre terms of nineteenth-century European theatre. On the other hand, he questions exactly this notion of nineteenth-century European theatre by extending those ideas and terms to what we might call cultural performances. Seen in this way, not only are travelogues important for questions concerning theatrical development and its (historical) documentation, but theatrical development also has an impact on the aesthetics of the travelogue themself. To that effect, as has been shown, the descriptions of theatre forms and mises-en-scène of cultural encounters differ considerably in the travelogues from the late sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century as they are affected by the development of theatre practices and concepts.

5 Transnational theatre histories These examples do not fully map the various forms of interlinkages between travel and theatre, but they nevertheless show the potential of travel literature in an alternative theatre history which questions nationally based theatre concepts and the idea of linear progress.78 Additionally, such a comparative analysis is able to provide insight into the complex and continuously changing literary genre of travel writing, as the functional and aesthetic differences of travel narratives from Montaigne, Platter, and Furttenbach via Voltaire to Nerval show. The pluralism of travel narratives is particularly visible in nineteenth-century travel literature, which is also a period rich in female travel writers.79 Through the travel memories of the actress Minna Wohlgeboren-Wohlbrück and the writer Johanna Schopenhauer, we can observe how differently they experienced and presented the theatre culture in Europe. Wohlgeboren-Wohlbrück constantly refers to her role as a female actor locating herself in the tradition of ars apodemica,80

77 Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 74–82. 78 With regard to the problem of a ‘linear theatre historiography,’ see Andreas Kotte, “Zur Theorie der Theaterhistoriographie”, MIMOS. Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft 54.1 (2002), 5–12. For a deeper understanding of the philosophical topic of linear historiography and progress one should turn to Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253–264. 79 Cf. Frank Estelmann, Sarga Moussa, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, Voyageuses européennes au XIXe siècle. Identités, genres, codes (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2012) and Clare Broome Saunders (ed), Women, Travel Writing, and Truth (London: Routledge, 2014). 80 Cf. Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 70–94.

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whereas Schopenhauer claims to give an objective report on London’s theatre culture. Schopenhauer does not broach the issue of her gender but rather focuses on the tradition of Voltaire and Lessing and on national theatre cultures by comparing their qualities and deficiencies.81 As a theatre practitioner regularly travelling for various theatre engagements, Wohlgeboren-Wohlbrück’s notion of theatre differs clearly from Schopenhauer’s. Being a member of the intellectual and economic upper bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum), the latter’s receptive behaviour as a theatre spectator is influenced by the idea of a national theatre culture. Thus, the gap between transnational theatre practice and nationally orientated theatre theory as well as related modes of perception appears in the travelogues themselves. Regarding the methodological problem of female travel writing,82 the fact that – independent of the discourse of gender and écriture feminine – literary history has long underestimated the ‘genre viatique’ is of great significance.83 It helps to understand why in theatre history, which is mainly a product of the long nineteenth century,84 women are nearly absent. As mentioned above, nineteenth-century travel writing also became a female domain and a medium of feminine expression. Thus the fact that the mainly nationally orientated theatre historiography ignored travelogues intensified the marginalisation of possible female contributions in the field of theatre historiography. Undoubtedly, those documents are important sources of an alternative theatre historiography. In the last decades, new approaches to national analysis and postcolonial theory have started to account for cultural exchanges that occur across national and regional borders – even when power relations are unequal, as Robert Henke argues. Postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and the comparative literature scholar Mary Louise Pratt have established new theoretical models for addressing the ubiquitous phenomena of cultural hybridity and cross-cultural exchange.85 To this end, Sarga Moussa, for example, sees in the aforementioned Nervalian traveller the

81 Cf. Minna Wohlgeboren-Wohlbrück, Reise-Erinnerungen der Schauspielerin Minna WohlgeborenWohlbrück, (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 1846) and Johanna Schopenhauer, Erinnerungen von einer Reise in den Jahren 1803, 1804 und 1805, vol. 2 (Rudolstadt: Verlag der Hof-, Buch- und Kunsthandlung, 1814). 82 Cf. Imgart Scheitler, Gattung und Geschlecht. Reisebeschreibung deutscher Frauen 1780–1850 (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999). 83 Cf. Friedrich Wolfzettel, “Récit de voyage et Écriture féminine”, Frank Estelmann, Sarga Moussa, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, Voyageuses européennes, 19–27. 84 The term is coined for the period between the years 1789 and 1914 (cf. Ilya Ehrenburg, Eric Hobsbawm) or in a more generalised version of the long nineteenth century, for the period lasting from 1750 to 1914 (cf. Peter N. Stearns in the context of the world history school). For further reading see Trevor R. Getz, The Long Nineteenth Century, 1750–1914: Crucible of Modernity (London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2018). 85 Robert Henke, “Introduction”, Transnational exchange, ed. Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, 9.

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possibility of a hybrid orientalism [“la possibilité d’un orientalisme hybride”86] and, referring to Bhabha, insists on the double gesture of alterisation and hybridity [“le double geste d’altérisation et d’hybridation”87]. Taking a transhistorical perspective, such methods of analysis also help generate new insights into transnational theatre exchanges, not only in the early modern period but in other periods up to today’s current debates on the significance of national theatre concepts and their obsolescence in the age of globalisation.88 For travelogues as a genre of transnational theatre histories, the history of travel literature89 and theatre historiography entertain an aesthetic-historical relation comprised of nothing less than the theatrical and literary forms of the perception of the ‘Other’ and the ‘foreign.’

86 Sarga Moussa, “Le Voyage en Orient de Nerval”, 151. 87 Sarga Moussa, “Le Voyage en Orient de Nerval”, 157. 88 For further reading, see, for example, Günther Heeg, Das transkulturelle Theater (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2017). 89 Concerning the correlation between the history of the genre and literary historiography, see Friedrich Wolfzettel, “Vorwort”, Wolfzettel, Reiseberichte und mythische Struktur, 9–10.

Laura Rivas Gagliardi

Transnationally Forged Nationality: Le Brésil littéraire and the Writing of Literary History in the Nineteenth Century Abstract: The circulation of capital, people, and ideas that followed the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution (1789) formed a propitious context for the emergence of Ferdinand Wolf’s Le Brésil littéraire (1863). The work is a result of the transnational relations between the Brazilian and the Habsburg Empires. Its author locates Brazilian literature within the pantheon of Weltliteratur, attributing literary, cultural, and political autonomy to Brazil despite the fact that it remained a colonised country until recently. An analysis of the context of the book’s publication as well as of some excerpts of the work reveals the ideological purpose behind the writing of literary history and how the writing of literary history can serve as an tool in projects of nation-building and the formation of national identity. Ferdinand Wolf’s study Le Brésil littéraire: histoire de la littérature brésilienne1 can be considered from the very beginning a product of a transnational enterprise.2 It was originally written in German by the Viennese philologist Ferdinand Wolf,3 but

1 Ferdinand Wolf, Le Brésil littéraire: Histoire de la littérature brésilienne suivi d’un choix de morceaux tirés des meilleurs auteurs bésiliens [sic] (Berlin: Asher & Co, 1863). 2 In my use of the words ‘transnational’ and ‘transnationalism,’ I follow Herrmann, Smith-Prei, and Taberner, who see the term “as an analytical tool” to understand “a plurality of intersecting, and crosscutting flows of products, ideas, and people back and forth over borders.” Unlike the authors, I do not deal with twenty-first-century literature, but instead with the writing of literary history in the nineteenth century. Despite historical, political, economic, and literary differences between both contexts, I use this general definition as a starting point for my own attempt to find a conceptualisation of transnationalism more adequate to the moment of Le Brésil littéraire’s emergence. See Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner (eds), “Introduction: Contemporary German-Language Literature and Transnationalism,” Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 1–15. 3 Ferdinand Wolf (1796–1866, Vienna) can be counted among the few philologists of his age who devoted themselves to the study of Portuguese language and literature. His first works on Romance philology date back to 1837. Until his death, he was director of the Manuscripts Section in the Imperial Library of Vienna. Wolf never entered academic life, but strove energetically for the foundation of scholarly institutions – such as the Academy of Sciences of Vienna, where he represented the area of Romance Philology from 1847 onwards – and for the publication of magazines specialising on this subject, such as the Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Literatur. Wolf saw himself as a precursor of new perspectives on scholarship and literary studies, as is evident in his extended exchange of letters (more than thousand documents) with researchers from numerous countries. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-009

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published in 1863 in French by the Berlin Publishing House Asher & Co. Although Wolf had never visited or spent time in Brazil, his book had an astonishing reception in this country. It was the first extensive history of Brazilian literature and was considered to be the most important until the beginning of the twentieth century.4 The originality of Wolf’s book stems precisely from the fact that the author extended the concept of national literature to a former Portuguese colony in South America, whose existence was at that time limited to the function of, on the one

See Edmund Stengel, “Vorwort,” Kleinere Schriften von Ferdinand Wolf (Marburg: N.G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1890), III–XV; Adolf Ebert, “Ferdinand Wolf: Seine Bedeutung für die Romanische Philologie, namentlich die Literaturgeschichte,” Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Literatur (Leipzig: Brockhaus), v. 8, 1867, 271–305; and Adolf Mussafia, Zur Erinnerung an Ferdinand Wolf (Vienna: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1866). 4 Shortly after its publication, the European reception of Le Brésil littéraire was restricted to a few assessments in some magazines and supplements (see Literarisches Zentralblatt für Deutschland 34 (22. August 1863), 807–808). In Brazil, by comparison, it had been adopted as a handbook in the most important school of Rio de Janeiro, Colégio D. Pedro II, despite having been written in French. As a result of the fall of the monarchy in 1889 and the establishment of a new wave of decolonisation in scholarly thought, especially in the realm of literary history, represented by the works of Silvio Romero, Wolf was accused of having elaborated his book at the behest of D. Pedro II and producing a falsified image of Brazilian literature (see Silvio Romero, História da literatura brasileira [1888] 7th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, Brasília: INL, 1980)). In the twentieth century, following the process of intellectual decolonisation and the formation of new, homegrown theories about Brazil, Wolf’s book ceased to be an important point of reference, with scholars increasingly adopting the attitude that it should be neither accepted nor condemned. (See Antonio Candido, Formação da literatura brasileira: momentos decisivos [1959] (Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro: Itatiaia, 1997)). Still, the first and only translation into Portuguese appears only in 1955 (see O Brasil literário (história da literatura brasileira), trans. Jamil Almansur Haddad [São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1955]). As a result of the institutionalisation of Brazilian Studies (Brasilianistik) in German-speaking countries, Le Brésil littéraire was rehabilitated and often mentioned as a curious anecdote about the beginning of this research field in the German context (see Karl Kohut, “Brasilianische Studien in Deutschland,” Brasilien im Umbruch: Akten des Berliner Brasilien-Kolloquiums vom 20.–22. September 1995, ed. Dietrich Briesenmeister and Sergio Paulo Rouanet [Frankfurt am Main: TFM, 1996], 397–410). In her PhD thesis on Wolf’s contribution to Romance philology, Anneliese Habel turns especially to Wolf’s analysis of Spanish literature and does not provide any kind of explanation of Le Brésil littéraire (see Ferdinand Wolf: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Romanischen Philologie [Universität Wien, 1980]). Recently, Wolf was restored by new interpretations of foreign authors writing about Brazilian literature and their influence in the construction of a specific country’s image (see Regina Zilbermann, A terra em que nasceste: imagens do Brasil na literatura [Porto Alegre: Editora da Universidade/UFRG, 1994]). Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, two doctoral theses (one from France, the other one from Brazil) refer to Le Brésil littéraire but do not make a comprehensive analysis of it (see Carlos Augusto de Melo, A formação das historias literárias no Brasil: as contribuições de Conego Fernandes Pinheiro (1825–1876), Ferdinand Wolf (1796–1866) e Sotero dos Reis (1800–1871) [Universidade de Campinas, 2009] and Sébastien Rozeaux, La genèse d’un “grand monument national”: littérature et millieu littéraire au Brésil à l’époque impériale (1822–1880) [Université Charles de Gaule, Lille III, 2012]). In any case, neither of these examples examined the original German manuscript.

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hand, providing Europe with raw materials, and, on the other, of nourishing the European imagination of the ‘New World.’ A philological, historical, and comparative analysis can contribute to an understanding of the limits and possibilities for a transnational approach to literary history in the context of the nineteenth century. Based on the original manuscript Geschichte der brasilianischen Nationalliteratur,5 which has never been published and remains forgotten until the present day in Vienna’s National Library archives, I intend to show here the existence of a complex transnational network of diplomatic, political, and economic relations underlying the emancipatory discourse through which Brazilian literature is presented in the book. In fact, I consider Wolf’s book to be a piece of evidence of a dynastic form of thought and domination that was essential for the constitution of the Brazilian nation-state and subsequently of Brazilian identity, even within the context of the emergence of liberalism, bourgeois moral conventions, and democratic institutions. In order to legitimate itself, it was of fundamental ideological importance for the Brazilian monarchy (1822–1889) to create and globally disseminate an image of its own national literature as one that was autochthonous, original, and independent from European models. The starting point of my considerations about transnationalism are the definition of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism.’ The English historian Eric Hobsbawm provides much information about the debate on the meaning of these concepts between 1830 and 1880, “the era of triumphant bourgeois liberalism,”6 precisely the time in which Wolf published his study of Brazilian literature. It was within this period that the term ‘nation’ acquired its modern sense, i.e. it began to be used in political discourse to “equate ‘the people’ and the state in the manner of the American and the French revolutions,” with “centralizing and unitary implications.”7 He explains: “the ‘nation’ so considered, was the body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them a state which was their political expression. For, whatever else a nation was, the element of citizenship and mass participation or choice was never absent from it.”8 The author also points out that for liberal thought it was extremely important to consider the existence of various nation-states because this would represent “a stage of evolution” and “the assimilation of smaller communities and peoples to larger ones,”9 a point that was then seen as crucial. Regarding the notion of transnationalism and its manifestations – also intrinsically related to the conflicts and ideological tensions of the nation-building process

5 Ferdinand Wolf, Geschichte der brasilianischen Nationalliteratur (Austrian National Library, 1862, Manuscript 14547). 6 See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality [1990] 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39. 7 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870, 18. 8 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870, 18–19. 9 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870, 39.

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in the nineteenth century – I propose a distinction between dynastic transnationalism and modern transnationalism. This is only an abstract distinction and means neither the opposition nor the automatic continuity between them. Under this assumption, dynastic transnationalism would be a peculiar phenomenon in the relationship between imperial monarchies, with their dynastic bonds, feudal ways of life, and the absence of democratic institutional representation. Before the final triumph of liberalism in Western Europe and the establishment of modern nationstates, which occurred from about 1880 onwards, dynastic transnationalism was connected not only to the well-regulated market but also to the expansion of dynastic domains beyond European territory. In the case of the Austrian Empire, of which Wolf was a faithful representative, this kind of imperial expansion took place mostly by means of matrimonial arrangements. After about 1880, exchange between bourgeois nation-states, between ‘nations’ as defined by Hobsbawm, unfolds according to the contractual forms developed in accordance with the principles of bourgeois law, corresponding to an international political system and to an international division of labour. It is principally an international exchange between established nations. The modern form of economic trade presupposes correspondence between nation and state as well as mastery over national boundaries through the circulation of capital, as Karl Marx repeatedly remarks throughout his Critique of Political Economy.10 But especially in its initial phase, old dynastic forms of transnationalism coexist with modern internationalism, giving rise to what I refer to as modern transnationalism. In the case of Brazil and Austria, for example, dynastic bounds remained useful for the establishment of

10 In the last chapter of Capital v. I, “The modern colonization theory,” Karl Marx analyses the international character of capital and its power to reorganise all relations according to the laws of expropriation of labour. It is also instructive, however, to consider his words about the “Historical tendency of capitalist accumulation:” “As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.” (my emphasis). See Karl Marx, Capital [1887], trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Friedrich Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers).

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an ideological unity between Brazilian and Austrian elites, despite the fact that each elite was attached to its own nation-state. They recognise themselves as belonging to a transnational elite, with specific hegemonic interests.11 In this sense, Wolf writes precisely from the standpoint of someone located at the crossroads between dynastic and modern forms of transnationalism, which correspond likewise to specific forms of social, cultural, and economic life. There are also many other aspects which mark Le Brésil littéraire as a transnational enterprise. Firstly, three different languages play a decisive role in its composition: the language of the studied object is Portuguese; the language in which it was written is German; the language in which it is published was French. Given the scarcity of documents, it is impossible to know the specific reasons that induced the editors Asher & Co of Berlin to give Dr. van Muyden the task of translating the study into French for its publication. A potential explanation could be that French, lingua franca at that time, was the shared language of aristocrats and global elites, and it was in this context that the main characters of Le Brésil littéraire circulated. Another hypothesis is that a French version could remove some of the intensity of the characteristic vocabulary of German Idealism, as it can be seen by a comparison of the French translation with the German manuscript. Wolf’s concepts and worldview presuppose many postulates that could be called essentialist, reinforcing the opposition between a German philosophical matrix, based on the notion of critique and the invention of das Völkische, and the bourgeois ideals of the French Revolution founded on the paradigms of the Lumières. In any case, it seems to be clear that the editors were concerned about the book’s chances for success, since in French it would reach a wider public and could be contrasted with the brief study on Brazilian literature written earlier, in 1826, by the French scholar Ferdinand Denis.12 However, there is no doubt that a meticulous analysis of the original in

11 In his analysis of the formation of new social classes in contemporary neoliberal states, David Harvey explains that the emergence of a ‘transnational class’ is not something new: “The case that the ruling class anywhere has ever confined its operations and defined its loyalties to any one nation-state has historically been much overstated. It never did make much sense to speak of a distinctively US versus British or French or German or Korean capitalist class. The international links were always important, particularly through colonial and neocolonial activities, but also through transnational connections that go back to the nineteenth century if not before.” See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35. 12 As Wolf comments in his Preface, Jean Ferdinand Denis (1798–1890), director of Sainte-Geneviève’s Library in Paris, is the only contemporary European literary historian who turned to Brazilian literature before himself, especially in the work Résumé de l’histoire littéraire du Portugal, suivi du résumé de l’histoire littéraire du Brésil (Paris: Lecointe et Durey, 1826). In contrast to Wolf, Denis was more widely received in later years and is still held in positive regard as a forerunner of Romanticism in Brazil and as an example of how Brazilian intellectuals in the nineteenth century should strive to write original literature. See Antonio Candido, A formação da literatura brasileira: Momentos decisivos, v. 2 (1997), 287–290.

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German, as well as of some of Wolf’s letters, demonstrates that the work in French has little to do with its original, starting with the title, which would have been in German: Geschichte der brasiliansichen Nationalliteratur [History of the National Literature of Brazil]. Even in the title, it is clear that Wolf aims to present Brazilian literature as a coherent and national ensemble. From analysing the differences between the two versions – the German manuscript and the French published book – we can clearly see that certain Eurocentric aspects of the original are also present in the translation. There are, however, differences in the way in which Eurocentrism is discursively constructed in the two versions, differences that reveal more about an entrenched European dispute regarding French and German positions of power between France and Austria than about Brazilian literature itself, which is sometimes reduced to a mere background feature. Secondly, this combination of languages corresponds to a system of production, reception, and literary circulation that lies beyond strictly national boundaries: the author is Viennese, the publishing house is Prussian, and the topic is Brazilian. At this crossroads, Austria and Brazil approach each other, first and foremost, in order to strengthen dynastic ties, of which Le Brésil littéraire is one of the most eccentric products. It must be remembered here that Austria and Brazil were not yet established as ‘nations’ in the sense of modern nation-states.13 However, apart from all differences between the European and the colonial contexts, there were historical forces that pushed these two monarchies to this mode of social and political organisation based on bourgeois civil society and the exploitation of the wage labour force. Thirdly, the conditions that allowed Wolf’s contact with Brazilian authors and works presuppose transit between nations: the scientific expedition Novara bought books in Rio de Janeiro commissioned by the Vienna Imperial Library, without which Wolf would never have written Le Brésil littéraire. Furthermore, Wolf was able to refine his knowledge of Brazilian literature thanks to personal and epistolary contact with writers who, as diplomats, ensured the mediation between Brazil and Europe on behalf of the emperor D. Pedro II, a fact that reveals the interest of Brazilian monarchy in strengthening the political and cultural bond between the 13 Eric Hobsbawm explains the reason behind the difficulty of concretely determining which countries could be considered nations in the nineteenth century: “Since the number of nation-states in the early nineteenth century was small, the obvious question for enquiring minds was which of the numerous European populations classifiable as an ‘nationality’ on some ground or another, would acquire a state [. . .], and which of the numerous existing states would be imbued with the character of a ‘nation’. [. . .] It seemed obvious that not all states would coincide with nations, nor the other way round” (23–24). About the Habsburg empire he argues: “Other candidates for nationhood were plainly not excluded a priori, but neither was there any a priori presumption in their favor. [. . .] The Ottoman empire was the most obvious evolutionary fossil of this kind [by the standards of nineteenth-century liberalism], but so, it was increasingly evident, was the Habsburg empire” (38). See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality.

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two imperial houses. For these reasons, it is possible to affirm that Le Brésil littéraire is a work that alternates between dynastic transnationalism and modern internationalist relations between established nations, and is thus expressive of what I call modern transnationalism: a coexistence of the recently established relations between nation-states (‘international relations’) with remnants of an older order existing across those nation-states: the transnational order of the elites. My analysis aims to understand the causes for the success of the conservative aspect – and not of a liberal nor of a progressive one – in the emergence of the national image of Brazil which was also in no small part corroborated and disseminated by Wolf’s work. In accordance with his conservative ideological views, Wolf intended to replace the French models of political and cultural life predominant at that time in Brazil with what he understood to be German models.

1 Ferdinand Wolf in the context of the Austrian Empire The House of Habsburg was at the head of an essentially multinational and multilingual state, in which the transition from absolutism to liberalism took place on a practical level only a few years before World War I. It maintained power for an uninterrupted stretch of time longer than that enjoyed by any other European dynasty, from the thirteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century.14 Throughout this long period, we can identify moments at which different political and economic models come into conflict with one another, accompanied by particular sets of tensions and ideological systems – varying from the conservative to the liberal, from the reactionary to the progressive. In line with this contemporaneous coexistence of opposing political tendencies, Wolf’s vocabulary on the one hand alters the meaning of many of the relatively progressive concepts of the bourgeois discourse of his age, endowing them with reactionary meanings, especially in the German original. On the other hand, even though Wolf is not aware of it, his work also bears signs of fluctuations that go in the direction of modern transnationalism because his thinking is located exactly in this overlapping of the two political and economic models, defined by the need to maintain the feudal system while anticipating the modern paradigm of bourgeois society already propagated by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. In his book Lineages of the Absolutist State, the English historian Perry Anderson opens the chapter on Austria by noting that the Austrian state “was more

14 See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), 299. My following comments are based on the chapter about “Austria,” 299–327.

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exclusively and entirely founded on the organizing principle of dynasticism than any other in Europe.”15 The success of its imperial domination is ascribed by Anderson to the political unity of the diverse regions of the empire, which was structured by the identity of the ruling dynasty without reference to any common denominator such as ethnicity or territoriality. Unlike other European absolutist monarchies, the House of Habsburg was subjected to incongruity and structural insecurity resulting from the conglomerate character of the social formations over which it exerted its dominion. Anderson notes that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Austria remained a decentralised monarchy despite its efforts to implement some changes to modernise its political-administrative organisation, such as the establishment of regular armies, a permanent bureaucracy, a national tax system, a relatively unified market, and a codification of law. In Austria, the inconsistency of these elements, which later became the basis for the consolidation of modern nation-states, produced new conditions for the establishment of industry, for the formation of the bourgeoisie, and for the growth of nationalism, all characteristic features of the modern age. The feudal aristocracy, for instance, was neither properly national, since it used to come from various parts of Europe, nor socially unitary, which explains why the army became even more feeble. As a result, diplomacy and marriage arrangements became one of the essential instruments of the Habsburg State for maintaining its power. It was within this context that the dynastic connection with Portugal arose – and, by extension, with Brazil during the colonial period. In 1817 the Austrian princess Maria Leopoldina married the crown prince D. Pedro, a member of the House of Braganza. He would be, as D. Pedro I, the first king of Brazil after its independence in 1822 and later king D. Pedro IV, in Portugal, to which he returned in 1831 leaving as his successor his son, D. Pedro II, thus inaugurating the association of the two Empires – Brazilian and Austrian. D. Pedro II was raised as a European monarch and, for his part, was also interested in strengthening political and economic ties with Europe, especially with Austria, then possibly the greatest fortress of conservatism against the emancipatory movements that took place after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The main task of D. Pedro II in the first years of his reign was reducing the risk of Brazil fragmenting into small republics that would threaten his own monarchical sovereignty. He undertook the development of an ideology in order to shape an image of Brazil as a coherent and unified country, hiding its regional differences or incorporating them in a stereotypical form. This strategy of building up the unity of the country through cultural integration proved to be more effective than the violent repression employed during the Regency period (1831–1840).16 By 1860, the Brazilian monarchy 15 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 299. 16 In the Regency period, corresponding to the period between D. Pedro I’s abdication in 1831 and the early coronation of D. Pedro II as Emperor of Brazil in 1840, many rebellions erupted across the country with the aim of establishing independent republics and deposing the monarchical

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was also experiencing intense political and diplomatic troubles, especially as a result of the failed attempts to introduce wage labour in big farms of the southeastern region. European immigrants denounced the precarious work conditions as being akin to slavery, which led Prussia to prohibit immigration to Brazil in 1859.17 At the time, it seemed that the only way to avoid new situations that could jeopardise the world’s recognition of the Brazilian elite and to counterbalance a negative image of Brazil was to send Brazil’s scientists and politicians – turned into authors, literati, artists, orators – as diplomats traveling around the world in a kind of pilgrimage, in order to extend political and economic ties to the cultural field, ideologically connecting the Brazilian elite with its transnational counterpart. It was precisely at this moment that Wolf entered into contact with Brazilian diplomats then serving D. Pedro II in Saxony, Berlin, and Vienna, such as Manoel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, Ferreira França, and especially Gonçalves de Magalhães, to whom Le Brésil littéraire would eventually be dedicated.18 Influenced by them, Wolf creates a narrative of Brazilian literary history whose main character is in the first place Magalhães, and secondly, the emperor himself and his faithful staff. Although Brazil’s independence from Portugal had been recognised since 1826, it still maintained a colonial social order. Colonial, in this case, means not only an

government, which was a great menace to the unity of Brazil and its control through centralised power. All these rebellions were crushed. The most important ones were Malês (1835) in Bahia, Cabanagem (1835–1840) in Pará, Farroupilha Revolution (1835–1845) in Rio Grande do Sul, Sabinada (1837–1838) in Salvador, and Balaiada (1838–1840) in Maranhão. 17 See Thomas Davatz, Die Behandlung der Kolonisten in der Provinz St. Paulo in Brasilien und deren Erhebung gegen ihre Bedruecker (Chur, 1858). 18 The source here is a document written by Wolf in 1861, in which he explains his decision to dedicate his work to D. Pedro II, and no longer to Gonçalves de Magalhães: “This most devoted subject has for some time been occupied in drawing up a history of Brazilian literature and hopes to conclude it in the course of the coming winter. Sir Magalhães, Brazilian ambassador at the local court, who, as a poet and philosopher himself, occupies an outstanding position in the literature of his fatherland, has greatly contributed to this work through his suggestions, so that this subject considered himself obliged to dedicate it to him. Sir Magalhães, however, considered it more appropriate to dedicate this work to S. M. the Emperor of Brazil, and asked this subject to do so, promising to obtain acceptance of the dedication on the part of the emperor. This subject requests then to the higher court the permission to dedicate the above mentioned work to the S. M. the Emperor of Brazil”. (“Der ergebenst Gefertigte hat seit einiger Zeit, sich mit der Ausarbeitung einer Geschichte der brasilianischen Literatur beschäftigt und hofft damit im Laufe dieses Winters fertig zu werden. Der brasilianische Gesandte am hiesigen Hofe, Hr. v. Magalhães, der selbst als Dichter und Philosoph eine ausgezeichnete Stelle in der Literatur seines Vaterlands einnimmt hat durch seine Mitteilungen dieses Werk wesentlich gefördert, so dass der Gefertigte sich für verpflichtet hielt, es ihm zu widmen. Hr. v. Magalhães aber erachtete es für passender, dass dieses Werk S. M. dem Kaiser von Brasilien gewidmet werde, forderte den Gefertigten dazu auf und versprach die Annahme der Widmung von Seite der Kaiser zu erwirken. Der Gefertigte bittet dafür, höheren Ortes ihm die Bewilligung erwirken zu wollen, das oben bezeichnete Werke S. M. dem Kaiser von Brasilien widmen zu dürfen”.) (My italics and translation from German to English.) HB 267/1861, National Library of Vienna.

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economic dependence on the European centres of capitalism, whose industries bought raw materials extracted through enslaved labour in Brazil at a low price while selling products to the nation at a high price; colonial here also means a relationship of intellectual and cultural dependence. This is clear from the fact that until the transfer of the Portuguese royal family and of the seat of the Portuguese Empire from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, there was neither a university in the colony, nor a legal press. Moreover, within politically independent South America, Brazil was the only monarchy, alongside the new republics that had emerged from popular struggles against Spain, organised by leaders like Simón Bolívar and San Martín and influenced by a wave of revolutionary movements that spread throughout Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.19 In Brazil, the war for independence was rapid, and resistance on the part of the Portuguese was small. All this is closely connected with the fact that, while enslavement was gradually abolished in various regions of the world and the trafficking of enslaved people was banned by England in 1850, it persisted in Brazil until 1888. Thus, it is possible to conclude that the Brazilian tropical soil in which, according to the founding myth of Pero Vaz de Caminha’s Letter,20 everything that was planted would grow, was not so fertile an environment for liberal ideas. Yet despite these circumstances and the country’s colonial past, Brazilian literature was the only literature of a nation outside Europe that, according to Wolf,

19 Despite the settlements of the Vienna Congress in restoring the power of Russia, Britain, France, Austria, and Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars in the Restoration period (1815–1830), new revolutionary waves spread across and beyond Europe: in the 1820s, the independence of Greece and of the Spanish colonies, between 1829 and 1834 the fall of the Bourbon Monarchy in France and, finally, the Revolutions of 1848. Then arose two new facts, according to the English historian Eric Hobsbawm: the workers movement and nationalism. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 [1962] (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 100. 20 The official report of Pêro Vaz de Caminha to the king of Portugal D. Manuel on 1 May 1500 is considered the founding document of Brazilian history as much as its first literary text. The national imaginary was basically derived from countless interpretations of its descriptions of autochthone populations and nature, which the Portuguese saw for the very first time. The image of a promised land, which Wolf uses as well in his works, is represented as follow: “So far we have not been able to know whether there is gold or silver in it, or something of metal, or iron; nor have we seen it. However, the land itself is of very good fresh and temperate air like those of Entre-Douro-e-Minho, because at this time we thought it feels like those there. Waters are many; infinite. It is gracious in such a way that, wanting to take advantage of it, everything will grow in it; because of the waters it has!” (“Até agora não pudemos saber se há ouro ou prata nela, ou outra coisa de metal, ou ferro; nem lha vimos. Contudo a terra em si é de muito bons ares frescos e temperados como os de EntreDouro-e-Minho, porque neste tempo d’agora assim os achávamos como os de lá. Águas são muitas; infinitas. Em tal maneira é graciosa que, querendo-a aproveitar, dar-se-á nela tudo; por causa das águas que tem!”) (My translation.) Carta a el-rei D. Manuel sobre o achamento do Brasil (1 de Maio de 1500), introd. M. Viegas Guerreiro; leitura paleográfica de Eduardo Nunes (Lisboa: Impr. Nac. Casa da Moeda, 1974).

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could be considered worthy of inclusion within the select group of what he called Weltliteratur. The recognition of the supposed autonomy of Brazilian literature in relation to European models may sound to the unsuspecting reader like a progressive and liberal judgment. However, Le Brésil littéraire is less emancipatory than it seems to be at first glance. It is in this regard similar to the agreement between the Portuguese and Brazilian elites to feign the appearance of a break between European metropolis and the colony by means of an official political independence proclaimed by the heir to the Portuguese throne. Wolf is situated in this context not only by the fact that he was one of the most prominent scholars of his time and famous for his research in Romance philology, but also as an employee of the Imperial Library of Vienna, i.e. as a representative and an agent of the House of Habsburg, and as a close friend of Prince Metternich.

2 Brazilian literature and Weltliteratur Ferdinand Wolf’s manuscript Geschichte der brasilianischen Nationalliteratur, written in the now obsolete script referred to as ‘German Running Hand,’ begins with a Preface from which I quote some excerpts below: The Empire of Brazil has recently obtained such an important place in world history that Europeans sought to acquaint themselves with it in almost all issues; European naturalists, ethnographers, historians and politicians have made it the subject of their studies and a considerable number of remarkable works are their fruits. Brazil has so far remained almost a terra incognita for the Europeans only in one subject: the peculiar literature that has grown out of and risen up from Brazil’s soil has been almost completely ignored, having at most come to be seen in Europe as an appendage to the literature of the Portuguese. Yet the development of Brazilian literature, especially in recent decades, has progressed to such an extent that one can no longer deny its independence, nor no longer deny it the respect or treatment deserving of such an independent national literature. [. . .] In recent years the Imperial Court Library in Vienna has acquired a quite significant supply of works of Brazilian literature, partly through the expedition of His Majesty’s Ship Novara, inasmuch as it asked one of its members, Mr. Ferdinand Ritter von Hochstetter, to make use of his stay in Rio de Janeiro by buying such works for the Imperial Court Library; partly through the gracious kindness of Mr. Johann Jakob von Tschudi, who during his most recent stay in Brazil sought to increase the stock of Brazilian literature through fresh purchases and gifts made to him. Moreover, I had the good fortune of making the personal acquaintance of such distinguished Brazilian writers as Mr. Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães, Manoel de Araújo Porto-Alegre and Ernesto Ferreira França, who supported me not only by offering materials, but also by guiding my study with their advice; for these reasons I feel compelled to express also here in public my gratitude to them. [. . .] I saw within this coincidence of favorable circumstances a demand being made upon me to plug the aforementioned gap in the history of National Literatures. [. . .] In any case, it has the merit, albeit certainly only a relative one, of being the first, and so far the only work on this subject in Europe. (My translation)

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Das Kaiserreich Brasilien hat in neuester Zeit bereits eine so bedeutende weltgeschichtliche Stellung eingenommen, dass die Europäer sich in fast allen Beziehungen damit bekannt zu machen suchten; europäische Naturforscher, Ethnographen, Historiker und Politiker haben es zum Gegenstand ihrer Studien gemacht und eine ansehnliche Anzahl beachtenswerter Werke sind die Früchte derselben. Nur in einer Beziehung ist Brasilien bis jetzt fast eine terra incognita für die Europäer geblieben: Die auf diesem Boden entstandene und emporgewachsene eigentümliche Literatur ist fast völlig unbeachtet geblieben und höchstens bruchstückweise als ein Anhang der portugiesischen in Europa bekannt geworden. Und doch ist die Entwicklung der brasilianischen Literatur, besonders in den letzten Jahrzehnten, in einem so bedeutenden Maße fortgeschritten, dass man ihr nicht länger eine selbstständige Stellung, und daher die einer solchen zukommend Beachtung und Darstellung in der Geschichte der Nationalliteratur wird verweigern können. [. . .] Die k.k. Hofbibliothek in Wien hat aber in diesen letzten Jahren einen nicht unbedeutenden Vorrat von Werken der brasilianischen Literatur erworben, teils durch die Expedition der k.k. Fregatte Novara, indem sie ein Mitglied derselben, Hrn. Ferdinand Ritter von Hochstetter, ersucht hatte, seinen Aufenthalt in Rio de Janeiro dazu zu benutzen, für sie solche Werke anzukaufen; teils durch die gütige Verwendung des Hrn. Johann Jakob von Tschudi, der während seinem jüngsten Aufenthalt in Brasilien sowohl durch Ankauf als [auch] durch Geschenke diesen Vorrat noch zu vermehren suchte. Hierzu kam noch, dass ich so glücklich war, die persönliche Bekanntschaft so ausgezeichneter brasilianischer Schriftsteller, wie der Hrn. Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães, Manoel de Araújo Porto-Alegre und Ernesto Ferreira França, zu machen, die nicht nur durch Mitteilung von Materialien mich unterstützten, sondern auch durch ihren Rat meine Studie leiteten; wofür ich ihnen hier meinen besten Dank auch öffentlich auszusprechen, mich verpflichtet fühle. [. . .] In dem Zusammentreffen dieser günstigen Umstände glaubte ich eine Aufforderung zu finden, die erwähnte Lücke in der Geschichte der Nationalliteraturen auszufüllen. [. . .] Jedenfalls hat es das, freilich nur relative Verdienst, das erste und bis jetzt einzige über diesen Gegenstand in Europa erschienene Werk zu sein.21

Considering these fragments, Geschichte der brasilianischen Nationalliteratur, but also its translation Le Brésil littéraire, gives the impression of being, above all, a very peculiar work. As far as one can see, it is curious that the subject of the first sentence, the main character in Wolf’s narrative, is the Empire of Brazil. Only in the second paragraph does “literature” itself emerge, appearing as a kind of natural consequence of the supposed progress that Brazil was experiencing, reported on in the many studies about the country conducted by Europeans. Another essential element is his perspective: Wolf never speaks as Austrian or Viennese, but as a European, without a specific nationality. Vienna is portrayed as a sort of cultural epicentre, as if it were even superior to the European “nations” themselves. As a consequence of Austria’s unexpected overseas power to organise the Novara Expedition, and of quite a few fortunate circumstances, the Vienna Imperial Library ended up having access with unprecedented exclusivity in Europe to books and other documents from Brazil, which served as Wolf’s inspiration. From my point of view, this extract depicts primarily a

21 Ferdinand Wolf, Die Geschichte der brasilianischen Nationalliteratur (1862), I–III.

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relationship between the two empires and secondly their ambition to prolong their vast domains and become invulnerable to the disintegration and fragmentation imposed by bourgeois emancipatory disruptions for independence, whether they take place in Europe or in America. With the aim of disseminating his research on Brazilian literature to a broader audience, broader than the one attending his seminars at the Vienna Academy of Sciences and reading his articles in the Jahrbuch für romanische Literatur,22 Wolf devoted himself to the elaboration of the entry “Brazilian literature” in Conversationslexikon – a kind of guide with interesting topics for conversations, typical of the nineteenth century.23 In the following extract, Wolf presents an idea quite similar to the one presented in the previously quoted Preface, but now expressed even more unequivocally: Presently it is not only legitimate but also necessary to speak of a Brazilian literature separate from the Portuguese one, since its independent development, especially in recent times, has made such progress that it can claim a place of its own in world literature. If it was originally only a sprig that had been transplanted from Portugal, improving itself pitifully, in the course of time it has become a more peculiar form in the lush soil of the New World and under the tropical sun, producing ever richer flowers and more genuine fruits. (My italics and translation) Von einer brasilianischen Literatur, abgesondert von der portugiesischen, zu sprechen ist man gegenwärtig nicht nur berechtigt, sondern auch genötigt, da ihre selbständige Entwicklung, besonders in neuester Zeit, solche Fortschritte gemacht hat, dass sie auf einen eigenen Platz in der Weltliteratur Anspruch machen kann. Allerdings war sie ursprünglich nur ein aus Portugal verpflanztes Reis, das sich kümmerlich fortbrachte; aber im Laufe der Zeit hat es sich in dem üppigen Boden der Neuen Welt und unter der tropischen Sonne immer eigentümlicher gestaltet, immer reichere Blüten und genuinere Früchte hervorgebracht.

According to Wolf, Brazilian literature would represent, by virtue of the natural forces of the tropical sun and soil, an ideal and peaceful reconciliation between culture and nature. The exotic local colour should guarantee an exotic content, which would fulfil the unconditional curiosity of the reader – European or otherwise. Apart from the biased tone of the excerpt, the conversion of nature into a central element of the “character” of Brazilian literature does not seem particularly new. In fact, the novel aspect of Wolf’s discourse is to be found in his claim that Brazilian literature could occupy a serious position within Weltliteratur, satisfying the requirement of showing an “autonomous development” not only in politics but also in culture; it

22 Wolf points out on the first page of his manuscript Geschichte der brasilianischen Nationalliteratur that some extracts of his work were published separately as articles: “Antonio José da Silva” in Sitzungsberichten der philosophische historische Klasse der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaft, v. 34, 249 (Vienna, 1860); “Magalhães” in Katholische Literaturzeitung, 1862, n. 32–34 and 36; “Nebulosa,” de J. M. de Macedo, in Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Literatur, v. 4, 121. 23 Ferdinand Wolf, “Die brasilische [sic] Literatur,” Unsere Zeit. Jahrbuch zum Conversationslexikon (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1864), v. VIII, 634–642.

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could arise as a national literature demonstrating the essential connection between language, literature (the press, science, and criticism), politics, and geography. This is the originality of Le Brésil littéraire: it presents Brazilian literature to Brazilians themselves and to Wolf’s compatriots as a national literature. However, the template by which national literature was presented as an expression of the nation-state was already an ideological construct in the European context, the context of bourgeois industrial society and the rise of the modern nation-state. When it came to Brazil it was already transformed into a kind of “ideology of second degree,” as the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz pointed out in his famous essay “Misplaced ideas.”24 According to him, a severe discrepancy prevailed in Brazil between the basic principles of political economy and the colonial order in which the predominant form of labour power was enslaved labour, and in which the dominant means of production were plantations: “in this context, ideologies do not describe reality, even falsely, and they do not move according to a law of their own; we shall therefore call them ‘ideologies of second degree.’”25

3 Philology and the meaning of writing literary history It is possible to say that modern transnationalism is the fundamental issue that underlies Wolf’s philological project, of which Le Brésil littéraire is the last part. Wolf devoted his life to the study of medieval literature, especially from Portugal and Spain, but also from France. Following the romantic tendency of the nineteenth century, he hoped to find there a novel that would represent the common literary origin of Europe, i.e. a novel that would represent the communion of all countries and the unity among them. The need to find this common origin could be understood as a form of reaction to the devastating effects of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. As Eric Hobsbawm states, tidal waves of migration are one of the most dramatic social consequences of these revolutions within the context of Europe in the nineteenth century. Thus, the perception of a lost harmony between human beings and their surroundings was basically counterbalanced in three different ways: by the return to the medieval imaginary and the supposed naturalness of the way of life of the common people; by the invention of the primitive and the exotic, inspired by the expeditions to regions far from Europe; and by the

24 Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas,” Misplaced Ideas. Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 19–32. 25 Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas,” 23.

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idealisation of the values at the heart of the French Revolution.26 Conservative romantics, like Wolf, found in the Middle Ages a spiritual homeland that served as a symbolic opposition to modernity. Through the investigation of the specificity of medieval customs and literature, Wolf calls into question the political and cultural domination of French rationalism and the typical mentality of classicism in contrast to German romanticism. Wolf’s opposition to France was justified not only by his clear standpoint against Napoleonic power, but also by his aim to preserve the cultural hegemony of Austria and its dynastic views. For these reasons, Wolf’s interests in Brazilian and medieval literature were not as incongruous as they might seem. His teleological conception of history demonstrated that the progress of the primitive – and the exotic, in the case of Brazil – would lead to a common unity, politically reflected in monarchical affinities. In this context, the writing of history undertakes a crucial role for the comprehension of present and past time, and would be considered, together with philology, a new area of scientific knowledge, as Hobsbawm affirms in The Age of Revolution.27 The chronological presentation of historical events, connected according to an evolutionary sequence, is also decisive in Wolf’s interpretation of Brazilian literature. For him, the development of literary subjects and forms in the colonial period was accomplished in the exact moment he was writing his book, when Brazilian empire and its corresponding literature were finally consolidated. Wolf collected his most important essays on the history of the Spanish and Portuguese ‘national literatures’ in a volume published in 1859, Studien zur Geschichte der spanischen und portugiesischen Nationalliteraturen.28 A combination of his philological and literary criticism of the previous 30 years, the book “represents a miniature of human life and aspirations,” as explained by the author in the dedication placed at the beginning of his study.29 Wolf’s mode of exposition is based on the performance of his predecessors and contemporaries such as Bouterwek and Sismondi or Diez and Varnhagen. In this sense, Wolf also played a decisive role in establishing the tradition of philological studies, to which he hoped to offer, in his own words, “seeds for further development.” Yet despite his insistence regarding the scholarly necessity of describing Spanish literature in a manner which would reveal its “spiritual relationship” with German

26 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, 264. 27 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, 285–287. 28 Ferdinand Wolf, Studien zur Geschichte der spanischen und portugiesischen Nationalliteraturen (Berlin: Asher, 1859). It was only translated into Spanish in 1895 by Miguel de Unamuno, with additions and commentaries by the literary scholar and historian Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo: Historia de las literaturas castellana y portuguesa (Madrid: La España Moderna, 1895). There seems to have been no Portuguese translation either then or later. 29 Ferdinand Wolf, “An die Freiherrn Eligius von Münch-Bellinghausen und Adolph Friedrich von Schack,” no pagination.

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literature, Wolf did not himself write a systematic history of Spanish literature. When he did a systematic literary history, as was the case with his literary history of Brazil, he never proposed the existence of any “spiritual relationship” with Germany. After all, for him Brazilian literature was the heir of the Portuguese, whose core was not autochthonous.30 Only under D. Pedro II would political independence be reflected in its literary independence, and Brazil could at last elect its “spiritual allies.” Le Brésil littéraire would then contribute to a new era in the relationship between Brazil and Europe or, more specifically, between Brazil and Austria. Considering Wolf’s work as a whole, his attempt to integrate all European literatures in Romance languages under the concept of Weltliteratur becomes clearer. In his perspective, Weltliteratur can almost be considered to be a compendium constituted by several national literatures and for this reason it would have a kind of transnationalism as its implicit premise. Although Wolf does not make any explicit reference to them, his assumptions are closely related to Goethe’s scattered references about Weltliteratur. Observing the movement of goods in the Weltmarkt, the need to overcome geographical borders and political rivalries arises in order to establish an exchange of ideas that could reflect the global exchange of goods.31 Wolf takes a step forward and surprisingly includes Brazil in this restricted group of European literatures. The final goal here is human enlightenment and a universal aesthetic instruction, based on a cosmopolitan consciousness.

30 Spanish and Portuguese literatures are paradigmatic examples of the principles that operate in literary development through a national ensemble in Wolf’s thinking. In his studies of the literature of the Middle Ages, Wolf indicates the difference rather than the unity between Spanish and Portuguese literatures, as was usual at that time. Obviously both countries developed corresponding national literatures, but they have taken different paths which reveal basically two different attitudes regarding cultural exchange. In the case of Portugal, literature developed through the importing of foreign models, and therefore was based on a cultural-ideological expansionism. Portugal was between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, for instance, constantly under foreign cultural influences, such as those of Italy and France. In the case of Spain, on the contrary, literature functioned through cultural exportation resulting from dynastic connections. Wolf considers Spanish literature to be the most perfect expression of the original and consequently of the national element because the country preserved its traditional way of life and rejected the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In fact, in the sixteenth century the political and dynastic ties between Madrid and Vienna became stronger, especially as a result of the mobilisation of Spanish arms, allies, and money “to crush Czech secessionism [. . .] extending Habsburg power into North Germany for the first time, and dangling the possibility of a renovated, centralized German Empire ruled by the House of Austria.” See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 306. 31 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Vorwort zu Carlyles Leben Schillers” [1830], Ästhetische Schriften 1824–1832: Über Kunst und Altertum V–VI (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999).

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According to Goethe, the way to put Weltliteratur into practice would be the translation of works in diverse languages with the aim of gradually establishing a canon representative of all cultures in all times.32 It would fall primarily to intellectuals to take responsibility for instituting a network of relationships through letters and other forms of communication, which would allow for a cultural interchange between nations. In broader terms, Goethe’s proposal can be better understood against the backdrop of the call for political peace during the turbulent times following the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic Wars. Even if wars were a burden, they forced a recognition of the existence of the unknown ‘Other’ and that this ‘Other’ must be viewed as an equal; wars had also forced those affected to recognise the indelible marks that such contact produced in the identity of all parties involved. More striking still than Goethe’s conciliatory proposal, which has been reiterated in almost all subsequent debates on Weltliteratur, is the evident association he traces between literature and trade.33 Goethe transfers to literature, probably for the very first time, the economic and political categories of classical liberalism, such as equality and freedom. In liberal theory, economic inequality does not stand in contradiction with the natural equality among all human beings, nor with the equality of rights in a modern bourgeois state, because the latter is also based on a relationship of equality: the exchange of equivalents. Everyone is equal and free when buying and selling. Thus, according to Goethe, literature would work in a very natural way, similar to a global market: it would also be a sphere in which production – in this case, literary production – could be negotiated through exchanges. As a result,

32 Anne Bohnenkamp, “‘Den Wechseltausch zu befördern’: Goethes Entwurf einer Weltliteratur,” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften 1824–1832: Über Kunst und Altertum V–VI. 33 In his “Introduction to Carlyle’s Life of Schiller” [1830] Goethe writes: “There has for some time been talk of a universal world literature; and rightly so, for the nations, flung together by dreadful warfare, then thrown apart again, have all realized that they had absorbed many foreign elements, and become conscious of new intellectual needs. This led to more neighborly relations, and a desire for a freer system of intellectual give and take. This movement has been in existence only a short time, it is true, but long enough for one to form an opinion on it and to acquire from it, with business like promptitude, both profit and pleasure.” Quoted in Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature (London: Routledge, 1949), 32. (“Es ist schon einige Zeit von einer allgemeinen Weltliteratur die Rede und zwar nicht mit Unrecht: denn die sämtlichen Nationen, in den fürchterlichsten Kriegen durcheinander geschüttelt, sodann wieder auf sich selbst einzeln zurückgeführt, hatten zu bemerken, dass sie manches Fremde gewahr worden, in sich aufgenommen, bisher unbekannte geistige Bedürfnisse hie und da empfunden. Daraus entstand das Gefühl nachbarlicher Verhältnisse, und anstatt dass man sich bisher zugeschlossen hatte, kam der Geist nach und nach zu dem Verlangen, auch in den mehr oder weniger freien geistigen Handelsverkehr mit aufgenommen zu werden. Diese Bewegung währt zwar erst eine kurze Weile, aber doch immer lang genug, um schon einige Betrachtungen darüber anzustellen, und aus ihr bald möglichst, wie man es im Warenhandeln ja tun muss, Vorteil und Genuss zu gewinnen.”) (My italics.) Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Vorwort zu Carlyles Leben Schillers” [1830], Ästhetische Schriften 1824–1832: Über Kunst und Altertum V–VI.

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literature would equally provide “profit,” “advantage,” and “pleasure,” creating the possibility of its consumption. Goethe was sensitive to the changes of the economic system and understood that, although different, the two engines of literary production and of more conventional commodity production would be run by the same forces. As for Wolf, he acted as a sort of mediator, establishing connections between different contexts when writing reviews, facilitating translations, setting up magazines, and finally conceiving a work like Le Brésil littéraire. According to Anneliese Habel, Wolf’s ethical horizon was mostly influenced by romantic thought based on bourgeois values like equality and freedom, but positioned against enlightened rationalism.34 I however would rather claim that Wolf rethought these values and adapted them to his goals. Habel affirms that Wolf comes closer to German Idealism’s postulate according to which “idea” would be a generating element of reality, but also notes that his universal-speculative perspective carries traces of views derived from Positivism, Empiricism, and Scientism. In this sense, Wolf’s starting point would be the investigation of the world as an organic unity. Literature would also be such an organic unity, an expression of a cohesive whole constituted by common poetic forms. These would be organised and harmonised by a self, the historian, who contemplates them from the perspective of universal history. Habel concludes her analysis of Wolf’s thought by stating that the writing of literary history is, for Wolf, a method to enrich knowledge, and claims that the principles of selection which he applies could, if applied elsewhere, help to avoid the dangers of relativism and of mere chronology. Wolf strives to deal with literary objects according to an objective method, and that is why he holds philological details in such a high regard. In the case of Le Brésil littéraire, this schema could not be completely followed, as Wolf had to include many aspects specific to the history and context of Brazil.

4 Le Brésil littéraire and the building of the Brazilian nation-state The picture painted by Wolf of Brazilian literary autonomy, and of its correspondence with political independence, is made possible only by his utter neglect of the country’s shocking reality. Wolf never mentions enslaved labour, for instance, even when analysing works which make reference to it, of which there are admittedly

34 The following observations are based on Anneliese Habel’s thesis, in which she examines Wolf’s intellectual influences and his position within the historical and philosophical context of the nineteenth century. See Ferdinand Wolf. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Romanischen Philologie (Dissertation, Universität Wien, 1980), especially the chapters “Zwischen den Zeiten,” 26–41, and “Zur Romantik,” 42–53.

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not many. Wolf looks at Brazilian literature and its agents from an elitist standpoint, reinforcing both his own superior position and that of his partners, i.e. their dynastic ties. In Le Brésil littéraire this imperial elite represented itself as standing apart from the whole of Brazilian society, which at that time consisted predominantly of enslaved people. One of the most appalling examples here is Wolf’s usage of the word ‘enslavement,’ which appears many times in his book but always with a metaphorical meaning, in order to designate the subservient relationship of Brazilian writers to the Portuguese and French literary models. By explaining ‘enslavement’ merely as an intellectual relation, or as a literary phenomenon that had prevailed prior to the rise of Romanticism and the transformations wrought by the influence of German thought, Wolf conceals its real meaning, in a move driven by an unmistakably ideological motivation. Some examples are sufficient to show how the inappropriate use of the word ‘enslavement’ perverted its literal meaning and concealed the abhorrent character of the institution in Brazil in 1860, i.e. almost 100 years after the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” set in France by the National Constituent Assembly in 1789. From the capitalist point of view, enslavement had become an obstacle to the advance of the most profitable ways of production, which in Europe were already based on industrial production and wage labour.35 The fact that Wolf does not mention the historical condition of enslaved people seems even more cruel in this context. Economic subjects are definitely not relevant in his works. He instead accepts the extremely conservative outlook of the Brazilian elite, who ignored Brazilian reality and forged another one. In this regard, the question must be asked as to how it was possible for Wolf to propose a historical interpretation of literary development in Brazil that includes extraliterary factors, without at the same time taking the

35 See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Richmond, VA: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 170: “Adam Smith thereby treated as an abstract proposition what is a specific question of time, place, labor and soil. The economic superiority of free hired labor over slave is obvious even to the slave owner. Slave labor is given reluctantly, it is unskillful, it lacks versatility. Other things being equal, free men would be preferred. But in the early stages of colonial development other things are not equal. When slavery is adopted, it is not adopted as the choice over free labor; there is no choice at all. The reasons for slavery, wrote Gibbon Wakefield, ‘are not moral, but economical circumstances; they relate not to vice and virtue, but to production.’ With the limited population of Europe in the sixteenth century, the free laborers necessary to cultivate the staple crops of sugar, tobacco and cotton in the New World could not have been supplied in quantities adequate to permit large-scale production. Slavery was necessary for this, and to get slaves the Europeans turned first to the aborigines and then to Africa.” About slavery in Brazil, Williams says: “The independence of Brazil gave Canning a better opportunity. Recognition in return for abolition. But there was a danger that France would recognize Brazil on condition that the slave trade be continued. What then of the British carrying trade and British exports? ‘There are immense British interests engaged in the trade with Brazil,’ Canning reminded Wilberforce, ‘and we must proceed with caution and good heed; and take the commercial as well as moral feelings of the country with us.’ Morality or profit? Britain had to choose” (6).

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existence of enslavement into consideration. My hypothesis is that precisely this example clearly reveals how the writing of history can, with the weapon of words, frame the past in a politically expedient and useful way. This already occurs in the Introduction of the book, which summarises and presents the chronology of the phases in the development of literature in Brazil. Wolf here describes the former subservience of Brazilian literature to European models with the word “slavish” – “slavish imitation of Portuguese and Spanish models” (“Sklavische Nachahmung der portugiesischen und spanischen Muster” [III]), translated in French as “servillement.” Subsequently, a footnote in one of the key chapters of the book refers to poets as “helots” – “the poet and the artist, helots, were condemned to oblivion” (“der Dichter und der Künstler, Heloten, [waren] zur Vergessenheit verdammt” [208], and in the French translation: “le poète et l’artiste – ilotes condamnés à l’oubli” [137]). Throughout the following chapters, Wolf joins many elements together to emphasise the idea that the real enslavement in Brazil was an intellectual one, which could however be abolished through “German criticism.” This example illustrates how enslavement is perversely mischaracterised: This liberation [of the peculiar Volksgeist] was the product of German criticism, and the Germans repaid the double bondage, both political and intellectual, to which they had so long been subjected by the French, by leading the French people, which had happily endured the selfannointed shackles of its pseudo-classicism and for a long time led other nations to mimicries of this voluntary slavery, by finally liberating it from it and bringing it to self-consciousness. Of course the French responded, as usual, by catapulting from one extreme to the other, from slavery to licentiousness; instead of a picture of full naivety, as before, now they give a caricature of themselves, and through it the true nature and legitimacy of Romanticism has in manifold ways been obscured and thrown into doubt. (My translation and italics.) Diese Befreiung [des eigentümlichen Volksgeistes] war ein Werk deutscher Kritik, und die Deutschen haben den Franzosen die doppelte Knechtung, die politische und die geistige, die sie lange von ihnen erduldet hatten, dadurch vergolten, dass sie selbst dieses Volk, das sich in seinen pseudo-klassischen Fesseln so wohl gefiel und so lange auch die anderen Nationen zur Nachäffung dieser freiwilligen Sklaverei veranlasst hatten, endlich davon befreiten und zum Selbstbewusstsein brachten. Allerdings sind die Franzosen, wie gewöhnlich, von einem Extrem in das andere, von der Sklaverei in die Zügellosigkeit verfallen, haben, statt wie einst ein Bild voll Naivität, nun ein Zerrbild von sich gegeben, und durch sie ist die wahre Natur und Berechtigung des Romantizismus auch schon vielfach verdunkelt und in Zweifel gestellt worden. (210–211) Cet affranchissement est l’ouvrage de la critique allemande. Les Allemands se sont vengés du double esclavage, politique et littéraire, que les Français ont fait si longtemps peser sur eux, en délivrant enfin ce peuple, si heureux des entraves pseudo-classiques et qui avait si longtemps forcé les autres nations à imiter son esclavage volontaire; ils lui ont enfin donné conscience de lui-même et de sa valeur. Il est vrai que les Français sont tombés d’un extrême dans un autre, de l’esclavage dans une liberté sans frein. Au lieu de donner d’eux-mêmes, comme autrefois, une image naïve et fidèle, ils se sont caricaturés, et ont fait souvent révoquer en doute la vraie nature et le droit à l’existence du romantisme. (139–140)

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In this passage, Wolf not only provides a definition of the concept of Romanticism that is so central to understanding his literary history, but also offers the Brazilian intellectual and economic elite a fundamental doctrine with which to differentiate itself from other social groups. This doctrine should be something that everyone living in Brazil would have in common, such that the Brazilian elite could simultaneously secure social unity within Brazil and its own power over that social unity. For this imagined identity,36 it was necessary to invent a ‘Brazilian character,’ a ‘Brazilian people,’ even if the nation was a mixture of diverse cultures. Therefore, it was necessary to create specific features for this newly invented national character and then to disseminate it. This dissemination was achieved not only through the education system and the press, but also through cultural objects. These cultural objects entered into circulation and offered the nascent public a point of identification through which it could experience itself as part of a larger collective, and thereby also come to view other nations as its equals, allies, or enemies. After the official Portuguese recognition of the Empire of Brazil in 1826, this privileged imperial elite pursued the goal of selecting useful elements in the colonial past to create its own physiognomy, and thereby write a historical narrative that provided a convenient defence of its right to dominate the country. Especially during the reign of D. Pedro II (1840–1889) countless political and cultural institutions were founded, such as the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute – similar to an academy of sciences – with the task of promoting and publicising research about secluded regions of Brazil and the ways of life of their indigenous populations. This way, the new elements that were in the process of being ‘discovered’ could be bound together and absorbed into the myth of the Brazilian nation in a manner controlled by the nationalist narrative. This invention of a self-image was based on a reworking of the first descriptions of Brazil made by European settlers. With this, the two main characters of Brazilian literary Romanticism were arising: nature, which would no longer pose a threat once it had been dominated by colonial rationality, and a caricatured depiction of the autochthonous populations, which could never have been represented homogeneously in their diversity. These populations were also no longer a danger after having been either exterminated or pushed to the countryside, where they fell into isolation. The Brazilian upper classes forged their own genealogy reinforcing not only the ‘union’ with the autochthonous populations, but also the supremacy of the European coloniser, who was presented as having committed the heroic act of bringing culture to Brazil and cultivating it in its fertile soil. This perspective was

36 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso: 2006), 5–6: “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

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presented as the only one with universal validity. It is in this sense that the Brazilian literary critic Antonio Candido talks about a “retrograde creation of Brazilian literature,”37 of which the purpose would be the creation of a genealogy for the Romantic writers contemporary to Wolf. The material conditions for the rise and development of Brazilian literature went unnoticed in Wolf’s interpretation. Le Brésil littéraire emerged once its basis, namely the structures established through the ideological process of nation building, had taken place under the romantic nationalist movement, beginning in 1836 with the launch of Nitheroy magazine in Paris by the already mentioned Gonçalves de Magalhães, a friend of Wolf’s. Magalhães’ purpose at this point in time was, above all, the reproduction and strengthening of this imagined past of honour and glory as one that was true and universal. Wolf made a contribution greater than that of any other European historian of his time to the establishment and dissemination of the image of Brazil based upon the perspective of the nation’s dominant social group. Given these authors’ position within the upper echelons of Brazilian society, it is even more important to consider the role played by their literary writings in creating a historical narrative that sought to justify the unequal distribution of power and resources between classes in that society. The descendants of the former colonial masters ensured their hegemonic status, and the order based on enslaved work remained untouched. The history of the exploitation of nature and of labour power was thereby intentionally concealed.

5 Final remarks The exemplary history of the genesis of Le Brésil littéraire reveals that the notion of modern transnationalism is, in this case, underneath the meaning of national literature itself. Precisely because it represents in embryonic form the limits and contradictions in the establishment of what should be considered ‘national’ in the cultural sphere, Le Brésil littéraire seems now to be an important piece of the puzzle: the work shows how literary, cultural, and intellectual production – including the writing of literary history – in Brazil at that time was centralised in the hands of an elite that was allied with its international counterparts with the aim of transforming culture into another means of domination. Elementary issues, such as the effective emancipation of the Brazilian population, which would inevitably entail the abolition of enslaved labour, were not even mentioned. Wolf was an ardent monarchist and conservative, much concerned about rare manuscripts that would reveal the European unity desired and imagined by the German Romantics to effectively worry about Brazil. He often remained unaware of 37 Antonio Candido, A formação da literatura brasileira, v. 1, 282.

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the contradictions of his own age and of those inherent to his engagement with Brazilian literature, not only because his contact with Brazilian authors of literature remained limited – just the male elite and just those who did not oppose the emperor – despite his acquaintance with the nation’s most eminent literary representative, Gonçalves de Magalhães. His perspective also suffered limitations on account of his Brazilian contacts’ interest in assuring their hegemonic position, which aligned fortuitously with the House of Habsburg’s imperial expansion plans. This provides us with an undoubtedly important example of how the development of scholarship is influenced by an ideological discourse in which an underlying intent of domination can also be found. This perspective on Wolf’s work becomes more convincing when we note that he simply takes the models of literary development used at his time to elucidate the differences between Portuguese and Spanish literature and applies them to the literature of Brazil. However, this makes his work even more interesting: European models do not explain the advent of literature in Brazil, nor do they clarify its modes of production and circulation. Besides that, the confusion about the usage of the typical liberal bourgeois vocabulary demonstrates once again that these concepts, full of ambiguity since their origin, are an expression of false consciousness. The category ‘national’ is implicit in the core of Wolf’s thought, but surprisingly serves to support the maintenance of the Ancien Régime rather than express a revolutionary sense. Here lies a possible reason for the many and varied considerations in the reception of Wolf’s work throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: his study endorses a type of nationalism that aims primarily at the maintenance of vast imperial dominions by means of bonds of consanguinity; this is a system completely different from the bourgeois nationalism that had risen out of “the discontent of the petty nobility of landowners and the emergence of a national bourgeoisie,” composed primarily of the middle and lower middle classes in numerous countries, whose spokesmen were largely professional intellectuals.38 This crucial difference constitutes the social basis for the rise of the kind of modern or bourgeois nationalism that one is hard pressed to find in either Brazil or in Austria, as the analysis of Wolf’s work can demonstrate. Le Brésil littéraire has its value exactly in these apparent incongruities. They represent both its weakness and its strength. The reading of Le Brésil littéraire above reveals the historical, political, economic, and cultural disputes that, with regard to Austria, were present during the transition from the Ancien Régime to liberalism. Regarding Brazil, they indicate the effort to enhance awareness of the country’s particular issues and to develop a national image that was designed to correspond with the interests of the class that was forging the nation, applying foreign ideologies to Brazilian conditions. Moreover, the work is an important document of how dominant

38 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, 133.

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groups participated in culture and politics, either in Brazil or in Austria, in order to promote the ideological basis for a modern nation-state. Through the analysis of the transnational interaction between global elites, we can move from the dichotomy between, for example, metropolis and periphery, to a concept of transnational class domination. In this sense, Wolf’s judgments have little relevance: they tell us more about the relations between the authors that figure as the protagonists of his study than they tell us about Brazilian literature itself. Wolf is committed, most of all, to the establishment and dissemination of the self-representation of the Brazilian elite, an image that, even if transformed, is still alive.

Lukas Lammers

Historical Horizons: The Historical Novel and Transnational Memory Abstract: The writing of history, whether academic or fictional, has long been a key concern of postcolonial studies. However, discussions of postcolonial historical fiction have largely reaffirmed the traditional view that the historical novel is central to imagining a national community. Focusing on a historical period that is commonly associated with Eurocentric and decidedly nationalist narratives – World War II – this chapter aims to show that the term ‘transnationalism’ helps throw into relief a spectrum of recent literary responses to a historical situation which has pushed nationalist identifications to extremes. It explores why World War II has become such an important nexus for rethinking the relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in recent anglophone writing. In this context, the term ‘horizon’ is introduced to highlight how postcolonial historical novels recalibrate nationalist narratives of the war and how they draw attention to the use and construction of transnationally shared historical memory. The writing of history, whether academic or fictional, has long been a key concern of postcolonial studies.1 Indeed, postcolonialism more generally may appear to be “to a large extent, a discourse of and about the writing of history in multiple forms.”2 The enduring importance of concepts such as ‘re-writing’ or ‘writing back’3 testifies to this understanding of much postcolonial literature as a particular form of historiography. And yet, only quite recently have there been attempts to discuss this intersection systematically. At the same time, the sway of the paradigms ‘rewriting’ and ‘writing back’ has also meant that discussions of postcolonial historical fiction frequently reaffirm the traditional view that one of historical fiction’s most important functions is the imagining of a national community.4 That is to say,

1 Hamish Dalley, for instance, recently observed: “literary critics, historians, and cultural theorists have written extensively on how the historical imagination might be transformed by postcoloniality, and by the need to accommodate the contested nature of such representations.” Hamish Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel: Realism, Allegory, and the Representation of Contested Pasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 4. 2 Hamish Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 4. 3 The well-worn phrase was first prominently used by Salman Rushdie in an article in The Times (3 July 1982) and subsequently taken up by literary scholars. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002). 4 The reference is to Benedict Anderson’s concept of nations as “imagined communities.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006.). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-010

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postcolonial fiction concerned with the past is often framed as part of the struggle for independence and the search for new, postcolonial identities. Discussions have therefore often focused on the attempts of authors to represent “their own” country in order to counter colonial discourses and (re-)write the history of the newly independent nation. In this view, the “reconstruction of the past” appears to be, as Neil Lazarus puts it, “profoundly overdetermined by contemporary – that is to say, by liberationist – political insights and imperatives.”5 He quotes Ranajit Guha, who spells out the inherent logic of this kind of rewriting: “[h]istory became thus a game for two to play as the alien colonialist project of appropriation was matched by an indigenous nationalist project of counter-appropriation.”6 As Guha’s analysis makes clear, a postcolonial perspective on historical fiction thus commonly entails a national(ist) framework.7 My aim in this chapter is to show that contemporary anglophone postcolonial novels seeking to explore the past are often positioned more ambivalently visà-vis the nation. Many are marked by a rather excessive crossing of national borders. Nevertheless, it would be rash to conclude that the anglophone historical novel has entered a post-national phase. After all, transgressions in many cases constitute or affirm rather than eliminate such borders. This pertains especially to the thematic focus that I want to propose as a third factor for the following study: fictions of World War II. The term transnationalism, I want to suggest, helps capture a spectrum of recent literary reactions to a historical situation which pushed nationalist identifications to extremes. The Second World War has long been recognised as an important watershed in the history of colonialism. Politically and culturally, it was a highly ambivalent transitional period marked by an intense dialectic of nationalist and transnational impulses. While the rhetoric of war demanded particularly clear demarcations of national identity, the participation and unprecedented mobility of thousands of soldiers from the colonies presented a new kind of challenge to fictions of national purity for ‘the mother country.’ With its emphasis on Britain’s splendid isolation, propaganda belies the effort of trying to maintain clear distinctions under the

5 Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 124. 6 Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 124. 7 This view is also supported by Elleke Boehmer’s analysis of literature published after 1945 (see especially the chapter “Independence”). Boehmer highlights the importance of the novel in this context, commenting on “the ways in which writing – in particular perhaps the novel – was used to project autonomous identity” (Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 176.). The statement can further be usefully glossed with John Clement Ball’s succinct comment on the importance of history in a postcolonial context: “[T]he desire to correct misrepresentations and fill in gaps in the written record prompts writers to hang onto a traditional referential desire to tell their own stories – to narrate their people’s history, if not ‘as it was,’ at least as they (rather than the colonizers) see it. (John Clement Ball, “Historical Fiction,” The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction, ed. Brian W. Shaffer [Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Blackwell Reference Online], no page).

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pressure of an ever-expanding war and increasing mobility of people from the colonies. A number of prominent contemporary anglophone writers of postcolonial fiction have revisited the events of World War II. One reason for a revived interest in this period might be that it has become in the traditional sense of Sir Walter Scott ‘historical’: “Tis Sixty Years Since.”8 The concept of transnationalism offers a productive perspective for studying this strand of writing and the “furious movement”9 it depicts. Aleida Assmann notes that The general challenge of the ‘trans’ [in transnational] is to go beyond national identification, investments and interests and explore new forms of belonging and cultural identification in a world characterised by streams of migration and dispersed and displaced populations with different historical trajectories.10

What Assmann describes as a challenge, can, in this context, be described as an opportunity: as an analytical category transnationalism draws our attention to the way writers cope with this challenge. What kinds of “cultural identification” emerge in recent historical novels interested in the aftermath of colonialism? In what way do they register the anxieties of “a world characterised by streams of migration and dispersed and displaced populations”? And how can a novel trace, or represent, such “different historical trajectories”? This chapter is particularly interested in the techniques with which the discussed novels trace histories across national borders and how, in doing so, they invite readers to “go beyond national identification.”

8 The reference is of course to the subtitle of Scott’s novel Waverley (Waverley; Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, rev. ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]). Georg Lukács made Scott’s subtitle part of his definition of the historical novel. The time frame of 60 years has since influenced almost all modern definitions of historical fiction (Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel [Boston: Beacon Press, 1963]). 9 I borrow the phrase “furious movement” from Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace. In the respective passage, the Burmese king Thebaw muses about the power of the British Empire to physically move people across large areas, often without apparent force: What vast, what incomprehensible power, to move people in such huge numbers from one place to another [. . .]. Why? Why this furious movement – people taken from one place to another, to pull rickshaws, to sit blind in exile? And where would his own people go, now that they were a part of this empire? It wouldn’t suit them, all this moving about. They were not a portable people, the Burmese; he knew this, very well, for himself. He had never wanted to go anywhere. Yet here he was, on his way to India. (50) Although the character is here focusing on the impact of British colonial forces in particular, the passage, I would argue, simultaneously captures the novel’s concern with migration more generally (Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace [London: Harper Collins, 2000], 50). 10 Aleida Assmann, “Transnational Memories,” European Review 22.4 (2014), 547.

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To explore the novels’ relation to the nation, I propose to supplement the notion of transnationalism with the notion of a ‘horizon.’ First, the term is intended to highlight how a historical novel, by gesturing more or less explicitly at a particular ‘outcome,’ constructs a ‘vanishing point’ (a point towards which the depicted events gravitate) and thus a telos of the respective (his)story. From this perspective, postcolonial literature can be seen as an attempt to recalibrate historical narratives, in this case of World War II. Secondly, the term should serve as a reminder that historical fiction both disseminates and relies on a shared horizon of expectations, that is, a certain ‘historical repertoire.’ In this sense, the notion of a horizon draws attention to the preconditions of reading and meaning-making.11 More specifically, it foregrounds the use and construction of transnationally shared historical memory. It thus allows us to consider how such literature might offer ways of identification that transcend the national (rather than participating in the writing of a newly independent nation). Put differently, the term transnationalism enables us to perceive more clearly what emerges on the horizon(s) of more recent postcolonial histories. The discussion of three very different novels in the second half of this chapter aims to show that while much literature written in the immediate aftermath of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s certainly bears out the suggestion that it was driven by “liberationist” and fundamentally nationalist aims, the texts discussed here, published in the last two decades, are positioned more ambivalently vis-à-vis the nation. On the horizon of these narratives emerges not the newly independent nation; they rather illustrate a spectrum that ranges, roughly, from a – reimagined – national community to a sense of cosmopolitanism.12

11 The term ‘horizon’ is meant to echo, albeit distantly, Hans Robert Jauss’s theory of an aesthetics of reception, particularly his notion of a “horizon of expectations.” Whereas Jauss uses the notion to propose a new way of writing literary history by establishing a work’s degree of ‘aesthetic newness’ (27) and its impact on canon formation, my aim is more modest. I want to draw attention to the significance of the embeddedness of a particular genre (historical fiction) in a particular discourse (historiography) and its implications for the reception of a work and its socio-cultural significance in the context of postcolonial studies. My comment on a ‘shared horizon’ is therefore also intended to recall Jauss’s description of a “horizon of expectations” as an intersubjective structure of knowledge (Hans Robert Jauss and Elizabeth Benzinger, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 2.1 (1970), 14, 27). 12 In considering cosmopolitanism as a mode of the transnational I am drawing on Kristian Shaw’s helpful distinction: “Cosmopolitanism should be distinguished from transnationalism as the presence of transnational communities does not suggest that ethical ideals are practised or promoted; it is merely a state of cultural movement. Similarly, exposure to otherness and diversity through mobility is not an inevitable precursor to ethical engagement” (Kristian Shaw, Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction [Cham: Palgrave, 2017], 13–14).

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1 A transnational historical novel? “History returned with a vengeance after the new millennium,” writes Ashley Dawson in his survey of literature from the 2000s, and later adds: “Indeed, it might be argued that contestation over the historical past is one of the central threads in the English novel across the twentieth century and into the 2000s.”13 A significant part of this ‘contestation,’ I would argue, can be seen as the fallout and revaluation of the end of Empire. In their recent collection, Andrew James Johnston and Kai Wiegandt similarly speculate about the return of the historical novel. In their introduction they note that, in the last 10 years, criticism has largely turned away from the two heretofore dominant perspectives on the historical novel: George Lukács’ Marxist analysis and Linda Hutcheon’s theory of historiographical metafiction. More importantly, they observe that prior to that, literary production itself had begun to generate new forms.14 Although Johnston and Wiegandt do not propose a specific label for this tendency, it could be argued that a widening of geographical horizons is at the centre of the noted change. The most recent monograph on the historical novel fittingly highlights ‘transnationalism’ in its title. However, Susan Brantly’s The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era (2017) does not consider postcolonial writing and explicitly turns away from “the British case” (1) to consider Sweden as a starting point for its discussion of transnational processes. That said, the book does make claims about the development of the historical novel that comment on the genre more generally and are particularly pertinent to the focus proposed here. For instance, Brantly argues that the novel’s traditional function as a central medium for imagining national communities has not only changed but has indeed been inverted: World War II made certain types of nationalism unappealing to many, and narratives challenging the very idea of nationality, or even demonstrating shared responsibility for colonialism, are a means of eroding national boundaries. If, as Benedict Anderson tells us in Imagined Communities, novels were a tool for building the very notion of nationhood, after World War II, they became a device for challenging concepts of nation and national identity – postnational, if you will.15

This diagnosis, although it may well be accurate with regard to the works selected by Brantly, appears to have two major blind spots. Most importantly, it overlooks the quite different appeal of the national for postcolonial writers after World War II. 13 Ashley Dawson, “The 2000s,” A Companion to the English Novel, ed. Stephen Arata et al. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley, 2015), 71, 78. 14 Cf. Andrew James Johnston and Kai Wiegandt, “Introduction,” The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking about Fiction and History after Historiographic Metafiction, ed. Andrew James Johnston and Kai Wiegandt [Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017], 12. 15 Susan C. Brantly, The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era: Presenting the Past (New York: Routledge, 2017), 3.

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For them, the end of the war and the gradual disintegration of the British Empire in fact provided the very basis for national historiographies. As Ania Loomba points out, it was “European nationalism [that] was discredited over the course of the twentieth century by its associations with fascism and colonialism. At the same time, its third world variant was legitimised through its connection with anticolonialism.”16 What is more, in the context of postcolonial literatures, the phrase “countries not their own” is politically fraught as the negotiation of postcolonial identities hinges precisely on this question: “What is my own country?” In fact, this arguably helps explain why the postwar period marked another flourishing of historical fiction and alerts us to the emergence of a new subgenre: the postcolonial historical novel. The label, however, has not really been taken up by literary critics until quite recently, as Hamish Dalley notes: Given the centrality of the genre to postcolonial literature, research on the historical novel from a postcolonial perspective has been surprisingly limited. [. . .] [N]o study has explored the significance of this genre for postcolonial writing, nor has the question of how postcoloniality has transformed the historical novel yet been approached.17

My aim in this chapter is to look at the more recent development of this subgenre and the specific significance of World War II as a point of reference in order to consider its relation to notions of national and transnational identification. The centrality of World War II can best be understood in terms of the circulation and rearticulation of memories.

2 World War II and transnational memory Memories of World War II are – as the name of the conflict indicates – potentially global. The war affected people and places across the world. The enormous geographical expanse of the conflict was mainly due to the fact that European powers, from the beginning, drew heavily on the resources of their overseas empires, accepting, encouraging, or pressuring people in areas under their influence into their service. Although this is of course also generally true for World War I, it can be argued that “[t]he Second World War was much more of a global conflict than had been the case in 1914–18” as “Empire and Commonwealth forces served in all

16 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, The New Critical Idiom, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 170. My emphasis. 17 Hamish Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 5. The book launches a critique of reading practices in postcolonial studies. Dalley argues that the specific aesthetic qualities of postcolonial historical fiction have been neglected, for which he mainly blames (a) criticism in the vein of Linda Hutcheon, (b) a focus on trauma (its assumption of unrepresentability), and (c) the influence of Homi Bhabha’s critique of literary and critical mimeticism (6–7).

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theatres.”18 As Ashley Jackson pointedly phrases it with a view to Great Britain: “[O]ne-fifth of the world’s people were ‘at war’ because Britain was.”19 The declaration of war on the part of Great Britain was quickly followed by numerous declarations of support from the colonies, dominions, and other dependencies.20 This network of alliances also meant that Great Britain acted as an empire even in parts of the world where its influence was already on the wane. Thus, Britain sought to defend the borders of Burma, for instance, against invasion by the Japanese to protect its “jewel in the crown,” India.21 Such defence invariably relied on the support of so-called colonial troops, either local or from other parts of the Empire (in this case especially from Australia, Africa, and India). Propaganda in Britain, as well as popular accounts, however, frequently presented a narrative firmly centred on the British Isles. The massive support by troops from other parts of the Empire was thus eclipsed by a narrative that already took shape during the war and which still has a strong hold on the British imagination today. Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speeches are in many ways the foundation of this British national myth. In particular, Churchill anticipated a time when Britain would look back at the war as its “finest hour.”22 There is, then, also an important paradox at the core of British memories of the war: on the one hand, Britain secured support from colonial troops by emphasising the need to stand together as an empire against the threat of Nazi rule. At the same time, Churchill and others were keen to circulate the image of Britain “standing alone.”23 The latter perspective allowed Britons to imagine themselves as

18 Nigel Dalziel, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire (London: Penguin, 2006), 114. 19 Ashley Jackson, “The Empire/Commonwealth and the Second World War,” The Round Table 100.412 (2011), 67. 20 “The Empire was,” in Jackson’s words, “a mass of territories acquired over a period of four centuries, ruled from London with varying degrees of direct and indirect control” (The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 18). The main difference here is one between the ‘white dominions’ (increasingly autonomous white settler states) and the rest (colonies where whites – with the help of native chiefs, kings, or princes – ruled over a large non-white population). 21 Burma was seen by the British as a crucial buffer against a Japanese invasion of India. Neighbouring Thailand, despite having declared its neutrality, was invaded by Japan in December 1941. 22 For a succinct article on the significance of Churchill’s speeches, the myth of the “finest hour,” and British identity see Helge Nowak, “Britain, Britishness and the Blitz: Public Images, Attitudes and Visions in Times of War,” War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain, ed. Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002], 241–259. 23 Ashley Jackson further argues that “[t]he entrenched view of Britain ‘alone’ is the product of a stubborn Eurocentrism and a failure to blend adequately the history of Britain with the history of the wider world to which it had become so intimately connected; but as Churchill’s War Cabinet knew in the heady days of May and June 1940, Britain had a global empire to defend and an economy dependent on global trade” (Ashley Jackson, “The Empire/Commonwealth and the Second World War,” 67).

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part of a small, but for that same reason also wondrously brave island nation defending the world against a barbaric enemy. The national borders are, in this view, clearly defined against a terrible opponent and a neglectful rest of the world. Only recently has the participation of so-called commonwealth or colonial troops found its way into official discourses on the war, such as the 50th anniversary of V-J Day (Victory over Japan) or the permanent exhibition of the Imperial War Museum. Some postcolonial authors were arguably quicker to take up this neglected history and set out to revise Eurocentric narratives of World War II. At the same time, the myth of Britain’s exceptional role in the fight against Nazi Germany has witnessed a new peak in popularity. The success of films such as Dunkirk (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2017) and Darkest Hour (dir. Joe Wright, 2017) testifies to this. Paul Gilroy has prominently noted Britain’s obsessive commemoration of World War II and related it to the history of empire. He argues that “Britain snatched a wider cultural and psychological defeat from the jaws of its victory over Hitlerism in 1945” (90). In this view, remembering World War II paradoxically emerges as a way to forget, or repress: memories of the victory over Nazi Germany are meant to compensate for and shift attention away from the loss of empire and the cruelties committed in its name. In Gilroy’s analysis, the British are unable “even to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of the empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige” (90). Considering the participation of colonial troops in this decisive victory, memories that serve as a cornerstone to a sense of national uniqueness, greatness, and splendid isolation turn out to be highly volatile. This, in fact, seems to be the most important reason why these memories have been reconsidered by postcolonial writers. It seems useful to consider World War II – although this may sound cynical – as an enormous migration, a furious movement that brought together as well as wrenched apart people from different national contexts all over the world. There arose in its wake often swiftly changing “contact zones” that echoed the asymmetrical relations of power which developed in colonial contact zones but also reconfigured them in crucial ways.24 For the British, colonial power relations were increasingly difficult to maintain. As people were shipped or flown thousands of 24 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008). Pratt coined the term ‘contact zone’ to describe “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (7). She uses the term mainly but not exclusively for colonial contacts. It is also worth noting that Pratt supplements the term with a notion of ‘transculturation,’ a term she borrows from Fernando Ortiz. The latter term – much like the term transnational – is meant to underline the fact that cultural exchange in the contact zone – despite highly asymmetrical power relations – is a dialectic process (cf. 7). Thus she points out, for instance, that “[o]ften the European archive provides valuable raw material on which to exercise a decolonizing creativity” (8). Narratives about World War II, I would argue, could be considered an example of such “valuable raw material.”

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miles across the globe to defend ‘the mother country’ and its imperial possessions – Nigerians fighting the Japanese in Burma; Jamaicans challenging the Germans in the air over London – questions of nationality became more pressing and, at the same time, more complicated. More generally, as millions of people (not only soldiers)25 from the colonies became directly involved in the contest of the European colonial powers they also became involved in a contest over European history. The war created a scenario in which people from very different national backgrounds in frequently changing constellations shared some of the same, often traumatic experiences or were united by widely shared narratives of iconic events. It might be objected that experiences of the conflict were so radically divergent and heavily overdetermined by nationalist sentiments enforced by propaganda that it seems overly optimistic to refer to them as ‘shared.’ Indeed, it seems obvious that people frequently insist on the singularity of traumatic experiences: Londoners might insist on the singularity of their suffering during the Blitz just as Dresdeners might insist on the singularity of their experiences during the infamous bombing of their home town. However, we should also note that (in the British context) hugely popular propaganda films such as London Can Take It made local experiences available to a larger, national community.26 Key events could thus be ‘experienced’ and appropriated by a larger group. At the same time, it is precisely because of the asserted singularity of these experiences and their significance for ‘imagining a nation’ that they constitute such an important point of entry for postcolonial writers. As David Cesarani explains: The resonances of war in British national identity continue to divide the population along racial lines. Thousands of West Indians and Indians served in the British armed forces in 1939–45, but this fact hardly registers in public memory of the war. Although the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act actually includes a special category for veterans from the British colonies, the war continues to exert a divisive rather than an inclusive influence. [. . .] The war is taken to evoke the British at their best, the qualities of Churchill’s ‘island race’. This is mythological nonsense, but it helps construct a sense of nation and nationality that excludes the bulk of post-1945 immigrants.27

25 An obvious moot point in this discussion is the enormous impact on civilian life. I will return to this point in my discussion of Amitav Ghosh’s and Andrea Levy’s novels below. 26 The film was originally produced for an American audience. Its initial purpose was to “to persuade US audiences of the British determination to fight” (Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 113) and thus convince them that the British deserved American support. However, an only slightly shorter version of the film was soon released in Great Britain and became “enormously popular with domestic critics and audiences” (Deer 113). ‘At home’ it was released with a small but telling change to its title: London Can Take It became Britain Can Take It. The new title more directly signals its significance for a national community and the change from ‘London’ to ‘Britain’ illustrates how the depicted events of the London Blitz could function metonymically. 27 David Cesarani, “The Changing Character of Citizenship and Nationality in Britain,” Citizenship, Nationality, and Migration in Europe, ed. David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (London: Routledge, 1996), 69.

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Because they are cornerstones of national identity, experiences of World War II offer a particularly significant inroad for the renegotiation of nationality for postcolonial writers. As the generation who experienced war and colonialism first-hand is dying, novels and films become the primary sites where these entanglements can be ‘experienced’ and reimagined. Alison Landsberg has coined the term ‘prosthetic memories’ to refer to memories which “are not natural, not the product of lived experience – or ‘organic’ in the hereditary nineteenth-century sense – but are derived from engagement with a mediated representation (seeing a film, visiting a museum, watching a television miniseries).”28 In this sense, experiences can be shared more widely across place and time and affect not only those who felt their impact unmediated. This process of mediation in turn opens up possibilities for resignification. Landsberg moreover indirectly affirms the centrality of memories of war when she notes that “prosthetic memories, like an artificial limb, often mark a trauma.”29 A novel like Andrea Levy’s Small Island takes up the point made by Cesarani by reminding its readers that white British people often conveniently forget the involvement of people from the colonies in what came to be called the ‘Battle of Britain.’ It produces prosthetic memories of shared experiences/mutual involvement. Broadly speaking, the production of such memories opens up two different opportunities: first, it might serve the purpose of reworking national identity so as to include people from the (former) colonies, or, second, it might be a way of imagining allegiances beyond the national, that is, of a transnational community. In both cases, experiences memorialised as singular for an ethnically homogeneous British community can be re-appropriated from a postcolonial perspective. I want to suggest that the two perspectives sketched here are part of a spectrum of recent reconfigurations in anglophone postcolonial historical fiction. Levy’s novel, as I shall argue, illustrates the first perspective – the attempt to rewrite British history in order to reimagine Britishness. On the other end of the spectrum is what is perhaps best described as a cosmopolitan perspective, one that tries to imagine a community beyond the national. The paradoxical place World War II occupies in this context is aptly captured by the remark that “Although the Empire was ostensibly united in conflict, the cost of the World Wars of the 20th century was its nemesis.”30 The remaining sections of this chapter will be dedicated to a comparison of three novels: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000), Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), and Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman (2014). All three have been published in the last two decades, and all three, on first glance, appear to qualify as ‘transnational’ in the sense sketched above, that is, as texts that challenge or reach beyond the framework of the national and depict “a world characterised by 28 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 20. 29 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 20. 30 Nigel Dalziel, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire, 115.

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streams of migration and dispersed [. . .] populations.”31 The novels are hugely different in tone, geographical focus, and outlook. I want to suggest that a comparison allows us to consider the changed relation of anglophone literature (especially the historical novel) to the nation as well as sketch a spectrum of responses to the powerful British myth of World War II. What interests me is on what level the noted transcendence of borders takes place and how the novels renegotiate the relationship between Great Britain and former colonised regions (India, Malaya, Burma/ Myanmar in Ghosh; Great Britain, Jamaica, India in Levy; Ireland, the Gold Coast/ Ghana in Barry). In all three novels, the war plays a central role, although none of them is war literature in a narrow sense. The war is not so much the immediate setting for the action as an enormous force that sometimes necessitates and sometimes inhibits people’s movement across national borders.

3 Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace: War, migration, and imagination beyond the nation Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace signals its interest in transnationalism already through its various paratexts. Thus most editions contain a map of the region in which the story is set. The map has the further function of emphasising the historicity of the narrative. It shows Burma, India, and Malaya with the territorial boundaries at 1945. This detail can tell us something not only about its claim to a form of historical accuracy, but also about the audience for which it is primarily intended. It caters to an international audience that is familiar neither with the history nor with the geography of this region. What is neither on the map nor a part of the main plot lines are Great Britain and British figures. In the form of a family saga, the novel instead depicts roughly one hundred years of the history of a region that, at the outset at least, has notably porous borders. The historical narrative is propelled first by Britain’s colonial interventions in the region and then by the course of World War II: from the British invasion of Burma in 1885, to the Japanese conquest and occupation of Burma (1941–45), to the independence of Burma (1947) and India, to (almost) the present time of the book’s publication. World War II occupies a central position in this history in more than one way. The novel manages to create an impressive panorama by introducing a large number of central figures that appear to be almost constantly on the move, frequently crossing borders, traversing the area circumscribed by the map the reader is offered on the first pages of the book. In the course of the story, all of the central characters become migrants of some sort. They are in search of work, in search of

31 Aleida Assmann, “Transnational Memories,” 547.

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family, and/or fleeing from the threat of war. At the end of the novel, none of the central characters is in the same place that he or she called their home at the beginning. The impression of a constant movement across borders is further amplified by the novel’s evident interest in the development of transport. Like much other colonial and postcolonial literature, The Glass Palace narrates history in part as a story of a rapidly changing mobility: the speed of cars, the expanding railroad network, the speed of planes, and the number of airports in the region. At the same time, this focus on mobility throws into relief a crucial ambivalence in the impact of the war: the war is both producing and inhibiting movement. On the one hand, we see troops being transported across continents and migrants fleeing their homes. This tendency culminates in an event that has become known as The Forgotten Long March (the exodus of the Indian population from Burma, in 1942). Fleeing from the invasion of Japanese troops into Burma (an event that, from another perspective, marks the defeat of British troops in the strategically important area of Burma), the large Indian population tried to leave the country in fear of persecution by the Japanese due to India’s close colonial ties with Britain.32 On the other hand, World War II is depicted as an event that comes over the local population almost like a natural disaster. Its arrival limits the possibilities of migrants who had previously moved freely within an area that appeared to be marked by porous borders and extensive informal trade relations. In other words, in the novel, national boundaries only really appear to affect the protagonists’ lives when under pressure during the Second World War. In The Glass Palace, the transnational can be located primarily on the level of the plot, the characters, and in the paratexts. Although nations are obviously central to the novel’s plot (the development of Burma/Myanmar, Malaya/Malaysia, British India/India), on the horizon of the novel emerges not so much a new, independent nation as a region with a shared history of pre-colonial migration, and colonial as well as wartime occupation. Of course, The Glass Palace can be read as revisionist history; however, it is not so much ‘writing back to the centre’ as developing a transnational history that marginalises the former colonial power in a number of ways. Apparently, Ghosh himself was intent on decentring the nation, and he aimed to do so through the constellation of characters. In a published correspondence with Dipesh Chakrabarty on the latter’s groundbreaking book Provincializing Europe, Ghosh writes: Two of my novels (The Shadow Lines, and my most recent, The Glass Palace) are centred on families. I know that for myself this is a way of displacing the ‘nation’ – I am sure that this is the case also with many Indian writers other than myself. In other words, I’d like to suggest that writing about families is one way of not writing about the nation (or other restrictively

32 The war against the Japanese in this region was largely fought by Indian troops under British command.

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imagined collectivities). I think there is a long tradition of this, going back at least to Proust – and it’s something that Jameson, Anderson (and even Bhabha) never seem to take into account.33

Ghosh’s comment draws attention to a shortcoming of readings in which the relation to the former coloniser and struggles for nationhood override other aspects of identity. A term like hybridity, grounded in the dynamics of centre and periphery, may thus lead us to neglect some of the complexities of transnational migration. World War II certainly produced radical forms of nationalism; but especially the world-wide employment of colonial troops during the war also led to confrontations that encouraged a more radical questioning of national identities. In The Glass Palace, there is a passage that addresses this issue, if in a rather indirect way. Towards the end of the novel Dinu, one of the protagonists, muses: If the people of India chose to regard Arjun [another central character who fought for the Indian National Army] as a hero, if Burma saw Aung San as her saviour – was it possible for someone such as him, Dinu, to assume that there was a greater reality, a sweep of history, that could be invoked to refute these beliefs. He could no longer be confident that this was so. (519)

Dinu’s conclusion is phrased very carefully and in a way that invites speculation. It foregrounds the prevalent tendency to champion the national but expresses disbelief. Ghosh himself appears to be confident that it is possible to present “a greater reality,” that is, to present the history of a region and its ethnically as well as nationally diverse people, rather than the history of a (postcolonial) nation still dialectically tethered to the former coloniser. The Glass Palace, I would argue, bears out this hope.

4 Andrea Levy’s Small Island: Writing back (with a twist) In 2009, The Guardian published a list of “50 books that defined the decade.”34 Among these 50 books, there are four which, I would argue, are attempts to decentre British narratives of World War II (Ian McEwan’s Atonement, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Andrea Levy’s Small Island). Two of them explicitly present postcolonial history. I want to focus on Levy’s Small Island, a novel that has been extremely popular both inside and outside Great Britain. The book won some of the most prestigious literary prizes and was adapted for television by

33 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 147. 34 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/05/books-of-the-noughties.

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the BBC in 2009. What is more, the work was selected for the so-called “Small Island Read,” an event that according to its organisers “was the biggest massreading initiative that has ever taken place in Britain.”35 The occasion for this event was the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. This choice is interesting insofar as slavery is an issue not directly addressed in Levy’s book, which is set long after the abolition of the slave trade. The choice therefore perhaps rather illustrates how works of postcolonial literature can serve as inroads to a larger commemoration of colonial violence and issues of postcolonial identity. The story is told entirely by four main characters – two of them from Jamaica (Hortense and Gilbert), two of them from England (Queenie and Bernard). Through this constellation the novel achieves a multifaceted representation of the time before, during, and immediately after World War II. As Bernard joins the British army and is sent off to fight in India, his wife Queenie meets Gilbert and later rents out one of the rooms in her house to him and his wife Hortense, who joins Gilbert from Jamaica after the war in the hope of finding a job as a teacher in Britain. Frequent shifts in time emphasise the weight of the past on the present, just as shifts between the two central settings – Jamaica and England – create a sense of connectedness of far-flung places. The war, while initially dividing the two couples, ultimately turns out to be the precondition for all of them to meet in post-war London. When we compare Levy’s novel to Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, some parallels immediately meet the eye. First, both books are centrally concerned with the history of a diaspora. Where Ghosh illuminates the history of an Indian diaspora in Burma, Levy focuses on the Caribbean diaspora. Indeed, Small Island can be regarded as an attempt to create a memorial for the ‘Windrush generation’ and thus for Caribbean migration to Great Britain in general.36 On the other hand, there are some striking differences as well that allow us to explore further the aesthetics of transnational texts. Ghosh, for instance, complicates the notion of diaspora by centring his story not on the exile of a single group but on the multiple migrations (both voluntary and forced) of people from diverse backgrounds across a far-flung region. The most important difference is indeed, I believe, the way in which the novels technically represent the movement between different national realms. Whereas in Ghosh this 35 http://www.bristolreads.com/small_island_read. 36 The arrival of the S. S. Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948 with 492 Caribbean migrants on board is often taken to mark the beginning of black immigration into Britain. The British government had advertised cheap travel in order to attract workers from the colonies to alleviate the postwar British labour shortage. The people who arrived on that ship had been granted British citizenship by the Nationality Act of the same year. For a brief discussion of the political and cultural contexts see, for instance, Cesarani 64–67. Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956) has become the defining literary classic of the Windrush era. Wendy Ugolini discusses experiences of former soldiers from the Caribbean who returned to Britain to settle in London after the war (Wendy Ugolini, “‘When Are You Going Back?’ Memory, Ethnicity and the British Home Front,” British Cultural Memory and the Second World War, ed. Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson [London: Bloomsbury, 2014], 89–110).

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task is accomplished by a linear plot and a, for the most part, unobtrusive yet clearly recognisable heterodiegetic narrator, in Levy it is an elaborately constructed anachronic plot structure that does most of the work. Small Island does not so much link people, times, and places as bring them into collision. The transnational emerges in the gaps between contrasting and consistently homodiegetic narrations. Not only are readers invited to engage in the perspectives of characters from different national backgrounds. They are also frequently relocated (both geographically and temporally) as the narrative jumps back and forth between Britain and Jamaica, as well as between past and present. History is, as it were, shredded into pieces only to be reassembled into an alternating pattern of before and after, before and after . . . Significantly, this pattern revolves around World War II as a turning point. Unlike Ghosh’s novel and despite an otherwise very traditional style of narration, the novel thus partakes in postmodern experiments with the representation of history. Levy’s novel, I would suggest, uses this structure to, by now, fairly traditional ends. It illustrates one of the most important functions of World War II for what, for lack of a better word, one may call ‘traditional’ postcolonial historical fiction. Because the war against Nazi Germany continues to be a cornerstone of British postwar identity, postcolonial writers can use this stretch of history as the single most effective point of access to establish the Britishness of former colonial subjects. The novel makes ample use of this insight by employing key motifs such as the Royal Air Force (all male Caribbean characters in Small Island serve in the RAF during the war) and the ‘home front’ (images of the London Blitz – perhaps the most quintessentially British site of memory – and the home guard are interwoven with the story of a Caribbean presence in London).37 At the same time, the war is also shown to directly affect the history of the former colonies. Britain’s call for colonial troops to join the British war effort is met with both enthusiasm and resistance among the Caribbean characters. However, the story only vaguely gestures at the fact that the war also provided the basis for resistance and the struggle for independence. More so than Ghosh’s novel, Levy’s Small Island appears to conform to the paradigm of a ‘writing back.’ It is a case of “the recovery of a lost or ‘subaltern’ history, told from the point of view of those who have been ruled and oppressed rather than those who are members of the ruling classes”38 – here, however, with a focus on a British setting, rather than on the former colony. Nevertheless, there are two ways in which the novel also goes beyond this dichotomy

37 For a detailed study of recurring motifs and their wider cultural significance, see Zeno Ackermann, Gedächtnis-Fiktionen. Ackermann also notes the outstanding importance of World War II for postcolonial writers (Zeno Ackermann, Gedächtnis-Fiktionen: Mediale Erinnerungsfiguren und literarischer Eigensinn in britischen Romanen zum Zweiten Weltkrieg [Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015]). For the latter aspect see especially 236–240. 38 Catherine Lynette Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37.

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of ruled and ruling. The first is a rather surprising overlap in plot with Ghosh’s novel. Towards the middle of the book, the otherwise consistent back and forth between Jamaica and Britain is abandoned and the horizon of the story momentarily widened to include India. In a number of episodes – too long to be called a mere excursus – the reader follows the white, British, overtly racist bank clerk (now soldier) Bernard on an assignment to India. The narrative picks up some of the very same events represented in The Glass Palace. This twist illustrates how postcolonial historical fiction, too, builds on a repertoire of scenes and images that are widely circulated and can serve as a grid familiar to an international audience. In Small Island, however, they also have the effect of contextualising the Caribbean contribution to the British war effort, hinting at the ubiquity of colonial troops as well as showing quite drastically how the “European war” also had a direct impact on civilian lives outside Europe. Despite this temporary widening of the geographical focus, the overall view of Small Island differs significantly from that of The Glass Palace. In contrast to Ghosh’s novel, Small Island, ultimately, crosses borders to secure a space on the small island of Britain, to imagine a sense of Britishness that includes Caribbean immigrants. This becomes clear at the end of the novel. The story ends sometime after World War II with the arrival of the generation Windrush in Britain. However, the end also gestures towards a further future by centring on the birth of a mixedrace child, the son of the British protagonist Queenie and the Jamaican soldier Michael Roberts. Ultimately, what emerges on the horizon of Small Island is today’s multicultural Britain. Indeed, although some parts of the novel are set in Jamaica and India, Britain is clearly the centre of gravity, or vanishing point, in this novel.39 It can therefore be regarded as an attempt to rewrite an emphatically British history in order to (re-)inscribe Caribbean subjects into it. In its privileging of Britain as the geographical centre, or historical horizon, it differs significantly from the two other novels discussed here. Both The Glass Palace and Sebastian Barry’s Temporary Gentleman, which I will turn to in a moment, present forms of transnationalism in which the centre-periphery dialectic characteristic of the writing-back paradigm is more radically challenged. In Small Island, the movement across national borders is an appeal for a reimagining of the national community of the former colonisers, but 39 The BBC film adaptation makes this (somewhat too) blatantly obvious by interpolating an ending set in contemporary London. The scene in which the grown-up son of Queenie and Michael Roberts – apparently living in a prosperous part of London where racial tensions seem to have disappeared – tells his own grandchildren the story of his parents borders on multicultural kitsch. It should be noted, however, that the novel, while it does not directly contradict this ending, seems more cautious. It is certainly more outspoken about racist views in postwar Britain. The fact that Bernard, one of the central white British characters whose role is significantly reduced in the film version, stubbornly resists appeals by his wife and the Caribbean characters suggests that racist views are deeply rooted in British society and not easily overcome (cf. Rachel Carroll, “Small Island, Small Screen: Adapting Black British Fiction.” Andrea Levy: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Jeannette Baxter and David James. [London: Bloomsbury, 2014], 73–74).

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it is not a questioning of the nation as the most important frame of identification. In contrast, in The Glass Palace World War II marks a moment of crisis that leads not only to a questioning of British authority but also to a questioning of nationalism per se: Ghosh does not, as biographically oriented criticism might expect, zero in on the moment of Indian independence. On the horizon of The Glass Palace emerges neither a new nation nor a new multicultural Britain. Instead Ghosh’s novel can perhaps best be described as an attempt to imagine a network of people from a multinational region connected by a shared history of migration across porous national borders, colonialism, and, not least, the experience of the destructive power of nationalism during World War II. It challenges a national frame and explores alternative forms of belonging, thus embracing a transnational vision in the more narrow sense indicated above. The range of different outlooks of transnational historical fiction can be further explored by comparing both Ghosh’s and Levy’s novel to Sebastian Barry’s 2014 novel The Temporary Gentleman.

5 Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman: Cosmopolitanism on the horizon of a transnational narrative Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman has received scant critical attention. It is, however, a highly interesting example of a historical narrative that complicates any straightforward notion of writing back from the outset by focusing on a character who is ambivalently positioned in the history of colonialism: an Irishman in colonial Africa. Like the other novels discussed here, Barry’s shuffles back and forth between different times and places and thus leaves the reader with a strong sense of transhistorical as well as transnational movement. Unlike the other two, The Temporary Gentleman is presented from the perspective of a single character. Its protagonist, Jack McNulty, is an Irishman who decides to join the British in the fight against Nazi Germany during World War II, a decision for which he is scorned as a traitor in his hometown Sligo near the border with Northern Ireland. At the same time, he is heartily greeted as an Irishman by other Irishmen amongst Britons on his missions abroad. On one of these missions, he is quite literally wafted onto African shores after a torpedo destroys the British ship on which he serves. In Accra, then capital of the British Gold Coast (today’s Ghana), McNulty finds a new home, or, in any case, a place to which he will be drawn back again and again. Structurally, the novel resembles Small Island rather than The Glass Palace. Like Levy’s novel, The Temporary Gentleman narrates history in asynchronically arranged chunks. However, in contrast to Levy, Barry employs this technique to represent the consciousness of a single remembering subject. This is made clear by a

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frame narrative which casts most of the story as the memoirs of Jack McNulty. The account, it turns out, is written in 1957, the year of Ghana’s independence. At this point, McNulty has once again left his home and family in Ireland to live in Accra. Bit by bit we learn that after the war, McNulty had worked as an engineer, a bomb disposal expert, and later as a UN observer (a job that also served him as a cover for gunrunning in Togo before its independence). When he is suspected of having sold weapons to rebels in colonial Togoland and is challenged by an inspector of the transitional police force in Accra, who turns out to be from Northern Ireland, the divided loyalties of the ex-British officer from Ireland, just south of the border, living in colonial and postcolonial West Africa are thrown into stark relief. For reasons the reader is invited to speculate about, McNulty is drawn to Accra, where he later lives with Tom Quaye, a native from the Gold Coast who fought with him for the British during the war and now works for him as a kind of housekeeper. In the course of the fragmented narrative, it becomes clear that not only has Accra become a second home for McNulty, but Tom Quaye has become a second, or indeed surrogate, family for him, despite the fact that during his first voyages his wife and child still live in Ireland. At the same time that we find McNulty physically and emotionally gravitating towards the Gold Coast/Ghana and its inhabitants, his memories/memoirs continuously return to his engagement and marriage with his wife May, to the Irish sea, to Irish politics, and later to his little daughters. In McNulty’s memories, this place on the Gold Coast increasingly blends with the home in Ireland, which he left behind of his own accord. This blending goes hand in hand with a gradual, extremely subtle, and therefore quite disturbing revelation of the narrator’s unreliability. The reader slowly comes to realise that the memories of McNulty’s earlier life do not quite add up to a consistent picture. The narrator, whose balanced and caring descriptions initially invite the reader’s sympathy, it transpires, betrays that trust. The memories of his early life with his family in Ireland are for the most part revealed to be wishful thinking. They are steeped in nostalgia for an earlier life when he first met his wife, a woman admired by many for her beauty and her outspokenness about the cause of Irish independence. It transpires that these memories serve to suppress the realisation that, despite all warnings, McNulty turns into the stereotype of an Irish drunkard who beats his wife and child, and eventually drags them down with him. Accra, then, turns out to have served as a way to escape a situation that McNulty seems to view as the almost unavoidable destiny for a man in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s. In Accra, McNulty seems to have found what he wanted to see – and therefore presented to the reader – in Ireland. By continuously drawing parallels between the two places, the novel arrives at a form of transnationalism that is quite unlike that of the other novels discussed here. McNulty’s homeland is not the Ireland that he repeatedly left behind. In Ireland, he feels, he is torn to pieces by powerful and contradictory claims on his loyalties and irresistibly drawn into the role of the stereotypical heavy drinker. ‘Home’ is thus constituted in a space between Ireland, Great Britain (via his

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participation in the imperial enterprise), and independent Ghana. A passage towards the end of the novel may serve to illustrate the described blending and the resulting sense of a newly found home: The people we passed moved slowly in the heat, always turning their faces to view us, sometimes nodding a greeting like an Irish country person. My happiness had now acquired an extra dimension. I am not sure I have ever felt so at ease in the world, apart from the counterfeit ease offered by alcohol.40

To feel “at ease in the world” in this context seems to describe a state of belonging that has transcended any national identification. In Barry’s novel, this vision darkens, however, almost as quickly as it occurred to its protagonist. Shortly after this epiphanic moment, Jack McNulty is killed by a native in an act of revenge after a brawl at a bar in Accra. The novel thus seems to suggest that this newly found home is indeed a place of McNulty’s imagination, a utopia. Still, I would argue that the vision retains its utopian appeal, as it were, despite its failure within the story-world and despite the ultimately troubling personality of the protagonist. It encourages readers to imagine a place in which the pressures of national obligations have been dissolved in favour of a sense of peace and mutual understanding that results precisely from a reconsideration of a history of extreme nationalist tensions in the wake of World War II, colonial violence, and the collapse of the British Empire. Although a story of a self-destructive person, loosely interwoven with the history of two countries torn by colonialism and its aftermath, seems to be an unlikely candidate, I would argue that The Temporary Gentleman marks one end on a spectrum of transnational historical narratives by evoking a cosmopolitan perspective. Importantly, this perspective emerges on the horizon of a story that, at the same time, registers continuing dependencies between nations and the lasting impact of empire. In Barry’s novel, the enormous influence of imperial Britain on the histories of Ireland and the Gold Coast/Ghana are obvious, yet Britain is also thoroughly decentred in this narrative of an individual who tries to escape the pressures of national identifications.

6 Conclusion The primary advantage of transnationalism as a heuristic category appears to be that it is not tethered to concepts of national identity but challenges us to trace, in Aleida Assmann’s words again, the “different historical trajectories” of characters and “explore new [or rather alternative] forms of belonging and cultural identification.” It allows us to consider structures of continuing inequality in postcolonial contexts while going beyond a dualistic logic of centre and periphery. Conceived in

40 Sebastian Barry, The Temporary Gentleman (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 261.

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this way, transnational does not necessarily mean global. Nor does transnational literature need to be cosmopolitan in outlook. Perhaps, the potential of the term resides in its possibility to throw into relief the ubiquity of various forms of migration. At the same time, it draws our attention to the multiple intersections that emerge along the way. The recent anglophone postcolonial historical novels considered here may indeed function as prosthetic memory, as a way of ‘experiencing’ a shared history of nationalist violence. Postcolonial fictions of the Second World War are significant reminders of the fact that what is still widely remembered as a narrative of European, national victory or defeat, was cross-cut by transnational alliances. These texts are positioned more ambivalently vis-à-vis the nation. They explore the past not of a nation but of a region or group linked by a shared, transnational history. If one were to speculate about the appeal, perhaps even the ethical potential of the fictional histories that could be labelled transnational, one might venture the guess that – by moving continuously across times, places, and socio-cultural perspectives – they capture an increasingly felt tension between ever-growing mobility in times of globalisation and the enormous pressures of persisting national frontiers. However, in doing so they can also draw attention to shared memories and thus offer a basis for empathising with people outside the national community. In their trailblazing work, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have drawn attention to the significance of the Holocaust for what they call “cosmopolitan memory.”41 I would argue that due to its connection to the end of Empire the Second World War more generally has become an important site of memory42 for the negotiation of transnational solidarities.

41 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Cosmopolitan Memory and Human Rights,” The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 195–209. 42 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989), 7–24.

Dobrota Pucherová

Re-centring European Geopolitics: Transnational Identities in the Twenty-FirstCentury Hungarian-Language Novel from Slovakia Abstract: This chapter analyses two postmodern historical novels from Slovakia by Hungarian-minority authors as transnational texts: Nálunk, New Hontban (2001) by Lajos Grendel and Határeset (2008) by Péter Hunčík. Set in southern Slovakia, where state borders repeatedly shifted over the course of the twentieth century, both novels emphasise the hybridity of identities in Central Europe, where many ethnicities have been commingling in a relatively small space for centuries. By describing how nationalist discourses have led to ethnic hatred, colonial practices, and genocide, the texts point out the impossibility of writing a unified, chronological, progressive narrative of the nation and show the histories of European nations as deeply entangled in transnational webs of meaning. By retelling twentiethcentury European history from the point of view of a historically, geographically, and culturally marginal region, the novels rearrange European geopolitics and question the idea of ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ in the European context. The texts are paradigmatic of twenty-first-century literature from Slovakia that considers the idea of the nation-state in the Central European context to be deeply problematic.

1 Introduction Slovakia has historically been a multicultural and multiethnic territory. As a crossroads of migration, trade, and imperial conquest, it has been inhabited by the Slavs, Hungarians, Germans, and Jews for centuries. From the eleventh century, when the territory inhabited by the Slavic-speaking population of the Danubian Basin was incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary, until 1918, when the AustroHungarian Empire collapsed, the territory of modern Slovakia, then known as Upper Hungary, was an integral part of the Hungarian state. The ethnic composition became more diverse with the arrival of the Carpathian Germans in the thirteenth century, the Jews and the Romany in the fourteenth century, and the invasions of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not until the nineteenth century that the idea of the ‘Slovak nation’ became a Note: I would like to thank my colleagues Anikó Dušíková, Judit Dobrý and Judit Görözdi for their helpful suggestions and interesting conversations. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-011

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serious political agenda. In 1918, Slovakia for the first time came into being as an ethnically defined political formation (as part of Czechoslovakia), annexing large parts of the historic territory of Hungary. After Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Czech Republic in 1938, right-wing Slovak nationalists created a fascist regime known as the Slovak State that violently oppressed ethnic minorities, especially the Jews, who were sent to German extermination camps. In 1945, a movement to expel all remaining ethnic minorities from Slovakia – the Germans, the Czechs, and the Hungarians – led to violence, destruction, and displacement of entire communities. The jingoist undercurrents in Slovakia resurfaced after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, leading to the creation of the independent Slovak Republic in 1993 by splitting from the Czech Republic. Slovak ethnocentrism has been played out not only in relation to the “old” minorities (especially the Hungarians), but also new ones (from Asia and especially Muslim countries), and since the migrant crisis in 2014 many Slovak people have been vigorously protesting against EU immigrant quota as an interference with state sovereignty. However, twenty-first-century literature from Slovakia offers different, more complex narratives than this ethnically exclusive Slovak conceptualisation of the nation and the state. It describes how ethnic exclusivism and nationalist chauvinism have lived side-by-side with ethnic and cultural intermixing as a result of the historical proximity of other ethnic groups, the frequent shifting of state boundaries, and the changing of political regimes in the region. This has led to cultural, ethnic, and linguistic hybridity, making it impossible to determine who is an autochthonous Slovak and who is a foreigner. In fact, according to the historian Jozef Tancer, if there ever was a sign of Slovak autochthony, it was multilingualism – having several mother-tongues, most often a combination of Slovak, Hungarian, and German, in addition to Yiddish, Czech, Ruthenian, Croatian, and others. The Hungarian ethnic minority in Slovakia, counting about 10% of the total population, was created in 1918, when most of the territory of historic Hungary and onethird of its population was divided among the successor states of Austria-Hungary. Even though the Hungarian language was officially recognised in Czechoslovakia in 1920 as a language of education, administration, and culture, Hungarians in Czechoslovakia did not enjoy equal rights until 1968, but were forced to assimilate and Slovakise themselves. This became particularly violent after World War II, when Czechoslovakia on the one hand sought to rid the country of Hungarians by confiscating their property and moving them to Hungary (in exchange for ethnic Slovaks), and on the other pressured ethnic Hungarians to have their nationality officially changed to Slovak, otherwise they were dropped from the pension, social, and healthcare system. In 1968 the rights of ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia were finally recognised, which included the establishment of Hungarian cultural institutions and provided an enabling environment for literary life. Some of the best-known Hungarian-language authors from Slovakia after World War II include the poets Árpád Tőzsér (1935–), László Cselényi (1938), Zoltán Csehy (born 1973) and the novelists Gábor Farnbauer (1957–) Anikó N. Tóth (1967–), Alfonz Talamon (1966–1996),

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Zsófia Bárczi (1973–), Anikó Polgár (1975–), Zoltán Szalay (1985–) Lajos Grendel (1948–2018), and Péter Hunčík (1951–). According to some Hungarian literary historians, the Hungarian minority literatures in the countries that annexed Hungarian territories after the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 (Slovakia, Romania, Serbia) “all belong to the literature of one nation: the literature of the Hungarian nation.”1 As Béla Pomogáts writes, “every Hungarian community detached from the mother country in 1918–1920 considers itself an authentic part of a Hungarian nation that is homogeneous as regards its language, culture, history, and traditions.”2 The following analysis of two historical novels by two contemporary Hungarian-language authors from southern Slovakia – Lajos Grendel (1948–2018) and Péter Hunčík (1951–) – will seek to complicate this claim. The work of Grendel and Hunčík represents the local expression of the postmodern historical novel that has found it necessary to rethink and problematise the nation by abandoning traditional narrative strategies founded on Romantic assumptions about the genre, such as causality, historical veracity, the possibility to represent reality through language, a teleological view of the historical process, the ‘grand narrative’ of the nation, etc.3 This tendency has followed the so-called postmodern and narrative turn in historiography (see e.g., Barthes, White, McHale, Hutcheon, Assmann, Ricoeur), which rejected the possibility of historical objectivity. Postmodern historiography emphasises meta-historical issues that problematise access to the past, such as memory, language, ideology, or identity, and brings attention to the textual character of history. In her analysis of twenty-first-century Hungarian historical novels (from Hungary) by authors such as Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, Pál Závada, Judit Kováts, and László Krasznahorkai, Judit Görözdi has identified various postmodern strategies, such as the deconstruction of content and narrative structure; the destruction of causal-realist aesthetics through magical realism; the focus on embodied experience; the focus on the historical experience of marginalized groups.4 All of these are present also in contemporary Slovak fiction and drama by authors such as Pavol Rankov, Peter Krištúfek, Viliam Klimáček,

1 Béla Pomogáts, “Hungarian Minority Literature (Hungarian Literature in Transylvania and the Historic Upper Hungary),” Minorities Research 7 (2005), 79. 2 Béla Pomogáts, “Hungarian Minority Literature (Hungarian Literature in Transylvania and the Historic Upper Hungary),” 79. 3 See Dobrota Pucherová, “Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-)Communist Literature,” Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, ed. Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015), 139–159, and Dobrota Pucherová, “Theorizing Central European Postcoloniality: A Postcommunist Reading of 21st-Century Literature from Slovakia,” Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research, no. 200 of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Norbert Bachleitner, Achim Hölter and John A. McCarthy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 307–337. 4 Judit Görözdi, Dejiny v súčasných maďarských románoch (Bratislava: VEDA, Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, 2019), 12.

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Rastislav Ballek, Silvester Lavrík, Peter Juščák, Sláva Daubnerová, in Hungarianlanguage fiction from Slovakia by Lajos Grendel, Péter Hunčík and Anikó N. Tóth, and in German-language fiction by the exilic Slovak writer Irena Brežná (living in Switzerland). In particular, they all seek to come to terms with violent twentiethcentury history by rewriting it from the margins – through the voices of ethnic and religious minorities, women, children, peasants, dissenters with communism, emigrants, the mentally disabled – suggesting that there is no authoritative, ‘true’ history of the Slovak nation; there are only interpretations and the recording of history is always a process of fictionalisation. Such “apocryphal history” (McHale), or rewriting of the nationalist, totalising ‘grand narrative’ of Slovakia from the margins, reveals national identity to be an ideological construction. This literature describes national identities as not clear-cut, but often overlapping, hybrid, and fluid; it could even be argued that it considers the idea of the nation-state in the Central European context deeply problematic. This is not necessarily a result of a growing migration across national boundaries, as transnationalism has been defined by contemporary sociological and anthropological discourse,5 but a result of historical multiculturalism within. Indeed, research perspectives such as transnational historiography, postcolonialism, constructivist theories of international relations, and the sociology of world society have shown convincingly that nation-states have never been self-contained units; instead, they emerged from political, economic, and cultural relations with others.6 The novels by Lajos Grendel and Péter Hunčík are set in the region of southern Slovakia, which features in their work as a site of turbulent history: at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was situated in Austria-Hungary; from 1918 it became part of Czechoslovakia; between 1938 and 1945 it was annexed by Hungary; after Hungary’s defeat in World War II it became again part of Czechoslovakia; since 1993 it has belonged to Slovakia. Focusing on the hybrid, fluid identities of the inhabitants of the border region, both retell twentieth-century European history from the perspective of a small, peripheral town to demonstrate how minor histories might complicate the accepted national narratives. In describing this bilingual, bicultural, and transnational Slovak-Hungarian region, both authors write exclusively in Hungarian but necessarily mix in Slovak phrases and words for authenticity. 5 See Kevin Archer, “Transnationalism,” 21st Century Geography: A Reference Handbook, ed. Joseph P. Stoltman (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011), 197–206; Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2010); Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist, Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010); Nina Glick-Schiller (ed), Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1998). 6 See Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (eds), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Homi Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); John W. Meyer, John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez, “World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103.1 (1997), 144–181; Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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2 Central European historical ironies: Lajos Grendel, Nálunk, New Hontban (In Our New Hont) Lajos Grendel was born in 1948 in Levice/Léva, which features in the short biography on the sleeve of the English translations of his novels only as “a small bilingual and bicultural town in Southern Slovakia.” Before his retirement, Grendel worked as a university lecturer and editor in Bratislava. He is the author of 11 novels and several short story collections which describe the absurd histories of ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia and the post-communist transition in the region. His work, interwoven with sarcastic humour, received numerous prizes in Hungary, Slovakia, and beyond. All of his works have been translated into Slovak and some also into English,7 French, Polish and German. Grendel is a unique author in Slovakia in that he is considered a Slovak writer who wrote in Hungarian, rather than a Hungarian-minority writer. This is because of Grendel’s strong presence in Slovak public life and his involvement during the Velvet Revolution of 1989.8 As Görözdi has analysed, his work reflects the hopelessness of the search for a reliable identity in the sweeping historical changes of twentieth-century Central Europe.9 Grendel’s historical novel Nálunk, New Hontban (In Our New Hont, 2001)10 has been recognised by critics for its intertextuality with Kálmán Mikszáth (1847–1910), a major Hungarian writer from the same region that in his time used to be part of Upper Hungary.11 Like Mikszáth, Grendel is skilled at crafting humorous anecdotes or micro-stories of “common people” to reveal the absurdity of history that cannot be described by large epic narratives, since it lacks logic. The novel is set in the fictitious small town of “New Hont” situated in southern Slovakia at the end of the twentieth century. The narrator of the frame story is a writer commissioned by the New Honters to write a book about their town which “has been forgotten by everyone. . . . It has been neglected not only by big politics, but also the media, as if it did not exist or as if nothing remarkable ever happened there. . . . Sometimes it even fails to appear on maps, which

7 See Lajos Grendel, Live Fire, trans. Paul Olchváry (Bratislava: Kalligram, 1999) and Lajos Grendel, Esmeralda’s Rainbows, trans. Paul Olchváry, Eszter Molnár, Richard Aczel, and Lászlo T. András (Bratislava: Kalligram, 1999). 8 See Judit Görözdi, “Grendel Lajos ‘szlovák írói’ karriertörténete,” Értelmiségi karriertörténetek, kapcsolathálók, írócsoportosulások – 2 (Nagyvárad and Budapest: Partium Kiadó – Reciti, 2016), 307–320. 9 Judit Görözdi, “ ‘ . . . so šiestimi nohami’: stratégie národnej identifikácie v Odkundesoch Lajosa Grendela,” Slová: pamätnica k sedemdesiatke Rudolfa Chmela, ed. László Szigeti (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2009), 305–310. 10 There is no English translation of this novel yet. 11 See e.g. Csilla Gizińska, “Absurdystanski swiat w cyklu powiesci Lajosa Grendela New Hont”, Porownania/Comparisons, n°14/2014, 59–69.

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is a shocking injustice” [Róluk valahogy mindenki mindig megfeledkezik . . . New Hontot csakugyan elhanyagolja nemcsak a nagypolitika, hanem a sajtó is mintha nem is létezne, vagy mintha New Hontban semmi említésre méltó esemény sem történhetne. . . . Olykor még a térképekről is lefelejtik, ami igazán nagy méltánytalanság] (12–15).12 As it emerges, the writer is expected to recover the “idea” [eszméjét] of New Hont that had once existed but was later forgotten. “Take New York, for instance! What is New York? The financial capital of the world. And Paris? The capital of the arts. And Vienna? The capital of waltzes. So, what is New Hont the capital of?” [Mert vegyük csak New Yorkot! Mi New York? A pénzvilág fővárosa. Hát Párisz? A művészetek fővárosa. És Bécs? A valcer fővárosa. Na de New Hont minek a fővárosa?] (17). Thus explicitly placing this small peripheral town beside world metropoles (as suggested already by the English adjective “New” in the name of New Hont) and narrating twentieth-century European history from this point of view, the novel recentres European geopolitics. New Hont becomes a microcosm of large European events: its cultural and ethnic hybridity, which goes against traditional thinking of national histories and identities, becomes a metonymy for the whole of Europe. It is suggested that the concept of nations and nation-states does not reflect the actual ethnic and cultural diversity of European populations. This is why it becomes impossible to recover the “idea” of New Hont. In collecting oral history, the writer realises that it is impossible to reconstruct a collective identity of New Hont, since the town is essentially a hybrid Slovak-Hungarian town whose ethnic groups have lived together in peace for centuries, but cannot agree on a common interpretation of history, as shown for instance in their inability to agree on a major historical personality whose statue should adorn the central square. The only identity of New Hont seems to be its provincial inconsequentiality that prevented it from entering either Slovak or Hungarian national history. The small history of a marginal town, as told to the narrator by its various inhabitants, offers innumerable opportunities for irony as it is full of contradictions. In the episode from 1944, the New Honters are impatiently awaiting liberation by the “Russians,” even though their town had never been occupied by the Germans, since for them it had “zero importance from a strategic point of view” [New Hont stratégiai jelentősége a nullával volt egyenlő] (19). The Red Army that finally arrives is composed of Ukrainians instead of Russians and instead of liberating the town proceeds to occupy it. Their commandant speaks fluent Hungarian and is clearly someone who after the break-up of Austria-Hungary in 1918 found himself on the “wrong side” of the border, that is, in Ukraine. Instead of showing solidarity with his fellow Hungarians, he is provoked to violence by the image of the Hungarian fascist president, General Horty, forgotten on the wall of a classroom.

12 All translations are mine.

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The ambiguity of the situation could have been in the fact that the Russian officer spoke in Hungarian, but they could not count on his solidarity. As if he had wanted to emphasize that he considered them enemies. And it meant nothing that they spoke the same language. And that he, unlike the other Russian officers, was able to not just physically arrest them, but see into their minds and their souls. [A helyzet kétértelműségének az lehetett az igazi oka, hogy az orosz tiszt magyarul beszélt, miközben szolidaritásra nem számíthattak tőle. Sőt, mintha így akarta volna mindenki másnál nyomatékosabban demonstrálni, hogy ellenségnek tekinti őket. Hogy semmit nem jelent az, hogy ugyanazon a nyelven beszélnek. Hogy ő – más orosz tisztekkel ellentétben – nemcsak a testi valójukat képes foglyul ejteni, hanem a gondolataikba és a lelkükbe is belelát.] (24)

This type of historical irony, in which the greatest enemy is “one of us,” points to the damage committed by high politics on the common people. This shows that Benedict Anderson’s theory of the nation as an “imagined community”13 united by a common narrative and by language, whose influence he traces through institutions such as schools, universities, and the media, fails to account for migrant, transnational, multilingual or hybrid identities that are characterised by irreconcilable paradoxes. The story is full of colourful characters whose cultural and linguistic hybridity works towards their advantage or, on the contrary, becomes fateful to them. One of these is Ďuso Nehéz (with a typical Hungarian surname meaning “heavy”), whose knowledge of the Russian language makes Soviet soldiers believe he is an emigrant from the Bolshevik USSR and execute him as a “traitor” (36). After 1945, when New Hont is reincorporated into Czechoslovakia, the Slovak language is officially enforced as the only language of administration, education, and the media, and Hungarian, as the language of war-time enemies, is suppressed. A special committee spies on people in public spaces to force the native Hungarian-speakers to speak in Slovak. As most of them speak the Slovak language only on a working level, this often causes misunderstanding, as in this scene in a shop, written in a combination of both languages (I have highlighted the Slovak words in italics): – – – – –

I need . . .. what’s it called. . ..szappan. You want soap? No, Marie, – said the terrified little woman in a headscarf. – I’ve got soap. I need szappan. Szappan is soap, Margie. Ok, give it to me, Marie. . . But I won’t talk anymore. Not a word.

– – – – –

[ Nemám doma . . . izé . . . szappan. Mydlo chceš? Nie Mariska, – mondta a megrémült, fejkendős néni. – Mydlo mám. Szappan nemám. Szappan je mydlo, Margitka. Dobre, daj, Mariska . . . Ale ja už nepoviem. Nič nepoviem.] (55, my emphasis)

13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1983).

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Difficulties arise with greetings such as “szervusz,” which means hello in both languages, only the spelling is different, so the committee cannot guess whether the speaker is speaking in Slovak or in Hungarian. This is used as resistance by the old carpenter Bárány, who refuses to speak in Slovak when the committee visits him in his workshop and thus points to the absurdity of ethnic Hungarians speaking in Slovak among themselves (I have highlighted the Slovak words in italics): – –

– – – –

– –

Good morning, Joe! How are you? Szervusz – said the old Bárány from bending over his clamp. This was not anticipated by the inspectors. Szervusz is the same in both languages, only the orthography is different. And since sounds cannot be seen, they can only be heard, it remained unclear whether the old carpenter answered in Hungarian or in Slovak. The inspectors blinked and Miska Török blushed. Why do you say szervusz? – he asked, now in Hungarian. Because we have always greeted each other like this – answered the old Bárány. [ Dobrý deň, Jožko! Ako sa máš? Szervusz – vetette oda az öreg Bárány a satu mellől. Hát erre nem számítottak a revizorok. Hogy a szervusz mindkét nyelven szervusz, csak az ortográfiája más-más. S mivel a hangokat a világ legképzettebb nyelvészei sem képesek látni, csupán hallani, nyitva maradt a kérdés, hogy az öreg asztalos most magyarul vagy szlovákul szólt-e hozzájuk. A tanfelügyelők máris pislogtak, Török Miska arcán pedig pipacsok nyíltak ki. Mért mondod azt, hogy szervusz? – kérdezte most már magyaryul. Mert mindig így köszöntünk egymásnak – felelte az öreg Bárány.] (59–60, my emphasis)

The episode from August 1968 describes the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact Army in reaction to the political liberalisation of the communist system. This time, the soldiers who arrive in New Hont are Hungarian and the New Honters are confronted with the ironic and tragic fact of Hungarian support for the Soviet invasion. Moreover, their commandant is the thirty-year-old Pisti Szabó, a native of New Hont, whose family had left the town for Hungary in December 1944 before the arrival of the Red Army, because as ethnic Hungarians they did not want to live in Czechoslovakia again. Learning that the invading army is led by “one of ours,” the New Honters feel calmer and hopeful. As it ironically turns out in a conversation with a town elder, Pisti is a cynical and opportunistic henchman of the Soviets: – – – – – – – – –

Tell me, son, why the hell have you come here? [. . .] We have come, Uncle Kálmán, to overthrow the counter-revolution, – he said. But there is no counter-revolution here! I know, – said lieutenant Pisti. You see, – sighed Uncle Kálmán with relief. – So why have you come? To overthrow the counter-revolution, – repeated lieutenant Pisti. His stubbornness made Uncle Kálmán smile bitterly. But you have just admitted there is no counter-revolution here. Yes, – agreed lieutenant Pisti. So?

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– – –

So what? Why have you come? To overthrow the counter-revolution, – emphasized the son of Marci Szabó with an irrefutable obstinacy. [. . .] We have come to clean up this pigsty. To reinstall the authority of the head of the family. Do you understand? [. . .] We will be strict and overthrow the counter-revolution even before it starts. That is, preventively.

– – – – – –

[ Mondd csak, fiam, mi a fenének jöttetek ti ide? [. . .] Azért jöttünk, Kálmán bácsi, hogy leverjük az ellenforradalmat – mondta. De itt nincs semmilyen ellenforradalom! Tudom – mondta Pisti főhadnagy. Na látod – sóhajtotta megkönnyebbülve Kálmán bácsi. – Hát akkor miért jöttetek? Hogy leverjük az ellenforradalmat – ismételte meg előbbi válaszát Pisti főhadnagy. Makacssága keserű mosolyra fakasztotta Kálmán bácsit. De hát az előbb ismerted be te is, hogy nincs ellenforradalom. Igen – bicentett Pisti főhadnagy. Hát akkor? Mi hát akkor? Akkor miért jöttetek? Hogy leverjük az ellenforradlmat – szögezte le apodiktikus határozottsággal Szabó Marci fia. [. . .] Azt kérdezted, hogy miert jöttünk? Nos hát, azért jöttünk, hogy kitakarítsuk ezt a disznóólat. Hogy a csaláfdő tekintélyét helyreállítsuk. Érted már? [. . .] Mi szigorúak leszünk, s leverjük az ellenforradalmat, mielőtt még kitörne. Vagyis preventíve.] (87–98)

– – – – – –

Through this absurd dialogue, the novel again complicates the idea of the nation and national identity. Even though Pisti Szabó is an ethnic Hungarian and a New Honter by birth, he feels no sympathy for the New Honters because he has been indoctrinated by the Soviet ideology and believes in violence as a way of disciplining both his nation and his family. On the other hand, the Slovak and Hungarian inhabitants of New Hont feel affinity towards each other in spite of their different national identities by virtue of being neighbours. By exposing minor histories, the novel demonstrates that the division of historical actors into victims and perpetrators is never simple because people’s identities are multiple, fluid, and over-arching. This shows that, as a number of scholars have proposed, instead of national histories it is necessary to write transnational or transregional, “entangled” histories (Verflechtungsgeschichten or histoires croisées).14 This type of methodology has been fuelled by postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the intellectual consequences of globalisation, leading some scholars to argue that it is possible to speak of globalisation since the late nineteenth century to describe the transnational societies of East-Central Europe.15 In the following analysis, I will propose a postcolonial reading of such identities in Péter Hunčík’s novel Határeset.

14 Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 15 Frank Hadler, Steffi Franke, Maria Hidvégi, Sarah Lemmen, and Mathias Mesenhöller, “EastCentral Europe in a Transnational Perspective: Strategies to Assess the Challenges of Globalization

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3 The legacies of colonialism in Central Europe: Péter Hunčík, Határeset (Borderline Case) Péter Hunčík was born in 1951 in Šahy/Ipolyság, a small Slovak-Hungarian town, and works as a psychiatrist in Dunajská Streda/Dunaszerdahely, a town in the same border region. In 1989 he entered politics and advocates intercultural tolerance between the Slovaks and the Hungarians. Határeset (Borderline Case, 2008)16 is his debut novel, which won the prestigious Sándor Bródy prize in Hungary, given annually for the best first novel. The 450-page novel, which took him five years to write, has been translated into Slovak to great acclaim, winning three Slovak literary prizes. According to one reviewer, Hunčík’s novel reflects “the author’s professional thinking as a psychiatrist and a social psychologist. [. . .] This entire region has been one big borderline case, where the mechanism of collective guilt is still used to judge people. This is perhaps why the protagonist of the novel is not an individual but a region.”17 The novel uses the trope of colonialism to analyse the multicultural and transnational identities of the border region of southern Slovakia across the twentieth century. It shows how the domination of one nation by another in this region has led to cultural hybridity, but also oppression and marginalisation through the use of colonial practices such as the imposition of language, culture, names, and the simultaneous suppression of alternative histories. At the same time, the novel can be read as a history of twentieth-century Europe told from the perspective of one small multicultural town situated on the border between Slovakia and Hungary. Narrating European history from the point of view of a historically, culturally, and geographically marginal place, the novel shakes up the notion of “centre” and “margin” in the European context and shows the histories of European nations as deeply entangled in transnational webs of meaning. In postcolonial theory, space is a central metaphor for rethinking culture from a minority perspective when looking at borders and border-crossings, transit and in-between spaces, where meanings commingle and overlap.18 Hunčík’s fictional town is a perfect example: located in a region where the state boundaries repeatedly shifted during the twentieth century, the town finds itself in five different countries within 75 years. The novel’s title points to the hybridity of identities in Central Europe, where a number of nations and ethnicities commingle in a relatively

from the late-19th Century to the Present,” Intellectual and Cultural Change in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Felix Böllmann and Stefan Jarolimek (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007), 145–160. 16 There is no English translation of the novel yet. 17 Pavol Rankov, “Hraničný prípad – Péter Hunčík – Veľká kniha o Palánku,” Knižná Revue 19 (2011), 11. 18 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

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small space for millennia, and the psychological confusion this might cause under nationalist political ideologies. Pali, one of the many narrators, ponders this: “My father was sixteen and often thought about how it came to be that his father was Slovak, his mother Hungarian and one of his grandfathers was half French” [Apu tizenhat éves volt, és sokszor gondolkodott azon, hogy is van az, hogy az apja szlovák, az anya magyar, az egyik nagyapja meg félig francia] (268). As Enikő Molnár Basa has commented, “through the eyes of the child it becomes clear that the multiethnic mind frame of an earlier age no longer applies; in the post-WorldWar I world, one has to declare an ethnic allegiance no matter how difficult such a declaration might be” (9). The characters’ Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Jewish, Gypsy, and German-sounding names make obvious the region’s transculturality, in spite of the efforts by successive governments to force it to become a monocultural area. Almost everyone in the town has a mixed heritage. For instance, the narrator Feri notes that in his own family different languages are spoken and his grandmother has many Slovak friends (88). His cousin Tomi remembers that his grandmother came from a small Slovak village near Krupina where “in the evenings they played Bach and Czerny and by the kerosene lamp read Jókai, Petőfi, Kollár and Hviezdoslav” [esténként Bachot és Czernyt játszottak, és a petróleumlámpa mellet Jókait, Petőfit, Kollárt és Hviezdoslavot olvastak egymásnak] (192) – i.e., German and Austrian composers and Hungarian and Slovak “national” poets. To reflect the town’s bilingualism, the narrative seamlessly inserts Slovak and Czech sentences into the Hungarian narrative where the characters speak in these languages as an expression of their ethnic identity. This becomes particularly important when the characters speak authentic, emotionally charged political slogans, such as “Češi peši do Prahy, Maďari za Dunaj, Židia do plynu” [The Czechs back to Prague on foot, the Hungarians across the Danube, the Jews to gas chambers], “Na Slovensku po slovensky” [In Slovakia speak in Slovak] or “Česi nám popravili Tisa” [The Czechs have executed our Tiso] (375). The first slogan is from 1939, when the fascist Slovak State, a client state of Nazi Germany, was created. The second slogan is from 1945, when Slovakia defeated fascism and was reincorporated into Czechoslovakia. The third slogan is from 1947, when Jozef Tiso, the fascist president of the Slovak State, was executed as a war criminal by Czechoslovak high court of justice. Here, however, the slogans are re-deployed in a political meeting in May 1968. They show that despite the region’s transculturality, the region has been characterised by violent nationalism and ethnic hatred in an effort to define one’s own identity as pure. The story is narrated by a multiplicity of child narrators (who are distinguished by chapter titles), presenting the reader with the task to untangle the various narratives and bring its frayed ends towards a meaningful story. Their naïve points of view create irony and parody to emphasise the absurdity of the way high politics damages the lives of people by drawing and re-drawing borders based on nationalist ideologies.

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The narrative explicitly describes the situation of the Hungarian-speaking population in Czechoslovakia as colonial: When my father was fourteen they took a school trip on bicycles. Reaching Dunaszerdahely, they realized that all the inhabitants spoke Hungarian. [. . .] Professor Herényi, their scout leader, explained that the entire Csallóköz is Hungarian and that president Beneš deceived the Allies when he demanded this territory. Professor Herényi took the scouts to the settlements whose names ended with the word colony. [. . .] These settlements were inhabited exclusively by Czechs or Slovaks. They were called colonists and in the early 1920s they got free land from the Czechoslovak state. Their only duty was to remain among the Hungarians and Slovakize them. Professor Herényi reassured the boys that healthy Hungarian roots cannot be torn from the Hungarian motherland. [Mikor apu tizennégy éves lett, biciklikirándulásra ment az osztállyal. Lekarikáztak egészen Dunaszerdahelyig, és csak ott vették észre, hogy mindenki magyarul beszél. [. . .] Herényi tanár úr, a cserkészek vezetője elmagyarázta nekik, hogy az egész Csallóköz színmagyar, és Beneš elnök csúnyán rászedte az antant vezetőit, amikor ezt a területet is magának követelte. Herényi tanár úr elvitte a cserkészeket olyan településekre is, amelyek neve úgy végződött, hogy kolónia. [. . .] Ezekben a falucskákban kizárólag cseheg vagy szlovákok laktak. Úgy nevezték őket, hogy kolonisták, és a húszas évek elején ingyen kaptak földet a csehoszlovák államtól. A kolonistáknak csak annyi volt a feladatuk, hogy ott maradjanak a magyarok között, és elszlovákosítsak őket. De Herényi tanár úr megnyugtatta a fiúkat, hogy az egészséges Magyar gyökereket úgysem lehet kiráncigálni a Magyar anyaföldből.] (269)

The passage refers to the region of the Danube Delta as the river spreads out on the Hungarian plain, creating a river island of 1 886 square kilometres that is a major part of the Danubian Flat and has been historically inhabited by the Hungarians. In 1918, the region falls to Czechoslovakia and its Hungarian population becomes an ethnic minority. Even though the Slovak and Czech “colonizers” live in harmony with the Hungarians, the intolerant political attitude of the Czechoslovak state is reflected in the linguistic behaviour of the people: He was like the majority of people in our town. The Hungarians did not want to speak in Slovak, and the Slovaks were unwilling to speak in Hungarian. Each understood exactly what the other said, nodded and shook head, even laughed, but then stubbornly fell silent and refused to say a word in the other language. [Csak ő is olyan volt, mint a városiak többsége. A magyarok nem akartak szlovákul beszélni, a szlovákok meg nem voltak hajlandók magyarul karattyolni. Mindenki pontosan értette, hogy mit mond a másik, bólogatott is neki, a fejét is rázta, néha még nevetett is, aztán megmakacsolta magát, és az istennek sem szólalt meg azon a másik nyelven.] (46)

When the town falls to Hungary after the creation of the Slovak State in 1939, this divides the citizens into two camps: those who experience nationalist joy and those who fear becoming part of fascist Hungary. This makes them feel alienated from their Hungarian identity as they realise they prefer to live in Czechoslovakia. After the war the town is reclaimed by Czechoslovakia and violence ensues once more. Ethnic

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Hungarians are forced to leave for Hungary, and speaking in Hungarian in public is considered an offence. This leads to the blurring of national identities once again: Only those Hungarians who said they were Hungarians only by mistake were not punished by the Slovak administration. These so-called Hungarians confirmed in writing that they had been originally Slovak, and only later Hungarized themselves because they wanted to live better. All of them signed a paper that their previous life did not count and from this day onwards they would be good Slovaks. So these former Hungarians could stay in their houses, but had to change their names and a few details. Lászlo became Ladislav, Pál became Pavol and Erzsébet became Alžbeta. [A szlovák hatóságok csak azokat a magyarokat nem büntették meg, akik kijelentették magukról, hogy ők tévedésből magyarok. Ezek az álmagyarok írásban ismerték el, hogy ők eredetileg szlovákok voltak, csak később magyarosodtak el, mert jobban akartak élni. Mind aláírták azt a papírt, hogy az eddigi életük semmit sem számít, és a következő naptól már jó szlovákok lesznek. Így ezek a volt magyarok maradhattak a házukban, csak a nevüket meg a többi apróságot kellett megváltoztatniuk. Aki eddig László volt, az ezentúl Ladislav lett, a Pálból Pavol, az Erszébetből Alžbeta lett.] (64)

While this can be seen as a colonial suppression of the characters’ ethnic identities, their successful “mimicry”19 of Slovak identity reveals that there is nothing essential about being Slovak and that, in fact, there is nothing essential about being Hungarian, either: they are able to perform both identities as necessitated by political circumstances. Such performance shows that Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community” can work only if there is a unified national narrative. In border regions, whose culturally hybrid populations cannot agree on a single interpretation of history, people’s primary allegiance is typically to their local community rather than the more abstract “nation.” This happens even more when history is kidnapped by political ideologies imposed from above. As Uncle Imre says after three years of World War II, “admittedly, there was one town where I felt at home, but I did not have a homeland anymore” [egy olyan város ugyan volt, ahol otthon éreztem magam, de hazám már évek óta nem volt] (419). However, those characters who refuse to “Slovakize” themselves suffer political persecution based on the “Beneš decrees.”20 In order to avoid having to choose between his Hungarian and his Slovak roots, Géza Nemčak, whose great-grandfather on his mother’s side had been French, decides to declare his nationality as French. Toncsi, a younger member of the family, decides to imitate him. Géza is confident

19 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October: Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28 (1984), 125–133. 20 The decrees declared the “collective guilt” of ethnic Germans and Hungarians in post-war Czechoslovakia and led to the deportation of three million Germans and Hungarians from the lands that had been their homes for centuries. Many of those who were not banished were stripped of citizenship and subject to arbitrary seizure of property and forced labour. The laws were in violation of international human rights.

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that in this way they cannot be deported since “a Frenchman can hardly be deported from the centre of Europe, and the deportation of two Frenchmen would constitute ethnic cleansing” [Egy franciát mégsem lehet kitelepíteni Európa közepéből, két francia kitelepítése meg már etnikai tisztogatásnak számított volna] (302). In this way, the novel problematises exclusionary discourses of who is a true European and who is “almost the same, but not quite,”21 as well as where the centre of Europe lies. By shifting the imaginary centre of Europe from Paris to Ipolyság in southern Slovakia, the narrative demonstrates that the histories of European nations are intensely intertwined. The problem is that big politics does not recognise transnational identities and seeks to lump people into clear-cut national identities so that it can control them. The situation of the Hungarians in socialist Czechoslovakia can be described as internal colonisation, a term that has been popularised by Russian theorist Alexander Etkind to describe the way the Soviet state colonised its own people. As an ethnic minority in Czechoslovakia, which is simultaneously marginalised within Europe, first through the Munich Agreement of 1938, later as part of the “Eastern bloc,” they are multiply marginalised. Even though in 1968 the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia were finally granted equal rights, they continue to be socially discriminated through daily practice, as shown for instance in this passage that mixes Hungarian and Slovak words to again show the commingling of ethnicities in the region (I have highlighted the Slovak expressions in italics): When we played in Léva, they booed us already as we marched onto the football field. They yelled, The Hungarians across the Danube, and In Slovakia speak in Slovak, and Dirty Jews. Only Hungarians are allowed to be abused like this. If they had shouted this at Slovaks, the police would have interfered. The old Lacušan got it worst, because during the match he always stepped beyond the touchline. In Léva someone reached over the fence and struck him on the head with an umbrella. It was no use crying, guys, stop this craziness, I don’t even speak Hungarian! [Amikor Léván játszottunk, már akkor megbunyóztak, amikor még csak mentünk ki a pályára. Azt kiabálták, hogy Maďari za Dunaj, meg hogy Na Slovensku po slovensky, meg Fuuuúj Židia. Ilyeneket csakis a magyarokra szabad mondani, mert ha valaki ilyeket kiabálna a szlovákokra, rögtön közbelépne a csendőrség. Az öreg Lacušan járt a legrosszabbul, mert ő a meccs közben mindig a partvonal mellett szokott sétálni. Léván egy kéz átnyúlt a kerítésen, és az esernyőjével egy jót ráhúzott a fejére. Hiába kiabálta nekik, hogy chlapi, neblbnite, veď ja ani neviem po maďarsky!] (249, my emphasis)

The narrative point of view of the Hungarian minority performs a double decolonising gesture: it shows that the Hungarians are not inconsequential within Czechoslovakia, and that they are not inconsequential within Europe. The novel thus implicitly questions the notion that “Europe” is a Western idea. Imrich

21 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.

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Szatmáry functions in the story as the agent of Hungarian “mental decolonization” whose European identity and activities in top European politics put the region into the actual, not just nominal, centre of Europe. A polyglot who speaks 12 European languages plus fluent Arabic, “Uncle Imre” is simultaneously a Hungarian patriot and a true world citizen. A civil engineer, he escapes from his unhappy wife by travelling around the world, where he builds bridges and roads. His travels – to New Zeland, Mexico, Chile, Patagonia, Taiwan – provide him with a larger perspective on his homeland. During the Second World War he becomes a secret agent and infiltrates big league politics to become part of a plot to remove Hitler. The plot fails because for the British, Eastern and Central Europe were not important enough. This becomes clear during Uncle Imre’s meeting with Churchill (known here only under the satirical initials W. C.): Mr W. C. repeated that for the British, Central Europe is a big nothing. There is nothing interesting for us. I don’t think we would risk the lives of British soldiers for Prague, Vienna or Budapest. [. . .] [T]he Romanians at least have some oil. But the others? Individually they are worth nothing. Maybe if in 1920 they had not shattered the region into bits, now it would have value. But in this way? They will be eaten by Hitler or Stalin. For breakfast. Or rather, as an afternoon snack. The Baltic states? Slovakia? A cocktail snack. [. . .] Had the region remained as one whole, today we would have been sitting here as equals. [. . .] If we help the Hungarians get back their territories, then the Romanians and the Slovaks will hate us and join Hitler. If we help the Romanians, our Hungarian friends will hate us [. . .] In other words, there is no solution. [W. C. úr már a bevezetőjében elismételte, hogy a britek számára Közép-Európa egy nagy semmi. Nincs ott semi, ami bennünket érdekelne. Nem gondolom, hogy brit katonák életét kockáztathatnánk Prága, Bécs vagy Budapest kedvéért. [. . .] Románoknak legalább van némi olajuk. De a többiek? Így küllön- küllön semmit sem érnek. Talán ha kilencszázhúszban nem szabdaljuk szét ezt a terséget, akkor most volna értéke annak a földnek. De így? Vagy Hitler vagy Sztálin fogja őket felzabálni. Reggelire. Vagy Inkább uzsonnára. A balti államok? Vagy Szlovákia? Alig egy falat. [. . .] Igen, ha egyben maradt volna ez térség, akkor most úgy ülnénk itt, mint kolléga a kollégával. [. . .] Ha segítünk a magyaroknak visszaszerezni az őket illető területeket, akkor a románok meg a szlovákok fognag gyűlölni minket, és odaállnak Hitler mellé. Ha a románokat támogatjuk, akkor a magyar barátaink bennünket is úgy fognak gyűlölni [. . .] Szóval, nincs megoldás.] (292–293)

Churchill’s imperial logic divides Europe into “important” and “unimportant” nations on the European “periphery.” Uncle Imre rejects this way of thinking: for him, Europe is one whole, and denying this will have transnational consequences. Subversively, he excludes both Churchill and Stalin from the European identity: “And so in 1945 Europe was divided by two politicians, neither of whom knew or liked Europe. Indeed, neither was a European. One was a Georgian patriarch and the other a lord from the islands” [És így negyvenötben tényleg két olyan politikus osztozkodott Európán, akik közül egyik sem ismerte és szerette Európát. Sőt, egyikük sem volt európai. Egy grúz pópa, meg egy szigetlakó lord] (283). Contesting Churchill’s point of view, the novel portrays Central Europe as the epicentre of both

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world wars, which makes it the actual centre of Europe. It shakes up the Western idea of European identity as invented by the French, German, and British and the East-West dichotomy constructed by the Yalta Conference. It suggests that small nations such as the Hungarians are culturally as much European as the big nations, only they are less visible because of their minor languages: Uncle Feri argued that everything important exists also in Hungarian and Batsányi and Vörösmarty are in no way inferior to Martial and Virgil. They are unknown because nobody knows our language. That is our tragedy. Petőfi is a greater poet than Béranger; however, every educated gentleman knows French poetry, while only we Hungarians know Hungarian poetry. [Feri bácsi azt magyarázta nekünk, hogy minden, ami fontos, az megvan magyarul is, és Batsányi meg Vörösmarty semmivel sem marad el Martialis és Vergilius mögott. Nem ismerik őket, mert senki sem ismeri a mi nyelvünket. Ez a mi tragédiánk. Petőfi nagyobb költő, mint Béranger, csakhogy a francia költészetet minden jól nevelt úriember ismeri, a magyart meg csak mi, magyarok.] (298)

Uncle Imre is a true European whose allegiance to his Hungarian identity is not in conflict with his allegiance to Europe. His multiple cover names as a secret agent – Tomaj, James Allbridge, Count Bodoli from Albania, Gordon Brown, Sat Mary – symbolise his multiple identities. He is able to converse about Marlowe and Mann, modern painting and Wagner’s music, the construction of hanging bridges, and the migration of seals. He makes a linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets to prove that they represent European, rather than English values (333). His transnational identity is reflected also in his advice to his grandson: “You will only become a citizen in the true sense of the word when you get to know all the roots of Europe reaching down to the sea floor and all its flowers, from Athens to Warsaw [. . .] Only then will you be able to decide who you are” [Csak akkor válhatsz igazi polgárrá, ha ismered Európa tengerbe nyúló gyökereit és minden virágát, Áthentól egészen Varsóig [. . .] Csak ezután tudsz dönteni, hogy ki is vagy valójában.] (298) Uncle Imre’s cosmopolitanism is an ethical position of being curious about other cultures. He spends 12 years travelling around the capitals of Europe explaining to influential people that “if we unite, we can save Europe” [de ha összefogunk, még megmenthettjük Európát] (414). Unfortunately, his optimistic vision for a stable Central Europe does not take into consideration that history revolves around the irrational hatred of those marked as “others.” Indeed, the only time the Slovaks and Hungarians unite in solidarity is around their shared hatred of the Jews: “He suggested that the Hungarians and the Slovaks together discuss the Jewish question. Géza Bárány explained that since we Hungarians live here as a minority, without the brotherly help of the Slovak majority we can never solve our Jewish question” [Ebben azt javasolta neki, hogy a magyarok és a szlovákok agyütt tárgyalják meg a zsidókérdést. Bárány Géza elmagyarázta, hogy mivel mi, magyarok kisebbségben élünk, a szlovák többség testvéri kéznyújtása nélkül sohasem fogjuk megoldani a zsidókérdésünket”] (438). Colonialism is shown to be not the exclusive practice of big

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and powerful nations: any nation, however small, is prone to oppress its others against whom it defines itself. In this way, the novel decolonises historiography of the region, exposing the martyr discourse of both Hungarian and Slovak nationalism as incomplete truth.

4 Conclusion As twenty-first-century Hungarian-language literature from Slovakia comes to terms with the violent twentieth-century history in which nationalist discourses led to internal colonisation, deportation, genocide, and ethnic hatred against the Hungarian minority, it becomes increasingly post-national, postcolonial and postmodern. Focusing on multicultural, multiethnic, and transnational communities, it suggests that the “nation,” especially in a Central European context, is a vague, unstable, and fluid concept that has been imposed from above. The nation, in the sense of an “imagined community,” as seen for instance in Uncle Feri’s promotion of Hungarian poetry, becomes in the twentieth century perverted through exclusivist politics that seek to create monocultural nation-states. As a result, a unified, chronological, progressive narrative of the nation is no longer possible. Both Grendel and Hunčík use a multitude of unreliable narrators who relate random events from the past in no particular order and reach no conclusion. The meaning of the nation can only be found in the larger picture composed of the fragments. As my reading has shown, the contemporary Hungarian-language novel from Slovakia has become firmly part of postmodern, post-totalitarian European literature that is concerned with dismantling totalising nationalist narratives and recovering forgotten histories. By performing transnationality through its characters, plots, and narrative styles, it overcomes national identifications, embracing instead the idea of Europe with all its contradictions, which includes both democratic as well as totalitarian traditions. Europe here includes “Central” as well as “Eastern” Europe and all of these are seen to contribute to the European philosophical and political traditions such as nationalism, liberal democracy, socialism, fascism, colonialism, bolshevism, and Stalinism. Understanding the transactions out of which this transnational poetics arises is crucial for describing contemporary literature from Slovakia and for conceptualising new developments in Central European literature.

Kai Wiegandt

Transnational Migrant Fiction as World Literature: Identity, Translatability, and the Global Book Market Abstract: In recent decades, a new literary genre written mainly by authors from the Global South living in North America and Europe has emerged. Mostly written in English, but also in French, German, and other languages, the (graphic) novels and stories of the genre describe the formation of migrant identities that do not primarily rely on nationality – neither on the original nationality nor on that affiliated with the destination country. Instead, these identities are formed by a variety of almost equal factors such as the birthplace of one’s parents, one’s place of residence, work, language, education, lifestyle, and culture. In this transnational migration fiction, the creation of identity resembles a collage of cultural elements from both the home and target cultures, between which the authors often oscillate. Discussing Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, this chapter demonstrates how the modelling of identity in transnational migrant fiction is related to the function of the genre in the global book market: transnational migrant fiction is read around the world because it provides insights into foreign cultures, which makes it a particular kind of world literature as defined by David Damrosch. The genre’s success is partly due to the way that it meets Western readers’ sensibilities halfway. It suggests a continuity between the world of the Western reader with the foreign culture. Thematically, this continuity is suggested by conflicts that exist across national borders, such as social inequality and discrimination based on ethnicity and gender. This creates the impression of a general human situation, the local characteristics of which remain translatable.

1 Introduction In recent decades, a new literary genre written mainly by authors from the Global South living in North America and Europe has emerged. Mostly written in English, but also in French, German, and other languages, the (graphic) novels and stories of the genre describe the formation of migrant identities that do not primarily rely on nationality – neither on the original one nor on that of the country of destination. Instead, these identities are formed by a variety of almost equal factors such as parents’ birthplace, place of residence, work, language, education, lifestyle, and culture. I propose the name ‘transnational migrant fiction’ for this genre, in which ‘transnational’ refers to the type of identity formation that is presented in the texts. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-012

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In other words, I use the term ‘transnational’ for a type of consciousness or selfdescription of characters. Such a use of the term can be differentiated, according to Steven Vertovec, from uses referring to a social formation (such as diaspora, or any group that coheres across national boundaries), a mode of cultural reproduction (the blending of styles and subjects associated with particular nationalities), an avenue of capital (principally for companies operating across several nations), a site of political engagement (for non-governmental organisations such as the Red Cross or the United Nations), and a (re)construction of ‘place’ or locality (a changed relationship to space due to media such as the telephone and the internet). These uses of the transnational are not mutually exclusive, as some rely on others,1 but their differentiation helpfully highlights the diverse phenomena to which the term ‘transnational’ has been applied, and the potential misunderstandings and unwarranted conflations invited by such diverse uses.2 As can be expected, transnational consciousness and self-description of migrant characters in fiction – what I call their transnational identity – often coincides with the transnational identity of the authors of such fiction and is therefore related to a social formation that exists across national boundaries. The transnational identities of characters in transnational migrant fiction are also related to the mixing in these works of styles and subjects associated with particular nationalities. As I will show, however, the transnational identities exhibited by the fictional characters are highly relevant to the reception of this genre among its readers predominantly from the Global North: the particular type of identity formation is crucial to the genre’s specific function in the global book market dominated by the Global North. That is why I define transnational migrant fiction as a (graphic) novel or story that is centrally concerned with transnational migrant identities. While transnational migrant fiction can theoretically be written by writers without migration background, or by migrants who have not developed a transnational sensibility, texts of this genre are typically written by authors who have migrated or whose families have a migration background, and who have themselves developed a transnational identity.3

1 See Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009), 4–12 2 A further problem is that ‘transnational’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘international,’ ‘multinational,’ ‘global,’ ‘diasporic,’ and other terms. Also, it is sometimes suggested that all migrants engage in transnationalism. In fact, however, even within specific groups, there is great variation in migrants’ border-crossing practices (see Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism, 17). 3 For novels of migration written by writers without migration background, see Marcus Hartner and Ralf Schneider, “British Novels of Migration and the Construction of Transnational Mental Spaces,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 63.4 (2015), 412.

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In transnational migrant fiction, identity formation resembles a collage of cultural elements of home and target culture between which the protagonists often commute – just like most authors of transnational migrant fiction themselves. The text corpus includes Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which can be considered the first globally successful work in the genre, as well as novels and stories by Chimamanda Adichie, Taiye Selasi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru, Khaled Hosseini, Mohsin Hamid, Marjane Satrapi, Calixthe Beyala, Ilja Trojanow, Terézia Mora, Teju Cole, Aleksandar Hemon, and many others.

2 Socio-economic background and current approaches to transnational migrants in literary studies It is helpful to consider some socio-economic factors facilitating the emergence of transnational migrant fiction. There is, first, the fact that from the 1960s on, large numbers of highly skilled Africans and South Asians emigrated to the Global North in pursuit of higher education and professional opportunities. In the case of Africa, between 1960 and 1975 around 27 000 highly skilled persons left for the North. Between 1975 and 1984, the number was already 40 000, by 1987 it had doubled again, representing about 30 percent of Africa’s highly skilled manpower. Many of the children of these Africans were born and raised in the Global North and then sent to Africa for re-acculturation. Some were raised in Africa and went on to universities in the Global North. In this way, a whole generation of young, ‘transnational’ Africans has emerged.4 Similar dynamics of migration, as well as the emergence of transnational identities, occurred in South Asian countries such as India and Pakistan. The novelist Mohsin Hamid, for example, grew up in the United States as the son of a Pakistani academic who had moved to Stanford. Hamid later re-migrated to Lahore with his family, studied in the United States, and today divides his time between London, Lahore, and the United States. Like Hamid, many writers of transnational migrant fiction come from families who either belonged to the elite of their home countries or who became part of a middle class abroad. More recently, the growth of a middle class in South Asia and Africa has allowed ever greater numbers of people to work abroad either temporarily or permanently. India’s rise as an industrial and service economy, for example, has since the 1980s led to rising incomes for a proportionally small but altogether sizeable part of

4 See Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?),” LIP Magazine (Africa edition), 2 March 2005.

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the population,5 and has led to a growing number of Indian students attending universities in Great Britain and the United States. In countries across Africa, a middle class has been growing rapidly since the millennium when, according to Achille Mbembe, the continent became the “last frontier of capitalism.”6 Real GDP rose by 4.9 percent per year from 2000 through 2008, more than twice its pace in the 1980s and 1990s. From $9 billion in 2000, foreign direct investment increased to $62 billion in 2008, generating jobs and raising incomes. Over the last 15 years, a broad base of middle-class consumers has emerged: 40 percent of the continent’s one billion people live in cities now, a proportion roughly comparable to China’s and larger than India’s. In 2000, roughly 59 million households on the continent had $5 000 or more in income. By 2014, the number of such households had reached 106 million. Today, Africa already has more middle-class households (defined as those with incomes of $20 000 or more) than India.7 In South Asia as well as in Africa, the rise of a middle class has reinforced, rather than capped, migration to the Global North in order to study or for professional reasons, as migration to the Global North has from its beginnings been a viable option predominantly for those who could afford it. The growth of a middle class in Asia and Africa has thus furthered the formation of transnational identities, and ultimately also of transnational migrant fiction. Bill Ashcroft has recently drawn attention to the insufficiency of traditional notions of diaspora and exile when applied to the new transnational migrants.8 The idea that immigrants cannot be fully accepted in their country of destination tends not to apply to the third wave of the professional transnational migrants mentioned above. In 1991 William Safran introduced a notion of diaspora that was based on absence and loss, alienation and not-at-homeness,9 and this definition has remained influential in postcolonial studies. The experience of exile and loss does not accurately describe the conditions of all diasporic subjects, however, nor of any subject all the time. Nor does it take into consideration the rapidly increasing ability to travel back and forth between ‘homes’ which is one of the salient features of contemporary global culture. The biographies of writers and artists increasingly testify to the new complications. Consider, for example, Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang, Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, Malaysian-American writer Shirley Lim, South African-Australian novelist J. M. Coetzee, Cuban-Russian-American writer

5 See Jaumotte et al., Asia Rising: A Sectoral Perspective (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2007), 4–18. 6 Achille Mbembe, “Africa in the New Century,” The Massachusetts Review 57.1 (2016), 96. 7 See Achille Mbembe, “Africa in the New Century,” 96–97, and Tom Jackson, “The Rising Middle Class, and Yes It Matters,” New African Magazine 1 (2016), 44–45. 8 Bill Ashcroft, “Globalization, Transnation and Utopia,” Locating Transnational Ideals, ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 18. 9 William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1.1 (1991), 83–99.

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José Manuel Prieto, and Chinese-Dutch-Indonesian-Australian cultural theorist Ien Ang. These are not members of a group who feel displaced, who feel that return is difficult or even impossible, or who identify in various symbolic or ethnic ways with a diasporic community. Nevertheless, they are incapable of completely identifying with any one nation or one ethnic, cultural, or immigrant group. In 2005, the Ghanaian-Nigerian-American novelist Taiye Selasi coined the term ‘Afropolitanism’ in a widely circulated essay to characterise a recent generation of Africans and their sense of home and identity. Her remarks speak to the situation of other transnational migrant groups while illustrating a specifically African side of globalisation. “Home,” Selasi writes, “for [Afropolitans] is many things: where their parents are from; where they go for vacation; where they went to school; where they see old friends; where they live (or live this year). Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many.”10 The model of cultural hybridity Selasi proposes for the Afropolitans could be termed ‘critical collage’: they salvage from African traditions the parts that seem valuable to them while acknowledging and trying to get rid of what they believe to be shortcomings in those traditions. Centrally, these adolescent Africans forge a sense of self from disparate sources, including language, education, lifestyle, and culture. Selasi names culture as the field most fraught with ambivalence and vagueness. While culture and transnational culture are particularly complex concepts,11 one reason for Selasi’s perception of vagueness in ‘culture’ seems to be that she does not consider class as a factor amongst others that determines who can be part of a particular community and which kinds of ‘homes’ are possible. My hypothesis is that recent transnational migrant fiction stages privileges of a specific class when it stages nomadism, plurality of homes, and a global imaginary characterised by heterogeneity, hybridity, and fluidity. While academic criticism has discussed these authors under rubrics such as Afropolitanism and cosmopolitanism, I argue that it is pertinent to go beyond those -isms to grasp the function of transnational migrant fiction in the global book market.

10 Taiye Selasi, “Bye Bye Babar.” 11 See Frank Schulze-Engler, “Introduction,” Transnational English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), ix–xvi, and “Transnationale Kulturen als Herausforderung für die Literaturwissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 50 (2002), 65–79.

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3 Two recent examples and a forerunner: Adichie’s Americanah, Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, and Rushdie’s Satanic Verses To give a concrete impression of identity formation in the genre, I would like to refer briefly to two examples from 2013: Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie and Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi, both of which are complex, multi-perspectival novels that have achieved bestseller status in Europe and North America. Published in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, Americanah is about the protagonist Ifemelu who, having immigrated to the United States from Nigeria, enjoys economic success working as a writer whose blog about her life as a “non-American black” leads to speaking engagements and to a fellowship at Princeton. Even though much of the novel takes place in the lead-up to Obama’s first election, the economic meltdown that became central to that election – and which challenged the viability of freelance writing – is of little concern to the novel’s heroine. Her writing career promises success for as long as she chooses to pursue it. However, Ifemelu decides not to continue in her occupation. She returns to Nigeria as an ‘Americanah,’ i.e. as someone who is neither Nigerian nor US-American, a hybrid subject who is not only beyond any single nation but beyond nationality as such. In 1986, Fredric Jameson argued that “third-world texts,” no matter how invested in the “private” or the “libidinal,” project “a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”12 This is not true of Adichie’s novel. Ifemelu is economically independent in Nigeria as well as in the United States. No national allegory is being developed of Nigerian backwardness as a result of global capitalism.13 At the heart of the novel is discrimination based on ethnicity and gender as a transnational problem. Ghana Must Go resembles Adichie’s novel in this regard. Selasi’s novel is about the four siblings Olu, Kehinde, Taiwo, and Sadie born and growing up in the United States as children of a Ghanaian father and a Nigerian-Scottish mother. One son is an internationally successful painter, another a doctor like the father. The daughters studied at Oxford or Yale. The trauma that shakes the family is the sudden disappearance of the father Kweku back to his native Ghana after his clinic fired him. An old-established and wealthy Boston family had sued the clinic after Kweku unsuccessfully operated on their irrecoverably ill relative. The family knows that Kweku is not to blame, and that racism played a role in his firing. For fear of not being able to feed the family after her husband’s disappearance, the mother, Fola, 12 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986), 69. 13 Katherine Hallemeier, “‘To Be from the Country of People who Gave’: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah,” Studies in the Novel 47.2 (2015), 233–235.

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places a daughter and a son in the care of an uncle in the Nigerian capital Lagos. The uncle abuses the children, who are brought back to the United States. Years later the family members, now scattered across the United States, are informed that their father died in Ghana. The siblings and their mother travel there, and the wounds of sexual assault and racism break open again, but can now at least partly heal. The siblings return to the United States in the knowledge that their own history is inseparably linked to their Ghanaian and Nigerian roots. In this novel, too, racism is a central issue, again as a transnational problem: the title of the novel alludes to the expulsion of Ghanaian refugees from Nigeria in 1983. The abuse of children by the uncle, in turn, is presented as an extreme form of patriarchal abuse as it can be found all over the world. The knowledge of this omnipresence helps the siblings to come to terms with the past. The feeling of homelessness that plagued the emigrated parents in the United States is transformed into a transnational consciousness that, like Adichie’s Ifemelu, bears humanistic features in the sense of a belief in universal human abilities and flaws, of universal human qualities expressing themselves in racism as well as in the ability to find a home anywhere. While their grandparents and parents fought for independence against British colonisers under the banner of Ghanaian and Nigerian nationalism, or fled Africa, Adichie’s and Selasi’s transnational protagonists, commuting between cultures and making a name for themselves on the internet, emerge victoriously from the struggles for equality and anti-discrimination fought all over the world. The characters of transnational migrant fiction typically move, often repetitively, in the circular pattern A to B to A, rather than in the teleological pattern that characterises fictions of exile: once from A to B. Some of the characters of Americanah and Ghana Must Go move from Nigeria/Ghana to the United States and back, some from the United States to Nigeria/Ghana and back. This shuttling back and forth between worlds also characterises Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the first globally successful work of transnational migrant fiction. Rushdie’s novel begins with the Indian Muslims Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha travelling from India to London, but what follows is not a tale of exile (although Chamcha’s deportation in England at first makes the reader expect such a tale) but one of return to India, and ultimately the realisation that England and India are equally home to the protagonists and part of their respective identities. The protagonists’ travelling between worlds is first essential to the emergence of their transnational identity, and then becomes a symptom of this identity. Whereas ‘global’ novels such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) or ‘global’ films such as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) switch to and fro between characters rooted and remaining in different continents, the reader of transnational migrant fiction experiences different worlds and their merging in the single consciousnesses of the protagonists: Chamcha and Farishta in The Satanic Verses, Ifemelu in Americanah, and Olu, Kehinde, Taiwo, and Sadie in Ghana Must Go. Perhaps no feature better illustrates the transnational identity of the characters than the airport and airplane scenes so often to be found in transnational migrant

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fiction – so much so that I leave the bird’s-eye view of this chapter for some close views. In most novels, the time spent by characters waiting at airports or sitting on airplanes is omitted by the narrative (ellipsis); the beginning of a new paragraph or chapter signals that the characters have travelled and arrived. In transnational migrant fiction, by contrast, airports and airplanes are more than places of transit named only to explain how characters move from A to B: they are spatial expressions of the characters’ transnational identities precisely because people waiting at airports or sitting on airplanes are in-between places – no longer ‘here’ and not yet ‘there.’ While these ‘non-places’ relieve travellers with national identities of their ordinary identities by reducing them to the role of passengers,14 airports and airplanes symbolise an important part of transnational migrants’ selves. It is no coincidence that Rushdie’s Satanic Verses begins with a scene in midair in which the protagonists Farishta and Chamcha are presented as different incarnations of identities in-between India and Britain. There is an explosion, the plane breaks apart. Farishta and Chamcha, in a marvellously drawn-out fall from the sky, are transformed into creatures in whom the interrelated oppositions ‘native’ and ‘foreign,’ ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘English’ and ‘Indian’ are all mixed up, and whose miraculous survival of the fall allows them to escape the British immigration officers waiting at the airport, tasked with keeping British and non-British apart: Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts – mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. [. . .] ‘O, my shoes are Japanese,’ Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, ‘These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that.’ [. . .] Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.15

As nationalist ideas (“land, belonging, home”) dissolve into thin air, Gibreel Farishta’s exalted song tells of a transnational being who is literally above any nation because he is made up of any number of (Japanese, English, Russian, Indian . . .) national features. The men’s transmutation into transnational beings goes hand in hand with a mixing of Hindu and Muslim faiths. In the course of the novel, the crucial difference between Farishta and Chamcha will be that Farishta wants to remain the same person while he cannot, whereas Chamcha embraces his accidental hybridity and makes it part of his

14 See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 96–111. 15 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Random House, 2008), 4–5.

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self-description. While both men become hybrids, only Chamcha is the incarnation of the transnational migrant. The airport scenes in Americanah do not have a religious dimension, but as in Rushdie’s novel, they are instrumental to the depiction of emerging transnational identities. Adichie uses these scenes to juxtapose the fates of the protagonist Ifemelu and Obinze, the man she loves; a juxtaposition reminiscent of the pair Farishta and Chamcha. However, the crucial difference between Ifemelu and Obinze is not that one embraces and the other rejects transnational identity. While Ifemelu’s professional achievements allow her to become part of the transnational elite that Selasi dubbed Afropolitan, and to fly back and forth between the United States and Lagos, Obinze remains tied to those in power in Lagos even as he moves to London. He remains Nigerian regardless of where he lives. Finally, he is apprehended to be deported to Lagos. The scene of deportation is, of course, again an airport, first Manchester Airport, then Heathrow Airport, finally Lagos Airport16 – the same infrastructure that enables Afropolitans like Ifemelu to live their lives largely untroubled by national boundaries.17 In Ghana Must Go, Fola, the mother, waits at a US airport, boards a plane and arrives in Africa to be picked up by her children.18 Most of the long scene is taken up by memories of when she first arrived in the United States and other experiences. Although Fola remembers these things while waiting in the transnational zone of the airport and while floating mid-air, her memories reveal that she is torn between her African origin and the United States. In this way, the airport and airplane scenes contrast the generation of Fola and Kweku Sai, who never developed transnational identities, with the generation of their transnational children awaiting Fola in the country from which she hails. The contrast between transnational and nationally inflected identities also illustrated by Adichie is given a temporal dimension in Selasi’s portrait of two generations of a family. However, one feature is common to the airport and airplane scenes of Rushdie’s, Adichie’s, and Selasi’s novels: the airport’s and the airplane’s function as a topographical correlative of transnational migrants’ identities.

4 Transnational migrant fiction and postcolonial theory Transnational migrant fiction portrays a growing but altogether still small group of migrants from the Global South to the Global North. If there is one genre that

16 See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (New York: Knopf, 2012), 280–284. 17 See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, 103–106. 18 Taiye Selasi, Ghana Must Go (London: Penguin, 2013), 196–203.

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dramatises what prominent representatives of postcolonial theory have diagnosed since the mid-1990s, it is transnational migrant fiction. Its earliest representative, Salman Rushdie, celebrates hybridity in novels such as Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s collection of essays Imaginary Homelands (1992) makes a plea against the self-ghettoisation of diasporic cultures: if nations, according to Benedict Anderson, are imagined and narrated communities, then the ‘home’ of migrants depends on narratives that can be altered and even created by the migrants themselves.19 In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi K. Bhabha has made valuable contributions to the theorising of globalisation by not equating it with modernisation premised on a teleological idea of universal progress; yet the insufficiency of the whole school of theories stressing cultural globalisation becomes apparent when one considers what Bhabha shares with Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996). Both influential theorists too optimistically suggested that culture has superseded the nation as provider of communal ties, and that culture can transcend borders and create a potentially global community. Appadurai suggested that fluid, deterritorialised ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes have superseded the nation.20 In all of these -scapes, imagination has acquired the status of a world-changing facticity, as the -scapes are themselves “imagined worlds.”21 Literature and other mediascapes (television, portable music, the internet) provide large reservoirs of images and narratives from around the planet, condensing the world.22 Bhabha too sweepingly welcomed globalisation for a similar reason: the creation of “a global or transnational imaginary and its ‘cosmopolitan subjectivities.’”23 Bhabha and Appadurai argued that in a globalising world migration contributes to the replacement of homogeneous national identities by hybrid, culturally shaped identities. Until now, the vast majority of literary scholars have read English-language transnational migrant fiction through the eyes of such postcolonial theories. The novels thus appear as confirmations of an era of cultural hybridity heralded by theory and in turn become the preferred subjects of literary studies. Neil Lazarus has recently shown how postcolonial theory based on poststructuralist assumptions has, since the mid-1990s, exalted hybridity, migrancy, liminality, and multiculturality, and resisted a struggle-based model of history and politics. According to Lazarus, the dominance of postcolonial theories such as Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and Appadurai’s Modernity at Large has led to a

19 Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1992), 9–21. 20 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 31–33. 21 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33. 22 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33–36. 23 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 204.

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restricted canon of works that are discussed in postcolonial criticism. The most canonical of these works, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, have tirelessly been read as portrayals of migrancy, instability, the malleability of history, and hybridity.24 In consequence, academic criticism has tended to treat transnational migrant fiction as postcolonial literature par excellence. The founders of postcolonial critique such as Frantz Fanon, and some of its prominent exponents today such as Robert C. Young and Lazarus, regarded and regard as the essence of postcolonial literature an engagement with the lasting effects of the colonial past in the nations of the Global South. In transnational migrant fiction, however, these effects play a subordinate role at best. Decisively non-transnational novels from the Global South that critically deal with the local effects of colonialism have received comparatively little attention in English academic discourse.25 It must be repeated that the literary representation of identities is not necessarily linked to the identity of the authors themselves. Some authors from the Global South who have long lived in countries such as France or Great Britain and who could be said to have developed transnational identities write novels that can be described as postcolonial in the sense of Young or Lazarus. Think of the novel Partir by MoroccanFrench writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, which deals with young Moroccans who want to get to Europe at all costs, or Maps for Lost Lovers, a novel by the Pakistani-British author Nadeem Aslam about the radicalised Pakistani diaspora in Britain. What escapes Lazarus in his critique of what Bhabha and Appadurai consider canonical postcolonial fiction is the fact that these texts are almost always about migration, whereas the novels Lazarus identifies as postcolonial rarely are. If migration is an issue in what Lazarus considers postcolonial fiction, it is presented as an experience of loss and exile, not as an occasion for the formation of hybrid identities. Due to the importance of nationalism for decolonisation, the focus in postcolonial fiction is usually on the national context. Young notes, similar to Lazarus, that novels and graphic novels like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000) should not be called postcolonial simply because they provide the reader a view of Afghanistan or Iran from the perspective of emigrants to the Global North. Rather, these (graphic) novels are apolitical literature that offers the Global South to readers from the Global North in easily digestible form.26 Yet Young, too, ignores the fact that the genre to which novels like The Kite Runner and Persepolis belong can be defined much more concisely than he and Lazarus do: as transnational migrant fiction.

24 See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21–23. 25 See Neil Lazarus, Postcolonial Unconscious, 36–59. 26 Robert J. C. Young, “World Literature and Postcolonialism,” The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (New York: Routledge, 2013), 213–216.

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5 Relationship between textual qualities and function in the market Genres are rarely invented by academics. They emerge and assert themselves in the book market. The preferences of readers, advertising strategies of publishers, and the media reporting on books all play important roles in this process. However, qualities of form and content of books – their literary qualities – remain important for the development of genres. Textual analysis and literary sociology have often been conducted separately, but can, I believe, be fruitfully brought into conversation with each other. In the case of transnational migrant fiction, it even seems necessary to relate its textual qualities and its role in the global book market to each other in order to understand the genre. My thesis is that transnational migrant fiction fulfils a specific function in the global book market dominated by the Global North. This function hinges on receptive attitudes of readers and the marketing strategies of publishers, but also on a central quality of the genre itself: its presentation of a transnational form of identity formation. Writing in 2001, Simon Gikandi made the point that what made India or Africa accessible to an Anglo-American audience in the work of Salman Rushdie and Ngugi wa Thiong’o was not any rendering of first-hand experience of Indian or African cities but the fact that these postcolonial writers – as well as theorists like Bhabha and Spivak – went through the colonial or English university system: this made their worldviews more similar than the obvious differences between these writers and theorists would suggest.27 The educational background acquired in the Global North led to an approximation of worldviews not only among the authors, but also between them and their readers in the Global North, who simultaneously got to know foreign countries in the novels and recognised their own ways of seeing and reflecting on the world. According to this line of argument, novels like The Satanic Verses are an expression of globalisation and at the same time address aesthetic preferences and expectations of the Global North. The forms and also the reasons for the relative accessibility to readers from the Global North of today’s transnational migrant fiction differ in some respects from the works written by the authors mentioned by Gikandi. Transnational migrant fiction today fulfils a function in the global book market that Rushdie and others first had to create. The global book market, with its traditional centres in London, New York, Frankfurt, and a few other places in the northern hemisphere, has found a taste for the genre and is now actively promoting the production of such works. While transnational migrant fiction has been called cosmopolitan fiction from the outset, other terms suggest that the genre has become more diverse. Selasi’s term

27 Simon Gikandi, “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001), 653.

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‘Afropolitan’ for the group of young, highly educated Africans who work all over the world and no longer have a traditional home but are at home in many places has been used to describe Americanah and Ghana Must Go. This term for a cosmopolitanism with African roots aptly emphasises that this is African fiction beyond the description of crisis and a victim perspective, as Susanne Gehrmann has shown with reference to the reflections of Achille Mbembe and Simon Gikandi.28 What the term ‘Afropolitan’ does not highlight, however, is the specific function of this subgenre, and of transnational migrant fiction in general, in the global book market. The term refers above all to the production of novels and stories, i.e. to the authors who present their experiences and worldviews in them, as is commonly assumed. Focusing on the reception of the novels and stories, it becomes clear that the role of transnational migrant fiction in the book market is linked to the cosmopolitan and Afropolitan outlook of the novels and stories. Timothy Brennan has argued that, on the one hand, readers in the Global North have developed a taste for cosmopolitan narratives, but that on the other hand these narratives, informed by enlightened humanism and focusing on apparently universal human problems, testify to their authors’ will to finally break away from topics such as national liberation and decolonisation.29 But what exactly makes the cosmopolitanism of migrants from the Global South attractive? Arguably, the demonstrated abilities to cope with adverse circumstances and, unlike the generation of grandparents, to be at home everywhere today. At least as much, however, it is what these abilities imply about the idea of ‘foreign culture’ as such: the idea that cultures can almost without loss be translated into and made intelligible to one another. Transnational migrant fiction suggests that there is a perspective that covers near perfectly both the familiar and the foreign: the perspective of transnational migrants.

28 Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), 224–225. Simon Gikandi, “On Afropolitanism,” Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore, ed. Jennifer Wawrzinek and J. K. S. Makokha (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 9. Susanne Gehrmann has argued that the term preserves this liberating potential even though some critics accuse the Afropolitan subgenre of being an unpolitical genre of economically privileged individuals. Not only is the subgenre uncritical of globalised capitalism, these critics argue, but it affirms it by portraying its protagonists as successful players in this market (see Gehrmann, “Cosmopolitanism with African Roots: Afropolitanism’s Ambivalent Mobilities”, Journal of African Cultural Studies 28.1 (2016), 62). It is questionable, however, to reproach economically privileged persons for writing books, and to reproach authors with African roots for not writing political books. What is certain is that transnational migrant fiction refrains from lending central influence to identity-forming factors such as nationality or ethnicity, but that many of its authors (and their characters) are quite homogeneous in terms of social class and education: they belong to the middle class and are highly educated. 29 Timonth Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Boston, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 39–40.

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6 ‘World literature’ instead of ‘Afropolitan’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ literature The term ‘world literature,’ as defined by David Damrosch in his influential study What Is World Literature? (2003), comes closer to this function of transnational migrant fiction than do ‘Afropolitanism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism.’ World literature, according to Damrosch, are works that spread and are read beyond the place of their origin.30 These works spread beyond their place of origin for different reasons. Some do because they are recognised as masterpieces, others because their translation opens up new horizons of meaning.31 Others do because they offer readers insight into foreign worlds.32 Goethe already had the latter characteristic in mind when he wrote, “national literature does not say much now; the era of world literature is at hand and everyone must now work to accelerate its arrival.”33 Goethe saw great value in works that offered vivid impressions of foreign continents, regardless of these works’ aesthetic achievement. Not only is transnational migrant fiction enjoying global appeal as one of the booming genres in the global book market dominated by the North.34 Reviews of Ghana Must Go and Americanah in British, US-American, and German newspapers also suggest that their popularity is due to the fact that the genre is read as world literature in the sense of a travel guide to foreign worlds, and that the genre can apparently also be read as such. The reviews repeatedly praise that insight into Africa is provided by authors who know how people in Europe and North America see the world. The Guardian praises Ghana Must Go in the following words: “The overriding issue of poverty is rescued from facelessness by her description of Kweku’s little sister dying of treatable TB on a raffia mat with her eyes glinting [. . .]. But the consciousness of this novel is also firmly grounded in the West, in America, in the rootlessness passed down through generations of immigrants and interpreted in myriad subjectivities.”35 The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also counts the cosmopolitan perspective on both Africa and the Global North among the advantages of Ghana Must Go: “A remarkable narrative power and Selasi’s skilful handling of the exotic attractions of African culture make this novel an exciting read. At the

30 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4–5. 31 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 289. 32 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 15. 33 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, Hg. Christoph Michel (Deutscher Klassiker Verlag: Frankfurt, 1999), 224, my translation. 34 See Emily Apter, “On Translation in a Global Market,” Public Culture 13.1 (2001), 6–12; Corine Elizabeth Tachtiris, Branding World Literature: The Global Circulation of Authors in Translation (University of Michigan: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2012), 103–209; Gisele Sapiro, “Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France,” Poetics 38 (2010), 430–437. 35 Diane Evans, “Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi – review,” The Guardian, 3 April 2013.

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same time, this remarkable book is the novel to the essay [. . .].” (The essay mentioned above is meant.) But, the reviewer continues, “in addition to chic world-Africanism, Selasi also has her eye on the concrete realities of Africa.”36 Transnational migrant fiction, these comments suggest, meets readers in the Global North halfway in its presentation of foreign worlds. The genre suggests a continuity of the Global South with the Global North, between the local here and the local there, an in-between whose authenticity is certified by the transnational authors’ successful commuting and mental oscillation between continents and cultures. Thematically, this continuity is suggested by conflicts that exist across national borders, such as social inequality or discrimination based on ethnicity and gender. This creates the impression of a human condition whose local characteristics can be translated to each other. Again, the reviews attest to this impression. The reviewer of the Süddeutsche Zeitung writes: “Selasi’s heroes and heroines are Afropolitans, cosmopolitan and highly gifted. But it would be wrong to read this novel as a literary illustration of the term ‘Afropolitan’. Selasi wants more. She wants to describe the placeless and timeless misfortune of every torn family, the love-hate, the despair, reconciliation and death.”37 And the New York Times writes about Americanah: “Americanah examines blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain, but it’s also a steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience – a platitude made fresh by the accuracy of Adichie’s observations.”38 Conflicts that readers from the Global North know from home promise at the same time access to foreign worlds and an opportunity for identification. Thus a correlation between the cosmopolitan form of identity formation in transnational migrant fiction and the genre’s function in the global book market becomes discernible.

7 Humanism between false consciousness and ethical project While this correlation has not yet been addressed by scholars, the often heated debates about works of transnational migrant fiction suggest it. We find an example in the provocative theses of author and critic Tim Parks. Parks calls works that I

36 Hubert Spiegel, “Schwarz, erfolgreich, zerrissen [Black, Successful, Torn],” Review of Tayie Selasi, Diese Dinge geschehen nicht einfach so. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 March 2013, my translation. 37 Tim Neshitov, “Das dunkle Ikebana namens Unglück [The Dark Ikebana Called Misfortune],” Review of Taiye Selasi, Diese Dinge geschehen nicht einfach so. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 April 2013, my translation and my emphasis. 38 Mike Peedjune, “Realities of Race,” Review of Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah, New York Times, 7 June 2013.

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consider transnational migrant fiction world literature, which is appropriate, but ascribes exclusively negative meaning to the prefix ‘world.’ According to Parks, neither the authors of world literature who write on global issues nor their readers can ever come to grasp the problems of the world, since these problems are always local39: “[world literature’s] universalist approach [. . .] invites us to extrapolate or identify some easily communicable, generic element – unequal power relationships, existential anxieties, or some key idea central to all human life – and tells us that this is what matters about the work of art.”40 In other words, world literature expresses a belief in universal human qualities without critical awareness of the fact that this humanism is deeply rooted in the Global North. From this perspective, globalisation is no longer an economic process of exploitation and expropriation whose agents are transnationally operating corporations, and whose consequences are local. Rather, globalisation becomes a worldview of transnational subjects in which problems such as poverty and discrimination are part of the human condition. With Walter Mignolo one could say that globalisation here has become a view of the world from above in which everything looks the same: “[a] homogeneity of the planet from above – economically, politically, and culturally.”41 Or to put it in the language of the Frankfurt School: globalisation is a ‘false consciousness’ that under the cover of humanism ignores the political origins and locally specific effects of injustice. It is only a small step from here to a critique of transnational migrant fiction as a product of the cultural industry, which Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer tried to demystify as mass fraud.42 In a globalised cultural industry, one could say with Sarah Brouillette, the major publishers encourage authors from the Global South to write success stories about Africa and Asia in order to present the problems created by the Global North as problems that have always existed, thus relieving European and North American readers of neocolonial guilt. The authors, the publishers, and also the readers of this fiction understand the rules of this game, but by tacit agreement continue to play it because everyone profits from it.43 Yet the humanism of transnational migrant fiction can also be seen in a more favourable light. In the tradition of Kant’s Zum Ewigen Frieden, a number of political philosophers have defined cosmopolitanism as an extension of categorical

39 See Tim Parks, Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books (New York: New York Review of Books, 2015), 49, 55–59. 40 Tim Parks, Where I’m Reading From, 62. 41 Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Cosmopolitanism, ed. C. A. Breckenridge, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 157. 42 See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, „Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug,“ Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 141–191. 43 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–7.

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imperatives to the global sphere. Seyla Benhabib, for example, defines cosmopolitanism as a catalogue of rules that are more binding than ethical standards but less binding than juridical laws. According to her, these rules point to a universal connection between ethical and juridical laws and indicate that the rights of humans must in the long run assume legal status anywhere in the world,44 i.e. become legally enshrined human rights. In this perspective, the humanism of transnational migrant fiction can be seen as part of a larger cosmopolitan project that is not limited to the genre: to increase awareness of the ethical, i.e. normative, equality of women and men, Europeans and Africans, for example, and of the fatal human tendency to lapse into sexist and racist thought patterns against one’s better judgment. This utopian cosmopolitanism can be inferred from the way the Global South is presented to readers from the Global North in transnational migrant fiction. In fact, many a blurb advertises this utopian cosmopolitanism as a purchasing argument in its own right; whatever its ethical merits, transnational migrant fiction remains tied to the book market.

8 The global book market and translatability Instead of taking sides with either reading, it seems more sensible to emphasise once again the complexities resulting from the correlation between the literary qualities of transnational migrant fiction and its function in the global book market. After all, both readings point to this correlation, which is also obvious in view of the fact that almost all works of transnational migrant fiction have been published by one of the major publishers based in the Global North. In 2013 in The Guardian, Nigerian author Helon Habila criticised African authors of transnational migrant fiction for catering to tastes of the Global North and for marketing the African continent. Selasi answered in the same newspaper: African novelists cannot easily or profitably publish in African countries. But it does not follow that African novelists are writing for the west. Can we really not imagine that the African novelist writes for love: love of craft, love of subject? Do we really believe that she is not an artist but an anthropologist, not a storyteller but a native informant? Would we really suggest that she hasn’t the right to engage a global audience? Many African novelists publish in the west because no alternative path to global readership exists.45

It has been noted that Selasi here performs a precarious balancing act between the right to profitable publication and the claim that African authors write out of love 44 Seyla Benhabib, et al., Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20. 45 Taiye Selasi, “Stop Pigeonholing African Writers; Why must writers from Africa always bear the burden of representing their continent? They should be granted artistic freedom, as other authors are,” The Guardian, 4 July 2015.

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of craft and of subject.46 But anyone who only looks at the apparent discrepancy between the two motives overlooks the fact that economic success is not the only thing at stake. At stake is also the opportunity for African authors to be read worldwide and to be, in this sense, perceived as authors of world literature. Even in the age of e-books Selasi’s statement that publishing with one of the major publishers is the only way to reach a global audience cannot be discarded. Nor can it be denied that being written in prose that can be translated with as little loss as possible increases the chances of a novel’s status as world literature, and that authors from the Global South have realised this. English is therefore still gaining in importance as a language to write in, and so is a certain stylistic norm that functions as an implicit definition of translatability. This norm pertaining to vocabulary, syntax, register, etc., is operative regardless of the language in which a novel or story is originally written. Selasi plausibly argues that African authors publishing in the Global North rarely intend to cater to Northern tastes. What she does not mention but arguably implicitly acknowledges is that publishing in the Global North generally requires writers somehow to cater to the North’s expectations and tastes. Authors from regions of the Global South other than Africa experience the same problem, as do authors from nations with minor languages in the Global North who publish in the major European languages. In Hungary and Romania, for example, authors publishing in Germany are accused of catering to Western tastes. In the case of transnational migrant fiction, however – including, for example, books by the Hungarian-born author Terézia Mora writing in German and living in Germany – meeting the tastes of the major publishing industries in the Global North is programmatic rather than accidental because being in-between nationaities, styles, and weltanschauungen characterises the consciousness of the genre’s protagonists. It is intermingled with the very stories told by transnational migrant fiction: stories of rising above any single nationality (and sometimes also language) by embracing several. The question of which narrative, stylistic, and pictorial means of transnational migrant fiction suggest continuity of the Northern and non-Northern cultures is important not least because Young, Parks, and other critics have claimed that homogenisation characterises world literature’s linguistic texture, from its preference for ‘realism’ to its vocabulary. According to Parks, the ‘global novel’ simplifies its language and tones down its local specificity in order to sell on the world market.47 Young argues that world literature diminishes obstacles to translation and international comprehension by avoiding regional linguistic features and by wearing its original cultural context lightly, whereas postcolonial literature has always had to

46 Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl, “Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English,” Anglia 135.1 (2017), 181. 47 Tim Parks, Where I’m Reading From, 27–28.

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grapple with the dilemma that the language it was written in – such as English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish – was the coloniser’s language. Postcolonial literature has therefore tended to stress local cultural specifics.48 Again, Young’s and Parks’s claims can be more fruitfully applied to transnational migrant fiction than to world literature in general. Transnational migrant fiction’s detachment from national paradigms indeed tends to go hand in hand with a de-politicisation of language: the main concern is no longer one of ‘writing back’ and resisting the coloniser’s language even while writing in that language.49 Transnational migrant fiction is typically wearing its original context, including local linguistic inflexions, rather lightly – a characteristic of world literature according to Damrosch50 but especially important in transnational migrant fiction in which migrants rising above nationality perform the proof that identity formation can work without recurrence to a ‘mother tongue’ as the only means of valid expression. It is certainly fair to say that Americanah and Ghana Must Go wear the inflexions of Nigerian and Ghanaian English lightly, and that this is a constitutive part of their humanist vision that all cultures are intelligible to and translatable into each other because each culture’s specific set of symbolic representations refers to the same human condition. As illuminating as Young’s and Parks’s polemical criticism of world literature’s relation to language can be if applied to the more limited genre of transnational migrant fiction, if we look beyond the examples of Americanah and Ghana Must Go, a still more nuanced account of transnational migrant fiction’s politics of language might be necessary to do justice to all instances of the genre. This could be achieved by pitting Young’s and Parks’s claims against more recent contributions to the debate to show how works in the genre have increasingly addressed and negotiated their own relation to language and translation. Walkowitz has coined the term ‘born translated’ for texts that are written for translation, and in which locally coloured expressions are replaced by a language that can be translated with as little loss as possible. She takes a more optimistic stance towards the fact that more and more novelists write for publication in multiple languages. She points out that their born-translated novels often include dialogues which are conducted in a language other than the one the novel is written in (for example, the reader picks up clues indicating that the dialogue in English he reads on the page is really conducted in Spanish). Narrators speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques treat translation as a medium rather than as an afterthought. These strategies, Walkowitz argues, challenge the global dominance of English, complicate ‘native’ readership, and protect creative 48 Robert J. C. Young, “World Literature and Postcolonialism,” 215, 220–221. 49 Bill Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002), 1–13. 50 See David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 139.

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works against misinterpretation as they circulate.51 Walkowitz does not suggest affinities between specific genres and born-translated texts. What can be safely stated of transnational migrant fiction here is the following: the genre testifies to the fact that translatability is far more than transferability of meaning between languages. The achievement of linguistic translatability tends to go hand in hand with an alignment of worldviews including their epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic implications, and vice versa. The fact that authors from the Global South can only find a worldwide readership if they publish with North American or European publishers demonstrates that this alignment is not a symmetrical process. The love of craft and of subject named by Selasi cannot remain untouched by the medium and the language in which that love can communicate itself.52

51 See Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 1–47. The most prominent recent example of this trend is Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words (2016), originally written in Italian by Lahiri (and retranslated into English by Ann Goldstein). Lahiri had only recently began learning Italian and moved to Italy before writing the book. 52 Emily Apter’s intervention Against World Literature (2013) also complicates the picture by shedding light on how works written in different languages and typically counted towards world literature while being marketed for the world put to use the untranslatability of words such as ‘fado’ and ‘saudade’ that are nevertheless continually retranslated and mistranslated (138–156). In my view, the question of whether such textual strategies subvert the facile consumption of the foreign promised by transnational migrant fiction’s marketable cosmopolitanism, or whether they prevent subversion by pre-emptively performing it, is open to discussion.

Thomas Hunkeler

Translinguistic Theatre for a Globalised Stage? Abstract: The rapid internationalisation and festivalisation of the European theatre scene since the 1980s has brought forth new forms of transnational theatre in which language often plays a minor role. However, some theatre directors and companies such as Milo Rau, Yael Ronen, and the collective Rimini Protokoll seek to explore new forms of linguistic interaction on stage. This kind of translinguistic theatre systematically exposes several languages on stage, reflects on new forms of community, and thereby adapts theatre to the multicultural world in which we live.

1 Transnational theatre and the question of language Theatre has undergone important changes since the beginning of the twenty-first century both in terms of its relation to nationhood and the ways in which it faces internationalisation. In a recent study, Nancy Delhalle has argued convincingly that the interplay between national production and international circulation which shaped the European theatrical landscape since the 1980s is being more and more replaced by a tendency towards denationalisation, on the one hand, towards globalisation on the other.1 The old centre-periphery model,2 which permitted the international circulation of noteworthy national productions, she argues, indeed gives way to a transnational, polycentric structure in which international circulation becomes the basic condition of theatrical production. The ‘festivalisation’ of theatrical life can be seen as both one of the models and one of the actors of this shift, in which not only the reception, but the production of the plays itself becomes transnational. This evolution towards theatrical deterritorialisation brings forth not only new forms of interaction, but also new aesthetics. Theatre directors such as Romeo Castellucci, Pippo Delbono, Jan Lauwers, and Jan Fabre, whose work is closely analysed by Delhalle, all tend to go against the traditional link between theatre, 1 Nancy Delhalle, Théâtre dans la mondialisation. Communauté et utopie sur les scènes contemporaines (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2017) (my translation). On the complex relationship between the categories of ‘local’ and ‘global,’ see Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), in particular 53–72. 2 This model is still at the base of a study such as David Bradby and Maria M. Delgado (eds), The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the City’s Stages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-013

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(national) literature, and (national) language, which was one of the fundamentals of the European theatrical scene since the formation of national states. Transnational theatre, on the contrary, no longer depends on linguistic and cultural borders, since it focuses, from the very start of the creative process, on international and thus multilingual reception. With the introduction of surtitles, but also, in a more general way, by seeing language and the theatrical text as just one among many other theatrical signs,3 transnational theatre is no longer rooted in just one linguistic and/or national tradition. Delhalle concludes: The question of language no longer constitutes a major vector of theatre. Minimized, text and language, which were at the very core of Western tradition of theatre, are not an obstacle to the international circulation of plays once a minimal understanding is being guaranteed by surtitles or any other form of communicational strategy by the organizing institutions.4

Transnational theatre such as the one described by Delhalle tends indeed to become more and more a theatre of images, based on (more or less) universal perceptual stimuli more than on linguistic signs. While this is certainly true for the theatre directors mentioned above, I would like to analyse here the work of artists who experiment with new forms of linguistic interaction while taking part in the tendency towards transnational theatre just described. Their work, I will argue, tries to come to terms with new linguistic situations both in- and outside the theatre; it thus becomes a laboratory for what I will call translinguistic theatre, understood as a theatre which exposes several languages onstage, simultaneously or one after the other, with all the risks of (mis)understanding and anxieties5 such a decision sometimes brings with it.6

2 Sensual experiences of strangeness: Milo Rau The first example I would like to examine in this context is the play Empire by Milo Rau. Born in Switzerland in 1977, Rau has been working as an independent theatre director in several theatres, mainly in Switzerland and Germany, before launching in 2007 his “International Institute of Political Murder” (IIPM) for the “production

3 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren, 1999). 4 Nancy Delhalle, Théâtre dans la mondialisation, 56. 5 See Robert J. C. Young, “World Literature and Language Anxiety,” Approaches to World Literature, ed. Joachim Küpper (Berlin: Akademie Verlag / De Gruyter, 2013), 27–38. 6 This chapter develops some ideas sketched out in Thomas Hunkeler, „Translinguistisches Theater,“ Schweizer Theaterwelten – La Suisse – ses théâtres en scène – Universi teatrali svizzeri, ed. Andreas Härter, Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer, and Anne Fournier (Bern: Peter Lang, 2018), 35–48. On multilingual theatre, see the important study of Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

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and international exploitation of his theatre productions, activities and films.”7 As the website of the IIPM proudly states, the more than 50 productions of the IIPM created since 2007 have toured in more than 30 countries throughout the world and have been invited to all of the major international theatre festivals, making Milo Rau’s IIPM an excellent example of the shift towards the transnational theatre scene analysed by Delhalle. At the same time, the overtly political dimension of Rau’s theatre, which since its beginnings has concentrated on multimedia treatment of historical, social, and political conflicts, makes it difficult to renounce the dimension of language, which indeed remains central to the IIPM’s work as shown in the 2016 production of Empire. As the last part of Milo Rau’s “European Trilogy,” which started with The Civil Wars (2014) and continued with The Dark Ages (2015), Empire introduces four figures onstage who speak in four languages which are probably not very familiar to the average European theatre-goer. The four actors of Empire who tell their own story in (one of) their own language(s) are Remi Khalaf, Ramo Ali, Maia Morgenstern, and Akillas Karazissis; the languages used in the play are Arabic, Kurdish, Romanian, and Greek. Empire presents four interwoven monologues about experiences of exile, escape, violence, and powerlessness. Taking turns, the actors film each other while they are talking, and these images are projected on a large screen above the stage scenery, which represents a kitchen. Between the two, one can read the surtitles adapted to the country in which the play is being shown. What is crucial to Empire is the fact that the experience of strangeness, of being a foreigner, which in Milo Rau’s documentary theatre corresponds to that of the actors themselves (and not to their fictional character, as in traditional theatre), is being transmitted to the audience not only thematically, but as a sensual experience: through the use of language. Let us imagine for a moment that Milo Rau would have chosen, instead of these four foreign actors speaking their own language, four German – or French, or Swiss, or whatever – actors playing their part in the language of the audience, in the same way we usually watch synchronised films at the cinema or on TV. At first sight, the content and the plot would have remained the same: experiences of exile and violence, told from the perspective of those who have experienced them. But the experience of the audience would have been entirely different. Entirely different, because the tension between directness and mediation, between authenticity and play, between distance and closeness, which so obviously marks Milo Rau’s staging, would in this case have been drastically reduced; entirely different also because through such an assimilation, the language of the audience would be dominating the original languages of the actors. It is precisely this kind of symbolic domination through integration that the play refuses by presenting a

7 According to the declaration figuring on the website of the IIPM: http://international-institute. de/about-iipm (accessed 22 June 2018).

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configuration which keeps the linguistic heterogeneity of the situation while creating the means, through its surtitles, for the audience to follow the monologues of the actors. The language of the audience functions at the same time as a lingua franca, that is as a dominating language, and as a second language, translated and reduced to the electronic medium of the surtitles. In this second sense, it works thus both as a complement and a supplement which emphasises the difference between original language and translation, between oral and written language. The languages spoken by the actors appear in Milo Rau’s staging both as mother tongues and foreign languages. As such, they symbolise in turn closeness and authenticity or distance and the necessity of mediation through translation and surtitles. We nevertheless need to understand that this kind of multilingualism as shown onstage is in fact a highly elaborated artistic artifact and not just the result of natural interaction. This becomes clear by looking at the situation during rehearsals in Berlin in September 2016, as witnessed by Joseph Pearson.8 The rehearsals were themselves multilingual, since both the director and the four actors communicated among each other in several languages which are commonly being used in European theatres: in a mixture of English, German, and French. But Empire was not about this kind of lived multilingualism of the elites which nowadays can be found in most European cities. It was about people who have to come to grips with a language situation which brutally confronts them with strangeness and unfamiliarity. By giving their dignity to the four original languages of his actors and by confronting them on screen with a fifth language, that of the audience, Milo Rau intends to use the theatre as a place in which new forms of sensual and thus linguistic experience are made possible. The first and most important experience for the audience of Empire is of course the fact of not understanding and the confrontation with languages one probably does not speak. It is obvious that this is also a basic experience every migrant or refugee has sooner or later. And in just the same way that the migrants are dependent on translation, albeit very basic, the audience too depends on the surtitles, of which we know nevertheless that they can only render part of what is being said. Our gaze is forced to oscillate between spoken and written words: an uncomfortable position which confronts us with the fact that we can never be in two places at the same time, but which also reminds us that none of these places can stand alone, for itself. Our attention goes back and forth between scene and screen, between what is familiar and what is foreign. Either way we experience for ourselves the loss of meaning; either way, all we can acknowledge are fragments of signification.

8 Joseph Pearson, “Empire On and Off-Stage: A Conversation with Milo Rau,” https://www. schaubuehne.de/de/blog/empire-on-and-off-stage-a-conversation-with-milo-rau.html (accessed 22 June 2018).

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A second point, no less essential, is that in Milo Rau’s Empire we come across not just one but several foreign languages. The linguistic experience of foreignness is not just that of the audience, but also of the actors onstage: the languages of the actors are equal, they have equal authority. But what about the representation of the language of the audience? Here the situation is more ambivalent. On the one hand, the language of the audience, which does not change throughout the play, dominates symbolically over the ever-changing languages of the characters and actors: it works, as we have seen above, as lingua franca. On the other hand, though, the written language of the audience is being marginalised and pushed to the back of the scene by the incorporated oral language onstage: it is limited to the reduced and linear space of an electronic screen. In this way, Rau’s play problematises in a very concrete way the idea of imperialism through the political notion of the “empire,” a political form which designates an aggregate of nations or people being ruled by a central government. In Rau’s play, this dimension is alluded to with respect to the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire, but also to the German Reich or the European Union. In Empire, the tension between domination and democratic involvement is shown primarily through theatrical means. For Milo Rau, as for Jean-Luc Godard before him, the idea is not to make political theatre, but to make theatre in a political way; it is about finding new aesthetic forms which allow one to gain radically new ways of seeing and thus new ways of understanding. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière reflects on this kind of politics of aesthetics in his collection of essays on what he calls “the distribution of the sensible.”9 Through this notion, Rancière tries to show that every aesthetic experience relies upon perceptual devices which structure the social space and thus precede every possibility of understanding. If we apply this idea to Milo Rau’s work, we see that his translinguistic theatre allows us to reflect on new ways of being together. Whereas in traditional theatre, the figure of the foreigner, if not mute, is always already linguistically integrated and thus subordinated to what is familiar (at best, he can keep a foreign-sounding accent), the distribution of the sensible functions in a radically different way in Milo Rau’s theatre, in at least two ways. In Empire, the stage becomes the space in which what is foreign is put in the place of what is familiar: the self becomes the other. But the very natural way in which every actor on stage speaks his own language deconstructs the dichotomy between familiarity and unfamiliarity, between self and other: one’s mother tongue is the other’s foreign language. In Milo Rau’s theatre, this kind of insight does not come in a theoretical way; it is experienced sensually. And it is in this way that the stage is recognised as a space in which language is always already presupposed as natural, and thus not

9 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004) (2000 for the original French edition).

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acknowledged. Theatre, in opposition to the movies in which we perceive language more and more as a fundamental choice, is the space of given language, of language as given: a fact that has heavy consequences for its potential audience. We’ll come back to this point a little later. There is at least one more way in which Rau’s distribution of the sensible is significant: the way in which the play distributes foreign languages equally instead of giving only a marginal presence to what is foreign. It is because Rau refuses to put his own language – or that of his audience – on stage that the possibility comes into being to give space to the other languages. Every actor, every story, every language gets equal attention: a fact that does not come naturally on the theatre stage, where the language of the audience usually dominates without most people ever noticing it.

3 Never-ending identifications: Rimini Protokoll My second example is the “lecture-performance” Prometheus in Athens by Rimini Protokoll, a German and Swiss theatre collective of three main members – Helgard Haug, Daniel Wetzel, and Stefan Kaegi – which since 1999 has worked in various team combinations. Their work, situated at the intersection of theatre, performance, and art installation, has been presented at several theatre festivals all over the world, but also in many theatres throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Known as the inventors of a new type of documentary theatre, in which they cast “real people” as what they call “experts of the everyday,” the directors of Rimini Protokoll have received many prizes and awards, such as the “Europe Theatre Prize” 2008 in the category “New Realities” and the “Swiss Grand Prix of Theatre” 2015.10 The “lecture-performance” Prometheus in Athens of 2017 is based on an earlier theatrical performance created by Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel at the antique Odeon theatre of Herodes Atticus on the slopes of the Acropolis of Athens. In the 2010 original production, Rimini Protokoll put 103 inhabitants of Athens on a stage who symbolically represented the city’s population and asked them both to publicly express their position on several issues of contemporary social life during the financial crisis and to identify with one of the characters of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. At the time, the evening was staged mainly for the Athenian public, but it was documented by film-maker Athina Tsagari and again put onstage, in the form

10 On Rimini Protokoll, see Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher (eds), Experten des Alltags. Das Theater von Rimini Protokoll (Berlin: Alexander, 2007) and Anne Fournier, Paola Gilardi, Andreas Härter, and Claudia Maeder (eds), Rimini Protokoll (MIMOS. Schweizer Theater-Jahrbuch, 77–2015) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015). On Rimini Protokoll’s theatrical aesthetics with regard to the creation of a new kind of theatrical public sphere in contemporary postdramatic theatre, see Christopher Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 185–189.

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of a reenactment based on the film, in several European theatres. In this new staging, several protagonists who had participated in the 2010 event ‘stepped out’ of the film and onto the stage in order to actualise the performance for a new public. Obviously, the choice of these protagonists who now worked as “experts” on various European stages was also done on the basis of linguistic criteria, since during the tour through Switzerland in 2017, all of them spoke either German or English, albeit sometimes with a heavy Greek accent. While the excerpts of the film made during the original Athenian performance all had subtitles, the comments and remarks made during the lecture-performance were either in German or English or translated live and on the spot by one of the protagonists. The distribution of the sensible, to reuse Rancière’s terms, during the lectureperformance was fundamentally different from the one of the original performance of 2010 in Athens, which took place in Greek only. In contrast to Milo Rau’s Empire, mediation and translation were explicitly at the heart of the lecture-performance: the reenactment was aimed at a foreign-speaking audience, whom it now enabled to live an experience from which it had been excluded, both linguistically and socially, in 2010. This transposition also modifies the status of the protagonists onstage. While during the initial performance, they were simply people concerned who talked to other people concerned, the reenactment made them into “experts of the everyday” in the very sense Rimini Protokoll gives this notion: they were specialists standing for their own cause, who worked both as witnesses and guarantors for an audience which is not always familiar with the situation that is being discussed. They became mediators while – the performance insists on this point – remaining concerned by what they were talking about, since the crisis they evoked was not yet over. This ambivalence is also reflected in the language use on stage. On the one hand, we hear the protagonists of the film speak Greek, just the way all other people concerned spoke Greek that night; on the other, we hear the very same protagonists speak German or English onstage during the reenactment, that is, they speak languages in which they can be rather sure that the audience is able to understand them. But the most important point, to my mind, is the fact that the protagonists, who somehow come out of the antique choir of Athenians and who only at that moment become individuals for the foreign audience, all speak with a clearly perceptible accent. It is this foreign accent, as well as moments of (faint?) hesitation while translating more or less spontaneously, which put the shift from one language to another at the very heart of the performance. What is at stake during these moments, what becomes sensible, is the non-concordance between people and languages, the non-concordance between national identity and the individual. Not only Greeks speak Greek; Greeks don’t speak only Greek. In what is perhaps his most personal and most beautiful book, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prothesis of Origin, Jacques Derrida writes in just this sense that “an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and

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indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures.”11 Rimini Protokoll’s lecture-performance of Prometheus in Athens confronts the audience in a sensual way with the process of never-ending identification Derrida talks about. In this performance, language does not hint at a given identity, but at the gradual production of an in-between, of an identification which has to be negotiated over and over again, as Derrida shows: [The] master does not possess exclusively, and naturally, what he calls his language, because, whatever he wants or does, he cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological, with it, because he can give substance to and articulate this appropriation only in the course of an unnatural process of politico-phantasmatic constructions [. . .].12

What Derrida says of the master, that is of the colonial position of power, is also true for the theatre as the place in which a given society reassures itself traditionally about its language, its identity, its history, and its power. But we have to remember that the mythological figure of Prometheus, which stands at the very heart of the two performances created by Rimini Protokoll, is not standing for preservation of power, but for its subversion. By bringing the fire to the humans and liberating them from their slavery, Prometheus stands for emancipation. In the last verses of his most famous poem on Prometheus, Goethe points this out explicitly: Here sit I, forming mortals After my image; A race resembling me, To suffer, to weep, To enjoy, to be glad, And thee to scorn, As I!13

The people who get onstage in Prometheus in Athens are themselves only mortals; they are no God-like abstractions. Like Prometheus himself, they are mediators who allow us to participate in their destiny; like Prometheus himself, they stand for an identity which has to be renegotiated over and over again. Their use of language is baring the traces of this process; their accent is not a defect, but the sensual trace of a never-ending to and fro between languages and identifications.

11 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prothesis of Origin, trans. P. Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) (1996 for the French original), 28. 12 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 23. 13 “Prometheus,” The Poems of Goethe, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (Boston, MA: Cassino Publisher, 1882), 174.

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4 From integration to inclusion: Yael Ronen The last example I would like to analyse here is that of Yael Ronen, a director born in Israel who now works mainly in Germany and Austria. Since 2013, Ronen has been one of the associated directors of the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, which under the joint direction of Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hillje starting that same year significantly opened up to issues of migration, multiculturalism, and social heterogeneity. Distinguished as “Theatre of the Year” in 2014 by the renowned German theatre journal Theater heute, the artists at the Gorki Theatre are, according to the website of the Goethe Institute, “probably a little ahead of other theatre institutions for what concerns their postnational awareness of globalization, but also their own lives.”14 In the context of the evolution towards a translinguistic theatre, I would like to single out two recent plays by Ronen: Winter Journey (Winterreise), created in Spring 2017, and Roma Army (Roma Armee), which premiered in September 2017. Winter Journey is the result of a theatrical research project which Ronen undertook with a group of refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and Palestine by means of a bus trip through Germany and Switzerland. On the one hand, the idea was to turn the focus away from the refugees towards German society: the actors would then function as ethnologists who observe the particularities of the host society from without. On the other hand, Yael Ronen aimed at “giving people a voice who are not usually represented in the realm of culture.”15 Indeed, the actors of the “exile cast” (Exil Ensemble) of the Gorki Theatre not only come from very different theatrical traditions and backgrounds, they also don’t all speak German fluently. In the play, they are for instance shown trying to learn German by observing the “Pegida”16 banners with anti-refugee slogans, on which “Fatima Merkel” is being accused of betraying Germany. In Winter Journey, cultural and linguistic differences give way to sometimes funny misunderstandings; they create comic relief and work as a contrast to the usual discourse of pity and dismay which the actors explicitly refuse to endorse. Yael Ronen’s theatre is not so much concerned with integration than with interculturalism, a notion described by the journalist and researcher of migration Mark Terkessidis in 2010, before the major European migration crisis, in a study that allows us to better understand the political and social aim of Ronen’s work. For her, the newly arrived actors of the “exile cast” certainly do need to come to grips with the German system of city theatres, but first and foremost, this theatre system needs to become more diverse in its cultural implications. It does so by encouraging

14 “Das Berliner Maxim-Gorki-Theater vermittelt neue Perspektiven,” https://www.goethe.de/de/ kul/tut/gen/tup/20448059.html (accessed 24 June 2018). 15 Interview with Yael Ronen by Dagmar Walser, https://www.srf.ch/kultur/buehne/buehne-freifuer-gefluechtete-yael-ronen-gibt-ihnen-eine-stimme (accessed 24 June 2018). 16 “Pegida” is the abbreviation of “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West,” an anti-Islam right-wing movement founded in Dresden in 2014.

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cultural participation from social groups who normally do not consider theatre as a form of art directed at them. With regard to the German city theatres, Terkessidis states: For many people with a migration background, the theatre continues to be a space which does not even show up on their cognitive map. It seems to naturally belong to ‘the Germans’. Attending a theatre would catapult most of them in a state of fear and aggression, since many of them would not even know how to dress, how to behave and what to say. But if you don’t have any relation to a space, you cannot contribute to its modification.17

Such a relation can only be constructed if the theatre really opens up towards a society which has become heterogeneous with respect to its cast, to its audience, to its programme, but also to its language. In this sense, cultural participation does not ask for integration into the culturally dominant language, but for inclusion of other languages onstage: only then is there the possibility of effective cultural participation based on a new “distribution of the sensible.” In the theatre, politics are, first of all, a matter of sensual experience of inclusion or exclusion. And in this sense, translinguistic theatre is always political. Yael Ronen’s Roma Army is in that respect a most interesting play, because it thematises explicitly the paradoxes of what the Roma writer Damian Le Bas calls “a transnational nation”: We, Roma, Gypsies and Travellers of Eastern and Western Europe, after 1000 years of unofficial European citizenship, we are still seen as the pariahs, the outsiders, public enemy number one, the thieves, the children of the devil, the cursed, the square peg that will never fit in the round hole. We are waiting for a Romanistan that will never come.18

Roma Army presents onstage, in a sometimes very violent, but also very ironic way the many clichés and paradoxes inherent in the situation of the “transnational nation” of the Roma in Europe. On a linguistic level, the play is particularly confusing, since the actors – most of them Roma – express themselves not only in (surtitled) Romani, but also, in turn, in German or English. The situation is further complicated by the presence onstage of two gadjé, that is non-Romani people, who themselves represent minorities, at least in Berlin: Mehmet Atesci is of Turkish origin, Orit Nahmias is from Israel. This most heterogeneous cast allows Ronen to present the contradictions of identity in various ways: as the desperate claim for a common language in a rap song presented by Simonida Selimovic: “Kaj jek cib trubul amen” (We need a common language),19 but also as the complaint of the gadjé who are cast here in the (for them) very unusual situation of a dominant majority. The play

17 Mark Terkessidis, Interkultur (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), S. 185 (my translation). 18 Damian Le Bas, “Gypsyland Europa,” programme flyer of Roma Armee by Gorki Theatre, September 2017. 19 Rap poem quoted and translated on the programme flyer.

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further complicates the situation by confronting these issues from the very beginning of the play with other identity issues, such as sexual orientation (lesbianism and homosexuality) or the fact of being actors. I saw Roma Army a few days after it premiered, and what most impressed me during this evening was in fact the audience. It was visibly different from what you usually see in a city theatre; and many people in the audience were obviously touched, challenged, and sometimes also shocked by what they saw and heard on stage. The public not only reacted very strongly to the play, but it wanted to interact with the actors by commenting, shouting, laughing, etc. They did not need the common language the play (or at least one of the actresses) had called for, but seemed on the contrary to enjoy the Babelian situation reigning on and off stage. Ronen’s translinguistic theatre had created the conditions for a moment of intense transcultural interaction.

5 Conclusion: Theatre as a laboratory of community “In a logic of rootedness, everything which is contrary to it appears as an abstraction.” In one of his major essays, the philosopher and philologist Heinz Wismann rightly insists on the difficulty of thinking between languages. “It is neither easy nor painless,” he points out, “to extract oneself out of a community which is already constituted or of a clearly circumscribed linguistic environment.”20 Yael Ronen, Rimini Protokoll, and Milo Rau are three particularly interesting examples of the ways in which contemporary theatre tries to give tangible forms to a way of living between languages. Their creative reaction towards the double tendency of denationalisation and globalisation which has marked the (European) theatre scene since the turn of the century is not to do away with language or to reduce it to a theatrical sign among many others, but to adapt the theatre to the multicultural world we live in by inventing new forms of linguistic interactions on and off stage. Milo Rau, who has recently accepted the artistic direction of the city theatre of Ghent (Belgium), is particularly aware of the fact that the theatrical system which saw the rise of the city theatre seems almost by nature inapt to have its productions tour outside of their original linguistic situation. This is why he has written the “Manifesto of Ghent” which tries to oppose the unwritten rules which govern our idea of what a city theatre is by explicit ones which can then be discussed. Two points of this manifesto deserve our attention in the context of the evolution towards translinguistic theatre I have been trying to describe here:

20 Heinz Wismann, Penser entre les langues (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 47 (my translation).

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Point 6: In every production, there have to be at least two different languages spoken on stage. [. . .] Point 10: Every production has to be shown in at least ten places in at least three countries. Before this number has been reached, no production falls out of the repertory of the NT Ghent.21

For the artists discussed in this chapter, translinguistic theatre is not just another way of experimenting with language on stage. Rather, it is a way of giving a new sense to the antique tradition which saw theatre first and foremost as a laboratory of community. Most of all, it is about accepting a certain responsibility towards an art form which is still, more than two and a half thousand years after the invention of Athenian theatre, intimately linked to the idea of democracy and the public sphere.

21 This manifesto figures (in German) on the website of the IIPM: http://international-institute.de (accessed 24 June 2018).

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Notes on Contributors Jacqueline Dutton is Associate Professor in French Studies and Head of Languages at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on contemporary French and Francophone literatures and cultures, ranging from a monograph in French on 2008 Nobel Laureate JMG Le Clézio’s utopian visions, Le Chercheur d’or et d’ailleurs: L’Utopie de JMG Le Clézio (2003) to a major article for French Studies, “World Literature in French, Littérature-monde and the Translingual Turn” (2016). Her work on comparative and transnational utopianism is included in the Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2012) and a special issue of Utopian Studies (2013). She recently co-edited a book with Peter Howland entitled Wine, Terroir and Utopia: Making New Worlds (Routledge 2019) and is currently working on a cultural history of wine in Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne. Laura Rivas Gagliardi studied Portuguese and French language and literature from 2001 to 2007 at the University of São Paulo and applied literary studies at Freie Universität Berlin from 2010 to 2013. She taught French and German, was a proofreader for several Brazilian publishing houses, and translated Theodor Adorno and Georg Simmel into Portuguese. Between 2015 and 2019 she was a PhD candidate at Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies. In 2019 at Freie Universität she defended her PhD “Le Brésil littéraire (1863) by Ferdinand Wolf. Literary History and Ideology in the 19th Century.” Martina Groß studied theatre, film and media, Romance philology, and comparative literature in Paris, Nantes, and Frankfurt/Main. She has been a visiting Professor of Theatre Studies at LMU Munich and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Media, Theatre, and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim. She has worked and published on the history and theory of experimental theatre forms, early modern theatre, methods of theatre historiography, dramaturgy and spectatorship, translation as critical theatre practice, and interlinkages between travel and theatre. Her publications include Le Spectateur en vue: les voyages européens de Joseph Furttenbach, Andreas Gryphius et Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (2017) and Querelle, Begräbnis, Wiederkehr. Alain-René Lesage, der Markt und das Theater (2016). Anna Margaretha Horatschek was Professor of English Literature at Kiel University, Germany, until 2018. She studied Philosophy, English and German Literature in Freiburg, Mannheim (Germany) and at UC Berkeley (USA), and taught for one year at College Park, Maryland. She has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg since 2010 and Vice President since 2016. Her research and publications focus on identity and alterity constructions (gender, ethnicity, religion), epistemology and ethics, intermedial representation, and space/place in English and American literature. More recently, she has turned to consciousness studies, transnational hermeneutics (‘Compoetics’) in Indian literatures in English, and questions of knowledge production (cf. ed. Competing Knowledges – Wissen im Widerstreit. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020). She is co-editor of the journal Literature in Research and Teaching (LWU). Thomas Hunkeler is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Freiburg, Switzerland, and president of the Swiss Society for Comparative Literature. He has published widely on European modernism and the avant-garde, but also on contemporary theatre. Recent publications include Paris et le nationalisme des avant-gardes 1909–1924 (Paris: Hermann, 2018), Paradoxes de l’avant-garde européenne. La modernité artistique à l’épreuve de sa nationalisation (Paris: Garnier, 2014), and Place au public. Les spectateurs du théâtre contemporain (Geneva: MetisPresses, 2008). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-015

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Lucia Krämer is Professor of British Culture and Media at the University of Passau, Germany. Most of her research focuses on forms of productive reception and questions of representation. She has published widely on fictional representations of Oscar Wilde and co-edited volumes on the construction of authenticity (transcript, 2011), Remakes and Remaking (transcript, 2015), and the relation between postcolonial studies and media studies (transcript, 2016). Her current research focuses on adaptation and related phenomena like transmedia storytelling. Since publishing her book Bollywood in Britain (Bloomsbury, 2016), she has engaged with the phenomenon of transnational cultural flows. Lukas Lammers is Assistant Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, where he teaches English literature and cultural studies. His research focuses on historical fiction, questions of cultural memory and identity, early modern drama, World War II, and colonialism/postcolonialism. His monograph Shakespearean Temporalities was published with Routledge in 2018. He is co-editor of Shakespeare Seminar and is currently working on a project entitled “The Colonial Home Front: Writing World War II Across the Colonial Divide.” Cordula Lemke is Professor of English literature at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published in the fields of gender studies, postcolonial studies, and nineteenth- to twenty-first-century literature. Her publications include Wandel in der Erfahrung: Die Konstruktion von Welt in den Romanen von Virginia Woolf und Jeanette Winterson [Experience in Transition: Constructing Worlds in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson] (2004), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) (2007, co-edited with Claus Zittel), and Weeds and Viruses: Ecopolitics and the Demands of Theory (2015, co-edited with Jennifer Wawrzinek). Her current book project is titled “Hospitality and the Nation: Scotland around 1800.” Gesine Müller is Full Professor of Romance Studies at the University of Cologne. Her areas of research include literatures of French and Spanish Romanticism, Latin American contemporary literature and culture theory, literatures of the Caribbean, literary transfer processes, and transcultural studies. She is director of the ERC-funded project “Reading Global: Constructions of World Literature and Latin America.” Her publications include Crossroads of Colonial Cultures: Caribbean Literatures in the Age of Revolution (De Gruyter, 2018) and, co-edited with Dunia Gras, América latina y la literatura mundial. Mercado editorial, redes globales y la invención de un continente (Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 2015). Dobrota Pucherova is Senior Researcher at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and a lecturer in African and comparative literature at the University of Vienna. She has published widely on contemporary African Anglophone and Slovak literature in the context of theories of postdependence, cultural trauma, world literature, global coloniality, ethics, feminism, and modernity. Her book publications include The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011) and Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, co-edited with Róbert Gáfrik (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015). Cecile Sandten is Professor of English Literatures at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. She is the author of Broken Mirrors: Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt (1998) and Shakespeare’s Globe, Global Shakespeares: Transcultural Adaptations of Shakespeare in Postcolonial Literatures (2015). She has published widely on Indian English poetry and edited and co-edited volumes on the representation of cityscapes and the (postcolonial) metropolis, on conceptualisations of ‘home,’ on detective fiction, and on asylum accounts and refugee tales.

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Kai Wiegandt is Heisenberg Fellow at the English Department of the University of Tübingen. He studied English and German literature and philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Yale University, and Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare (2012) and J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form (2020) and has published widely on early modern, modernist, and postcolonial literature. In 2015 he was elected member of the German Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. From 2016 to 2018 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Index Abhinavagupta 26 Abramovic, Marina 62 Achebe, Chinua 101 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 2, 18, 90, 102, 207–8, 211–214, 220 Adorno, Theodor 221 Aeschylus 231 Aldridge, Alfred 114 Alexie, Sherman 6 Ali, Ramo 228 Amoussou, Sylvestre 118 Anderson, Benedict 7, 108, 173, 181, 195, 201, 215 Anderson, Perry 148–149 Andrade, Luiz de 113 Ang, Ien 210 Anouilh, Jean 25 Appadurai, Arjun 12, 215–216 Apter, Emily 46 Aristotle 26, 69 Armstrong, John A. 108 Artaud, Antonin 25 Ashcroft, Bill 5, 43, 91, 117, 209 Aslam, Nadeem 216 Assmann, Aleida 171, 187, 191 Atesci, Mehmet 235 Atwood, Margaret 102 Auerbach, Erich 3, 45, 47 Baartman, Sarah 16, 56–75 Bakhtin, Michail 3 Balibar, Étienne 7 Ballek, Rastislav 192 Bárczi, Zsófia 191 Barry, Sebastian 178–179, 184–187 Basch, Linda 5 Bassnett, Susan 41 Beattie, James 39 Behera, Guru Charan 31, 34, 36, 40 Behn, Aphra 65 Ben Jelloun, Tahar 2, 216 Benhabib, Seyla 222 Berlant, Lauren 71 Berman, Jessica 3, 7, 11, 43 Besson, Patrick 118 Beyala, Calixthe 208

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688726-016

Bhabha, Homi K. 12, 22, 60, 140–141, 181, 215–217 Biet, Christian 126, 130 Bourne, Randolph 13, 60, 108 Bouterwek, Friedrich 156 Brand, Dionne 50 Brantly, Susan 173 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 50 Brecht, Berthold 25, 29, 32, 68 Bréton, André 9 Bretonne, Rétif de la 117 Brežná, Irena 192 Brouillette, Sarah 221 Brown, Dan 102 Brown, Nicholas 117 Brydon, Diana 56 Bulwer Lytton, Samuel 114 Burns, Alan 81 Butler, Judith 77, 85 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 51 Camus, Renaud 118 Candido, Antonio 163 Carpentier, Alejo 51, 54 Carver, Raymond 4 Casanova, Pascale 46 Castellucci, Romeo 226 Catanese, Brandi W. 69 Cervantes, Miguel de 9, 101 Cesarani, David 177–178 Cezar, Hendrik 65 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 22, 30, 180 Chamoiseau, Patrick 52–54 Charles I, King of Spain 112 Chateaubriand, Francois-René de 137 Chatterjee, Partha 22, 31 Chatwin, Bruce 121 Churchill, Winston 175, 177, 203 Coelho, Paulo 102 Coetzee, J. M. 209 Cohen, Robin 11 Cole, Teju 16, 76–88, 208 Columbus, Christopher 49 Condé, Maryse 54 Confiant, Raphaël 52–54 Corneille, Pierre 133–134

264

Index

Crichton, Michael 98–99, 102 Csehy, Zoltán 190 Cselényi, László 190 Curtius, Ernst Robert 3 Curtius, Georg 107 Cuvier, Georges 66–7, 69–70 Dalembert, Louis-Philippe 54 Dalley, Hamish 174 Damrosch, David 11, 18, 46, 78, 206, 219, 224 Daniel, Samuel 108 Dante Alighieri 101 Daswani, Girish 61 Datta, Dattatreya 32–3, 38 Daubnerová, Sláva 192 Dawson, Ashley 173 Debray, Régis 53 Delanty, Gerard 11–12 Delbono, Pippo 226 Delcourt, Marie 113 Delhalle, Nancy 226–228 Dengel-Janic, Ellen 22 Denis, Ferdinand 146 Derksen, Jeff 56 Derrida, Jacques 3, 232–3 Desai, Anita 100 Desai, Kiran 100 Devy, Ganesh 22, 26, 28, 41 Díaz Nerio, Terésa María 16, 56, 58, 65, 73–74 Díaz, Junot 1–2 Disraeli, Benjamin 114 Djebar, Assia 1–2 Douki, Caroline 108 Dowling, Julie 122 Dowling, Terry 122 Dunlop, Alexander 65 Eckermann, Johann Peter 45 Edugyan, Esi 102 English, James F. 6 Estelmann, Frank 138 Esterházy, Péter 191 Ette, Ottmar 47 Fabre, Jan 226 Farnbauer, Gábor 190 Faulkner, William 53 Flaubert, Gustave 7, 137 Florio, John 108

Fluck, Winfried 3, 7, 11, 60–61 Fogarty, Lionel 122 Foigny, Gabriel de 117 Freud Sigmund 39 Furttenbach, Joseph 127, 139 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 41–42 García Márquez, Gabriel 101–102 George V, King of the United Kingdom 33 Ghosh, Amitav 178–185 Gikandi, Simon 28, 217–218 Giles, Peter 111 Gilroy, Paul 176 Glick Schiller, Nina 5 Glissant, Édouard 1, 52–54 Godard, Jean-Luc 230 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 10, 45–47, 60, 77, 157–159, 219, 233–234 Görözdi, Judit 191, 193 Goyal, Yogita 8, 12, 60 Green, Renée 16, 56, 58, 64, 67–68, 70, 74 Grendel, Lajos 18, 189, 191–197, 205 Griffiths, Gareth 91 Grisham, John 98–99 Guha, Ranajit 27, 170 Guzmán, Nuño de 112 Gyasi, Yaa 90, 100, 102 Habel, Anneliese 159 Habila, Helon 222 Hamid, Mohsin 208 Haug, Helgard 231 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 7 Hemingway, Ernest 4 Hemon, Aleksandar 208 Henke, Robert 125, 140 Henry VIII, King of England 110–111 Herrmann, Elisabeth 91 Heym, Stefan 98–99 Hitler, Adolf 203 Hobsbawm, Eric 144–145, 155–156 Hobson, Janell 66 Hodge, Bob 25 Homer 101 Horkheimer, Max 221 Hosseini, Khaled 208 Houellebecq, Michel 11, 119 Huggan, Graham 7, 22–3, 33, 43 Hugo, Victor 52

Index

Hulfeld, Stefan 127–128, 131, 133 Hunčík, Péter 18, 189, 191–192, 197–205 Hutcheon, Linda 173 Iñárritu, Alejandro González 212 Ishiguro, Kazuo 1, 98–100, 102, 120, 209 Itoh, Keikaku 120 Jackson, Ashley 175 Jackson, William 42 James, E. L. 3, 98 Jameson, Fredric 181, 211 Jandl, Ernst 98–99 Jay, Paul 5, 14, 78, 91 Johnston, Andrew James 173 Jorgensen, Darren 121 Joyce, James 2, 9 Juščák, Peter 192 Kaegi, Stefan 231 Kanor, Fabienne 52, 54 Kant, Immanuel 39, 221 Karazissis, Akillas 228 Karnad, Girish 15, 21–43 Khalaf, Remi 228 Kierkegaard, Søren 39 King, Stephen 98–99 Klimáček, Viliam 191 Kourouma, Ahmadou 118 Kováts, Judit 191 Krasznahorkai, László 191 Krištúfek, Peter 191 Kumar, Amitava 102 Kumar, Krishan 110 Kunzru, Hari 100, 208 Küpper, Joachim 47 Kushner, Eva 129 Kwan, Kevin 102 Laferrière, Dany 53–54 Lahiri, Jhumpa 3–4, 208 Lal, Vinay 29 Lamartine, Alphonse de 137 Lauwers, Jan 226 Lavrík, Silvester 192 Lazarus, Neil 10, 170, 215–216 Le Bas, Damian 235 Le Blond, Jean 112–113 Le Clézio, J. M. G. 53

265

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 135, 140 Levy, Andrea 178–179, 181–185 Levy, Daniel 188 Lijeroth, Lena Adelsohn 72 Lim, Shirley 1, 209 Linde, Makode Aj 16, 56, 58, 65, 72–74 Loomba, Ania 174 Lukács, George 173 Magalhães, Gonçalves de 150, 152–153, 163–164 Mann, Thomas 15, 23–24, 30–31, 34, 37–8, 41 Manuel, Frank 110, 116 Manuel, Fritzie 110, 116 Martin, George R. R. 98–99 Marx, Karl 145 Matt, Peter von 132 Mbembe, Achille 209, 218 McEwan, Ian 102 Mehta, Jarava Lal 42 Mehta, Vijaya 23 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 118 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel Lothar von 152 Mignolo, Walter 15, 56, 58, 61–64, 70–71, 73–4, 221 Mikszáth, Kálmán 193 Miller, Arthur 42 Minard, Philippe 108 Mishima, Yukio 120 Mishra, Vijay 22, 25 Mistry, Rohinton 102 Mitchell, David 212 Montaigne, Michel de 17, 108, 124–125, 128–133, 135, 139 Mora, Terézia 98–99, 208, 223 More, Thomas 16, 107–123 Moretti, Franco 46 Morgan, Marlo 122 Morgenstern, Maia 228 Morrison, Toni 71, 101 Moussa, Sarga 137, 140 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 138 Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) 121 Muni, Bharata 26 Murakami, Haruki 102, 120 Nádas, Péter 191 Nahmias, Orit 235 Naipaul, V. S. 50

266

Index

Nandy, Ashis 22 Napoleon Bonaparte 66 Navaud, Guillaume 113 Nayar, Pramod 5, 91 Nerval, Gerard de 125, 128, 136–139 Netto, Priscilla 70 Neumann, Birgit 49 Noël, Alyson 95 Nolan, Christopher 176 Oe, Kenzaburo 120 Ondaatje, Michael 84 Ono, Yoko 62 Paranjape, Makarand 27 Parks, Suzan-Lori 16, 56, 58, 65, 68–72, 74 Parks, Tim 220–221, 223–224 Patot, Tyssot de 117 Pearson, Joseph 229 Pease, Donald E. 8, 60–61 Pedro II, Monarch of Brazil 147, 149–150, 157, 162 Peggram, Reed Edwin 113 Perry, Matthew 114 Perse, Saint-John 51, 53 Phélippeau, Marie-Claire 112 Pilger, John 115 Plato 119 Platter, Thomas 17, 124–125, 128, 132–133, 135, 139 Polgár, Anikó 191 Pomogáts, Béla 191 Pordzik, Ralph 117 Pound, Ezra 6 Prakesh, Gyan 22 Pratt, Mary Louise 140 Prieto, José Manuel 1, 210 Quayson, Ato 61 Quiroga, Vasco de 112 Racine, Jean 134 Ramazani, Jahan 6 Rancière, Jacques 230, 232 Rankov, Pavol 191 Raspail, Jean 118 Rau, Milo 18, 226–232, 236 Reinfandt, Christoph 22 Rhys, Jean 50 Rimbaud, Arthur 51

Rivera, Diego 9 Robinson, Ralph 113 Rolin, Jean 118 Ronen, Yael 18, 226, 234–236 Roudemetof, Victor 12 Rousseau, Thomas 113 Rowe, John Carlos 60–61 Roy, Arundhati 102 Rushdie, Salman 3, 10, 18, 98–99, 101, 206, 208, 212–217 Ryunosuke, Akutagawa 120 Safran, William 209 Said, Edward 57, 137 Sansal, Boualem 119 Satrapi, Marjane 208, 216 Schmidt, Helmut 98–99 Schopenhauer, Arthur 39 Schopenhauer, Johanna 139–140 Schwarz, Roberto 155 Schwitters, Kurt 9 Scott, Walter 171 Sebald, W. G. 181 Selasi, Taiye 18, 82, 85–86, 90, 206, 208, 210–214, 217, 219–225 Selimovic, Simonida 235 Shakespeare, William 9, 132, 133–136, 204 Silva, Agostinho da 113 Singh, A. K. 22–23 Sismondi, Jean de 156 Smith-Prei, Carrie 91, 93 Smith, Barbara T. 62 Smith, Zadie 181 Soyinka, Wole 76 Spivak, Gayatri 22, 36, 41, 59, 75, 217 Stalin, Joseph 203 Stanišic, Saša 98–99 Steinfeld, Henning 82 Strehlow, Ted 121 Sturm-Trigonakis, Elke 47 Suaudeau, Julien 118 Swift, Jonathan 114 Szalay, Zoltán 191 Szanton Blanc, Cristina 5 Sznaider, Natan 188 Taberner, Stuart 91, 93 Tabucchi, Antonio 53 Tagore, Rabindranath 33

Index

Takanayagi, Shunichi 114 Talamon, Alfonz 190 Terkessidis, Mark 234–235 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 101, 207 Tiffin, Helen 91 Tóth, Anikó N. 190, 192 Tower Sargent, Lyman 117 Tőzsér, Árpád 190 Trivedi, Harish 22, 41 Trojanow, Ilja 208 Trotsky, Leon 9 Tsagari, Athina 231 Vairasse, Denis de 117 Varnhagen, Karl August von 156 Vatsyayan, Kapila 27 Velter, André 53 Venuti, Lawrence 42 Vertovec, Stephen 2, 11, 207 Vespucci, Amerigo 111 Virgil 119 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 17, 124–125, 128, 133–136, 139–140 Völz, Johannes 14

Waberi, Abdourahman A. 118 Wagner, Richard 204 Walcott, Derek 50 Walkowitz, Rebecca 224–225 Walton, Robyn 116 Weller, Archie 121 Wetzel, Daniel 231 Wiegandt, Kai 173 Wieland, Christoph Martin 77 Wismann, Heinz 236 Wohlgeboren-Wohlbrück, Minna 139–140 Wolf, Ferdinand 17, 142–165 Wolfzettel, Friedrich 127–128 Wright, Alexis 121 Wright, Joe 176 Yan, Mo 101 Yang, William 209 Young, Robert C. 13–14, 216, 223–224 Závada, Pál 191 Zeh, Juli 98–99 Zimmer, Heinrich 21, 23, 30–31, 38, 41

267