Translocality in Contemporary City Novels (Literary Urban Studies) 3030666875, 9783030666873

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LITERARY URBAN STUDIES

Translocality in Contemporary City Novels Lena Mattheis

Literary Urban Studies Series Editors Lieven Ameel Turku Institute for Advanced Studies University of Turku Turku, Finland Jason Finch English Language and Literature Åbo Akademi University Turku, Finland Eric Prieto Department of French and Italian University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA Markku Salmela English Language, Literature & Translation Tampere University Tampere, Finland

The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary mediations and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “cityness” of its study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban condition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series’ focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international and cross-disciplinary audience. Editorial board Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15888

Lena Mattheis

Translocality in Contemporary City Novels

Lena Mattheis University of Duisburg-Essen Essen, Germany

ISSN 2523-7888     ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic) Literary Urban Studies ISBN 978-3-030-66686-6    ISBN 978-3-030-66687-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

As I am preparing this book for publication, the world looks quite different from when I started writing it in 2016. A few months after I had begun to shape a vague notion about the interesting spatialities of contemporary global writing into a thesis, the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and of the US presidential elections unsettled the Anglophone world. The shockwaves were tangible, also in the more slow-paced literary scene, and can be felt in some of the most recently published translocal novels. Now, in the summer of 2020, the world has changed yet again. A global pandemic has reinstated rigid borders and put restrictions on movement to a degree that most of us have never experienced. At the height of the pandemic—in response to police brutality, systemic racism and institutional violence—the Black Lives Matter movement has initiated global protest at unprecedented scales. As I feel my breath under the face mask I now wear every day, I wonder what this will do to the translocal world I write about in these pages. How will it re-emerge? Will it be forever changed? Could it even end up being a more translocal world that creates universally accessible digital spaces of exchange, communication and shared knowledge? Or will socio-economic and racial divisions, now even more visible and harmful especially in the tight spaces of cities, deepen further?

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Since I can only speculate on the answers to any of these questions and the novels that may respond to them have yet to be published, I have decided to refrain from any substantial alterations or additions to my manuscript. I remain utterly curious as to what the world may look like when I will hold this book in my hands and reread these words. Essen, Germany

Lena Mattheis

Acknowledgements

In 2015, when Jens Gurr asked me whether I had been thinking about writing a doctoral thesis, I first of all confessed that I had not even thought about my MA thesis yet, that I was not sure whether I was at all suited to do research and that, lastly, I had absolutely no idea what writing a dissertation or being a doctoral candidate entailed. About five minutes after this exchange, I deeply regretted my unfortunate tendency towards extreme honesty and expected this to be the untimely ending of an academic career I had previously not even dared to consider. Instead, I ended up with the best mentor I could have hoped for. I am deeply grateful to Jens for his advice and guidance, for always assuming that I know what I am doing and, especially, for giving me the courage to still say so when I don’t. No regrets. In addition to having a superb supervisor, working in a team composed exclusively of clever, encouraging and generous human beings was truly helpful and made a process that can be rather lonely and stressful a (mainly) fun and empowering experience. I cannot thank Torsten Caeners, Steffie Caeners and Adam von Wald enough for all their proofreading, teaching advice and inspiring coffee chats. Without Beate Mrugalla and Christine Cangemi, office life would have been infinitely less fun. The lunch crew always made my day—one pun at a time. I would especially like to thank Christian Hunt for his notes on the concluding chapter of this book as well as for, many moons ago, helping me apply for my first scholarship— another concept I was unfamiliar with. Mair, thank you for all the cake. I needed it. I am also very grateful for the feedback and support provided by Saskia Hertlein, Ricarda Menn, Maria Sulimma and Claudia Drawe. vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the second phase of my research, I was introduced to the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) and have found this network to be an incredibly helpful resource with many innovative researchers who were always ready and willing to discuss, give feedback and ask the right questions at the right time. I will never forget the moment Ayona Datta told me I could be a geographer at my first ALUS conference. The association’s co-founder Lieven Ameel was not just a great discussion partner at many a conference but also provided invaluable and highly productive feedback as a second examiner for my dissertation. I am therefore very pleased that my monograph is now a part of the association’s Literary Urban Studies series. Last, but most definitely not least, to my wonderful family of friends, and especially to Lioba Schreyer: this book would not exist without you.

Contents

1 Introducing Translocal Narratability  1 2 Simultaneity 19 3 Palimpsest 49 4 Mapping 83 5 Scaling135 6 Silence, Absence and Non-Place165 7 Haunting195 8 Conclusion225 Works Cited231 Index249

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Cover and back cover of Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician with a map of Edinburgh and masked figures in the foreground (Cover design: Veena Bhana; Cover art: “Know and Don’t Believe” by Tafadzwa Gwetai) Copper engraving entitled Edenburg—Edenburgum, Scotiae Metropolis (1581) by German and Flemish mapmakers Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg

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List of Maps

Map 4.1 Map 4.2 Map 4.3 Map 4.4

Map 4.5

Map 4.6 Map 4.7

Americanah I. All locations mentioned in Part One of Americanah by Adichie with white markers for Ifemelu’s chapter and green markers for Obinze’s chapter 88 Americanah II. This map shows all locations mentioned in Part One of Americanah by Adichie with clustered markers. The dark green circles indicate a cluster of less than ten markers 90 Americanah III. All locations mentioned in Part One of Americanah by Adichie with clustered markers and arrows describing the main trajectories of the protagonists 91 Entire Corpus. This map shows the real-world referents of all main settings of my entire corpus. The size of the circles corresponds to the density of clustered locational markers, clearly marking New York City and London as the most frequently narrated cities 93 The first two chapters of Huchu’s novel. The first two chapters of Huchu’s novel are narrated from the perspectives of the Magistrate (red line) and Farai (blue line), respectively. An interactive version of the map reveals the corresponding quotation from the novel for each pushpin 95 Streets and landmarks. Streets and landmarks mapping in the Magistrate’s chapter 97 Farai’s possible locations in the beginning of the novel. The green circle marks his actual location 102

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List of Maps

Map 4.8

Lothian Buses map of the route of bus 22 with an added directional arrow to confirm Farai’s location Map 4.9 The location of Doctors indicates that Farai takes Forrest Road from Teviot/Lauriston Place Map 4.10 The Magistrate’s authorial pictorial map of Edinburgh (Huchu 2015, p. 286)

103 104 106

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 3.1

Overview of main locations in my corpus of 32 contemporary translocal novels, sorted alphabetically by surnames of the authors12 Matrix of types and qualities of palimpsests in translocal urban narratives78

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CHAPTER 1

Introducing Translocal Narratability

Contemporary city novels are increasingly characterised by a global, transcultural and complex quality that becomes particularly tangible in their spatial settings and narrative voices. Novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2014), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) or Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) are translocal insofar as that they are set in two or more distant cities, which—by means of a variety of narrative techniques—are closely layered, connected and intertwined. This reflects not only a more and more translocal world but also calls for innovative approaches in narratology in order to capture translocality, ‘cityness’ and the literary representations of both. The rather simple question that prompted my research is therefore concerned with this overarching issue: Which narrative features, techniques or elements work together to produce something one might call the translocal narratability of city novels? The term, as I would like to define it, is informed by three main areas of research: urban studies, research in narratology and the study of translocality. These three pillars support the theoretical background out of which not only the concept itself emerges, but also the sets of techniques that I will identify as contributing to translocal narratability. As narratability, just like narrativity, is not simply either there or not, but is instead a scalar quality (cf. e.g. Abbott 2009 or Prince 2011),1 the number of 1  Marie-Laure Ryan, who has produced some of the most influential research on narrativity, illustrates this quality with a question: “If we ask ‘is Finnegans Wake more narrative than

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_1

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narrative techniques that have the potential to produce translocal narratability is virtually infinite. There are, however, styles, themes and motifs that lend themselves very easily to such an end, whereas others hardly ever occur in translocal writing. The inventory I will create in the following chapters is therefore an approximation of the narrative techniques that produce the highest degree of translocal narratability and which are most frequently used in the urban texts of my corpus.2 Since one almost archetypal feature these novels share is their foregrounding of urbanity and all of them profoundly ground their narration and narrative voices in the mapping and simultaneous layering of seemingly incompatible urban spaces (e.g. Kalimpong and New York in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss or Bindura and Edinburgh in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician3 (2015)), the focus of this book lies on urban fiction and is structured around concepts associated with urban studies.4 As I attempt to define translocal narratability as a broadly applicable concept and, at the same time, produce versatile tools for its analysis, my corpus includes novels that fulfil all of these criteria, but also represent a large variety of translocal writing. This means that, while all novels in my corpus are translocal, urban, contemporary and Anglophone, they range from representations of queer spaces as perceived by a Vietnamese artist in Toronto to an imaginary door connecting London to Lagos and from a white Zimbabwean in Edinburgh to a tiny community desiring all things British in West Bengal. Translocal narratability is to be understood as the effect this type of narrative has, whereas the tools my chapters are structured around reveal how this effect is created. The tools are always constructed as both analytical tools used by researchers and as creative tools used by texts.

Little Red Riding Hood?’, we will get much broader agreement than if we ask ‘is Finnegans Wake a narrative?’” (2010, p. 316). The example is just as fitting if we ask whether Joyce’s opus magnum is more ‘narratable’ than the fairy tale. 2  For more information on my corpus, please see the second part of this introduction and Map 4.4. 3  First published by amaBooks, Zimbabwe, in 2014. 4  Not all translocal novels are necessarily always urban. See, for example, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2006) by Peter Orner, a novel which deals—like Chekhov’s Three Sisters—with the envy of life in the city, constantly imagining and projecting stories from Windhoek, Cincinnati and various other large cities onto the sparse farm life in the middle of the Namib.

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A considerable number of literary and cultural scholars have recently focused on translocal city novels. Maria Ridda’s London, New York, Bombay (2015) skilfully explores the transnational tendencies in postcolonial urban writing, relying in particular on Bakhtin’s chronotopes. Melanie Pooch’s DiverCity – Global Cities as a Literary Phenomenon (2016) reads novels about Toronto, New York and Los Angeles as globalised urban imaginaries. In Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), John McLeod explores the transcultural heart of the British metropolis and the spaces in which it beats most fervently. While these researchers, as well as many others, analyse translocal, transcultural and transnational urban spaces in intriguing ways and present compelling findings on the basis of cultural, literary, sociological and political research, most of them focus on specific cities—often with London or New York as the archetypal global city—and their embedded histories, trajectories and politics. What I propose is an inquiry into what makes city novels translocally narratable in general. Walking the line, or tightrope, between overgeneralising universalisms and self-isolating specificity will of course be a demanding task, but also, I believe, a productive one. As Wolfgang Welsch, in revision of his original conception of transculturality, adapted now to include cultural commonalities, puts it: “We need, I think, a theory that faces up to and is able to explain this transcending of context, this transcultural force of semantic items. Such a theory, it seems to me, does not yet exist” (2009, p. 14). Notwithstanding the fact that the creation of such an all-encompassing theory as Welsch demands is too bold an aim for my book, I consider his observation a starting point and an inspiration. In addition to tracing out commonalities of translocal texts, I aim to find further productive intersections between my three main fields of study—research in urban studies, narratology and the study of translocality—that I would now like to address one by one. To paint, with very broad strokes, an image of my understanding of translocality, I consider research on translocality not as a clearly delineated field but as a web of approaches and concepts that are all concerned with similar—at times overlapping, at others clashing—phenomena. The major terms, in a way the nodal points of this web, are the ‘local’, ‘globalisation’, ‘transnationalism’ and ‘transculturality’, although questions of ‘borderlands’ and ‘diasporas’ play a role as well.5 The ‘global’ is one of the 5  Naturally, this list is incomplete and simply reflects what I consider the most prominent and frequently used terms in this area of study. ‘Glocal’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ thought could be

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dangerously generalising terms that can become so omnipresent as to become bereft of content or—even worse—expressive of a unidirectional hegemony. Nevertheless, many scholars are very successful in avoiding the pitfalls of conceptions of globalisation,6 which Edward Said in his essay on the globalisation of literary study puts forward in the form of a question: “Can one formulate a theory of connection between part and whole that denies neither the specificity of the individual experience nor the validity of a projected, putative, or imputed whole?” (2001, p. 68). One of the most effective ways to consolidate the part and the whole and to resist homogenising tendencies at the same time is, in my view, a focus on the “importance of local-local connections” (Brickell and Datta 2011a, p. 3) that could also be described as “pluri-local overlaps” (Munkelt et  al. 2013a, p. xxix) as they often incorporate more than two places. Via such translocal connections, two, three or more specific locations are linked across great distances. With a more pronounced tendency towards larger scales, urban sociologist Saskia Sassen points out that “today social actors are likely to live, and entities likely to operate, in overlapping domains of the national and the global” (2001a, p. 267). The contemporary relevance of translocality and related concepts is also addressed when Frank Schulze-Engler claims that “what is most strikingly new about the transcultural is its sudden ubiquity” (2009a, p. ix). This ubiquity is a reaction to the accelerated and hypermobile world we live in, which produces novel impressions, enactments and manifestations of transculturality on a daily basis. Nonetheless, it is important to consider that this acceleration has deep historical roots and that cultures and people have always been mobile to a degree. Since these phenomena have therefore also been studied for decades, using various terms and approaches, the ubiquity of transculturality, transnationality and translocality in many fields of study is the result of a long process involving a variety of schools mentioned as well. It is also important to note that theories of, for example, the ‘transnational’ in certain aspects stand in opposition to my definition of the ‘translocal’. Nonetheless, all of these terms are concerned with understanding how connections across large distances function and thereby inform my study. 6  For concise overviews of globalisation theories relevant in this context, see, for example, Avtar Brah’s article “Global Mobilities, Local Predicaments: Globalization and the Critical Imagination” in Feminist Review (2002b) or Saskia Sassen’s essay “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization” in Globalization (2001), a collection edited by another leading theorist of the transnational and the transcultural: Arjun Appadurai.

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of thought pointing forward to conceptions of hybridity that are now described with variations of terms prefixed by ‘trans-’. Other related areas of research do not use the prefix but deal explicitly with movement through and across. Zooming in on US-American borders, for example, Sadowski-­ Smith’s analysis of the spatialities of borders and globalisation puts an emphasis on both “border porosity as a harbinger of global change and the accompanying tendency to overlook or minimize simultaneously occurring processes of border rigidity [which] also characterizes other border scholarship” (2002b, p. 4). The current political climate, especially with regard to questions of borders, appears to be just as torn between exchange and isolation. This is one reason why border studies are also relevant to my conception of the translocal, although my explicit focus lies on urban locales that are more indirectly affected by border discourses. An additional concern my research shares with this field is the significance and centrality of ‘place’ that can at times be neglected in global or transnational research.7 My conceptualisation of the notion of translocality additionally utilises scholarship concerned with the study of diasporas. While homing desires create a hierarchy between overlapping places (a tendency that I would prefer to avoid), the socially, artistically and narratively created imaginary representing a place (or several places) resonates very well with literary analysis. In her influential study on Cartographies of Diaspora, originally published in 1996, Avtar Brah explains that “diasporic identities are at once local and global. They are networks of transnational identifications encompassing ‘imagined’ and ‘encountered’ communities” (2002, p. 196). Despite the fact that I would instead refer to local-local connections that result in the presence of a global, transcultural or transnational plane, the image of a network of imaginaries and lived experiences—based of course on the works of Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai—is utterly convincing. I therefore agree with Brickell and Datta, whose conception of the translocal corresponds best with my study, when they propound that “by grounding translocality within different scales and locales then, we are able to examine translocality beyond a notion of ‘grounded’ 7  When explaining how Chicana/o studies can transform the border into a purely discursive symbolic place, Luis Martinez points out that “the most damaging aspect of this socalled post-national work, however, is its dismissal of the importance of ‘place’ and ‘citizenship’ in a nationally defined entity that permanently denies especially the (undocumented) migrant arrival” (2002, p. 54).

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transnationalism” (2011, p. 4). In sum, the specific spatial focus is crucial. What is layered to produce translocal narratability are the individual experiences of different cityscapes, specific mental maps and perspectives (such as those described by de Certeau, Lynch or Lefebvre) in a process which may or may not include concerns with culture or nation. In a 2014 TED talk, Taiye Selasi proclaims herself a ‘local’ of many places and cities and expresses her regret at often being reduced to her nationality, which relates to none of the specific “rituals, relationships and restrictions” (n.p.) we experience in local spaces. Selasi’s frequently quoted request: “Don’t ask me where I’m from, ask me where I’m a local” (n.p.), which is also the title of her talk, is a much less theoretical but nonetheless apt summary of core practices in several of the scholarly approaches surrounding translocality. Put simply, translocal stories take specific local ties, experiences and behaviours and layer them with ties, experiences and behaviours belonging to another place. Selasi herself uses the term ‘multilocal’, which is a helpful term in the context of the questions of identity she responds to. I prefer the trans-prefix for the novels I study since they move through, across and sometimes beyond several local spaces. Where multi- or inter-prefixes suggest connected localities existing side by side, the trans-prefix describes the interpenetration of distant locations, which is a central characteristic of translocal novels. The stories told in these novels are then local in more than one place at the same time, just like Selasi considers herself as much a local of New York as she is of Rome and Accra. A perhaps surprisingly substantial number of the foundational works that are frequently quoted in translocal research are also considered essential to urban studies.8 Lefebvre’s social production of space, David Harvey’s time-space-compression, Edward Soja’s ‘postmetropolis’9 and Saskia Sassen’s ‘global city’ are only a few of the most prominent ­examples. 8  I discuss urban studies here with much more brevity than translocality and narratability, not because the city is less relevant but because the term is much more common than the other two. 9  Soja links urbanity directly to globalisation through the concept of the cosmopolis in the eponymous chapter seven of Postmetropolis (2000). An interesting reflection on cosmopolitanism, which is particularly relevant in the context of translocality, is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), which Julius, the extremely educated and cosmopolitan protagonist of Teju Cole’s Open City also explicitly references. For a study on the ‘neo-cosmopolitan’, which (like my own corpus) features a variety of writers from different places around the globe, see Sneja Gunew’s Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators (2017).

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The fact that the overwhelming majority of translocal novels foreground urban spaces is a second connection between the fields of translocality and urban studies, and may be due to the fact that “the postcolonial city is a spatiality in which cultural translocations become particularly visible” (Munkelt et al. 2013a, p. liv). This observation holds true not only for postcolonial urban spaces but also for the city as an administrative centre, the economic city, the informational city, the informal city, the divided or segregated city, the gendered city, the global city and almost every other type of urban space.10 One might go so far as to describe “cities as sites of translocality par excellence harbouring places of origin, settlement, resettlement and transit” (Brickell and Datta 2011a, p.  16, italics original). This can be traced back to the long history of cities as sites of acceleration and condensation Georg Simmel depicts so emphatically in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), but also to more contemporary descriptions of urbanity as characteristically complex (cf. Walloth et  al. 2016 or Gurr 2011). This complexity is created by the extremely diverse lived and experienced places that accumulate, overlap and display the tension between heterogeneity and homogeneity that is as formative for cities as it is for globalisation: “large cities have historically been places with significant concentrations of wealth and poverty, long-established households as well as transients, immigrants, and casual laborers” (Sassen 2001b, p. 200). This, in turn, underlines why city novels are most likely to exhibit translocal narratability as well as the largest possible variety of settings and characters. There is then a strong interconnection between translocality and cityness. The curiously malleable nature of the urban fabric allows for the flexibility that is essential for the creation of a translocal space. The palimpsest-­like layering that is constitutive of cityness also lies at the heart of translocality. In studying translocal city novels, this book will thus also explore new dimensions of cityness, new types of contemporary urban spaces created by global flows. To productively engage with how these particular spatial constructs are narrated, approaches from urban studies and the study of translocality are used side by side, showing again how the urban nature of the text enhances its translocality and vice versa. Finding the narrative techniques that convey translocal urban experiences will, in the context of this study, not be limited to, but mainly 10  These categories are not identical with, but most definitely a nod to, those Setha Low employs in Theorizing the City (1999).

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focused on, questions of narratability. This concept, which is also regularly referred to as ‘tellability’, originated in conversational narratology and linguistics, but is now, after the rise of postclassical narratology and the more recent interest in more differentiated types and definitions of narrativity, also closely connected to ‘narrativehood’ and literary texts (cf. e.g. Baroni 2009, Abbott 2009, or Ryan 1992). Narratability is evaluated on a scale that takes into account qualities inherent in the text as well as the impact of the reader’s contextual knowledge. In my analysis, this contextual knowledge is conveyed by processes of fictional worldmaking (see A.  Nünning 2010), of place attachment (see Altman 1992, or Manzo 2014) and of (mental) mapping (see Lynch 1960). All of these factors can help assess which narrative devices succeed in creating a sense of translocal space and how well they do so. If we take one step back, however, one might ask: what is the relationship between the ‘real’ translocal city and the narrated one? In his influential article “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, Jerome Bruner describes Joyce’s Dublin as “an invented referent not entirely free of the meanings imparted by the real place, just as a story that requires a ‘betrayal’ as one of its constituent functions can convert an ordinarily mundane event into something that seems compellingly like a betrayal” (1991, pp. 13–14). This ‘betrayal’ is also a key factor of narratability since a break with convention or expectation provides what is referred to as the ‘point’ of the story. Bruner then goes on to explore further universal features of narrative: What are genres, viewed psychologically? Merely conventionalized representations of human plights? There are surely such plights in all human cultures: conflicts of family loyalty, the vagaries of human trust, the vicissitudes of romance, and so on. And it might even seem that they are universal, given that the classics can be done in modern dress and the tales of exotic peoples be locally translated. But I think that emphasis on plights and their putative universality may obscure a deeper issue. For plight is only the plot form of a genre, its fabula. But genre is also a form of telling, its sjužet. Even if genres specialize in conventionalized human plights, they achieve their effects by using language in a particular way. And to translate the ‘way of telling’ of a genre into another language or culture where it does not exist requires a fresh literary-linguistic invention. (1991, p. 14)

Although translocal narratability is of course not a genre as such, but an effect created by specific narrative techniques and devices, this ‘way of

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telling’ and its translation are exactly what I will investigate. The focus on the effect on the reader, inherent in the concept of narratability, is just as essential in transcultural and translocal literature since “the location of transculture is not only to be found in realities outside texts or in the texts themselves, but also in audiences that make sense of them” (Schulze-­ Engler 2009a, p. xiv). After Labov and Todorov had established narratability as a domain of narratology that merits more critical attention, Gerald Prince became one of the central figures to survey it, alongside with narrativity and narrativehood. Prince asserts its universal potency when he explains that “perhaps any topic or theme—however local or insignificant—not only constitutes potential material for a narrative (is narrativizable) but also can be made narratively appealing (is narratable)” (2011, p.  24, my emphasis). The near equation of the local and the irrelevant seems to me to be at once inadequate and understandable considering that highly specific local content may indeed require a more masterful storyteller than a story grounded in a shared context or requiring little contextual knowledge. Nonetheless, a narrative that is entirely without local context, and the seemingly insignificant details that come with it, would not be all too narratable either, since “narratives exist and are meaningful only because they are situated in and across space, within networks of stories and trajectories” (Bieger 2016, p. 15). In her evaluation of spatial forms of storytelling, Bieger, drawing on Ryan’s Possible Worlds, goes on to explain that “while the story space (or ‘space of the plot’) is made up of all the spatial frames and all the locations mentioned, the narrative (story) world completes this space in the reader’s imagination by drawing on her personal knowledge and experience” (2016, p. 16, italics original). This implies that every reading process is, in a way, translocal since the story space is always layered with the narrative world. The complex question of when, where and how readers of translocal texts complete their reading experience by layering the narrative with their own knowledge or experience of real places will be a central concern in my entire study. Doreen Massey’s and Marie-Laure Ryan’s works inform my thoughts on this issue, which is why I would also like to refer to one of Ryan’s essays on culture-transcending narrative categories here.11 Ryan 11  Sheila Hones should be mentioned as well in this context, although I have opted to focus on other scholars whose work is more compatible with translocality. Hones’s conception of literary geography, narrative space and the novel as a spatial event, in particular, are

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explains that her “fuzzy-set conception of narrative” (2010, p. 314)—like my approach to translocal narratability—consists of categories that can produce more or less narrativity and that are grouped by the likelihood with which they will produce or describe a typical narrative. Despite her focus on narrativity and genre, her observation that “studying the modes of narrativity in a variety of literary traditions, both oral and literate, will not only enrich our understanding of particular texts, but will also make a significant contribution to narratology by revealing previously undescribed avatars of story” (Ryan 2010, p. 322) applies to the aim of my conception and study of translocal narratability as well.

Corpus and Structure of Chapters In order to achieve a certain variety in terms of narrative techniques, literary traditions and narrated locations, I work with a large corpus of translocal city novels and reduce detailed surveys and analyses of individual texts in favour of selective and strategic close readings of passages that pertain to translocal narratability and cityness. My chapters are therefore grouped along the lines of narrative techniques and strategies rather than being structured by a focus on particular novels. Although I do not abstract as much as a distant reading, in Franco Moretti’s sense,12 would require me to do, I believe that a corpus of 32, rather than merely 2 or 3, exemplary novels will provide new insights into the nature of translocal urban fiction. Referring back to Welsch and the tension between the general and the specific,13 my approach can hopefully achieve a balance between the two by including not only a larger number of texts but also by acknowledging that, as Jens Gurr beautifully puts it, “the literary traffic of ideas does not stop at borders” (2011, p. 13): instead of focusing on nonetheless influential in shaping this line of thinking. For an overview of these approaches, see her essays in Social & Cultural Geography and in the edited collection Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds, both from 2011. 12  Moretti perfects this approach in his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900, in which he explores how “geography shapes the narrative structure of the European novel” (1999, p. 8) by creating, for example, a map of all of Jane Austen’s novels and by then looking for commonalities and possible abstractions rather than analysing the place-bound nature of each text separately. 13  While each pair of terms reflects a slightly different school of thought, I regard this tension as extremely similar to that between the whole and the part, between commonality and specificity, between the global and the local.

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certain regions, nations or cultures, I have attempted to include a range of settings and locations, and as result of this, many of the referenced authors are at home in more than one country.14 My corpus consists of 32 novels, 21 of which were published in the 2010s, 11 in the 2000s and one novel which came out in 1997, making contemporaneity one of my criteria for selecting texts. I have, additionally, focused on urban and Anglophone novels with roughly contemporary settings, although the most important factor in selecting novels for my corpus was that they connect, layer and intertwine two or more distant city settings through the strategic use of varied narrative techniques. Table 1.1, which contains the information visualised in Map 4.4, provides a brief overview of my corpus of novels and their main settings. Please note that the listed locations reflect the degree of specificity the respective novels provide: Narcopolis (2012) by Jeet Thayil, for example, explicitly mentions Shuklaji Street as its main location in Mumbai, while it only references New  York as the protagonist’s new home and becomes much more vague when it comes to the various locations in China. In order to make this table, and the map made on the basis of it, as accurate as possible, I have decided to list each location as it is provided in the novel, instead of homogenising the scales by listing only either countries, cities or coordinates. In the case of The Virgin of Flames (2007) by Chris Abani and NW (2013) by Zadie Smith, one main location is layered with so many references to further locations, it would have been impossible to list all of them. I therefore include only their main locations here and will go into more detail on their translocal connections as I analyse the texts. The table lists the novels in alphabetical order of the authors’ surnames (or what the novel’s publisher defines as their surname) as this is the same order in which the works are listed in the corresponding section of my Works Cited. What this table already hints at is that contemporary city novels are translocal in different ways but mainly fall into one of two categories: they either have one primary setting and layer one or more distant locations 14  Although many authors included in this study, such as Xiaolu Guo or Chris Abani, have written several interesting novels that could be considered translocal, I have decided to mainly refer to one book per author. In the case of Zadie Smith, I have included a brief discussion of NW despite my main focus on Swing Time. I do this mainly because the two novels narrate translocality in very different ways and NW comes with a map-like cover image—a phenomenon I have become quite interested in and will discuss in more detail in the fourth chapter of this study, which deals with mapping.

Accra Bejing

2018 London 2014 London 2017 Aleppo? 2015 Edinburgh

2004 Calcutta 2017 New York 2015 Kampala, Uganda 2016 London

Mohsin Hamid

Tendai Huchu

Jhumpa Lahiri Min Jin Lee Dinaw Mengestu

Irenosen Okojie

Exit West

The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician The Namesake Free Food For Millionaires All Our Names

Butterfly Fish

Boston Korea Laurel, Midwest Benin

Bindura

London

Alexandria, VA Vietnam Detroit, Michigan Niger Delta Brussels New York Baní

Location 2

2018 Tokyo 2005 Toronto 2014 Paradise, Zimbabwe 2008 London 2011 New York 2006 Kalimpong 2008 Paterson, NJ

Location 1 Lagos

Year 2008 East LA 2014 Princeton

Author

Chris Abani Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Consolation of Maps Thomas Bourke What We All Long For Dionne Brand We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo The Other Hand Chris Cleave Open City Teju Cole The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai The Brief Wondrous Life of Junot Díaz Oscar Wao Happiness Aminatta Forna I Am China Xiaolu Guo

The Virgin of Flames Americanah

Title

Cambridge

Mykonos

Lagos London Santo Domingo Massachusetts Lausanne

Florence Bangkok

New York

Location 3

New York

Location 5

New York

United States Crete/ Iona Marin County

Mito

Location 4

Table 1.1  Overview of main locations in my corpus of 32 contemporary translocal novels, sorted alphabetically by surnames of the authors

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2013 Japan 2007 London 2013 British Columbia 2017 London 1997 2001 2015 2013 2004 2017 Amherst, MA

Julie Otsuka Helen Oyeyemi Ruth Ozeki

Olumide Popoola

Arundhati Roy Salman Rushdie Sunjeev Sahota Taiye Selasi Elif Shafak

Kamila Shamsie

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

Jeet Thayil

Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi

When We Speak of Nothing The God of Small Things Fury The Year of the Runaways Ghana Must Go The Saint of Incipient Insanities Home Fire

N-W

Swing Time

Narcopolis

Call Me Zebra

2013 North-West London 2017 North-West London 2012 Shuklaji Street, Mumbai 2018 Iran

Ayemenem New York Sheffield New York Boston

2006 Goas

Peter Orner

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo The Buddha in the Attic The Opposite House A Tale for the Time Being

United States

China

New York

Preston Road, London

United States Mumbai London London Istanbul

Port Harcourt

United States Lagos Japan

Cincinnati

Barcelona

New York

Bendigo

Raqqa

England Amsterdam Chandigarh Boston Madrid

Cuba Sunnyvale, CA

Gambia?

Karachi

Cambridge Kanyakumari Accra Marrakesh

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over this setting or the novel is divided between two or three main settings with the references to further locations being more sparse than in the first category. Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, with its main setting in Edinburgh, or Chris Abani’s East LA novel The Virgin of Flames (2007) are examples of the first type; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which is set in Nigeria and the United States, or Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, with its narrative moving constantly between Kalimpong, London and New  York City, represent the second type. As the subsequent chapters will show, this distinction is often reflected in the narrative techniques required to produce translocal narratability and to layer the settings in a way that makes for a particularly narratable story. For example, the first type often works with the palimpsest whereas the second type frequently employs simultaneity as a core strategy. Novels that constantly move between two or three main settings readily illustrate why simultaneity, discussed in Chap. 2, is not only essential to cityness but also extremely well suited to produce translocal narratability. I will survey a variety of narrative techniques and structures, employed in my corpus of novels to show that their settings are not simply narrated side by side but instead interpenetrate each other in meaningful ways. The basic question I respond to is how actions that take place at the same time in different settings, rather than simply alternating between locations, are narrated as truly simultaneous. Speculative simultaneity and readerly participation are the strategies I identify as being the most specific to translocal narratability as both narrative tools suggest that there are translocal connections beyond the ones which are overtly present in the narrative. In a number of translocal texts, the reader’s location and reality is implied to be one of the simultaneously present storyworlds. Characters and narrators additionally speculate on numerous other simultaneously occurring actions around the globe that might, in a possible future, gain significance for the translocal connections at hand. The translocal urban palimpsest, my focus in Chap. 3, expands from the simultaneous present to include layers of buried ‘pasts’ into the translocal connections formed in the novels. The main difference between the ‘standard’ palimpsest and the translocal palimpsest is that the latter complements movement through time by movement through space: a story set in Edinburgh, which explores hidden layers of local Scottish history, can be enriched by layers of Zimbabwean everyday stories from Bindura, as is the case in Tendai Huchu’s novel. Since the palimpsest (translocal, urban or textual) is a concept that tends to be overused, in literary urban

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studies in particular, its potency is at times reduced by the vagueness with which it is employed. I will therefore establish and distinguish between different qualities and types of palimpsests that are particularly prominent in translocal writing. Mapping palimpsest-like or simultaneous city settings, a technique I discuss in Chap. 4, can provide further insights into translocal connections. Maps and mappings represent extremely fruitful tools for researchers, readers and authors, although all three groups use and produce them in distinct ways. For this section, I have produced a variety of maps as a researcher but also consider authorial maps and studies regarding maps created by readers. Descriptions of maps, maps as metaphors, digital maps, authorial maps and even the maps or map-like images frequently printed on the covers of translocal texts all make translocality more tangible, relatable and, therefore, narratable. While a map can only represent one scale at a time, scaling, the subject of my fifth chapter, allows us to explore several scales, separately as well as simultaneously, and to also pay close attention to the spaces between scales and their fuzzy edges. An almost iconic scaling in urban films, poetry and prose is the switch from a bird’s-eye perspective (often from a rooftop, taking in the entire city) to the more localised street level or vice versa. These contrasting scales, as well as a consideration of what is lost or gained in the scaling process, reflect the tension between the part and the whole, or the global and the local, which is central to this study. While observing an object or subject in the context of a different scale can provide clarity and insight, the distortions caused by scale effects can also complicate matters further. In my reflections on scaling, I will not only explore how different scales and scale effects affect narratability but also discuss how and why certain scales are more relevant than others in a translocal context. Although all of the techniques I explore in this study can overlap or be used in a complementary manner, silence, absence and non-place are so closely intertwined in translocal narratives that I have chosen to discuss them all in Chap. 6. Translocal novels employ all three concepts in their established forms but, more often than not, invert expectations by, for example, presenting settings typically thought of as non-places as locations with a high degree of ‘placeness’. The airport, one of the most conventional examples of Augé’s non-places, is (in translocal texts) frequently presented as a place that, counter-intuitively, showcases identities, relationships and even translocal history. Absence, a spatial concept by nature, is narrated through temporal structures whereas silence, generally

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perceived through its duration on the level of time, is presented as a spatial phenomenon on the page. These reversals of readerly expectations produce narratability as they build on established narrative patterns and reinvent them at the same time. Lastly, Chap. 7 discusses haunting as less of a technique in itself but rather as an extremely well-established narrative motif, which engenders certain narrative techniques. The city becomes productive as a site that shelters countless ghosts, memories and haunted spaces. Storied ghosts generally haunt a specific location, which means that translocal haunting involves several specific locations and establishes the local-local connections between them that are so essential to translocal narratability. Haunting therefore emphasises the fact that translocality, as well as transculturality, are by no means detached from local, small-scale processes and place attachment. Additionally, haunting sheds light on which stories, people and locations are generally considered important and central and which ones remain spectral and liminal. In relating this liminality, translocal novels use innovative means to make experiences of exclusion and ‘silencing’ narratable without becoming didactic. Italics, footnotes and unusual narrative voices are particularly productive here. In each of these chapters,15 I will present possible categories or typologies, developed by other researchers or myself, which aid my analysis and may furthermore be employed to bring more clarity to those terms which tend to be used with a degree of vagueness. I will also evaluate the supposed novelty of translocal writing and point out narrative elements which have a long literary history, as well as those which might seem similar to, for example, travel writing, but are in fact quite innovative. Since I believe that “literature is a cultural spinal cord that links places and cultures, an integral part of all cultures, where it shapes people and histories” (Larsen 2017, p. 9) and has therefore, in a way, always been translocal, I hope that my more detailed study of translocal narratability in contemporary Anglophone city novels will provide a new perspective on the important connections which narratives create.

15  Although the chapters build on each other in the sense that they employ concepts introduced in and terms established by preceding chapters, they do not necessarily need to be read in sequence. As my aim is to produce a toolbox of translocal narratability, readers should be able to pick and choose specific tools they want to work with.

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Works Cited Further References Abbott, H.  Porter. 2009. Narrativity. In Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 309–328. Berlin: de Gruyter. Altman, Irwin, ed. 1992. Place Attachment. New York: Plenum Press. Baroni, Raphaël. 2009. Tellability. In Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 447–454. Berlin: de Gruyter. Bieger, Laura. 2016. Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 64 (1): 11–26. Brah, Avtar. 2002 [1996]. Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Brickell, Katherine, and Ayona Datta. 2011a. Introduction: Translocal Geographies. In Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections, ed. Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, 3–22. London and New York: Routledge. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry 18 (1): 1–21. Gurr, Jens Martin. 2011. The Representations of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inventory of Strategies. In Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, ed. Jens Martin Gurr and Wilfried Raussert, 11–38. Trier: WVT. Larsen, Svend Erik. 2017. Literature and the Experience of Globalization. Texts Without Borders. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Luis Martinez, Manuel. 2002. Telling the Difference between the Border and the Borderlands: Materiality and Theoretical Practice. In Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, 53–68. New York: Palgrave. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The Technology Press & Harvard University Press. Manzo, Lynne Catherine, ed. 2014. Place Attachment. Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. Abingdon: Routledge. Moretti, Franco. 1999. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800—1900. London: Verso. Munkelt, Marga, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, and Silke Stroh. 2013a. Introduction: Directions of Translocation—Towards a Critical Spatial Thinking in Postcolonial Studies. In Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking, ed. Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, and Silke Stroh, xiii–lxi. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nünning, Ansgar, ed. 2010. The Aesthetics and Politics of Cultural Worldmaking. Trier: WVT.

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Prince, Gerald. 2011. Narrativehood, Narrativity, Narratability. In Theorizing Narrativity, ed. José Angel Garcia Landa and John Pier, 19–27. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1992. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. Narrativity and Its Modes as Culture-Transcending Analytical Categories. Japan Forum 21 (3): 307–323. Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, ed. 2002b. Introduction: Border Studies, Diaspora, and Theories of Globalization. In Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, 1–30. New York, NY: Palgrave. Said, Edward. 2001. Globalizing Literary Study. Modern Language Association 116 (1): 64–68. Sassen, Saskia. 2001a. Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization. In Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 260–278. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2001b. The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schulze-Engler, Frank. 2009a. Introduction. In Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze-Engler, ix–xvi. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Walloth, Christian, Jens Martin Gurr, and J.  Alexander Schmidt, eds. 2016. Understanding Complex Urban Systems: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Modeling. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Welsch, Wolfgang. 2009. On the Acquisition and Possession of Commonalities. In Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze-­ Engler, 3–36. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

CHAPTER 2

Simultaneity

A Californian woman is accidentally shot on a tourist bus in a desert in Morocco. Back in San Diego, the family’s nanny is increasingly worried by the prospect of not being able to attend a wedding in Tijuana. In Tokyo, a young girl watches reports of an alleged terrorist attack in a Moroccan desert flicker by on the global news. In this rough sketch of the seemingly disjointed plotlines of Babel (2006) one can recognise not only the handiwork of director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, but also one of the many reasons simultaneity is essential in the study of translocal and transnational narratives. An event in one corner of the world, such as a gun purchased by a goatherder to keep jackals at bay, can have devastating effects locally, on an entirely different continent and in the international press at the same time. Babel in fact narrates events that take place not at exactly the same time but overlap to different degrees. The alternation between storylines and locations leaves the audience unsure of when exactly something happens and how the characters and their actions will all be connected in the end. No longer an uncommon trick, and a hallmark of Iñarritu’s filmography (think 21 Grams or Amores Perros), a similar style of narration marks translocal novels such as Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For or I Am China by Xiaolu Guo.1 1  Guo creates a similarly labyrinthine simultaneity through the use of a series of letters exchanged between two Chinese lovers, which reveal temporal and spatial overlaps only over the course of the reading process since they are mediated to the reader by a Scottish ­translator,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_2

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Forcing readers and audiences to try to presage outcomes and puzzle over connections and timelines is an effective way to display interplays of cause and effect in a globalised world. A heightened sense of simultaneity increases the urgency with which the translocal puzzle needs to be solved and subtly shows how “neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces” (Appadurai 2000, p. 4). Before Arjun Appadurai, one of the pioneers of transnational scholarship, reaches this conclusion, he posits media and migration as two major factors in newly emerging types of transnational imaginations. Explaining a basic assumption underlying his much-cited monograph Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai writes that “implicit in this book is a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (2000, p. 3, italics original). In literature dealing with migration, simultaneity either forges translocal bonds or is characterised more by the absence of a location or a person from that location.2 Since this potent mixture of absence, presence, co-presence and simultaneity will be explored in more depth in Chap. 6, the focus will here lie on a variation of Appadurai’s second diacritic, namely on the impact of electronic media, [which] together with growing opportunities for fast travel, invests Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the global village’ with new meanings. Simultaneous transmission to countries linked by who is not certain of the letters’ chronology. For a more detailed analysis of temporal narrative structures in I Am China, see my article “Time in the Translocal City” in Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination (2021, Palgrave). 2  In The Suffering of the Immigrant, Abdelmalek Sayad describes the paradoxical situation of the immigrant, who is necessarily also an emigrant and therefore both absent (from their country of origin) and present (where they currently reside) in a permanence that is often perceived as temporary, because they may always (have to) return. Sayad writes: “If it is not to be a pure ‘absence’, emigration requires a sort of impossible ‘ubiquity’, or a way of being that affects the modalities of absence it generates. […] The condition or paradox of the emigrant is that he goes on ‘being present despite his absence’. […] He is no more than partially absent where he is absent’. Correlatively, he is ‘not totally present where he is’” (2004, p. 125, italics original). While Sayad analyses political struggles transferred in autobiographical accounts and quantitative studies, his ‘science of absence’ can easily be transferred into the sphere of literary analysis.

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s­atellite means that an event happening in one part of the world can be ‘watched together’ by people in different parts of the globe. (Brah 2002a, p. 195)

As a part of her definition of the diaspora space—a space shaped by ‘natives’, migrants, borders and mobility alike—Brah here explains that a diaspora is not simply about a shared desire to return to an imagined homeland. In a time of global media, the networks between places are not to be underestimated in their potential to produce a shared present. Nevertheless, the concept of the diaspora space acknowledges that who watches, where that person watches and who watches with them all have an impact on the simultaneous activity. To hark back to Babel, a news story about an alleged terrorist attack in Morocco could be watched at the exact same time but elicit entirely opposite responses in a tourist group of mixed nationalities in Morocco, a Mexican audience in the United States or in a Japanese audience in Japan. With a large number of people now consuming a constant newsfeed via their smartphones, the sense of simultaneity and immediacy that comes with electronic media usage has only been heightened since Brah observed this phenomenon. While online media, instant messaging and video calls have played, and continue to play, a big role in making translocal simultaneity not only thinkable but experienceable, simultaneity has for a much longer time been “the crux of any attempt to narrate urban complexity, for simultaneity, the notion of innumerable things—momentous or trivial—happening at the same time, is surely a central characteristic of urban complexity” (Gurr 2011, p. 12). Gurr’s inventory of strategies used to narrate urban simultaneity deliberately takes into account a whole range of urban texts, from Sir John Denham’s 1642 poem “Cooper’s Hill” to Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985). Gurr then explores different strategies to simulate urban simultaneity in a text, focusing on the effect those textual strategies have on implied readers: synecdochic representations, declarative complexity, experiential strategies and breaking linearity. In his reading of urban simultaneity as urban complexity, the focus lies mainly on events occurring in one place at the same time, with the exception perhaps of Eliot’s The Waste Land’s (1922) “Unreal city” passages condensing Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London into one cosmopolitan conglomerate (cf. Eliot 2011, pp.  66/72). In the following reflections, I will use and slightly adapt Gurr’s inventory to analyse simultaneity

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in translocal urban texts and additionally use a second typology, developed by Uri Margolin. Margolin’s more strictly narratological typology complements Gurr’s approach since simultaneity is a central concern not only in translocal and urban studies, but also in narratology. In his entry on “Simultaneity in Narrative” for The Living Handbook of Narratology, Margolin focuses on structure by subdividing the narration of simultaneity into alternating block presentation, repeated intercutting and splitting the page into two dimensions. Both Gurr and Margolin take as their starting point the old question of whether a written text, linear in nature, can ever fully convey simultaneity, which has most famously been asked in Lessing’s Laocoon (1805). As Lessing argues, words on a page can tell a story only in sequence, unlike a painting (or the split screen in a film) which allows for simultaneous perceptions of several aspects of a scene. Novels require more elaborate strategies in order to simulate a similar onrush of impressions, especially when the narrated actions take place in more than one place at the same time. In this chapter I will therefore provide examples from translocal novels to further explore the strategies described by Gurr and Margolin, adapt those strategies to the specific needs of translocal texts and also identify additional narrative and textual techniques that simulate simultaneity. In this process, I will coin speculative simultaneity and implied participation as central terms in the discussion of translocal narratability and simultaneity. This approach then elucidates why simultaneity is an essential and ubiquitous phenomenon in translocal writing and concurrently demonstrates how simultaneity is shaped and expressed to enhance translocal narratability.

Synecdoche, Metonymy and Experiential Strategies The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004), Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s first novel in English, uses a whole range of simple yet effective strategies to narrate translocal simultaneity. Ömer from Istanbul, Abed from Morocco and Piyu from Spain all share a house and pursue different university degrees in Boston. The focalisation shifts between the three of them, Piyu’s Mexican-American girlfriend Alegre and her American friend Gail, who later becomes Ömer’s partner. In shorter passages a minor character’s point of view—such as that of Arroz, Piyu’s dog, or a Japanese tourist walking by—is mixed into a chapter narrated mainly from the perspective

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of a protagonist. Those interspersed jumps in perspective are always brief but occur frequently. Showing that what another character experiences in the same environment can differ to a great extent from other points of view illustrates how, in the urban environment at every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. (Lynch 1960, p. 1)

Kevin Lynch’s observation, starting point of The Image of the City, his influential study on mental maps, becomes even more relevant when applied to a translocal urban environment. Memories and impressions of other places colour the perception of the present one and this colouring is distinctive for every single character, even the nameless Japanese tourist in Shafak’s novel. This means that there is not only more than could possibly be perceived at once, but also that the cityscape is teeming with potential connections to other cities, places and memories around the globe, all present in their potential to be triggered by the right observer at the right moment. This basic narrative set-up is complemented by “‘synechdochic representation[s] of simultaneity’ which consist[…] in narrating one strand of action and suggesting that there would have been innumerable others that would also deserve to be told” (Gurr 2011, p. 18). Shafak uses synecdochic representations frequently and ties them to specific time spans: within the span of only two minutes, before Ömer wakes up to his first morning in the shared house on Pearl Street, the heterodiegetic narrator jumps from perspective to perspective, at times giving a small insight into the thoughts of one of the group of characters passing through Pearl Street: Between 10:33 and 10:35 a.m., a UPS van loaded with letters and boxes, a hacker on his way to break into the computer of one of his professors who he heard had accused him of being a ‘hacker,’ a Norwegian tourist lost on his way to the Museum of Modern Art, and a pizza delivery boy who had just received two phone calls from people unknown to him […] plowed through Pearl Street, each in his own rhythm but similarly pensive and quiet. As they passed by one another, a brawny, buoyant worker on a ladder leaned against a three-floor house under reconstruction sedately watched them all from up there, whistled a tune he’s heard back at Joe’s this m ­ orning, took out the hammer from his belt and started hitting on the slack nails of

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the front. Exactly at the same time, on the other side of the wall, Ömer slumped in his sleep as if smacked on the face and opened his eyes in panic to his first morning in his first house in the U.S.A. (Shafak 2004, p. 101)

This passage is synecdochic, first of all, because it shows how within only two minutes, a whole host of people with stories worth telling move through the same urban space. Although we do not follow the student, the worker or the tourist, the density of possible untold or, as it were, partially told stories that characterises city novels is clearly evoked. Secondly, the synecdochic pars pro toto is underlined because the story fragments spark interest in the larger narrative they stand in for: why was the student accused of being a hacker and who did the accusing? Who called the delivery boy and will they call back? What did the worker eat or drink at Joe’s in the morning, why is this significant and where is Joe’s even located? The memories and past experiences described by Kevin Lynch feed into the synecdochic representation when Shafak points to how each character’s simultaneous experience of Pearl Street is shaped by their respective past (“the tune he’s heard back at Joe’s”), the present (“lost on his way to the Museum of Modern Art”), and the future (“on his way to break into the computer of one of his professors”). The simultaneous presence and indirect involvement of a whole other set of characters, removed once more from the present of Ömer, is invoked: the professor, the people who have called the pizza delivery boy, even the other guests at Joe’s. Again, the allusions to their stories are synecdochic because while only a small part of the story is told, there clearly is more to every single one. There are therefore two scales at which simultaneous action takes place: the immediate vicinity or truly local, namely Pearl Street, through which the delivery boy, the worker, the tourist and the students move, as well as the larger area of the city or possibly region in which the anonymous callers, Joe’s and the professor are located. A third scale of simultaneity, the translocal space, is here only alluded to and not made explicit. These allusions, however, are rather numerous: UPS as a multinational delivery company, the World Wide Web, the tourist from Norway, an immigrant’s first morning in a house in the United States. All of these hints at the translocal scale are synecdochic in themselves. Ömer’s experience reflects that of countless travellers and migrants; one tourist stands for hundreds, one UPS delivery for millions all around the world. In their synecdochic

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function, they are not unique characters but rather indicate a common experience of a group of people. While this assigning of one quality to an entire group (e.g. a tourist is always lost) is what Arjun Appadurai warns against and terms ‘metonymic freezing’, the metonymy also represents movement across different concepts, identities and spaces. In The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (2012), Stephen Clingman explores this metonymic movement, which is not unlike the synecdochic but employs a concept that is related to another rather than part of it,3 to develop his core concept: navigation as a central feature of transnational literature. In contrast to the metaphor, which unsettles an image or conception by making us see it in a new light, “this, then, is what metonymy allows: transition, navigation, mutation, alteration, a whole morphology of meanings” (Clingman 2012, p. 15). Taking Jakobson’s binary of combinatory versus substitutive as a starting point, Clingman then develops his grammar of the transnational. Beginning at the level of only one sentence, Clingman illustrates this idea with a very helpful comparison: Think of it this way: you begin the sentence, and when you begin you are not quite sure how it will end. You navigate your way through its recursive and combinatory possibilities, looking for landmarks, safe havens, and new vistas—just as you might navigate through a landscape half-known and unknown. (2012, p. 18)

Suggesting that navigating a sentence is not unlike navigating a landscape is a particularly interesting thought because it connects with an underlying argument of Gurr’s analysis: the structural analogies between city and text.4 Where Gurr sees the city as resembling text and vice versa, Clingman equates the movements of reading and writing with those of finding one’s way through a physical space. I believe that there are similar analogies to 3  Though frequently used as if they were interchangeable, synecdoche and metonymy are distinct. Where the synecdoche has a part representing the whole or vice versa, the metonymy represents a concept or entity via a related one. An example for synecdoche would be a black sail representing a pirate ship; a metonymy would be the symbolic crown standing in for a monarch. 4  Gurr makes this argument more explicit in a later publication, also concerned with T.S.  Eliot: “The Waste Land, I will argue, is the quintessential poem of urban memory, because the text in its layering of structures and meanings resembles the urban fabric itself” (2015, p. 22).

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be found between translocal texts and translocal lives: both movements and structures of translocal fictional narratives strongly resemble actual translocal spaces and journeys. This becomes clearer in another passage from The Saint of Insipient Insanities which is similar to the previous one but mixes synecdochic with experiential strategies and is more explicitly translocal. According to Gurr’s typology, experiential strategies convey the confusion caused by many simultaneously occurring events by mirroring them on the level of the text, for example, through long or fragmented sentences or frequent interruptions. The reader experiences the onrush of simultaneous impressions via an onrush of incomplete or disorienting textual information. This excerpt begins with a seemingly simple solution to the problem of simultaneity: the reader is told that all of the events take place within the same short span of time. The chapter starts at 11:33 a.m. with the depiction of a protest at a mosque in Istanbul, which is photographed by a journalist. Within the eight seconds the photographer needs to put a new roll of film into his camera, the reader is transported around the world only to land back in Boston, where the main part of the novel takes place. That lasted eight seconds. Within those eight seconds, Zahra back in her house in Marrakesh poured melted lead into a pan of cold water to protect the apple of her eye against the evil eye. The lead sizzled sadly. At the same time, a coyote in the empty horizons of Arizona smelled a dubious plant that had flourished at the spot where a Buick had crashed into a caravan parked by the road at this time eight years ago. The plant did not taste as good as paloverde, but the coyote ate it all the same. When the camera had paused clicking in Istanbul, the lead stopped sizzling in Marrakesh, and the coyote gulped down the plant in Arizona, the clock in Harvard Square moved from 3:37 a.m. to 3:38 a.m. That was precisely when winter came to Boston. (Shafak 2004, p. 205)

Giving the exact time is a device that anchors the restless characters in a moment while at the same time crossing boundaries of space. Almost as if the pictures of Istanbul are momentarily replaced with snapshots from

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other places, the pause of the camera creates an empty chronotope5 that is filled by experiential sense impressions. A paragraph later, the sounds from Istanbul, Marrakesh and Arizona carry the narrative over to Boston. This slightly confusing mix of sense impressions disorients readers and may even force them to go back to the previous page to remember in which city the sizzling sound, for example, was located. What is left of the quite visual impression of a series of snapshots is a chaotic soundscape that adds to the experiential quality. As Gurr explains, “complexity and simultaneity are […] frequently enacted by means of a suggestive asyndetic sequence of impressions” (2011, p. 20) which simulates the multifaceted urban environment and allows “the reader to ‘experience’ the sense of being overpowered by the simultaneity of multiple impressions” (2011, p. 20). In this definition of experiential strategies to represent urban simultaneity, Gurr draws on Georg Simmel’s influential essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, which already in 1903 provided an insightful characterisation of the metropolitan experience that still holds true today. The overpowering onrush of rapidly changing sense impression is magnified in translocal writing since the impressions typically come from a variety of places all at once. Adding Margolin’s list of formal features to Gurr’s typology, experiential simultaneity most frequently corresponds with “repeated intercutting, sometimes with ever increasing frequency, between two or more simultaneous narrated actions or acts of narration” (Margolin 2011, n.p.). While this is exactly what we find in The Saint of Incipient Insanities, another strategy to simulate disorientation and simultaneity is used in the opening chapter of Narcopolis (2012) by Jeet Thayil. The novel is mainly set in 1970s Bombay but also contains chapters set in rural China as well as hints at the narrator’s life in New York. Paying homage to one of the most intricately narrated urban novels, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the prologue of 5  The chronotope, a mental representation of a timespace, is a key concept in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, most prominently developed in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937-38). Bart Keunen comments on how the concept of the chronotope makes any conception of mental images much more workable by imposing order through time and space. Accounting for the interaction of texts and readerly imagination, Keunen also points out that “fiction is able to creatively transform the images that are available to us from perception and from memory; it assimilates those images in a series of narrative processes that enable us to picture for ourselves a world-in-motion” (2011, p. 5, italics original). The fact that the chronotope allows for ‘motion’ makes it a useful tool in the context of translocal narratability.

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Narcopolis is written as one long, disorienting sentence that hops from place to place, from local to global, painting a picture of a labyrinthine and gritty Bombay by invoking its odours, sounds and heat. In this case, the outstretched and winding sentence structure is what relates the confusion and sensory overload of the translocal metropolitan experience. Disorienting experiential descriptions of translocal settings with an abundance of sense impressions and shifts in perspective are then typical strategies in translocal writing. They are frequently combined with synecdochic and metonymic structures—a strategy that is particularly successful because of what Clingman calls ‘navigation’: the movement (from one thought, idea or concept to another related one) that is inherent in synecdoche and metonymy and that resembles translocal movement. The difficulty of narrating simultaneity on the page and of layering distant places is not exactly overcome but instead employed productively to enhance narratability.

Alternations and Links Following Margolin’s formal categories, the simplest way to relate simultaneous events is through alternating block presentation in different successive paragraphs, chapters or even books of different concurrent processes or activities, the successive textual parts thus retracing the same temporal interval. This obvious and rather unsophisticated procedure is mockingly referred to as ‘Meanwhile, back on the ranch.’ (2011, n.p.)

This harsh verdict may apply in other cases, but does not hold true for contemporary translocal novels, which often use alternating block presentations to build up subtle analogies, recurring motifs or complex temporal structures that connect their settings in numerous and surprising ways. Since simultaneity is here narrated through space as much as it is through time, translocality offers more interesting ways of using alternations. Adichie’s novel Americanah, arguably one of the most prominent examples of translocal writing, introduces the reader to the two central characters, Ifemelu and Obinze, in the first part of the novel that is split into two chapters. Roughly in the middle of her chapter, Ifemelu sends an e-mail to Obinze from a hair salon in Trenton. Obinze’s chapter then opens with him receiving that e-mail in Lagos, making the second chapter essentially

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a new-media version of ‘meanwhile, back on the ranch’ to emphasise the immediacy with which digital media connect distant places. What the reader does not yet know is that this first part is more or less in the middle of the narrative timeline that takes us back to Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s youth in Nigeria, Ifemelu’s time in the United States and Obinze’s journey to England before the narrative then follows Ifemelu back to Lagos and to Obinze. All of this is foreshadowed in these first two chapters that mirror each other in the structuring of time: flashbacks are located at roughly the same points in the chapters, suggesting an intense simultaneity that reaches beyond the present moment into the lovers’ past and future. Both chapters also start with a rather long sentence which condenses the urban environments the respective characters are moving through into a set of brief images and sense impressions: Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well all had smelled distinctly. (Adichie 2014, p. 3) When Obinze first saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Range Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued outside his window, a hawker pressing colourful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the Pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the grey loom of imminent rain all around. (Adichie 2014, p. 19)

In the course of the chapters, translocal and transnational connections embedded in the cityscapes are constantly foregrounded with a special emphasis on economic, political, personal and cultural ties between the United States and Nigeria. Both the temporal and the textual structure of the two chapters therefore create translocal simultaneity, albeit within the larger framework of ‘meanwhile, back on the ranch’, and highlight similarities as well as differences between Nigerian and US-American cityness. The use of a single e-mail as the pivotal point of the entire narrative parallels increasing middle-class mobility with the high-speed movement of data. In her article on national allegory in Americanah, Katherine Hallemeier also points out that “while Americanah stands as a self-­ consciously global novel, as metonymically encapsulated by Ifemelu’s

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transnational blogging, questions of global economic history appear marginal to the novel’s central love story” (2015, p. 236). In a similar vein, I would argue that the digitisation of the translocal private space creates another synecdochic effect that frequently reminds readers of all the stories and histories that remain untold. Despite oft-expressed criticism that Adichie, much like Teju Cole or Taye Selasi, presents only ‘Afropolitans’ with the means to profit from hypermobility in a globalised world, I therefore do not believe that Adichie risks falling prey to the “danger of a single story”.6 Conversely, Adichie ensures that the reader is always aware that what she is telling is one of many stories. The simultaneity of translocal stories thereby becomes a global phenomenon that is underlined by the very structure of the text and the urban settings, which act like a magnifying glass with regard to issues related to class, race and migration. Princeton and Lagos are not that different after all. With a different approach to locality and socio-economic equity, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai creates a sense of simultaneity between New York, London and Kalimpong by slowly building up structural parallels between the three locations. The privileged characters live further up the mountain in West Bengal and on the highest floors of Manhattan skyscrapers, while the poor and socially excluded ones dwell in basements or in slums on lower slopes. Many other such parallels are slowly established between the three settings to lead up to an increase in narrative pace—through ever briefer chapters, paragraphs and sentences and a quicker alternation between narrative voices—that picks up more and more speed as Biju is travelling back from New  York to his father in Kalimpong. By employing concepts such as fault lines and vectors in her analysis of the novel, Maria Ridda explains how “the passage from New York to Kalimpong reveals the existence of two realities running side by side and yet colliding” (2015, p. 242). The faster the perspective alternates between the now connected cities, the more a sense of simultaneity is established for the reader. Desai starts out using mainly alternating block presentation but, by the end of the novel, also uses intercutting with increasing frequency. Taking Flaubert as his example, Joseph Frank describes a similar narrative structuring as “cutting back and forth between 6  In 2009 Adichie coined the phrase “the danger of a single story” in her eponymous TED talk. In the talk, she explains that the danger she refers to here is to define a person, city, country or region by one single story rather than considering the manifold stories that could be told of the same place or person.

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the various levels of action in a slowly-rising crescendo” (1954, p. 231).7 The musical vocabulary is very fitting here since the interconnection of chronotopes in both The Inheritance of Loss and The Saint of Incipient Insanities resembles a fugue-like structure. In the composition of both novels, motifs are introduced in one timespace and then taken up in another. Presenting one location as simultaneous to another by repeating a phrase, motif or structure ties in with Gurr’s discussion of hyperlink-like repetitions that break with linearity. In The Saint of Incipient Insanities one such hyperlink-like device is pointing out the exact time. Once this time code is established as a translocal connector, whenever the exact time is given the reader will be reminded of all the instances in which snippets of narratives from other locations were woven in with the time codes. Even the mundane reality of time zones, without any further mention of characters or actions in other places, will thereby trigger synecdochic or experiential implications of simultaneity. Take as an example this sentence from a chapter narrated mainly from the point of view of Alegre: “By 11:33 p.m. in Boston, 4:33 a.m. in Marrakesh, 5:33 a.m. in Madrid, and 6:33 a.m. in Istanbul, Alegre decided it was time to leave her kitchen and be paid” (Shafak 2004, p. 122). Despite the fact that there is no further mention of what is happening at that time in these metropolises, the reader already has enough contextual knowledge of the secondary characters and locations to be reminded of, for example, Ömer’s friends in Istanbul or Abed’s mother in Marrakesh. Other parts of the novel are thereby linked to every mention of the exact time and place. Since readers may even be motivated to turn back the pages and find the passage that gives further clues about what Ömer’s friends may be doing at 6:33 a.m., the hyperlink-­ like function can result in something that is not unlike Margolin’s third formal representation of simultaneity, namely that of “turning the text on the page from a one- into a two-dimensional object by splitting the page 7  In The Other Side of Silence (2002) by André Brink, which does not fit all criteria of my corpus as it is set not in contemporary Germany and Namibia but in colonial times, another interesting crescendo is constructed. What Brink does to break with the simple linearity and create expectations in more than one storyline is a layering of linear plots that start at different points in protagonist Hanna’s life. Ruth Franklin explains a simplified version of this in her review: “The first section of Brink’’s novel traces Hanna’s history with a rocking motion, moving backward to narrate the dramatic events of this day as well as forward from her early childhood, until finally the two strands converge in the unspeakable attack that disfigured her” (2003, n.p.).

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into two or more distinct rows or columns running in parallel, each representing one of the concurrent activities or acts of narration” (2011, n.p.). Margolin is of course referring to actually presenting passages side by side, a strategy more often to be found in fantasy or science fiction. Nonetheless, linking passages to encourage skipping back and forth also breaks the linearity of a text and may produce equivalent results as printing two columns of text. The physical ‘distance’ between the pages additionally mimics translocal trajectories if we see passages as times and places in a novel.

Time, Space and What Lies Between Thinking thus about the novel as a physical object, we tend to describe its first pages as the opening of the novel, talk about its middle and then about what happens later. Most of the common words and phrases to describe the progress of the narration as well as the actual movement through the pages are tied to both time and place. The mixing of the two spheres points to “the universal tendency to conceptualise the abstract domain of time in terms of the more concrete and accessible domain of space” (Kwiatkowska 1997, pp. 329–330). Kwiatkowska, from the perspective of translation studies, goes on to give evidence of how the “spatialization of time is reflected in language: the English within the space of two weeks or the Polish kawal czasu ‘a large piece of time’” (1997, p. 330), and thereby provides us with another perspective on simultaneity. Not only does simultaneity create links, movements and complex structures reaching across places, it is also described and designated through space. During a phone call from Ömer to his friends in Istanbul, for example, he feels transported back to streets he used to know. Ömer can suddenly describe the scene in Istanbul in much more detail than a dialogue over the phone would provide. He begins the call by asking the local time but is soon entirely immersed in  local space. The conflation of time and space is especially prominent when Ömer suggests that “he could spy on the commencement of a long night, every particular stage of which he could more or less presage from his phone booth in Harvard Square. […] He could stalk them as they’d leave the table, only to be engulfed by the snaky side streets of Istanbul” (Shafak 2004, p. 86). The vocabulary of the first half of the quotation—“commencement”, “night”, “stage”, “presage”—is grouped around time, specifically the future. The second half, however, employs strictly spatial wordings: “stalk”, “leave”, “engulf”, “snaky side streets”.

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This part of the sentence deals not with a possible future but with possible future simultaneity. In Clingman’s terms, the passage ‘navigates’ its way from a temporal to a spatial future. In an imagined collectivity reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, Ömer feels as if he could experience the streets of Istanbul while his friends are walking through them. The future is spatialised and rendered simultaneous to Ömer’s present through the sentence’s shift from temporal to spatial terminology. In translocal novels, we often encounter a very particular spatialisation of time that expresses translocal simultaneity: a space that is nowhere, in-­ between or one that belongs to two larger spatial units, or countries, at once. Airports, planes, bridges, large bodies of water but, in particular, borders play a central role in just about any translocal narration. One poignant example is the setting of the final chapter of The Saint of Incipient Insanities: the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul which Ömer’s girlfriend Gail jumps off of to commit suicide during a trip to meet Ömer’s family. The bridge is not a border between nations, it connects continents: “with a sign that read WELCOME TO THE ASIAN CONTINENT on one side, and another sign that read WELCOME TO THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT on the other, the bridge they stood on was the in-between” (Shafak 2004, p.  345). The bridge does of course demarcate borders between cultures, groups of nations, land and water and between different neighbourhoods of the same city, but at the same time it ensures movement and transport between them. The very nature of a bridge is thus likened to translocal narratives. The fateful event of Gail’s suicide taking place on it resonates through all other locales, activated again in the reader’s mind by time codes: “At 1:22 a.m. in Boston, 6:22 a.m. in Marrakesh, 7:22 a.m. in Madrid, and 8:22 a.m. in Istanbul, the back right door of a taxi stuck in the traffic on the Bosporus Bridge yawned open” (Shafak 2004, p.  347). Before Gail jumps, we are then presented with quick glances of all characters in their respective locations who are also about to make life-altering decisions, which all hinge on whether or not they enter or exit a particular location, such as the door step of a potential new lover. All of these locations gain their relevance from the exact same moment in time, a fixed point, if you wish, on each character’s timeline. The movement through all of the simultaneously narrated settings gives the reader a sense that time meanwhile stands still on Bosporus Bridge. When the clocks start ticking again, it is another time span that ties action to space: “The bridge is sixty-four meters above sea level. A song plays on Ömer’s Walkman. The song lasts three minutes, twenty seconds, but if you keep

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repeating the track it can last an eternity. Gail’s fall lasts only 2.7 seconds” (Shafak 2004, p. 351). In two other translocal novels, translocal simultaneity is not only spatialised but literally built into the setting. Both The Opposite House (2007) by Helen Oyeyemi and Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid contain doors that lead to far-away places. These magical realist elements are contrasted with the realistic and detail-oriented way in which the urban spaces in the respective novels are narrated. In The Opposite House, the protagonist’s London home has three doors: one that opens to a regular street in the English capital, another that transports the protagonist into an imaginative representation of Cuba, peopled by Yoruba gods and goddesses, memories and symbols. The third door to Lagos is nailed shut. Cuba and Lagos are therefore not so much places rather than half-remembered, half-­ imagined homelands. Both locations exist side by side with their simultaneity being spatialised through the private sphere of a home. The two locations are only connected and accessible through the protagonist.8 Exit West, by contrast, creates a world in which a rising number of refugees suddenly gains access to other countries by magical doors that transport everyone who steps through them to a distant location.9 The novel follows Nadia and Saeed on their travels through these doors from an unnamed city at war10 to Mykonos, to London, to San Francisco. Additionally, the novel is interspersed with snippets of stories from other locations, providing another example of synecdochic simultaneity. These brief chapters construct more rounded characters than the extremely short hints at other cities presented in The Saint of Incipient Insanities and are always introduced by a sentence that transitions from Saeed and Nadia to the other character. In this transition, simultaneously occurring actions are described: “As Saeed’s email was being downloaded from a server and read by his 8  According to Helen Cousins, who reads many elements of The Opposite House as spatialisations of new forms of multiculturalism, “the splitting of an essential black subject into different identities is a condition of a multiculturalism which insists on recognising specificity of difference” (2012, p. 3). Cousins thereby suggests that in this form of multiculturalism, a simultaneous existence of various (partial) identities is performed. 9  A radical nationalist nightmare, these compelling doors gain particular cultural traction in a cultural climate in which ever more people are dying during their dangerous travels to Western countries and official actors such as governments seem increasingly disinterested in or incapable of preventing such deaths. 10  The city bears a strong resemblance to Aleppo in Syria, which is why I have listed it as such in the locations of my corpus.

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client, far away in Australia a pale-skinned woman was sleeping alone in the Sydney neighborhood of Surry Hills” (Hamid 2017, p. 7). The beginning of the next chapter, back in the unnamed city that is Saeed’s home, uses the same sentence structure in reverse to return to the main storyline. The past progressive is used to emphasise that Saeed’s and the Australian woman’s actions overlap in time: “While this incident was occurring in Australia, Saeed was picking up fresh bread for dinner and heading home” (Hamid 2017, p.  9). Again, we find navigation, in Clingman’s sense, already on the level of syntax. Translocal simultaneity then subverts the traditional relationship between time and space through word choices, sentence structure and images. A particular focus lies on spaces and time frames that lie in-between in one way or another. Bridges, doors and time codes can all embody this liminality.

Speculative Simultaneity and Implied Participation Before protagonists Saeed and Nadia step through a door to a new country in Exit West, travel via magical doors is introduced via brief snippet chapters.11 The unnamed characters in those interspersed chapters come from different countries and socio-economic backgrounds and use the doors to seek new lives, friendships, fortunes or simply an interesting day trip. Despite the fact that the novel focuses on characters seeking refuge from a country at war, Hamid uses these snippet chapters to underline the immense variety of mobilities that a globalised world produces. Towards the ending of the book, the trajectories of door travel are briefly discussed more explicitly: “That summer it seemed to Saeed and Nadia that the whole planet was on the move, much of the global south headed to the global north, but also southerners moving to other southern places and northerners moving to other northern places” (Hamid 2017, p.  169). The doors here spatialise not just translocal simultaneity but also a complex and multifaceted process that reminds us how “the compression of time and space and the consequent ‘shrinking’ of the world can have contradictory outcomes” (Brah 2002a, p. 195). The political commentary on how the mobility of refugees is treated differently from the voluntary movement of affluent groups of society—rhetorically coded differently as 11  Doors are of course a potent image that can signify ‘in-between’ spaces or opportunities for mobility but can also be read as means to close and delimit a space.

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‘expats’ or ‘tourists’—is unmistakable and made explicit in another type of simultaneity, which I will call speculative simultaneity. The reader is presented with speculations of what may be happening in another place, the degree of plausibility being determined by the reliability of the narrator and the genre conventions of the novel. After Saeed and Nadia have experienced some difficulties in London, such a speculation is introduced: “they knew that in other desirable cities in other desirable countries similar scenes must be unfolding, scenes of nativist backlash, and so even though they discussed leaving London, they stayed” (Hamid 2017, p. 137). The ‘desirable cities’ are here clearly identified as metropolises of the West, while the fact that Nadia’s and Saeed’s home city remains unnamed underlines an unequal and destructive global power structure. A more poetic usage of suspected simultaneity can be found in Peter Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. Obadiah, one of the teachers and residents at a secluded school on a farm in the middle of the Namibian veld, sits alone, trying to listen to a silent radio with dead batteries, and watches his wife sleep. The brief vignette-like chapter describes what he could be doing, but chooses not to, in long, circumlocutory sentences and then suddenly interrupts the calm reflection with a set of staccato sentences: “In the hostel, the boys are sleeping. In Windhoek, his sons, Thomas and Matti (both employed), are sleeping. In Tehran, two lovers, Tehranians, sleep. In Moscow, old cosmonauts gracefully sleep. In Peru, Morocco, Flanders. Why? Why can’t I?” (Orner 2006, p.  38). Obadiah’s lament is not only reminiscent of a grieving Dido in book IV of The Aeneid, it also creates a sense of global translocal connection. The repetitive sentence structure uses the present progressive to describe those sleepers closest to Obadiah, both in terms of location and relationships. The sleepers in Tehran and Moscow then sleep in the present simple, which means that their sleep is a habit, a routine, unlike the sleep of the Namibians that could be interrupted at any moment. Their sleep is also described in a more fanciful manner that suggests that Obadiah, who likes to read and dream of other places, only imagines a simultaneity. Considering time differences, it is not unlikely that people in Windhoek, Tehran and Moscow sleep at the same time, but the mention of Peru moves one step further away from a realistic suggestion. The suspected simultaneity here ends in a hyperbole: every single person on the entire planet is asleep except for Obadiah. This emotionally laden usage of an assumption of simultaneity is not unlike a typical device in a romantic storyline that either has one person speculating about what their love interest is doing at the

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same time or shows two lovers unwittingly performing the same action at the same time. Speculative simultaneity therefore often tells us more about a character than about the setting—especially when the narrator is less reliable. Coming back to Exit West, an important function of simultaneity in the translocal context—one that may be regarded as a special case of speculative simultaneity—is that of implied participation. By presenting the reader with a contemporary and realist setting that is interspersed with glimpses of other cultures, other characters and other stories, the narratives seem to imply that the reader’s own lifeworld, however near or far from that constructed in the novel, could form one of the simultaneously occurring stories. Through translocal simultaneity, the reader becomes a liminal part of the story they are reading. Since Exit West deals with the globally perceived, experienced and mediatised issue of seeking refuge, the novel creates a landscape of images and symbols that any contemporary reader would be familiar with. In his review of the novel, Philip Sulter ascribes the suggested commonalities between the world of the novel and that of the implied reader to the urban environment of Nadia’s and Saeed’s city of birth: “The city’s anonymity acts to universalise the context in which the novel’s characters find themselves, and encourages the reader to imagine how one’s own city might change if subjected to a similar scenario” (2017, p. 1). Another factor here is of course the degree to which urban spaces have become global, cosmopolitan places, thereby allowing a reader to draw connections between the entire range of cities described in the novel and their own experiences of urbanity. The reader therefore participates by building his own city into the narrative, either on top of a universalised narrated city or as a simultaneously existing one that simply has not yet been mentioned. To borrow a term originally coined by Nelson Goodman,12 the reader is drawn into the ‘worldmaking’ process of the novel. Since both fictional worldmaking and identity formation are based on “fabricating storied versions ‘of the world’” (A.  Nünning and V. Nünning 2010, p. 6), a novel can, at least temporarily, become a part of the world of the reader. In Exit West, the reader’s city becomes a part of the world of the novel. This implied participation of the reader is hardly 12  In Ways of Worldmaking, Nelson Goodman makes a cunning observation that holds true for both reader and researcher: “Recognizing patterns is very much a matter of inventing and imposing them. Comprehension and creation go on together” (1978, p. 22).

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ever as explicit as it is here, but generally subtly present, especially in cases of speculative and synecdochic simultaneity. In an article on the very sparse narrative worlds of J.M. Coetzee’s novels, Julika Griem comments on the trend of making vast worlds in novels, especially in those concerned with mobility, and pointedly invokes the “spellbinding effects of readerly participation” (2017, p. 74). This (implied) readerly participation also comes into play when translocal narratability is produced. There is of course also the question of in how far characters participate in the worldmaking processes of other characters. Is the simultaneity of their actions, and thereby the possibility to draw meaningful connections between them, only visible to the reader and the narrator or are they ‘aware’ that their diegesis is shaped, limited and expanded by the worlds of others? In tackling a related question, Margolin firstly argues that simultaneous actions of different characters are only meaningful if those actions are the same or alike.13 I partly disagree with this point since it is exactly the disjunction of actions, which is often narrated as a form of experiential simultaneity, that invites the reader to search for meaningful connections between actions or impressions, or to simply experience the sense of being lost in a chaotic onrush of disconnected images. Margolin’s second point, however, is well taken: Collective narratives emphasize the identity or at least marked similarity of the activities of any kind undertaken by all agents involved in a given scene, thus creating the image of a supra-individual collective agent. In the majority of cases, however, such as in big city novels or in crowd and battle scenes, it is the diversity or contrast of the simultaneous actions of the participants which is of the essence. Multi-strand narratives, especially novels, are based on several long-term chains of events (e. g. the Anna and Levin strands in Anna Karenina (Tolstoi) involving different groups of people (such as families), sometimes at different locations, running in parallel, and intersecting every now and again.) (2011, n.p.)

Unfortunately, Margolin does not go into much detail with regards to an interesting argument he makes here: the relevance of settings for narrative 13  A novel that employs a group of characters all simultaneously performing similar actions would be The Buddha in the Attic (2011) by Julie Otsuka. The narrative point of view literally creates an us versus them, as all chapters are narrated through the voice of the ‘we’ or ‘they’, while we follow a group of Japanese brides immigrating to the United States in the early 1900s.

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structure. To take up this point, multi-strand narratives that intersect from time to time are, in addition to the chaotic contrasts of urban settings, quite popular in translocal novels. While this may be unsurprising, the range of effects that can be produced by parallel narratives and their occasional intersections is diverse. With the example of The Inheritance of Loss, I have already discussed a crescendo of quickly alternating narrative strands and settings. A similar structure guides the parallel narratives of Quy and his family in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For. Quy is believed to be dead after his parents lost sight of him while boarding a boat to flee Vietnam. The family settles in Toronto with their two remaining children and have another son and a daughter: Tuyen, who is the protagonist of the novel. The third-person perspective of the novel alternates between her and her friends and is interspersed with Quy’s chapters that are written from a first-person point of view. While the novel centres on present-day Toronto, Quy’s chapters start with his early childhood in a refugee camp and then detail his travels to Thailand and finally to Toronto. Just like in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, the narration accelerates as Quy gets closer to his family. Desai’s novel ends after the reunification of the separated characters but Brand’s Quy is severely injured just before the fateful meeting can take place. The novel ends before we find out whether he and his parents, momentarily waiting in the house just down the street, will ever meet again. In both cases, the intersection of the parallel narrative strands is anticipated for a good part of the novel and then dramatically delayed. In Brand’s novel, spatial distance is additionally emphasised by a temporal rupture since most of Quy’s chapters run on a different, longer timeline from the others and only become simultaneous as he arrives in Toronto, suggesting that each space has its own time. The (life-)long anticipation of Quy’s return creates a dramatic effect that speeds up the narrative and the implied translocal movement. An entirely different way of using intersections of previously parallel narrative strands is one that could be likened to a transversal, which, in geometry, is a line that intersects two or more other lines at different points. In Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician (2015), this transversal is a character called Alfonso. The novel tells the stories of three Zimbabwean men all living in Edinburgh. While they sometimes see each other in passing, attending the same event but never really meeting each other, for example, it seems as if there is hardly any connection between them. This impression is supported by their unique prose styles, the fact that they are of different ages and care about different

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things in life. Since all three nonetheless share a connection to the city of Edinburgh, it almost seems as if the Scottish capital is more central to the story than the characters.14 The only, seemingly random, person connecting The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician is Alfonso, a negligible character with goofy looks and gauche ways, who, to a degree, knows all three men. The three strands of the narrative therefore never truly intersect but merely touch fleetingly with Alfonso as a vicarious link. Almost until its very end, this novel is a typical translocal text with three simultaneous narratives in Edinburgh and the simultaneously occurring political events in Zimbabwe, discussed by all characters, on a larger scale. In their article on genre in African literatures, which details how “many contemporary African writers are working around rather than against genre’s constraints” (2017, p. 152, italics original), Jaji and Saint however describe how this changes on the last pages of the novel, due to a shift in genres: Tendai Huchu has stated that the challenge and aim when writing his most recent novel, The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, was essentially to disguise what he considers to be a spy novel centered on an apparently minor character, Alfonso, behind the cloak of literary fiction. (2017, p. 156)

Finding out that the flimsy connections Alfonso had created between the storylines were not a subtle suggestion of diasporic translocality for a clever reader to pick up on, but rather a spy gathering intel under a veil of secrecy created by genre expectations could be read as suspected simultaneity: readers will wonder what Alfonso had been doing as they were following the actions of the other three men and realise they themselves ‘disguised’ him and his mission by reading the book as a different genre. Shortly before the novel ends, the Magistrate and Alfonso leave Edinburgh for London. After Alfonso abandons the Magistrate under the pretext of visiting relatives, the focalisation of the third-person narration switches, for the first time, to Alfonso who had previously only been described through the eyes of the three protagonists. The change in his comportment is immediate and absolute: “He walked tall and straight, the limp was gone. He completely blended in, anonymous, cosmopolitan, a 14  Tendai Huchu himself even described the city of Edinburgh as a character rather than a setting during his reading on 20 April 2016 at Proust—Wörter und Töne in Essen, Germany.

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Londoner in an instant” (Huchu 2015, p. 293). After the first 292 pages of the novel have suggested an awkward and clumsy Alfonso, this nod to the 1995 neo-noir classic The Usual Suspects may come as surprisingly as the fact that he is a spy for the Zimbabwean government. His suddenly suave manners are underlined by the location change from Edinburgh to London, which is a drastic rupture considering how essential Edinburgh is to the novel. The reader is therefore invited to return to the Alfonso that had existed in Scotland and wonder what he had been doing or how he had been walking during the times he was not present in the narration. We are enticed to question, in hindsight, what Alfonso had actually been up to and therefore suspect an entirely different simultaneity after the fact. The move from translocal literary fiction to espionage genre writing also sheds new light on the perception of diaspora spaces and translocal movement. The first part of the novel seems to take a typical stance of translocal and diasporic texts through its underlying suggestions that the diasporic subjects’ literal or symbolic forms of transborder movement undermine state-based nationalist ideologies and oppressive nation-state structures by defying a central aspect of state power—to define, discipline, control, and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence. (Sadowski-­ Smith 2002b, p. 3)

Sadowski-Smith focuses her analysis on the nation and the border. With Huchu’s startling switch to a genre and character concerned mainly with national loyalties, the contrastive statement of how diasporic movement across nations and borders generally takes away from the power of states is quite fitting. Destabilising preconceived ideas of the nation via the denial of a crucial border-crossing, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire tells the story of British-­ Pakistani Parvaiz, twin brother to Aneeka, who is denied his return to Britain even in death, since he had joined the media arm of the Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria. The back story to Parvaiz’s uncharacteristic decision, which he soon comes to regret, is told in five parts, each narrated from the perspective of a different character: his older sister Isma, Aneeka, Parvaiz himself, home secretary Karamat Lone and his son Eamonn. In the narrative, which is loosely based on Antigone as apparent already from

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the names of the characters,15 Aneeka seduces Eamonn in order to help her convince his father to let Parvaiz come home to London. Meanwhile, Parvaiz is killed on his way to the British embassy in Istanbul. In the final part of the novel, Aneeka travels to Pakistan, where her brother’s body had been shipped, and demands that he be transported home to Britain to be buried with his family. This last turn of events is related through home secretary Karamat Lone’s perspective as he angrily and anxiously follows the media coverage of Aneeka sitting with her brother’s dead body in a park during a dust storm: “The girl licked her thumb, ran it over her mouth, painting lips onto the dust mask. Then she looked directly at the Home Secretary, and spoke: ‘In the stories of wicked tyrants men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from families’” (Shamsie 2017, pp. 224–25). The cameras enable Aneeka to create a unidirectional, live and thereby simultaneous, ‘video chat’ with Karamat Lone, through whom this final part of the novel is focalised. Her dramatic monologue— not in verse but characterised by a rising rhythm, lyrical language and a direct address that reveals much about her temperament and her audience—is streamed by several news channels, which brings us back to the opening remarks of this chapter: an enhanced sense of global simultaneity is created via new media. In a review for The New York Times that focuses on the contemporaneity of the topic of terrorism, Peter Ho Davies describes this style of simultaneity and how the readerly involvement is enhanced by an unapproachable Karamat16 and the way in which he experiences what is arguably the most important scene in the novel via live streams: There’s an ambitious stylistic shift—Aneeka’s section is told in poetic fragments interrupted by a chorus of media reports—but the overall effect is 15  In her review of the novel, Natalie Haynes proposes that Shamsie draws in fact more on a specific adaption of Antigone, which makes it easier to transport the tragic heroine into contemporary times: “In some ways, Shamsie owes a greater debt to Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone than to the Sophoclean version: for Sophocles, Antigone is the older sister, who acts as she does because she is an extremist. […] But Anouilh, writing during the second world war, saw things differently. He reversed the birth order of the two sisters: for him, Antigone was not the dutiful older sister, but rather the young rebel. And in Home Fire, Isma is much older. ‘She’s my sister,’ she says of Aneeka. ‘Almost my child.’ This blurring of roles is a neat modern echo of the troubled bloodline of Antigone and Ismene, whose parents were Oedipus—also their half-brother—and Jocasta, who was both their mother and grandmother” (2017, n.p.). 16  Shamsie likens Karamat Lone to Theresa May in a 2017 interview with Vogue.

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distancing. We lose touch with Aneeka, and never quite get close to Karamat, whose political crisis feels schematic, less inevitable than predictable. The upshot is a headlong final act that aims at stark political theater but at times comes off as only stagy. Tellingly, much of this closing action is viewed through screens, the way most of us engage with terror. (2017, n.p.)

While Karamat is a difficult figure to relate to, his helplessness in the face of the events unfolding onscreen is all the more so. Aneeka’s simultaneous actions are filtered thrice—through the camera, through the media executives and through Karamat—but the ending of the previous section (a collage of tweets and headlines about Aneeka) gives the reader a more immediate insight into what is being written about her. Davies underlines the distancing effect of this technique, but at the same time the reader is more directly engaged by having to draw their own conclusions from the conflicting press coverage. In addition to the very contemporary usage of media as a tool to relate simultaneity, Shamsie also presents her translocal London via what Eliot termed the mythical method, when writing about Joyce’s Ulysses: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. (Eliot 1923, p. 483)

Writing this in 1923, Eliot believed that the underlying structuring of a narrative through myth was not a but the new direction of literature. Shamsie first of all makes use of the mythical method by creating multi-­ levelled parallels to Antigone. The author then translocates both the primary story and the underlying myth by narrating more than one cityscape at once: she tells the story of Preston Road in Wembley and the trajectories leading from Wembley to Karachi, Raqqa and Amherst, Massachusetts, where Aneeka works on her PhD. A myth embedded in Western culture but well known around the world becomes an associative blueprint for a translocal text dealing with very contemporary issues. This identifies a more abstract simultaneity of literary texts that has been theorised by Wai C. Dimock as part of her conception of ‘planetary

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literature’. In outlining Mandelstam’s relationship to Dante and reinterpreting Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity, Dimock shows how literary texts, as well as their readers, construct their own present in which “two thousand years and two thousand miles can sometimes register as near simultaneity” (2001, p. 174). According to Dimock, borders of time and space can be surmounted by literary texts since they are “not absolute givens but operational effects” (2001, p.  174) to begin with.17 Just as Joyce’s text therefore enters a literary and readerly space of simultaneity with Homer’s, Home Fire and Antigone exist in the same ‘now’ constructed by the text and by the reader.

Conclusion As the theoretical starting points of this chapter (Appadurai’s, Lynch’s and Gurr’s observations in particular) have already suggested, translocal simultaneity strongly resembles urban simultaneity. Neither can actually narrate all that is implied to take place, both are based on a large, chaotic system of interconnections and both tend to be characterised by an intense onrush of diffuse sense impressions that neither reader nor character could ever process entirely. Where urban simultaneity, in all its varied forms, makes use of complex networks, trajectories, stories and a multitude of unseen actants, translocal simultaneity adds another layer of similarly complex interconnections on a larger scale. Most translocal texts present multiple simultaneous layers on different scales, the most common of which are the home, the neighbourhood, the city, the region, the nation and the global. Urban simultaneity is generally established first—on the level of home, neighbourhood or city—before the narrative becomes translocal by adding another synchronism within the region, the nation or the global. This succession of simultaneities is present in most of the novels discussed, but particularly evident in the brief excerpt from Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo with sleepless Obadiah. Concludingly, the narrative suggestion of simultaneity enhances translocal narratability in many ways. Firstly, as Mike Crang points out in an 17  In his article on the globalisation of American Literary Studies, Donald E. Pease partly criticises the underlying value system of Dimock’s theory but nonetheless adopts large parts of it to his perspective on the future of American Studies. A central aspect of Dimock’s theory that he finds particularly valuable is the assumption that “literature has always been global in its reach” (Pease 2004, p.  180). I agree strongly that this potential of literature predates more recent conceptualisations of a rupture caused by globalisation.

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insightful analysis of urban space, “one story of the city told in terms of space and time could be the conquest of time through space, and the creation of conditions of co-presence. This is a story of density, proximity, planned and unplanned contact that create a civil society” (2001, p. 188). The dense co-present spaces of the urban take on different forms in each city, but retain a basic structure connecting narrated urban spaces everywhere in the world through structural analogies that we have seen mirrored in the various city novels discussed in this chapter. Secondly, an infinite number of untold stories is inherent to the urban, the global and the narrative as such, since every story starts with the decision to tell this one and leave out others. The stories that are not told are nonetheless alluded to by means of synecdochic structures or speculative simultaneity. Both of these characteristics are, thirdly, replicated on the level of the structure of the text in order to make them narratable and experienceable for the reader. Hyperlink-like repetitions (in The Saint of Insipient Insanities), structural analogies between chapters (in The Inheritance of Loss) and creative ways of alternating perspectives (in Home Fire or What We All Long For) are examples of such structures. This leads me to my final observation: a sense of participation is required and encouraged through these structures, which is why I have introduced the concept of implied (readerly) participation. By enabling movement and connections across borders of time and space, simultaneity is therefore an essential component of translocal narratability.

Works Cited Corpus

of

32 Main Novels

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2014. Americanah. London: Fourth Estate. Hamid, Mohsin. 2017. Exit West. New York: Riverhead Books. Huchu, Tendai. 2015. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician. Cardigan: Parthian. Orner, Peter. 2006. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. New  York: Back Bay Books. Oyeyemi, Helen. 2007. The Opposite House. London: Bloomsbury. Shafak, Elif. 2004. The Saint of Incipient Insanities. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Shamsie, Kamila. 2017. Home Fire. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Thayil, Jeet. 2012. Narcopolis. London: Faber and Faber.

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Further References Appadurai, Arjun. 2000. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brah, Avtar. 2002a [1996]. Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Brink, André. 2002. The Other Side of Silence. London: Vintage. Clingman, Stephen. 2012. The Grammar of Identity. Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cousins, Helen. 2012. Unplaced/Invaded: Multiculturalism in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House. Postcolonial. Text 7 (3): 1–16. Crang, Mike. 2001. Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion. In Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. John May and Nigel Thrift, 187–207. London: Routledge. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2001. Literature for the Planet. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 116 (1): 173–188. Eliot, T.S. 1923. Ulysses, Order, and Myth. The Dial LXXV (5): 480–483. Digitised by The British Library. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/review-­ of-­ulysses-­by-­t-­s-­eliot-­from-­the-­dial. Accessed 16 Apr 2019. ———. 2011 [1922]. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Broadview Press. Frank, Joseph. 1954. Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts. The Sewanee Review 53 (2): 221–240. Franklin, Ruth. 2003. Nor Tongue to Tell. The New  York Times, 3 August. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/books/nor-­tongue-­to-­tell.html. Accessed 8 Jul 2020. Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Griem, Julika. 2017. ‘Good Paragraphing. Unusual Content.’ On the Making and Unmaking of Novelistic Worlds. In Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee, ed. Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm, 70–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gurr, Jens Martin. 2011. The Representations of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inventory of Strategies. In Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, ed. Jens Martin Gurr and Wilfried Raussert, 11–38. Trier: WVT. ———. 2015. The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural Analogies between ‘City’ and ‘Text’: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades Project. In Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry, ed. Kornelia Freitag, 21–38. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hallemeier, Katherine. 2015. ‘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): 231–245.

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Haynes, Natalie. 2017. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie Review—A Contemporary Reworking of Sophocles. The Guardian, August 10. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/10/home-­fire-­kamila-­shamsie-­review. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Ho Davies, Peter. 2017. An ‘Antigone’ for a Time of Terror. The New York Times, 29 September. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/books/review/ home-fire-kamila-shamsie.html. Accessed 29 Jan 2021. Jaji, Tsitsi, and Lily Saint. 2017. Introduction: Genre in Africa. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4 (2): 151–158. Keunen, Bart. 2011. Time and Imagination. Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Kwiatkowska, Alina. 1997. Silence Across Modalities. In Silence—Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Adam Jaworski, 329–338. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The Technology Press & Harvard University Press. Margolin, Uri. 2011. Simultaneity in Narrative. In The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. 2010. Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons. In Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, ed. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, 1–28. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Pease, Donald. 2004. The Extraterritoriality of the Literature for Our Planet. Journal of the American Renaissance 50 (1): 177–221. Ridda, Maria. 2015. Imagining Bombay, London, New  York and Beyond. South Asian Diasporic Writing from 1990 to the Present. Oxford: Lang. Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, ed. 2002b. Introduction: Border Studies, Diaspora, and Theories of Globalization. In Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, 1–30. New York, NY: Palgrave. Sayad, Abdelmalek. 2004. The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sulter, Philip. 2017. Book Review: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Transnational Literature 10 (2): 1–2.

CHAPTER 3

Palimpsest

When we think about the urban palimpsest, we generally think about layers of time. Structures, streets, buildings or more ephemeral parts of the urban environment such as posters, graffiti or flyers, are overwritten, adapted, destroyed or rebuilt and, in the process, leave imprints and erasures on the currently visible urban surface. Following this logic, the deeper we dig, the further we move into the city’s past. In Lieven Ameel’s words, “it is commonplace to regard the city as a palimpsestic repository of multiple memories not dissimilar to an archeological site” (2017b, p. 238). The distant past is still present as one of many temporal layers, constituting a movement on the axis of time while remaining fixed in one place. Depending on the subject position and perspective of the urban archaeologist, certain layers come to light more easily than others. In his thoroughly palimpsestic novel Open City, Teju Cole describes New York City

Parts of an early draft of this chapter were first published in the journal Narrative, published by the Ohio State University Press, © 2018 The Ohio State University, under the title “A Brief Inventory of Translocal Narratability: Palimpsestuous Street Art in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames” (Narrative 26.3, 2018). As indicated by the title, the article focuses mainly on an overview of my work on translocal narratability and on my reading of Abani’s novel. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_3

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as a burial site of obfuscated historical trauma:1 “And, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble? The site was a palimpsest as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten” (Cole 2011, p.  59). Deep beneath the surface, hardly visible anymore in present-day New York and consciously erased by centuries of political and societal ignorance and structural violence, the past of the city with its history of oppression is buried. Considering some of the prominent themes of Open City,2 a re-­ conceptualisation of the palimpsest, one that incorporates movement on the axis of space as well as through time, is essential to understand how the novel constructs its palimpsests. The frequently referenced translocal connections in the novel extend the urban text’s palimpsestic reach via the dimension of space. For example, Cole continues his description of the layers of New York City, beginning with the Lenape paths, as follows: There have been communities here before Columbus ever set sail, before Verrazano anchored his ships in the narrows, or the black Portuguese slave trader Esteban Gómez sailed up the Hudson; human beings had lived here, built homes, and quarrelled with their neighbors long before the Dutch ever saw a business opportunity in the rich furs and timber of the island and its calm bay. Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. (Cole 2011, p. 59)

Digging into the past of the cityscape, Cole finds New York’s past, but he also finds remnants of Seville, Amsterdam and Porto. This image shows how the surface of any city is formed by imprints of the people who build, 1  Rebecca Clark’s insightful reading of the novel focuses on how theoretical concepts such as the palimpsest need not be projected onto the text or unearthed from its underlying structure by a scholar; they are already right there: “Neither Cole nor Julius are implying that New York City is a ‘palimpsest’ of obfuscated historical trauma. They are saying so. Right there on the surface” (2018, p. 184). With reference to Nicholas Dames, Clark then posits Open City as a ‘Theory Generation’ novel (along with texts by authors such as Ben Lerner or Jeffrey Eugenides) and explains that theory and self-reflection are integral parts of such novels. 2  The novel deals with issues of migration, cosmopolitanism, globalisation, but also with the repression of violence and a colonial past. Additionally, as Lieven Ameel points out poignantly, “in a number of recent instances, the novel, its literary setting and its characters, then, have become enmeshed in the interpretation of real-life events, in ways that were in part stimulated by the author. Exemplary is a discussion on Teju Cole’s Facebook profile in answer to the Paris 2015 attacks, a discussion which drew explicit links between the conditions of some of the disenfranchised and radicalizing youths encountered in the novel and the events in Paris” (2017a, p. 266).

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explore, destroy, map or inhabit it and the places that have, in turn, shaped them.3 The translocal urban palimpsest is therefore composed of different layers of time and space. Interestingly, reconsidering the urban palimpsest not as a conglomerate of closely related layers (fixed on the axis of space, representing difference only in terms of time), but instead as a mix of spatially related or unrelated layers, is in fact more appropriate considering the origin of the term ‘palimpsest’: a parchment with unrelated,4 partially erased layers of text on it. In this chapter, I will therefore deal with the urban palimpsest, but will focus mainly on the translocal urban palimpsest and the way it is used as a narrative device. Since street art palimpsests are prominent in two of the novels in my corpus that most frequently use the palimpsest as a narrative device5—Abani’s The Virgin of Flames and Brand’s What We All Long For—a large part of my analysis will focus on revealing the translocal palimpsest-like nature of street art and public art in these city novels. To better understand how palimpsests produce translocal narratability, I will firstly reflect further on different types of urban and translocal palimpsests and put a particular emphasis on whether the layers of the palimpsests are related or unrelated. I will then differentiate between palimpsestuous6 and palimpsestic structures and explain how palimpsestuous structures in particular produce translocality in Abani’s The Virgin of 3  In their in-depth study of one translocal street, Walworth Road in London, Hall and Datta find plenty of visual and statistical evidence to suggest that the metropolitan environment is prone to translocality: “A fairly commonplace city street in London like the Walworth Road, is representative of an agglomeration of entrenched, established and emerging migrant cultures, and a palimpsest of immigration histories” (2010, p. 72, my emphasis). The shop signs in a variety of languages, the different styles of dress and cuisine that have become commonplace on big city streets across the globe, most clearly reveal the necessity for a translocal axis of the urban palimpsest. 4  This is a deliberate simplification. Of course, the fact that the layers are written on the same parchment already constitutes some form of relationship. The layers, however, can be as different as a shopping list and a poem that just happen to be written on the same piece of paper. In order to distinguish this very loose relation from that between the layers of the urban palimpsest, which is clearly more determined, I will simplify for now and elaborate on the varied relationships of layers in different palimpsests in the course of this chapter. 5  I have chosen not to focus on Cole’s Open City here, as the novel’s palimpsests have already been studied extensively and are frequently made so explicit that they do not necessitate further analysis. This is also why I have merely chosen the novel as a starting point for my reflections. 6  Gérard Genette uses the term to describe a relational reading of the palimpsest and attributes its coinage to Philippe Lejeune (cf. 1982, p. 556–557). As I will explain in more depth

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Flames and the street art produced by protagonist Black. To explore how the ability to perceive the translocal urban palimpsest is tied to modes of movement in the city, I will then briefly explore Benjamin’s concept of superposition, which also productively connects with the evanescence inherent to street art and the particular point of view of the street artist. Superposition is mainly relevant to the mode of walking, but further types of movement, travel, transport and migration, which all impact the perception of the translocal urban palimpsest in different ways, will be discussed in the subsequent sections, which mainly use Brand’s What We All Long For as an example. Excerpts from various novels will then be used to differentiate between more reconciled or more fragmented structures in the translocal urban palimpsest. As is the nature of the palimpsest, all types and qualities I discuss or infer can overlap or be co-present.

The (Textual)7 Palimpsest, the Urban Palimpsest and the Translocal Urban Palimpsest In the context of urban studies, the palimpsest is a popular image to describe the layered structure and resilient nature of cities. Commenting on Eliot’s ‘historical sense’, Gurr explains how this collapsing of past and present into a timeless continuum effectively suggests the layers of both physically built urban fabric (where, for instance, an underlying medieval layout is still visible in even the most heavily bombed and rebuilt European city) and memory in the contemporary city. (2015, p. 31)

Erased structures, such as the Lenape paths from Cole’s description of New York City, remain visible on the urban surface, if one has the required contextual knowledge. While this way of using the image of the palimpsest is certainly very productive, it neglects one essential characteristic of the palimpsest, which—in the original sense of the term—is a parchment inscribed with several layers of texts that were (partially) erased in order to later in this chapter, a palimpsestuous text creates connections between intimately related layers of text. 7  For the  sake of  my analysis, which focuses mainly on  the  translocal urban palimpsest and to a lesser extent on the urban palimpsest, I do not always distinguish neatly between the textual palimpsest and the palimpsest as a more general category, as this would require a discussion of poststructural theory that bears no connection to translocality. This is why I chose to add the word textual in brackets here.

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reinscribe a new text onto the same surface. Unlike the urban palimpsest, in which all layers are—at least to a degree—related to each other because they are at least partially predetermined by the space around them, the (textual) palimpsest therefore describes “an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other” (Dillon 2005, p.  245, my emphasis). Translocal novels like Open City make use of both types of palimpsest (urban and textual) and even recombine them in creative ways to enhance the narratability of their layered settings in translocal urban palimpsests. Take as another example Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: set in Lagos, London and Princeton and relying heavily on the mapping of cityscapes and the mutual permeation of cultures, the novel creates mental maps even for readers who have no relation to any of the layered and overlapping settings. Igbo culture functions as a textual key to the unfamiliar streets of a run-down suburb of Princeton while, at other times, a restaurant in Lagos is used to reflect on the bustling spaces of New York. The different urban layers of the translocal palimpsest, while seemingly alien or indifferent to each other, can shed light on one another as well as on the literary palimpsest as a whole. Both urban and textual palimpsest—with related and unrelated layers—are therefore negotiated in translocal urban palimpsests in order to enhance narratability. To briefly sum up these opening reflections on the nature of the palimpsest, I will work with three main types of palimpsests: the (textual) palimpsest, the urban palimpsest8 and the translocal urban palimpsest. The (textual) palimpsest is the original concept: a textual surface beneath which unrelated layers are partly visible. In the urban palimpsest, the layers are related and can be excavated as different strata, going back in time; the layers or strata are closely related in that they share the same urban space. In the translocal urban palimpsest, layers from different spaces can be used as foils, memories, historical remnants or even future projections of a city. Layers can not only be combined on the axis of time, but also move on the axis of space, making the layers less strictly related than in the urban palimpsest. The translocal urban palimpsest therefore combines m ­ ovement through time and space as well as related and unrelated layers. In all palimpsests, the visibility of layers depends on the onlooker. 8  More specifically, I here refer to a ‘uni-local’ urban palimpsest as I distinguish it from the translocal urban palimpsest. I prefer to refer to it in this simplified manner to avoid more cumbersome formulations.

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Palimpsestuous Street Art in The Virgin of Flames The Virgin of Flames (2007) by Chris Abani, uses street art, a palimpsest-­ like art in itself, to make its translocal urbanity particularly narratable. In the novel, protagonist Black paints murals on the walls of East LA, which reflect his questioning of his sexuality, his gender identity and his conflicting cultural and national identities. In order to combat the anxiety caused by these identity crises, Black decides to paint a mural depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe—an important icon in the local Chicanx culture. The entire novel is structured by the creation of this 50-foot-tall Virgin, later named Fatima, which protagonist and artist Black paints on a wall overlooking the Los Angeles River. The reader is first introduced to Black when he puts on a wedding dress, stolen from his friend Iggy, and paints his face white in order to model for his own artwork. After the gigantic mural, sporting Black’s features, has been painted and subsequently removed by city officials, the novel culminates in Black’s violent attack on his transgender lover Sweet Girl and with Black, again in the wedding dress, accidentally setting himself on fire on the rooftop of Iggy’s Ugly Store. The gathering Angelenos mistake him for the apparition they had been waiting for since Black was first spotted—and mistaken for Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe— on the rooftop in his virginal robes. Abani narrates the dramatic scene with a calm sense of ecclesiastical aesthetic, ending with gleaming pieces of lace being carried away by the wind and swallowed by the dark river. The readers are left to wonder whether Black will follow the fate of the colourful mural and the white dress, whether he himself will be destroyed and reabsorbed by the city. The framing structure of the narration, beginning and ending with Black’s transformation (that seems indicative of a desire to transition, repressed by internalised trans- and homophobia), is therefore an important indication as to why this particular work of street art is the most significant palimpsest in the novel. What then connects urban street art to translocal urban palimpsests? In her article on street art as palimpsest, Henriette Dausend explains that most street art can be regarded as glocal, as it is globally intelligible (or narratable) but at the same time grounded in a local space (cf. Dausend 2015, p. 209).9 Her other line of argumentation, explaining that street art 9  In the original German text, the passage reads as follows: “So dass der Großteil von Street Art als glokale Interaktion verstanden werden kann, welche global verständlich sein kann, aber gleichzeitig lokal verortet ist” (Dausend 2015, p. 209).

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also reflects changes in and interactions of individuals, societies and cityscapes by condensing critical artworks into small layered spaces,10 is easily connected to Kläger’s and Stierstorfer’s claim about ‘diasporics’, as they “produce innovative cultural artifacts that challenge static concepts of race, national identity, citizenship, gender, age, and other categories of collective identification” (2015, p. 5). Similar approaches to public participation can be found in street art. The diasporic desire of connecting a place to another real or imagined one called home is painted onto the translocal urban surface. When Annika Bauer analyses Abani’s GraceLand exploring questions of home, belonging and diaspora, she describes how “an intra-national diasporic community in Lagos [where GraceLand is mainly set] is constructed out of many diverse, overlapping personal spaces being negotiated” (2015, p. 344). A similar community, brought together as what Claudia Perner calls a “community of outsiders” (2011, p. 176), is constructed through Abani’s specific focus on East LA in The Virgin of Flames. Many members of this ‘community of outsiders’ could well be categorised as belonging to one or the other diaspora, but local misfits are included as well, in the same diaspora space.11 All characters as well as their artworks have an intimate relationship with the cityscape of East LA and become even more interconnected in their imagined community by recycling found objects that have belonged to other city dwellers. An analysis of visual arts in literature generally requires a discussion of “ekphrasis [as] the verbal representation of graphic representation” (Heffernan 1991, p.  299). In the novels at hand, however, the creative process is more interesting (in the context of the translocal urban palimpsest, at least) than the artwork itself:12 before it is even painted, the artwork is deeply rooted in the ­different places that are layered in the artist’s mind and the narrated plot. Referring back to the two general categories of translocal novels briefly

10  Again, please refer also to the original text in German: “Denn so ist zum einen eine Verdichtung von Street Art auf geringer Fläche und zum anderen eine Überlagerung und zeitliche Veränderung dieser, welche den Wandel der Individuen, der Gesellschaft und des Stadtbilds, aber auch deren Interaktionen abbildet” (Dausend 2015, p. 213). 11  As Avtar Brah explains: “The diaspora space is the site where the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native” (2002a, p. 209). 12  For a detailed discussion of visual arts in literature, see Stefanie Caeners’s Verbal Visuality: The Visual Arts in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (2011).

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introduced in Chap. 1,13 Abani’s novel, with its very detailed depiction of one specific place that is connected to hints, allusions and fragmented expressions of numerous other locales, clearly belongs to the first type. The palimpsestuous nature of the creative process makes it possible to create innumerable translocal connections despite the focus on one main location. Protagonist and painter Black’s extremely close relationship with the city is emphasised from the very beginning of the novel, when he first starts ‘becoming’ the Virgin: “White. Black sat before the mirror applying paste to his face. Face paint really, but it was thick like wallpaper paste” (Abani 2007, p. 4). Black incorporates and inscribes himself as a layer of the painting that will decorate, for a brief span of time, his city’s face. Therefore, and through the likening of his face paint to wallpaper paste, he himself also becomes part of the city, a wall, a building. More specifically, he identifies with the walls inside of a building, which are clearly present but not visible on the outside surface. This illustrates why the term ‘palimpsestuous’ is more suitable in this context than, for instance, ‘palimpsestic’ or ‘palimpsest-like’. Drawing on Derrida, Sarah Dillon in her insightful monograph on the palimpsest, defines “‘palimpsestuousness’ [as] a simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation” (2007, p. 3). In an article on the relevance of the palimpsest in contemporary literary studies, Dillon additionally specifies that “where ‘palimpsestic’ refers to the process of layering that produces a palimpsest, ‘palimpsestuous’ describes the structure with which one is presented as a result of that process, and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script” (2005, p. 245). This term then puts an emphasis on the strange tension between familiarity and distance that is inherent to a palimpsest’s structure. By adding a layer of paint to his skin, Black becomes even closer to his artwork, the Virgin, but also abstracts himself from his own face—his application of thick white paint to his dark skin visualising his struggle with race and identity. The artist enters a more intimate relationship with his artwork, which in turn causes moments of dissociation and dysphoria with his body. With regard to the city as well, both processes (of increasing intimacy and of disassociation) run simultaneously, as Black creates a close bond between himself and the city by painting it. He does so, however, by first creating  In the first category, novels have one primary setting and layer several distant locations over this setting. Novels of the second category skip between two or three main settings. 13

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a collage-like palimpsest from experiences and objects of the anonymous mass of all the city dwellers living around him. His close relationship with the city is therefore based on anonymity and distance. The image of the Virgin, which Black ever more strongly identifies with, is grounded in the local urban community. Abani approaches this image through what might not quite be a ‘thick description’ (sensu Geertz) but provides dense contextual information: The Virgin was important to the people here. Not only as a symbol of the adopted religion of Catholicism, but because she was a brown virgin who had appeared to a brown saint, Juan Diego. […] He had watched every year the procession to her, her effigy carried high through the streets of East LA starting from the corner of Cesar Chavez, held up, aloft, like a torch. (Abani 2007, p. 41)

The Virgin is connected not only to the people of East LA but also to the built environment, the streets, street names and history of the surrounding places. These close ties make her a popular image for public and street art, which is why even from this brief excerpt one can easily deduce a long list of attributes ascribed to the Virgin and relevant to translocal street art: (1) The Virgin is relevant in her context, which is also the most important criterion for narratability.14 (2) She is a symbolic as well as symbolically charged figure. (3) She is transcultural by nature.15 (4) This transculturality is expressed on at least three levels: the local, religion and race. (5) The Virgin has a strong impact on Black’s mental map of East LA. (6) Since he describes a procession on a central street, she probably plays a role in the entire community’s mental maps. This list could easily be continued. In sum, the Virgin is grounded in the local and social space, but always carries with her several adaptable notions of translocality. Claudia Perner, whose analysis of Abani’s novel focuses more on religious aspects, elaborates that “since the seventeenth 14  In Language in the Inner City (1973) William Labov describes how important the perception of the ‘point’ of the story—as an indication of relevance—is for tellability. Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996) includes experientiality and the emotional response of the reader in an evaluation of context and relevance. 15  For a helpful definition of transculturality, as opposed to multi- or interculturality, see Wolfgang Welsch’s essay “Transculturality—The Puzzling Forms of Culture Today” (1999). Welsch introduces the concept to reflect the interconnections moving through cultures and lifestyles, which is embodied here by the Virgin of Guadalupe embodying various religious, cultural, national and racial identities at once.

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century, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been perceived as a figure of contradictions, sometimes even of transgression, uniting features of Spanish Catholicism and Aztec religious tradition and inviting multiple, even oppositional, readings” (2011, pp. 176–177). What may be perceived as fragmentation represents, at the same time, continuity. The Virgin is perceived differently, depending not only on the observer, but also on spatial, temporal, cultural, national and religious contexts. The city provides a space in which a large number of such different contexts, settings and frames can exist side by side, or interpenetrate each other, within condensed spaces. This is, among other factors, due to the palimpsestic (referring to the process rather than the result of layering) nature of the city as a “space of complex superimpositions […], a place that always constitutes itself as a conglomerate of different spatial and temporal stratifications, transcriptions and deferrals and can be portrayed as such” (Kronshage et al. 2015b, p. 1, my translation).16 This transcultural palimpsest becomes more immediately translocal in the next step of the creative process, which constitutes, in a type of list or archive, how the Virgin connects not only different people and religions, but also separate places within the space of East LA. Black’s Virgin becomes a palimpsest of all individual representations of the Virgin that continuously rewrite, transcribe and overlay her. In his studio, Black has a collection of polaroids he took of different images of the Virgin: Statues, paintings, murals, posters, anything he came across in his travels of East LA; and he came across many. Each photo had a white name tag under it, labeling: 1st Street Underpass; Emil’s Mobil Station—South Wall; Underpass to INS building—Los Angeles Street; St. Sebastian’s forecourt; Immaculate Heart Cemetery, tombstone—Breed, Rosa’s Panaderia—Cake. (Abani 2007, p. 42)

What Huyssen, talking about video art, memoir and confessional literature, describes as “obsessive self-musealization” (2003, p.  14), is what Black does here to a cityscape that is closely connected to his own identity. What is ‘musealised’ are seemingly random places, objects and icons, but 16  The German original text reads as follows: “Die Stadt als einen Raum der komplexen Überlagerungen zu verstehen, wahrzunehmen, und zu beschreiben, d.h. als einen Raum, der sich immer schon als ein Konglomerat verschiedener räumlicher und zeitlicher Schichtungen, Überschreibungen und Verschiebungen konstituiert und als solcher dargestellt werden kann” (Kronshage et al. 2015b, p. 1).

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also the trajectories created between them by the artist’s paths, the cityscape and the translocal Virgin. The artist himself always feels in-­ between, in-between Igbo and Salvadorian, cis-male and trans identities for example, and therefore the connections between locales are where he situates his art. “People on the street generally do not see the urban environment as an outdoor gallery, but rather as scenery on the way from point A to point B” (Blanché 36), whereas Black, with the gaze of the street artist, locates inspiration by reading, and inscribing at the same time, the spaces of East LA. While Black does not know all the different members of the diverse community whose representations of the Virgin influence his, he imaginatively interacts with them by collecting bits and pieces of ‘their’ representations of the Virgin. This resonates with Benedict Anderson’s observation that “communities are to be distinguished […] by the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson 1991, p.  6). Black’s Virgin reflects the way in which the members of this imagined community identify through difference. A similar process leads Black to create his own virginal disguise. The reader is presented, again, with a list of objects—items of women’s clothing—always including the place in which Black found them. In her analysis of Brand’s What We All Long For, Pooch identifies a similar technique as ‘cataloguing’ and explains how ‘cataloguing’ is reflective of urban diversity (cf. Pooch 2016, p. 91). While the image of a catalogue, with all its elements easily visible and in order, seems to contradict the palimpsestuous nature of the novels, both Brand and Abani create inventories that link certain items, while disguising or entirely hiding others. Brand and Abani therefore use cataloguing in their writing to describe the palimpsestuous layering of places, for example, with Abani’s list of items of clothing: Scattered around the worktable were several articles of women’s clothing, collected at different times and places across the city: bikini tops and bottoms filched from Santa Monica Beach, sometimes from the women he initiated; G-strings and lacy bras from Charlie’s; a tank top and one blue garter of unknown origin, but found in the bins around the fashion district. When he took them he told himself it was for art. Parts of women he wanted to incorporate into paintings. (Abani 2007, p 56)

In the grand finale of the novel, his transformation into the Virgin completed, Black wears Iggy’s wedding dress. This dress is, however, the culmination of a series of outfits representing different women by their

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catalogued garments. All found objects form a part of the painting, although they are no longer visible. On the one hand, the seemingly chaotic collection of found items of clothing is reminiscent of collage-like artworks that are present throughout the entire novel and may remind the reader of readymades by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters or Tracey Emin. On the other hand, the lists or catalogues can also be read as the result of acts of ‘superposition’, a Benjaminian perception of space that the next section of this chapter will focus on.17

Superposition and Evanescence Gurr describes the effect of superposition in Eliot’s The Waste Land, as an archetypal urban text, stating that “superposition refers to both the temporal layering and to the ability to perceive it” (2015, p. 30). This mode of perception is what turns a mere catalogue into a palimpsest when it comes to Black’s inventory of clothes representing stories and locations. Where a passer-by may see only a discarded object, Black’s artist’s gaze reads stories and places. The clothes, together with the other inventories or catalogues, form a kind of hypertextual net-like structure, in which they all refer to each other, but also to the time at which they were worn, the time at which they were found and the places in which both actions took place. The reader is enticed to fill in the blanks with possible stories of why a particular top ended up where Black found it and why it caught his eye. We are actively invited to imagine ourselves as the artist and attempt to see

17  One of the passages in The Arcades Project in which Benjamin describes the phenomenon of superposition, which will also play a role in my chapter on translocal maps, reveals the chain of association through which the flâneur perceives a multitude of stories “potentially taking place in this one single room […] simultaneously” (1999, p. 418): “The appearances of superposition, of overlap, which come with hashish may be grasped through the concept of similitude. When we say that one face is similar to another, we mean that certain features of this second face appear to us in the first, without the latter’s ceasing to be what it has been. Nevertheless, the possibilities of entering into appearance in this way are not subject to any criterion and are therefore boundless. The category of similarity, which for the waking consciousness has only minimal relevance, attains unlimited relevance in the world of hashish. There, we may say, everything is face: each thing has the degree of bodily presence that allows it to be searched—as one searches a face—for such traits as appear. Under these conditions even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word) puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing opposed to it” (1999, p. 418).

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the same connections and trajectories. The fleeting temporalities18 that are implied here are the main difference between the way in which this text uses palimpsestuous structures and superposition and Gurr’s analysis of Eliot. Rather than a superposition of historical urban layers, Abani’s Black experiences superposition here as connecting stories that have taken place quite recently. The word ‘fleeting’ also describes a defining characteristic of street art. According to Dausend, Krause and Heinicke, the evanescence of a work of street art is consciously used as part of its mise-en-scène, just as the space in which it is painted, discussed, removed or painted over, becomes part of the artwork itself (cf. 2015, p.  206). After calling street art ephemeral, site-specific and participatory in his basic definition of the term, Blanché, with reference to Riggle’s 2010 definition of street art, explains that “the context of each Street Artwork, that is, ‘its material use of the street’ changes during its life period on the street in a palimpsest way” (2016, p. 36). Not only the art piece itself, but also its relationship to its canvas changes at an accelerated pace that is characteristic for urban environments. The temporal axis of palimpsestuous street art therefore needs to be adjusted. Where spatial distance extends its reach in this translocal urban palimpsest, the time frame that is considered here is short in comparison. Black points to the transience of his street art and characterises it as ‘haunting’, after his mural has been removed by city officials. The effect of superposition is even more prominent than in the previous passage, as erasure makes history visible: Black shook his head. ‘Everyone who saw that painting will always carry it with them. Do you think the Chumash are gone because the Mission settlers wiped them out? History is everywhere here; if it weren’t they wouldn’t be trying so hard to hide it. As for my painting? It will haunt the wall forever.’ (Abani 2007, p. 239)

18  An example of a translocal novel that emphasises temporal depth in the urban environment, instead of fleetingness, but still deals mainly with the contemporary city, is Huchu’s The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician. While the Magistrate from Bindura, Zimbabwe, has little knowledge of Scottish history, or desire to learn about it, he feels a haptic connection to Edinburgh and its age-old buildings: “The wall felt rough against the palm of his hand. It had weathered rain, wind and snow for centuries; time had leeched and calcified within. It was solid, fixed in this point of space, and the act of touching it fixed him to it too. They shared roots for a brief moment in time” (Huchu 2015, p. 84).

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Just as Black explicitly refers to the transience of street art, he extends the axis of time again to point out the violent and purposely silenced history of the site. Despite Black’s more casual tone, the similarities between this description of East LA and the Lenape paths in Open City, referenced in the beginning of this chapter, are noteworthy. In the two novels, haunting is posited as a condition of both urban space as an extremely dense environment where many life stories intersect, and of the palimpsest, in which layers haunt each other under erasure. As Huyssen puts it, “representations of the visible will always show residues and traces of the invisible” (2003, p. 10). The ‘spirit’ of a painting clings to the wall in the form of memories of onlookers, past interactions with its audience and the forced removal leaving an overly blank space. This tabula rasa also refers back to the very beginning of the novel marked by Black painting his face white: the likening of his face to a wall, or a blank surface to paint on, now becomes reality. Just after the removal, his friend Iggy even remarks that Black had given the Virgin his own face. Artist and artwork are silenced, although, as Black points out, this silence speaks its own language, which relies on the participatory nature of street art. The mere presence of a piece of street art “provokes questions concerning ownership and property as well as who has the right to communicate what and where” (Blanché 2016, p. 36). While Black’s artistic voice is muted, the subaltern19 in his art not allowed to speak, his art is still questioning its space, its status, as well as public authority. I touch here on the connections between haunting, absence and silence—which I will comment on in more detail in Chap. 7—to show how the different techniques producing translocal narratability function together. Especially now, in the process of removal, the particularity of Black’s handmade paint becomes relevant, since he paints but also removes the Virgin layer by layer: “Skeleton, muscles, flesh, skin and clothes” (Abani 2007, p.  233). The last layer he painted—the Virgin’s clothing—is the first to be removed. Before she is removed entirely, the Virgin reveals her nude body. Some observers find her even more offensive in her anticipated absence, which mirrors again the curious tension between intimacy and alienation that is inherent in the palimpsestuous. The properties of the 19  In this context, the term ‘subaltern’ was first coined by Antonio Gramsci, although my reference here is to Spivak’s more specific definition of the silenced subaltern in postcolonial theory, which she presents in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

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paint are likened to the condition of the city, “its polyphonic murmuring” (Brand 2005, p. 149) as Brand calls it, in Black’s reflections: Each color was designed specifically for a particular part of a particular mural that he might be working on at the time, and each had a different chemical consistency and density so that he could apply the paint in layers that never bled or dried into each other. Like LA, he thought, a segregated city that still managed to work as a single canvas of color and voices. (Abani 2007, p. 88)

In her insightful review of the novel, Jane Smiley explains that Black can see the city as both divided and beautifully united “because he experiences his city the old-fashioned way, by walking” (2007, n.p.). He is not separated from the immediate urban experience, as other Angelenos are, by the metal walls of a vehicle. This unique perspective, constructed through meandering walks and a special eye for chance encounters with superposition, is not only reminiscent of psychogeography20 but also, according to Smiley, a key feature in Abani’s renewal of the urban novel. Additionally, the way in which Black describes his paint is the antithesis of urban ‘beautification’ processes that are often hostile towards street art, since “the symbolic organization of public space under a certain aesthetic and social order, leads to a process of exclusion in which everything that does not fit the dominant aesthetic model is stigmatized or destroyed” (Menor 2016, p. 60). Black, however, consciously chooses a non-dominant movement, on foot, and a stigmatised and easily destroyed art form. Although he enjoys them much less than ephemeral street art, Black also creates installations and murals in places where their presence is not only tolerated but celebrated by an interested audience. Still, this publicly sanctioned art does not satisfy Black. Making exclusion visible, on the metaphorical level of the paint as well as through the literal removal of his artwork, is too essential a part of his artistic expression. Although his artworks are layers of the urban fabric that are constantly under erasure, superposition can make their traces visible again and, in a way, ‘unsilence’ them. Black’s ‘legal’ artworks therefore have a different appeal than his street art. One of the publicly sanctioned artworks mentioned in the novel is a mural entitled ‘American Gothic—The Remix’, which consists mainly of racist jokes collected from public restrooms all over the world and  For a helpful overview of the topic, see Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography (2010).

20

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therefore straddles the line between public and private, canonical and deviant. This tension is transferred onto spatial categories, on the local as well as on the translocal level. In her critique of the novel, Karen Olsson observes that “just as Black combines racist jokes and lines from Wallace Stevens in a work entitled ‘American Gothic—The Remix,’ so Abani imagines a place that is horrifying and tender and absurd in equal measure” (2007, n.p.). Olsson goes on to explain why she finds Abani’s depiction of LA much less convincing and vibrant than the more multifaceted Lagos in GraceLand, a perspective that seems to be due to her categorisation of Abani’s writing in The Virgin of Flames as that of an immigrant novelist refusing to be limited to an outsider’s perspective. Olsson reminds us several times that Abani is from Nigeria and therefore more apt at depicting either places in West Africa or life in the United States through the eyes of a character who has recently migrated. Apart from the fact that this stance is narrow-minded and confuses real and implied author, many other critics praise Abani’s novel for its vivid East LA setting. Olsson’s ‘horrifying and tender’ is nonetheless a fitting label not only for ‘American Gothic—The Remix’ as a mosaic recreation of city life, but also for the translocal links embedded in the piece: At first he had collected them [the jokes and quotations] himself but over time, as he had begun the installation, the community of The Ugly Store had started to collect them and pass them on to him. He was firm about their source, men’s public toilets, but flexible about the cities they came from. […] Running along the bottom of the installation was a border, six feet wide. Entered in like marginalia under the title An Attempted Index of Self-Censorship was a list of all the places in the world the text had come from. (Abani 2007, p. 89)

Among the people bringing Black quotes, which (like Brand’s protagonist Tuyen) he collects in a diary, are not only the regular men and women visiting The Ugly Store, but also celebrities from the ‘other’ LA who have heard of the project. Paris Hilton, Aishwarya Rai, Penelope Cruz and many others provide him with quotes from all over the globe, but what is documented in the index are neither the people who have collected the quotes, no matter their fame, nor the astonishingly large list of nations they were collected in, but instead the specific—and often surprising— places the quotes and jokes were found in, Buckingham Palace being only one example of a particularly unusual location. All places are listed side by

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side, regardless of their prominence or lack of such. Just as Schulze-Engler does in his analysis of transculturality, this calls into question “the assumption that transcultural phenomena occur in ‘peripheral’ rather than ‘central’ constellations” (2009a, p. xi). The mural also relates to Brah’s conception of diaspora space as inhabited by local as well as diasporic subjects.21 The translocal artwork questions global, national and local power structures and makes them less dominant through the hierarchy-free accumulation into yet another palimpsestuous catalogue. Evanescence then relates to superposition insofar as superposition allows the artist to perceive (partially) erased layers and connections in and through space and time. The artist needs the ability to look at space in a certain way in order to see translocal linkages and, at the same time, he actively seeks out spaces that demand to be seen through the lens of superposition. The focus on non-dominant, subaltern layers and their erasure questions established structures of power and dominance. Superposition and ephemeral street art in this way reveal translocal layers of the urban palimpsest and create a more diverse, critical and political cityscape.

The Translocal Palimpsest of the Lubaio in What We All Long For ‘American Gothic—The Remix’, as well as the other artworks in The Virgin of Flames, shows marked similarities to the description of art and artistic processes in Dionne Brand’s Toronto novel What We All Long For. Transculturality, diaspora spaces, participatory elements (in both cases a notebook to gather quotations), as well as palimpsestuous techniques are used, negotiated and navigated in both texts. Several other overarching themes and motifs are surprisingly similar in Brand’s and Abani’s novels and also appear in many other translocal urban novels, which leads me to believe that they may form another commonality. Queer (urban) spaces, concerns with sustainability, public participation and questions of agency are examples of such common topics.22 I will therefore put an emphasis on 21  “‘Diaspora space’ (as distinct from the concept of diaspora) is ‘inhabited’ not only by diasporic subjects but equally by those who are constructed and represented as ‘indigenous’. As such, the concept of diaspora space foregrounds the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’” (Brah 2002a, p. 16). 22  Dionne Brand, “one of Canada’s foremost figures” (Tavares and Brosseau 2013, p. 10), has dealt with “cultural imperialism, women and sexism, migrant exile and displacement, homosexuality and heterosexism, and related questions of social identity, belonging and mar-

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­ uestions of agency and participation in the following section, which will q be concerned with translocal palimpsestuous artwork in What We All Long For. The novel centres on Tuyen, a Vietnamese-Canadian lesbian artist, and her group of friends: Carla, Oku and Jackie. All of them feel a deep attachment to Toronto and struggle with their families’ migration backgrounds. Instead of the sense of belonging to a distant home country which their parents expect from them, they feel like they belong only to each other and the city they inhabit. All art pieces discussed in the novel also seem to belong to the city, rather than to one artist. Two of these artworks are explicitly palimpsestuous and translocal, although only one of them is, strictly speaking, street art. Since Tuyen’s lubaio,23 which is exhibited in a private apartment and therefore neither street art nor public art, is created through active interaction and engagement with the general public, it nevertheless fulfils similar criteria. When she starts working on the lubaio, Tuyen randomly asks fellow Torontonians what they long for and documents their responses on the signpost-like piece. Caroline Rosenthal finds one explanation for the curiously public intimacy of the messages on the lubaio—which is similar to Black’s Virgin in this respect—when she writes that “while Tuyen intends her artwork to create a realm where desires are heard and the otherwise invisible and hidden can enter discourse, it also functions as her personal space” (2011, p.  234). Rosenthal’s chapters on visual arts in What We All Long For are more descriptive than the rest of her analysis, but in them she aptly shows “the metamorphoses that people and spaces consistently undergo in the city. They assume new identities, bodies, and histories, while the city is littered with traces of residual identities” (2011, p. 233). One of these traces is a photo—marked by an inscription on the back as a memory of a shared night between two anonymous city dwellers—that Tuyen finds at an ATM machine.24 This photo inspires her to ginalization” (Tavares and Brosseau 2013, p. 11) in all of her work as a poet, novelist and queer activist. 23  In her analysis of queer spaces in the novel, Garvey explains how the lubaio is a “huge totem constructed from railroad ties—ones she [Tuyen] has stolen. She explains this art form as a system originally serving as signposts” (2011, p. 768). Garvey continues to describe how Tuyen therefore treats the lubaio not as a possession but as something that she continuously gives back to the public. 24  “She had happened on the idea of collecting these stories when she found the signed photograph, ‘Recuerdo de nuestra noche, 1968’ at the ATM machine. The city was full of longings and she wanted to make them public” (Brand 2005, p. 151, italics original).

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adapt the initial idea for her lubaio as a signpost for (political) messages to the city and transform it into an expression of the city’s secret or overt longings. Her original concept is already translocal on several levels, as she explains that it is based on signposts put up by public authorities in Chinatowns. These were artificially made to look ‘authentic’ and served as a marker of this different transcultural space that visitors were about to enter.25 Reminiscent of strategies Sharon Zukin terms ‘disneyification’ (see Zukin’s influential monograph The Cultures of Cities), Tuyen nevertheless succeeds in twisting the concept into a shape that allows for critique and participation when she explains that “at the planned installation, which was to be her most ambitious, she would have the audience post messages on the lubaio. Messages to the city” (Brand 2005, p. 17). Even though the lubaio becomes something different in the end, Tuyen continuously sharpens her vision of the city that inspires her artwork. Another shared characteristic between the palimpsest and street art can therefore be established by means of Blanché’s notion that “street art, like performance art, is a kind of process-based art; each work of street art is imprinted with traces of the process” (Blanché 2016, p. 37)—which strikes a similar note to Huyssen’s observations about the inscriptions of the invisible in the visible. Both the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous can become translocal since the palimpsestic process of layering as well as the resulting palimpsestuous structure expresses translocal elements. These translocal elements are constituted by the multilingual messages on the lubaio but also by its very form, for which Tuyen draws inspiration from Toronto’s Chinatown. The lubaio incorporates different layers of the translocal urban palimpsest and thereby prompts Tuyen to also reflect on her parents’ (Tuan’s and Cam’s) experience of the city: the lubaio, the bits of wood, the photographs, the longings were what she brought to the cave to be handled, and thought about, and made into something she could use to create alternate, unexpected realities, exquisite

25  Pointing to a Toronto street—Spadina Avenue—that runs through and connects a very high number of culturally and socio-economically distinct neighbourhoods, Tuyen explains: “You know those fake carved posts they’ve put in the middle of the road down on Spadina? In Chinatown? Well, they’re kitsch down there, but they’re supposed to be signposts. Like long ago people would pin messages against the government and shit like that on them” (Brand 2005, p. 16).

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corpses. That’s what Tuan and Cam were, exquisite corpses. Or were they surrealists and she their composition? (Brand 2005, p. 224)

Like Abani’s protagonist Black, Tuyen combines different found objects to fuel her art and inspiration. Some of these objects are found by chance while others, the longings, are consciously collected. The surrealist technique of the cadavre exquis, used by artists such as Max Ernst, also combines elements of conscious construction and chance additions in a collage-like whole.26 In contrast to the (textual) palimpsest, which consists of layers of texts that bear no relation to each other, the framework that brings the different elements into interaction is previously defined and therefore partly restricts the content and form of what can be added. Nonetheless, Tuyen combines the planned part of her artwork, the book of longings, with found objects and parts of previous projects, which again makes the artwork resemble a more palimpsestuous structure. Additionally, the histories of the city and of Tuyen’s family, as well as their respective core stories,27 are integrated into the seemingly borderless and constantly growing lubaio. In her analysis, which focuses on transnational and postcolonial discourses in Canadian literature, Heather Smyth points to the hidden pain that underlies not only the lubaio, but also the likening of Tuyen’s parents to exquisite corpses as an unsettling and conflicted image: Tuyen’s lubaio may translate the fragments of diaspora into beauty, turning personal and unofficial histories into a community’s messages to each other. It may give concrete form to the particularized local political struggles that reach past the national framework to insert themselves into the global. But the legacy of damage represented by Quy, and the evocation of dismemberment contained in the exquisite corpse or relic, gives to Brand’s exploration of the politics of difference a painful edge. (2008, n.p.) 26  “William S. Rubin cites Max Ernst on the virtues of Surrealist collage, of which cadavre exquis is an example: it is ‘a meeting of two [or more] distant realities on a plane foreign to them both’ and a ‘culture of systematic displacement and its effects’” (Smyth 2008, n.p.). 27  As Leonie Sandercock explains in the context of the story turn in urban planning, psychologists have long been aware “that each of us has a core story: that we do not merely tell stories but are active in creating them with our lives. We become our stories. When we tell stories about ourselves, we draw on past behaviour and on others’ comments about us in characterizing ourselves as, say, adventurous, or victims, or afraid of change, or selfish, or heroic. But in telling and re-telling the story, we are also reproducing ourselves and our behaviors. Social psychologists argue that communities, and possibly nations, have such core stories that give meaning to collective life” (2010, p. 22, my emphasis).

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Taken literally, the exquisite corpse expresses Cam and Tuan’s longing for a long-dead past, resulting in their inability to arrive in a globalised present, but it also represents the continuous harm done to their lost son Quy, who becomes the victim of a violent crime just as he is about to meet his parents at their home. What is even more interesting than this deferred history of pain is Smyth’s observation that this style of visual art, as well as Brand’s style of narration, can reveal the intertwined spaces of the local and the global that must not necessarily move through the national. Despite the recent focus in many areas of scholarship, such as anthropology, sociology, historiography and cultural studies, on transnationalism and transculturality, these three spaces (local, national, global) are still frequently thought of as three concentric circles rather than permeable layers. Local-local connections are, in Smyth’s view, enriched by a global perspective—a perspective that may even be limited or oversimplified by first moving through the national space. Despite the fact that her research is strongly tied to the field of Canadian literature, this perspective is one that provides a productive equilibrium between commonality and specificity. The lubaio embodies the same translocal tensions.

Public Transport and Palimpsests Towards the end of the novel, Tuyen plans yet another addition to the lubaio, in a side note that is reminiscent of Pound’s imagist haiku “In a Station of the Metro” (1913): “The streetcar was squealing by. The profiles of its passengers struck Tuyen as another idea for her installation” (Brand 2005, p. 234). As is the case in imagist poetry, a very specific image is suddenly reframed, viewed from a new angle. The streetcar is, of course, also an image of mobility and urbanity, a space replete with possibilities and potential chance encounters. This may be why the opening scene of the novel, in which we are first introduced to the four main characters and the mothering city of Toronto,28 is set in public transport (cf. Brand 2005, pp. 1–5). As is revealed later, Quy is unknowingly riding along in close proximity to his sister, adding density and further significance to the train 28  The city of Toronto is frequently described as a maternal body (cf. e.g. Brand 2005, p. 20, p. 67, p. 280) in the novel. An anthropomorphised translocal city can also be found in the capricious house connecting London, Lagos and Cuba in Oyeyemi’s Opposite House (2007) or in Lanchester’s Capital (2012), in which a row of houses take on their newly wealthy owners’ affectations in the process of gentrification.

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setting. A variety of sense impressions—the cold winter air outside, the thick mixture of smells in the heated train car, the rumbling of the train— makes the space easily imageable, especially since all of these aspects of public transport are similar in all large cities. This chapter therefore underlines one of the two central qualities Brah describes as constitutive of ‘home’. Apart from the “mythic place […] of no return” (2002a, p. 192), which Tuyen’s parents long for, “home is also the lived experience of a locality. Its sounds and smells, its heat and dust, balmy summer evenings, or the excitement of the first snowfall” (2002a, p. 192). Sensory impressions are not only foregrounded in the context of transport and when the city is described, but also in Tuyen’s work on the lubaio. She hammers, paints, chips away, writes and works with different media from sculpture to photography, the latter of which relies on the delicate work she performs in her own darkroom. However, it is not only the sense impressions that make the train ride such an integral part of the novel: “the train ride [also] functions as a synecdoche for the dynamics of space and the transitory character of city life: An analogy to the tram ride in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)” (Pooch 2016, p. 89). While Pooch is quite right, she unfortunately does not take the idea much further than pointing out a standard technique of urban narration. She does, however, use the suggestive term ‘synecdoche’, the translocal implications of which I have discussed in the context of simultaneity. In contrast to the metaphor, which is created out of difference and similarity, synecdoche and metonymy describe a movement through distinct types of similarities. In a metonymy, for example, the crown can replace the monarch because it is associated with power, the act of coronation, etc. and is thereby similar to the monarch. A mental movement from one association to the next takes place. Clingman explains that this is the territory of (among other things) transnational fiction: a navigational space. If identity is often connected with location, then we can put location, too, under the same lens. The fact is that landscape itself is intrinsically metonymic, as one feature literally leads to another. (2012, p. 23)

While I will return to navigational spaces in my discussion of translocal maps and mappings, what I am concerned with here is the affinity between metonymy, translocal literature and the narrative depiction of the physical

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world. Train rides,29 signifying the crossing of boundaries, arrival, flight, but also home, are not only made prominent through the opening scene and the urban setting, but also function as one of the recurring motifs that Nünning describes as essential for fictional worldmaking. All of these train rides therefore bear a metonymic, or at times synecdochic, relation to each other but also to the longer journeys of migration they allude to and the landscape they move through. The train rides are metonymic when they stand in for similar journeys and synecdochic (think pars pro toto) when they call to mind a larger journey of migration they are part of. Since train rides from various times and locations are alluded to through their metonymic similarity, they enter a translocal palimpsestuous relationship. Public transport therefore gains significance as a multi-layered and multi-sensory urban experience. The various sensory impressions involved activate memories of, or desires for, distant locations, which is how the comparatively short distances travelled in the city are palimpsestuously layered with much longer journeys. In this process, locations associated with travel can symbolise both opportunities for connections and missed opportunities to connect with other people, places or stories—when we find out that Quy had already almost met his sister in the very first chapter of the novel. Train journeys in particular can signify very short journeys within a city as well as long trips to distant locations and are therefore an ideal image and setting for negotiations of translocal urban palimpsests.

The Urban Palimpsest and Graffiti To briefly return to street and public art as quintessentially urban and translocal modes of expression, a group of minor but frequently recurring characters in What We All Long For is the graffiti crew. Usually, they are only present in the narration through traces of their existence: music that can be heard through their windows, smells of their cooking and, of course, their tags and murals. Instead of articulating their presence directly, they become omnipresent through “information that ‘something happened’ on this particular spot” (Blanché 2016, p.  37). Speaking with a term that Dillon borrows from Julia Kristeva (cf. Dillon 2007, pp. 86–87), 29  Lieven Ameel identifies train stations as a common nodal point in city novels, as well as a setting that allows for different scales to intersect: “In the city novel, specific locations can be singled out as thresholds that frame the shock inherent to such multiple distances being crossed. […] Two crucial thresholds are the railway station and the harbor” (2017b, p. 236).

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the graffiti crew behaves almost like the underlying geno-text to their visible pheno-text, which is the artwork. Due to the performative character of street art, this covert existence becomes part of their personalities and physical presence. Brand constructs them as rather flat characters that embody their chosen medium all the more intensely, when she writes, for example, that Kumaran’s graffiti crew prided itself on fluency, stealth, and agility. They had made themselves shadowy and present in the city, as in the room. […] They saw their work—writing tags and signatures—as painting radical images against the dying poetics of the anglicized city. The graffiti crew had filled in the details of the city’s outlines. (Brand 2005, p. 134)

Their physical presence is never described in any detail and is marked mainly by their near absence or invisibility, which is essential for a street artist. What defines them, makes them visible, is their interaction with urban space. Interestingly, even Lydia Efthymia Roupakia, who in her article on art and affective citizenship in What We All Long For laments that “no substantial critical attention has been paid to the pivotal role attributed to art in the novel as a medium through which group energy— which ties the local to the global—is shifted beyond ethnic loyalties” (2015, p. 33), neglects to analyse the role of the graffiti crew and takes only Tuyen’s art projects into account—despite the fact that the urban setting is so essential and graffiti and murals so closely tied to cityspace. While this dismissal may be due to the less immediate presence of the graffiti crew, their artworks are all the more visible and even reflect and project the other characters’ desires, thoughts and stories. Carla, who lives next door to Tuyen and is frequently haunted by traumatising memories of her mother’s suicide, sees the tags the graffiti crew spray as, on the one hand, reassuringly familiar on her long bike rides through the city, but also, on the other hand, as lacking in creativity or positive imagery: She felt slightly comforted, though she had asked them often enough to paint something else if they were going to paint the whole city over. Something more. They had practically filled all the walls of the city with these four signs, and she would have liked them to paint a flowering jungle or a seaside, the places where her mother, Angie, had always dreamed of going but never went. But she loved the city. She loved riding through the

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neck of it, the triangulating girders now possessed by the graffiti crew. (Brand 2005, p. 32)

The familiar inscriptions on the face of the city allow Carla to feel at home; they connect her social circle and the street she lives on to all places in the city. The ownership expressed over the cityscape is extended to herself, especially when—much later in the novel—the graffiti crew sprays exactly what she longs for, thereby writing her personal translocal history on the face of the city. Unlike Tuyen’s or Black’s artwork that “relies more heavily on preparation in the studio” (Blanché 2016, p. 36) as is typical for public art and murals, graffiti, especially in the form of tags, can appear suddenly and with no further insight into the artistic process. Brand reflects this in her writing, not only by hardly ever letting the graffiti crew appear in person, but also by explaining how even the characters that look out for the work of the crew usually only notice it sometime after it has been sprayed. This mirrors a general perception of urban art as “visual noise” (Blanché 2016, p. 36). The typical urbanite learns to ignore the omnipresence of graffiti in certain areas, just as they do with noise: certain layers of the urban palimpsest are muted. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Simmel describes this coping mechanism that is employed to filter the onrushing mass of sensory impressions as a ‘blasé attitude’. Despite the fact that neither Carla nor Tuyen degrade the crew’s work to ‘visual noise’, they seem to notice it only when they are not preoccupied with other worries, sense impressions or thoughts. When Tuyen walks home after a night of drinking, which has allowed her to disperse some her preoccupations, she hears loud music playing from the crew’s apartment. Only after she recognises the familiar tune and remembers the day when she had listened to it with the graffiti crew, does she see the large mural Kumaran and his friends have painted in accordance with Carla’s ‘longings’: It [the music] was Oku’s ‘The Jungle Is a Skyscraper.’ And the walls of the two buildings caverning the alley were now covered in paintings. On one side there was a flowering jungle, lianas wrapped around the CN Tower, elephants drinking by the lake, pelicans perched on the fire escapes. On the other side there was a seaside, a woman in a bathing suit and hat shading her eyes, looking out to sea. The black Audi was parked outside a cabana, a boat rocked against the radio antenna of the car. Tuyen recognized the scenes.

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The places Carla had talked about, the places where Angela Chiarelli [Carla’s mother] dreamed of going. (Brand 2005, p. 301)

The mural, as Tuyen now sees it, is organically integrated into the cityscape. First of all, it is inspired by Ornette Coleman’s free jazz title that likens the jungle to the urban environment. In a mutual interpenetration, the cityscape is then integrated into the jungle of the mural. While the “lianas wrapped around the CN Tower” (Brand 2005, p. 301) could be reminiscent of post-apocalyptic imagery, they here suggest a peaceful symbiosis. The black car that is parked in the street interacts with the space of the mural when the painted boat rocks against it. The artwork, the text and the city not only seem to palimpsestically layer, but to permeate each other. While this increases the degree of site-specificity the mural possesses, the subjects, inspirations and style also correspond with common themes and images of the representation of cities: the urban jungle, the post-apocalyptic cityscape and the desire to escape into peaceful greenery are only some examples of common urban tropes. Writing about Tuyen’s lubaio, but making a more general point about the affective response that art can produce, Roupakia points out that “the local embeddedness of artworks may speak across difference and articulate intimate experiences of the universal” (2015, p. 44).30 While it is arguably the backstory of Carla’s mother that produces the emotional effect of the painting in Brand’s novel, the artwork also speaks to more universal fears and desires of city dwellers. The mural, the lubaio and the different types of palimpsests reveal how site-specificity and locality can produce universally relatable or intelligible effects.

Fragmented and Reconciled Palimpsests The curious tension between specificity and commonality, between the local and the global, between the familiar and the Other, is as inherent to translocal narratability as it is to the translocal urban palimpsest. In this tension, heterogeneity and homogeneity do not exclude each other but rather complement different parts of the same story. In an article in which 30  Blanché makes a similar point about degrees of site-specificity: “There are different degrees of site-specificity of a Street Art work and the degree and quality of site-specificity can change during the shelf life of the street art piece because Street Art is ephemeral and participatory […]. A Street piece can refer to a certain wall, but also to a certain area, street, city, country or all of these at once” (2016, p. 36).

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he explores planning as storytelling and does so in a web of locally and globally entangled scales, Throgmorton refers to Ruth Finnegan’s Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life (1998) when he explains that “common urban narratives emerge from subject positions provided by the web’s nodes and links” (2003, p.  139) and further writes about how “Finnegan claims that common urban narratives (often expressed abstractly as urban theories) are told about cities in general, but that such narratives become locally anchored in specific urban places” (2003, p. 139, italics original). Just like street art, narratives can possess site-specificity as well as translocal commonality—a combination that becomes most productive in an urban context. The productive tension between difference and commonality is reflected in the unrelated and related layers of the translocal urban palimpsest and the palimpsestuous narratives that create it. What We All Long For is—like Happiness (2018) by Aminatta Forna, The Other Hand (2008) by Chris Cleave or The Year of the Runaways (2015) by Sunjeev Sahota—a novel that resolves most of the tensions it creates between familiarity and unfamiliarity. These novels bring all threads of their narratives and all histories of their settings together to form a more or less cohesive whole. The narrative arcs culminate in a not necessarily happy or realistic but satisfying ending without any loose ends. The Virgin of Flames and Open City, conversely, provide historical and personal narratives which remain unresolved and therefore keep unsettling the reader and his or her trust in the reliability of the narrator. Both protagonists are confronted with their own destructively violent actions towards the endings of the novels, after they have continuously pointed out the violent histories of the respective settings. Only some of the tension is resolved while seemingly familiar layers of the story and the setting are retrospectively defamiliarised. Many translocal novels create an even more fragmented and conflicted palimpsest, often through specific narrative modes.31 In Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), protagonist “Nao’s narrative possesses a collective voice from the several-layered past” (Usui 2015, p. 94). Ruth, who reads Nao’s diaries, which were washed ashore by a storm, constantly struggles with her inability to confirm any of the reference points Nao gives from her personal life. Neither the location of her grandmother’s temple and its history nor her uncle’s death as a fighter pilot can be 31  All palimpsests are of course fragmented and conflicted to a degree. As is the case with most of the qualifiers I introduce, I am discussing degrees, not absolutes.

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f­ actually confirmed by Ruth. The more Ruth desires familiarity with Nao’s setting, life and family history, the more distant and unreal she becomes. Ruth’s research on Nao includes scouring databases for journal articles written by her relatives, asking a friend to translate the diaries and letters found with Nao’s diary, and even consulting a marine biologist to find out for how long the bag containing all of these documents would have likely been in the ocean before Ruth found it on a beach in Canada.32 However, it seems that the more systematic and scholarly her research, the more unverifiable any part of the story becomes, leaving the translocal palimpsest of the ‘several-layered past’ more fragmented with every uncovered layer. Another novel that creates a palimpsest full of tensions and unfamiliar layers by questioning the accuracy and objectivity of historical as well as personal accounts is Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). The novel uses shifting points of view as well as extremely lengthy footnotes to provide personal and historical background information to settings and stories. The objectivity suggested by the insertion of numerous footnotes containing historical accounts is contrasted by the very informal tone in which they are written.33 In her insightful analysis of the fragmented discourses in Díaz’s novel, Monica Hanna points out how the very particular historiography, the translocal narrative structures and the different literary traditions combine to create a particularly complicated palimpsest: 32  A similar strategy is used in Xiaolu Guo’s I Am China, which is narrated through letters, translations and documents, such as CD booklets, covers, handwritten notes or an insurance card, many of which are inserted as images alongside the text. This documentary style mimics archival research and emphasises local connections by adding pictures of objects that are clearly marked as belonging to different places around the globe. 33  Jennifer Harford Vargas provides a detail-oriented analysis of this particular formal feature. While she mainly discusses the footnotes as subverting power structures through the structure of the narrative, she additionally explains how “the single-spaced footnotes and double-spaced main text also cause the novel’s structure to resemble that of an academic book. In traditional academic texts, footnotes establish authority, acting as the supportive and evidentiary structure. Yunior draws on the epistemic weight granted footnotes in scholarly convention to insert multiple kinds of sources into his fictional footnotes. The footnotes reference a report available at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library […] and cite historians, novelists, and even Yunior’s girlfriend […] and mother […], not to mention many science fiction and fantasy texts. The footnotes do not privilege academic sources over personal, let alone fictional, ones and instead gesture toward multiple perspectives on Trujillo’s reign, which is especially important given the univocal, monological nature of dictatorship” (2014, p. 21).

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Oscar Wao self-consciously engages with Caribbean literary and historical discourses, with a heavy emphasis on Afro-Caribbean literary tradition, while also adopting narrative structures and references particular to United States literature and popular culture in a language that crackles with vibrancy. The result is a form that incorporates superhero comics, magical realism, and noir, among other genres, as well as conventional historical narration and the use of multiple narrative perspectives. (2010, p. 499)

As with Quy’s chapters in What We All Long For, which are marked by italics and alignment on the left rather than a justified block of text, the way the narrative appears on the page (with the unusual footnotes) already suggests unfamiliar and dissimilar palimpsestuous layers; the style, tone, point of view and locally embedded but translocally conveyed literary traditions only add to the impression. By creating this type of translocal and fragmented palimpsest on the level of structure, these novels suggest that the translocal narrative that emerges is necessarily incomplete and subjective; moreover, these texts put the onus on readers, who are enticed to do their own research and become a part of the translocal urban palimpsest.34

Conclusion In addition to the distinction between (textual) palimpsests, urban palimpsests and translocal urban palimpsests, as well as their palimpsestic or palimpsestuous description, we can therefore distinguish between two types of narrative palimpsests translocal novels create: a palimpsest that reconciles all of its narrative strands and layers, making them familiar, and a more fragmented palimpsest that leaves open ends, causes the reader to question the reliability of every narrator and, sometimes even retrospectively, makes its layers seem unfamiliar to the reader and even to one another. Where the less fragmented palimpsests are often created by storylines fitting together perfectly due to unlikely coincidences, the more fragmented ones can at times be unsatisfying and require a lot of additional 34  Another novel that strongly suggests it is the reader’s responsibility to keep track of the fragmented palimpsestuous stories and histories is Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), which traces the trauma of twins Rahel and Estha’s childhood: “By overlaying the present-day activities of the resort with traces of the events that took place there years before such as Rahel’s abandoned wristwatch, the novel again holds readers responsible for filling in the gaps while cautioning them against constructing self-serving and inaccurate accounts of the past” (Lipson Freed 2011, p. 234).

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Table 3.1  Matrix of types and qualities of palimpsests in translocal urban narratives Palimpsestuous or palimpsestic

Fragmented or reconciled

(Textual) palimpsest Urban palimpsest Translocal urban palimpsest

attention from the reader. While the three, frequently overlapping, palimpsests I have discussed in this chapter are types, fragmentation is a quality they possess to varying degrees. One could therefore place the narratives, or different parts of one narrative, in several positions on this matrix (Table 3.1).35 What I have discussed in this chapter are therefore not always strictly delimited types of palimpsests but instead an approximation of the most potent mix of attributes to tease out translocal narratability: translocal novels tend to be palimpsestuous rather than palimpsestic, fragmented instead of reconciled. The degree of effort required from the reader to nonetheless follow the plot varies strongly, as does the reliability of the narrator. Narratorial reliability, however, seems to be connected to fragmentation: the higher the degree of fragmentation, the less reliable the narrator tends to be—as evidenced by Open City and The Virgin of Flames. What all novels analysed here have in common is that they employ the palimpsest to reveal how extremely subjective (and political) the perception of a place and its history or core story is. Benjamin’s concept of superposition lends itself to exploring the subjectivity of a person’s gaze and perception of space and the numerous interpretations a single space can offer. In Abani’s The Virgin of Flames, superposition enables Black to not only see the translocal urban palimpsests he moves through, but to recreate very similar structures, layers and erasures in his artwork. Brand’s protagonist Tuyen more directly attempts to display the plurality of perspectives and desires in the dense multicultural cityspaces she inhabits. Both artists create their artworks not in a linear process, but narrate their artistic instincts through catalogues, descriptions of discarded materials and abandoned or erased projects and 35  Although the palimpsest is a poststructuralist concept, I have decided to insert this very structuralist matrix for the sake of clarity. It is in the nature of the palimpsest to always hover between categories and only be categorisable to a certain degree.

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ideas. Often no longer visible in the artwork, these scattered parts of the creative process are nevertheless present—albeit to different degrees—in the reader’s mind whenever the piece of art is mentioned. The artworks are therefore created by a combination and (partial) erasure of textual layers that are not directly related and often alien to one another, just as they are in the translocal urban palimpsest. While this type of palimpsest is somewhat fleeting and focused on more or less contemporary perspectives, another popular use of the palimpsest is to explore the long history of migration, local-local connections and colonialism that continues to shape cities. The historical elements of translocal palimpsests tend to be more palimpsestic than palimpsestuous, focusing on the process that created or creates the layers of history. The degree of translocality in these urban pasts can vary immensely, depending not only on the narrator but also on the reader. Quite often, the different temporal layers are distinguished clearly by their presentation on the page: in footnotes, italics, marked by dates, places or names. The palimpsest in general and the translocal urban palimpsest in particular therefore present extremely versatile tools that create and enhance translocal narratability. A categorisation of any of the novels discussed in this chapter as making use of only one kind of palimpsest would take away from the productive flexibility and permeability of the types and qualities I have introduced and explored. Especially since the palimpsests enter a palimpsestuous relationship with one another, the lines between them are at times fluid. Nonetheless, I believe that this more categorical conceptualisation of the often vague concept of the palimpsest can help us to better understand palimpsests in general and translocal palimpsests in particular.

Works Cited Corpus of 32 Main Novels Abani, Chris. 2007. The Virgin of Flames. London: Vintage. Brand, Dionne. 2005. What We All Long For. New York: Dunne. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. New York: Random House. Huchu, Tendai. 2015. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician. Cardigan: Parthian.

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Further References Ameel, Lieven. 2017a. Open City: Reading Signs of Uncertain Times in New York and Brussels. In Mielikuvituksen maailmat / Fantasins världar / Worlds of Imagination, ed. Merja Polvinen, Maria Salenius, and Howard Sklar, 265–283. Turku: Eetos. ———. 2017b. The City Novel: Measuring Referential, Spatial, Linguistic, and Temporal Distances. In The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. T. Robert and J.R. Tally, 233–241. London: Routledge. Anderson, Benedict R. 1991. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bauer, Annika. 2015. Chris Abani’s GraceLand: Constructing a Diasporic Space in a Postcolonial Metropolis. In Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging, ed. Florian Kläger and Klaus Stierstorfer, 331–348. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. London and Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Blanché, Ulrich. 2016. Street Art and Related Terms—Discussion and Working Definition. SAUC Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal 1 (1): 32–39. Brah, Avtar. 2002a [1996]. Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Clark, Rebecca. 2018. ‘Visible only in speech’: Peripatetic Parasitism, or, Becoming Bedbugs in Open City. Narrative 26 (2): 181–200. Clingman, Stephen. 2012. The Grammar of Identity. Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coverley, Merlin. 2010. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Dausend, Henriette. 2015. Non-Digital SMS on Gray Surface: Street Art als Logbuch individueller und gesellschaftlicher Bedeutungen im urbanen Raum. In Palimpsestraum Stadt, ed. Eike Kronshage, Cecile Sandten, and Winfried Thielmann, 203–218. Trier: WVT. Dillon, Sarah. 2005. Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies. Textual Practice 19 (3): 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502360500196227. ———. 2007. The Palimpsest. Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum. Garvey, Johanna X.K. 2011. Spaces of Violence, Desire, and Queer (Un)Belonging: Dionne Brand’s Urban Diasporas. Textual Practice 25 (4): 757–777. Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. English Edition: Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gurr, Jens Martin. 2015. The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural Analogies between ‘City’ and ‘Text’: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s

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Arcades Project. In Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry, ed. Kornelia Freitag, 21–38. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hall, Suzanne, and Ayona Datta. 2010. The Translocal Street: Shop Signs and Local Multi-Culture along the Walworth Road, South London. City, Culture and Society 1 (2): 69–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2010.08.001. Hanna, Monica. 2010. Reassembling the Fragments’: Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Callaloo 33 (2): 498–520. Harford Vargas, Jennifer. 2014. Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. MELUS 39 (3): 8–30. Heffernan, James A.W. 1991. Ekphrasis and Representation. New Literary History 22 (2): 297. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kläger, Florian, and Klaus Stierstorfer. 2015. Introduction. In Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging, ed. Florian Kläger and Klaus Stierstorfer, 1–10. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Kronshage, Eike, Cecile Sandten, and Winfried Thielmann, eds. 2015b. Palimpsestraum Stadt: Einführung. In Palimpsestraum Stadt, ed. Eike Kronshage, Cecile Sandten, and Winfried Thielmann, 1–14. Trier: WVT. Lipson Freed, Joanne. 2011. The Ethics of Identification: The Global Circulation of Traumatic Narrative in Silko’s Ceremony and Roy’s The God of Small Things. Comparative Literature Studies 48 (2): 219–240. Menor, Luis. 2016. Graffiti, Street Art, and Culture in the Era of the Global City: The Ana Botella Crew Case. SAUC Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal 1 (1): 59–69. Olsson, Karen. 2007. The Recycled City. The New York Times, 28 January. https:// www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Olsson.t.html. Accessed 8 Jul 2020. Perner, Claudia. 2011. US-American Inoutside Perspectives in Globalized Anglophone Literatures. Duisburg and Essen: Diss. Universitätsbibliothek Duisburg-Essen. Pooch, Melanie U. 2016. DiverCity—Global Cities as a Literary Phenomenon. Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles in a Globalizing Age. Bielefeld: Transcript. Pound, Ezra. 1913, April. In a Station of the Metro. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, p.  12. Digitised by The Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poetrymagazine/issue/70324/april-­1913. Accessed 3 Apr 2019. Rosenthal, Caroline. 2011. New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban. Rochester: Camden House.

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Roupakia, Lydia Efthymia. 2015. ‘Art-iculating’ Affective Citizenship: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For. Atlantis Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies 37 (1): 31–50. Sandercock, Leonie. 2010. From the Campfire to the Computer: An Epistemology of Multiplicity and the Story Turn in Planning. In Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and Planning: Beyond the Flatlands, ed. Leonie Sandercock and Giovanni Attili. Dordrecht and New York: Springer. Schulze-Engler, Frank. 2009a. Introduction. In Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze-Engler, ix–xvi. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Smiley, Jane. 2007. Review: The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani. The Guardian, 21 April. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview21. Accessed 6 Mar 2017. Smyth, Heather. 2008. ‘The Being Together of Strangers’: Dionne Brand’s Politics of Difference and the Limits of Multicultural Discourse. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 33 (1): 272–290. Tavares, David, and Marc Brosseau. 2013. The Spatial Politics of Informal Urban Citizenship: Reading the Literary Geographies of Toronto in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For. Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 33 (1): 9–33. Throgmorton, James A. 2003. Planning as Persuasive Storytelling on a Global-­ Scale Web of Relationships. Planning Theory 2 (2): 125–151. Usui, Masami. 2015. The Waves of Words: Literature of 3/11 in and around Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale of the Time Being. Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 208: 91–95. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality—The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today. In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 1994–1213. London and New Delhi: Sage.

CHAPTER 4

Mapping

In the past decade or so, terminology related to geography has become omnipresent in the study of literature and culture. We map gender, create cartographies of postcolonial texts, trace tectonic fractures in the strata of a poem. Unfortunately, however, in most such studies, a scholar looking for actual intersections of geography and literary or cultural studies will be disappointed. While the use of geographical metaphors can often provide helpful illustrations, Tania Rossetto rightly points out that “the interchange between literature and cartography has been accused of being too superficial. The main target of this critique is the metaphorical (vague, ambiguous and vacuous) use of the term ‘mapping’” (2014, p. 513). This critique1 is not universally applicable, but neither is it incorrect. In order to show where and how geography and mapping can be used more efficiently, Rossetto surveys ways in which commonalities between

Parts of this chapter have been adapted for an article on “Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician”, which will be published in an edited collection entitled Literatures of Urban Possibility (2021, Palgrave). 1  For an overview of the lines of critique against metaphorical and vague uses of mapping vocabulary in literary studies, see both Rossetto’s 2014 article and David Cooper’s essay “Critical Literary Cartography” (2012).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_4

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geography, mapmaking and literature are already being explored and “suggest[s] that literary texts can productively be approached as sites of encounter with, as well as sources for, the observation of emergent cartographies” (2014, p.  515). More specifically, her approach stresses that a fertile exchange is possible between scholars of literature and researchers in geography on the basis of tools and strategies they use to approach, process, select and apply their data. The way of thinking with which a mapmaker goes to work can be adapted and adopted with regard to the study of literature and vice versa. In this chapter, I take Rossetto’s observations as a point of departure to explore different ways in which geographical approaches, methods and perspectives can be used to analyse literary texts. At the same time, I will survey and scrutinise how translocal novels use mapping in a variety of textual strategies. These strategies then cause many of the novels in my corpus to be focused on highly mappable settings. In addition to a map-­ oriented style of writing, the four main ways in which maps are used are descriptions of maps, maps as metaphors, digital maps, and authorial maps and mappings. The first part of this chapter will be based on mappings I have produced by applying different styles of mapping to my analysis while the second part will be more concerned with the maps authors create or describe.

Maps and Literature, Maps in Literature, Maps about Literature Despite the numerous solely metaphorical uses of geography by literary scholars, the transfer of methods from cartography to literary studies is, of course, not without precedent. In his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, Franco Moretti maps out a large corpus of novels and shows what we can learn in moving away from a close reading to what he terms distant reading, an approach that relies much more on abstraction and on the extraction of data. While my own approach is still largely qualitative, Moretti’s work has inspired and encouraged me to work with a fairly large corpus of 32 novels and also to not discuss aspects of the novels that do not relate to the six main strategies of translocal narratability I have abstracted from the corpus. In another insightful work, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Moretti explains in more

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detail why we can learn from abstraction, most notably from the abstraction provided by the methodology of mapping: What do literary maps do… First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit—walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever—find its occurrences, place them in space… or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object like the maps that I have been discussing. And with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level. Everybody, from the first reader onwards, had noticed the country walks of Our Village [1824–32, by Mary Russel Mitford]; but no one had ever reflected on the circular pattern they project on the English countryside, because no one—in the absence of a map of the book—had ever managed to actually see it. (2005, p. 53, italics original)

Moretti uses maps, not as illustrations or visualisations; he productively engages with the process of mapping to add to the analysis, find new angles for an analysis and/or, ideally, assess something that until then remained hidden within the text. His approach to reduce data in order to reveal patterns resonates with what Muehrcke and Muehrcke note in their influential article on maps in literature, meaning actual images of maps being inserted alongside the text or physical maps described in literature: “Maps cannot be both revealing and complete. Thus the mapping process is one of evaluation, selection, and emphasis, which leads to simplification of the detail and intricacy of the real world” (1974, p. 319). This observation shows why Moretti’s approach is so important: since maps are both produced and used for specific means, the information contained in them must be selected carefully. We can only sensibly transfer the tools of mapping to the study of texts once we have selected certain elements that we want to map, while necessarily leaving out others. Interestingly, this is also one of the analogies between story and map. Both choose one story that is told—possibly hinting at others—and the reader of stories and maps, consciously or unconsciously, accepts that this selection process has taken place despite the fact that countless other stories could have been told, innumerable maps made of the same place. Another similarity between texts and maps is that they require readers. Without readers, they neither contain nor convey any information, unlike an image, for example, that does not (in all cases) need to be decoded to be understood. Readers of both texts and maps not only need the skill to

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read but also need the skill to complete the information extracted from abstract signs, indexes and symbols by adding their own knowledge and experience of the world. While this forces each reader to engage with the text or map in a unique interpretative activity before they can use them, it also means that every text or map is potentially readable to every reader. Commenting on the uniqueness of readings and their connection to spatial experience, Laura Bieger explains that “familiarity with the scenery is not essential to becoming immersed in this story world; it creates a particular spatiotemporal assemblage of associations and memories with which the narrative word is completed” (2016, p. 18). Making reference to Bertrand Westphal’s, Marie-Laure Ryan’s and David Herman’s work in the same area, Lieven Ameel comments on how city novels in particular leave “it to the reader to fill in the rest of the scenery to the best of his/ her capabilities” (2017b, p. 235). A text about Madrid, for example, could be rendered narratable by memories the reader has of a different city in Spain, a summer day that resembles the narrated one or a smell that is described in the text, thereby allowing the reader to create their own mental ‘Madrid’. Similarly, a regular tourist map of Madrid can be read by anyone who has map-reading skills. While the street that this reader imagines in lieu of the Paseo del Prado might resemble instead a boulevard in New York, the map does not lose any of its functions but triggers a different imaginary. Analogous to a novel, the gaps and blanks2 left by the selection process are filled by the reader and thereby also allow for the insertion of translocal images and experiences. Further similarities between texts and maps will emerge in this chapter; identifying essential differences between the two, however, is just as central as keeping in mind the ways in which they are alike. This brings me back to a point made earlier about simultaneity, namely that it is much easier to simulate in a visual medium. Unlike texts, maps are visual, non-­ sequential and operate on pre-defined scales, rendering everything on their surface simultaneous. Muehrcke and Muehrcke identify exactly these differences as the reason writers tend to be intrigued by maps:

2  These gaps and blanks exist in literary reader-response theory in the tradition of Wolfgang Iser, as well as in the study of maps: “Clearly, a map invites interaction. The lack of completeness of a map inspires one to annotate it with his own experience” (P.  C. Muehrcke and J. O. Muehrcke 1974, p. 331).

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Writers may be especially attracted to maps because they are so well acquainted with the limitations of written communication in dealing with forms, processes, and relationships in the space-time continuum. Written language is linear. It has a beginning and an end and between the two flows predictably, according to the rules of grammar. The subject of discourse is rarely as well ordered; rather, it is characterized by the simultaneous interaction of many factors. Maps, on the other hand, involve far less transcription from reality and less formatting than idioms do, primarily because the position of maps on the gradient between reality and abstraction is closer to reality. Maps appeal in a natural and logical way to our visual sense and to our need for conceptualization. (P. C. Muehrcke and J. O. Muehrcke 1974, pp. 318–319)

While I agree with many of the points made here, I contest the assumption that maps are closer to reality than novels are. Rather, I would suggest, they have a more clearly defined and rigorously regulated relationship with the ‘real’ world than literary texts do. Transferring the data extracted from a novel to a map therefore offers a fresh angle from which to analyse the text since maps offer different ways of telling the same story, of looking at its reality. Additionally, maps put a renewed emphasis on the relationship between a narrativised place and its real-world counterpart: a relationship that at times is diminished or even ignored in literary studies. Since heightened translocality is both caused by and anchored in actual places, taking into account the physically existing cities and local-local connections that act as referents for the literary ones becomes essential.

Mapping Translocality The imaginative space constructed in Adichie’s Americanah, as a first example, in ‘real life’ exists for only a small group of people: a hypermobile, digitised world across which globalised citizens of many nations move with ease. This being the basic premise, an imaginative map of Americanah would more specifically place the United States and Nigeria at its centre and much closer to each other than they are in reality. While many scholars have tackled these specific transnational connections in the novel, a mapping that focuses on translocality in general looks more like this: Map 4.1 here provides a very simple quantitative mapping of all places mentioned in part one of the novel. The map does not take into account the frequency with which places are mentioned or their scale. Cities,

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Map 4.1  Americanah I. All locations mentioned in Part One of Americanah by Adichie with white markers for Ifemelu’s chapter and green markers for Obinze’s chapter

suburbs, regions and countries are all represented by the same type of marker, white for Ifemelu’s chapter and green for Obinze’s. As discussed in the context of simultaneity, the two introductory chapters introduce us to the primary locations of Americanah: Princeton in the United States, Lagos in Nigeria and a ubiquitous translocal space that reaches into every part of the narrated cities and out of them. A map that does not ascribe value to the location but simply lists each place that is mentioned puts an emphasis on this translocal sphere. Instead of choosing to map the fact that Ifemelu’s 15-page chapter contains the word “America” or “American” 28 times and “Nigeria” or “Nigerian” 24 times and contrast this with Obinze’s chapter in which both “America/n” and “Nigeria/n” are used 12 times on 17 pages, I have chosen to map the dataset that reveals that Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s chapter make reference to 24 and 15 different locations, respectively. Instead of simply visualising the obvious US-Nigeria trajectories in the novel, this way of mapping, and the data I have extracted to create it, therefore allow me to look at the text from a new angle and focus on local and translocal spaces instead of transnational linkages. The map also reveals more about the depicted urban spaces since the referenced places often have more to do with the physical surroundings than with the characters: “furniture imported from Italy” (Adichie 2014, p. 21) in a Lagos house, “a Chinese restaurant called Happy Joy” (Adichie 2014, p.  9) in Princeton or a French school in Nigeria teaching “the

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complete British curriculum” (Adichie 2014, p.  28) constantly change, expand and compress the local as well as the translocal spaces of a narrative setting that is far more complex and far-reaching than Princeton to Lagos. As Wimal Dissanayake stresses: “The local is constantly transforming and reinventing itself as it seeks to reach beyond itself and engage in the translocal” (2006, p. 25). Dissanayake here does away with the common misconception that an ‘intrusion’ from the translocal makes the local less local. The often oversimplified characterisation of the twenty-first century as one of unprecedented mobility leads many to assume that there was very little mobility before the Internet and cheap air travel, which, in turn, seems to support the claim that there used to be such a thing as firmly grounded, stable, local identities, now disrupted by globalisation, displacement, and ubiquitous ‘contact zones’, a term I borrow from Mary Louise Pratt. In Americanah, Adichie is able to address a new hypermobility without neglecting the fact that the local has always also been translocal, that culture has always been imported and exported. Using a label that he problematises in the same essay, John McLeod reminds us that while the ‘cosmopolitan novel’ is indeed a recent phenomenon, it is not so entirely different from other texts that all previous theories—McLeod mainly refers to postcolonial thought—should be abandoned. He also productively points out that culture has never been entirely closed off or stable, which leads him to observe that the cosmopolitan novel engenders a consciousness of being which frees the subject from solipsistic individualism as well as notions of holistic subjectivity promoted by nationalism or race, and makes him or her confront their porous singularity amidst those whom are neither the same nor other. (2011, p. 7)

The same porosity characterises the settings of Americanah. While my first mapping of the novel reveals exactly this porosity, a different style of mapping (based on the same dataset) draws attention to a different facet of Adichie’s translocal sphere. In Map 4.2, only two variables have changed: its scale is slightly larger, and the location markers are clustered: Nigeria is now the conspicuous centre of the map, followed by the US-American east coast. Additionally, on the level of the text, Lagos has the highest number of locational references (neighbourhoods, streets, landmarks) of any of the cities mentioned in Part One. Although this map

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Map 4.2  Americanah II. This map shows all locations mentioned in Part One of Americanah by Adichie with clustered markers. The dark green circles indicate a cluster of less than ten markers

only tracks locations and not the frequency with which they are mentioned, the Nigerian capital and the area surrounding it still stand out remarkably. Lagos is therefore the densest of the numerous translocal foils. Nonetheless, the clustered mapping can also lead us to a different observation, as the concentration of markers along Britain, the West African coastline, the Caribbean and the North American east coast readily evokes the highly problematic but familiar triangle of transatlantic slave trade. If we add the main trajectories of the first two chapters, however, as I have done in Map 4.3, then we can see how Adichie inverts the colonial structure in a geographical counter-narrative. Ifemelu’s chapter is entirely focused on her return to Lagos, while Obinze makes several references to his return from England and his subsequent personal and professional success. Even if their respective journeys to the United States and Britain were added, the connection between Europe and New England is severed. The colonial power structure defined by movement across specific locations and trajectories is not entirely

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Map 4.3  Americanah III. All locations mentioned in Part One of Americanah by Adichie with clustered markers and arrows describing the main trajectories of the protagonists

overcome but unequivocally subverted in a spatial form of ‘writing back’.3 A better visualisation of translocality was the main function of my first mapping of Americanah but testing out various forms of mapping has allowed me to see the locations and trajectories in a new way and thereby gain a deeper understanding of the subversive quality of translocal narratives. Having addressed three mappings of what is essentially the same data set allows me to draw attention to two basic presuppositions of this chapter. First, maps and datasets can be highly revealing as analytical tools. Second, it is nonetheless essential to keep in mind what Denis Wood et al. in Rethinking the Power of Maps, a more comprehensive reworking of Wood’s first monograph on maps, calls “the map’s propositional character” (2010, p.  4, italics original).4 The map offers, or proposes, one way of looking at reality. It is neither a reality in and of itself, nor is it ever the only 3  I am using the term ‘writing back’ in the sense of Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, who have adopted it from Rushdie’s 1982 essay. Writing back means writing against imperial and colonial discourses and destabilising the centre from a position of marginality. 4  Cited in its entirety, the quotation is also a comment on resistance, truth and counternarratives: “Once a map has been published, it is pretty much taken for a description of the way things actually are. And if this is the way things are, what is the point of resistance? The map’s propositional character becomes… hard to see” (D.  Wood et  al. 2010, p.  4, italics original).

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way of looking at something, of evaluating the data. In addition to this commentary on how maps are read, Wood et al. also write about how and why maps are made: People make maps to discover their minds and to connect themselves. These are also the reasons people talk, so where talk serves maps are rare. But when talk becomes inadequate, either because the discourse gets too complicated, or there are too many people, or they are separated by too great distances or too much time—as invariably happens with the emergence of modern states—people develop alternative forms of communication. (2010, p. 19)

We find here a surprising confluence of reasons why maps are made and why translocal texts are written. Both a novel and a map pick and tell a specific story to be able to ‘talk about’ an incalculable and incomprehensible whole. Where communication and explanation fail, it seems that we can choose one of two routes: the extreme abstraction of mapped data, aiming to imply a whole reality, or the extreme detail of a single story, attempting to imaginatively merge or evoke many realities. If, however, either the resulting story or map is read as absolute, we encounter what Adichie, in her influential and eponymous TED talk, terms ‘the danger of a single story’: the risk of viewing the world reductively and only with regard to specific experiences and groups of people. In her talk, Adichie reminds viewers that neither a country nor a place nor a person can be understood in terms of only one story. This is also why the study of a global phenomenon such as translocality requires a corpus of more than a handful of exemplary texts. Despite the fact that translocal novels generally imply a multitude of untold, or only partly told, stories, a large and varied corpus is needed to draw conclusions about the phenomenon in general—even when a study, such as this one, is limited to Anglophone novels. Drawing on Bertrand Westphal’s influential work in the field, Eric Prieto comments on the ways in which geocriticism demands exactly such a wide-ranging approach: Westphal and I agree that the geocentered study of authors or works should lead away from the individual author and work and toward a more general kind of knowledge, one that breaks through the aesthetic frame that sets works of literature off from the world and seeks to use the study of literature as a way to better think about the world around us. (Prieto 2011, p. 25)

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Prieto here asks for a productive and knowledge-oriented reconnection of the world of literature and the world as it is experienced. While both worlds are too complex to be contained in a single story, knowledge of commonalities can be drawn from a large enough dataset. Within the context of translocal narratability, I do not find it necessary to break “through the aesthetic frame” in order to find that knowledge. Finding out which strategies are widely used within the aesthetic frame to narrativise, ‘real’ localities can produce knowledge and surprising insights into the way stories are told about, through and with places. In an attempt to consider as large a variety of ‘real’ locales and cities as possible, my corpus includes novels set all over the world. Nonetheless, a mapping of the real-world referents of all main settings of my entire corpus of novels still clearly reveals past and present geographical, economic, political and (post)colonial structures. The number of main settings per novel generally lies between two and four. Only their coordinates are mapped in Map 4.4.5 Unsurprisingly, the New  York area is a main setting in 14 out of 32 novels, and London is a primary location in 13 narratives. The density of

Map 4.4  Entire Corpus. This map shows the real-world referents of all main settings of my entire corpus. The size of the circles corresponds to the density of clustered locational markers, clearly marking New York City and London as the most frequently narrated cities

5  An interactive map that reveals the novel and location behind every marker can be accessed via ScribbleMaps: https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/Interactive_Map_ of_Entire_Corpus/TranslocalCorpus.

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markers around Western and Southern Africa reflects flourishing old and new writing scenes that export texts to Europe and North America with steeply rising success. The map clearly also points to deep marks left by the former British Empire. Notwithstanding such general geographical tendencies, the largest numbers of markers are unclustered, or appear in groups of only two, and are spread around (almost) the entire globe. While a map of, say, 100 novels may, of course, reveal further or different general tendencies, I do believe that the distribution and density of clustered and unclustered markers indicate a cogent dataset with regard to (Anglophone) translocality. The map here is therefore not a tool for the analysis of a specific text but can be used to make the type of general observation around which my study of translocal narratability is organised and structured.

Detailed Mapping These general observations are, naturally, derived from numerous detailed analyses and many unique and more exhaustive datasets on much smaller scales. One example of how such a small-scale mapping can be used as an analytical tool is the following mapping of the first two chapters of Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician.6 The novel’s main settings are Bindura in Zimbabwe and Edinburgh in Scotland, the latter of which is narrated in so much topographical detail that it is—even in the context of geographically oriented writing—surprisingly mappable. The information as to where exactly a character is walking is, in some chapters, so precise that a reader who is familiar with Edinburgh would even know which side of the street the character is walking on. Just as it is the case with Americanah, the first two chapters, narrated by two different characters, provide a particularly comprehensive amount of information on the setting: they set the scene for the entire novel. As Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu point out, “since the reader’s imagination needs a mental model of space to simulate the narrative action, it is important to achieve a holistic representation of the storyworld as quickly as possible” (2016, p. 99). Mappings of opening chapters are therefore particularly productive.7 In 6  For an overview of Huchu’s works and a more general analysis of space in his novels, see Mattheis (2016a). 7  On the significance of opening chapters in urban novels, see Lieven Ameel’s article “‘It’s six a.m., do you know where you are?’ Framing the Urban Experience in Literary Beginnings” in Literature and the Peripheral City: Literary Explorations (2015).

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Huchu’s narrative setting and opening, the information about the characters is closely interwoven with movement through the city, which—in this process—seems to gain a certain degree of agency. I have therefore mapped the two chapters with an approach that takes into account the level of detail in the spatial narrative and the centrality of Edinburgh to both the characters and the novel. In addition to being an analytical tool, the following images of my interactive map therefore visualise a mapping process that the text itself performs. In this interactive map, a click on each pushpin reveals the quotation from the novel that indicates a location and the path the character takes to or from that location.8 The red path on Map 4.5 represents the Magistrate’s

Map 4.5  The first two chapters of Huchu’s novel. The first two chapters of Huchu’s novel are narrated from the perspectives of the Magistrate (red line) and Farai (blue line), respectively. An interactive version of the map reveals the corresponding quotation from the novel for each pushpin

8  The interactive map can be accessed online via ScribbleMaps: https://www.scribblemaps. com/maps/view/Interactive_Map_of_Tendai_Huchus_The_Maestro_the_Magistrate_ and_the_Mathematician/Magistrate.

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daily walk around Arthur’s Seat—a hill in the middle of Edinburgh—while the blue path shows Farai’s route to The Elephant House, a coffee shop of literary fame in the city centre. Both men are originally from Zimbabwe, but where Farai, a young man in his late twenties, acts and feels like a global citizen, the older Magistrate still struggles with his life in Edinburgh, even after having lived there for many years. Their different attitudes towards the city already become visible in this screenshot of the interactive map: the Magistrate walks in long straight lines whereas Farai zigzags; the Magistrate’s chapter provides fewer but more detailed indications to his surroundings whereas Farai’s chapter scatters very brief spatial references in every paragraph, suggesting that he moves through the city with an ease the Magistrate lacks. As a result, the Magistrate’s path leaves long stretches without any indication as to where he is moving—although the next reference point then always shows that he has not diverged from the red line.9 These ‘empty’ stretches leave gaps on the map of Edinburgh that are filled with impressions from Bindura, which is where the mapping becomes a translocal urban palimpsest. Before that, however, the mapping is grounded in local space, a process for which the Magistrate’s chapter uses a technique I refer to as a streets and landmarks mapping. Instead of pointing out ‘his’ street, he uses its proper name: “Craigmillar Castle Road” (Huchu 2015, p. 3). Instead of mentioning his favourite bakery or bar, he indicates well-known landmarks such as the Scottish parliament. Even when he describes the atmosphere of a neighbourhood, the wording and type of information— “quaint Georgian cottages” (Huchu 2015, p. 13)—is somewhat reminiscent of that of a tourist map. The mapping thereby underlines the lack of emotional connection the Magistrate feels with Edinburgh, while at the same time providing very exact information and correct names of locations. Another indication of this lack of emotional connection is the fact that locational references occur mainly at decision points. In Map 4.6, for example, a long stretch of the road from Craigmillar has no pushpins, but when the Magistrate turns left into Duddingston Village, several orientation points are provided, suggesting that the Magistrate does not move through the neighbourhood with ease but still has to consciously locate himself to find his way. Put simply, this is the type of map one would draw to give directions to a stranger: turn left onto Old Church Lane, which is 9  During a meeting with Huchu in May 2016  in Edinburgh, I was able to confirm the accuracy of my mapping as he was so kind as to walk both routes with me.

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Map 4.6  Streets and landmarks. Streets and landmarks mapping in the Magistrate’s chapter

the cobblestoned road, and there will be cottages to your right and a kirk to your left. Additional, easily verifiable, reference points are given to provide a sense of security, as the stranger can now ensure that they have taken the right path with the aid of several indicators. Providing a poignant explanation for the need for several points of reference, Kevin Lynch explains that a map is safe and readable only when it contains “a surplus of clues so that alternative actions are possible and the risk of failure is not too high. If a blinking light is the only sign for a critical turn, a power failure may cause disaster” (1960, p. 9).10 The locations the Magistrate knows and describes in detail, therefore, gain significance, not only because the passages used to describe them are rather long—especially when compared to Farai’s chapter—but also 10  Despite the fact that Lynch’s influential 1960 monograph The Image of the City is concerned with modes of orientation which, in the digital age, have drastically changed, Lynch’s description of the formation of mental maps is not only the basis for countless updated approaches to mapping, but also more or less resembles how the Magistrate orients himself in the city. What the Magistrate attributes to a difference between Zimbabweans and Scots is more likely a generational rupture between him and the digital natives using smartphones for directions: “The natives gave directions using street names as if they were reading off maps, but how does one orient oneself without reference to a landmark in the environment?” (Huchu 2015, p. 55).

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because they function as what in cognitive research is called an ‘anchor’. In their study on “Properties of Cognitive Maps Constructed from Texts”, Erika Ferguson and Mary Hegarty explain how “in a cognitive map constructed by traveling in an environment, an anchor is a personal, familiar landmark that serves as a reference point for a region of space. That is, a person represents the locations of a number of landmarks in a region in relation to a single anchor” (1994, p. 455). Their study is based on the hypothesis that cognitive maps constructed from texts, not travel, use anchors as well. In addition to being able to verify this hypothesis, Ferguson and Hegarty also found that “subjects who read a route text tended to construct more accurate representations than did subjects who read a survey text” (1994, p. 470; Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu conduct a similar experiment that is described in chapter four of Narrating Space/ Spatializing Narrative).11 This confirms my impression of The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician as a highly mappable text since the novel consists mainly of route-oriented city descriptions. In the reading process, the novel is therefore likely to induce the construction of an unusually detailed cognitive map consisting of different types of routes and anchors, depending on the character from whose perspective the cityscape is described. On his routes, the Magistrate uses several anchors, which are determined by the part of the city he walks in but also depend on the type of movement, as slow walking, fast walking or going by bus all require different routes and orientation points. The main anchor standing out, literally, among all others is Arthur’s Seat. Due to the hill’s centrality, visibility and popularity, this is hardly surprising. Here, however, is also where the Magistrate’s mapping diverts from its strict streets and landmarks route to add a palimpsestuous translocal layer over the meticulously constructed Edinburgh streets. As he arrives on his path around Arthur’s Seat, which is a calmer road with fewer potential decision points, he no longer needs 11  Drawing on Linde and Labov, de Certeau distinguishes between the ‘map’, which corresponds to Ferguson and Hegarty’s ‘survey’, and the ‘tour’, which is roughly analogous to the ‘route’. He further posits that the route consists of ‘operations’ and series of ‘paths’, the latter of which are further subcategorised as either “‘static’ (‘to the right,’ ‘in front of you,’ etc.) or ‘mobile’ (‘if you turn to the left,’ etc.)” (Certeau 1984, p. 119). While these further distinctions are of interest, particularly in the linguistic surveys they originated in, they are not as relevant to my reading of The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician since the novel tends to mostly use static and mobile paths and operations in conjunction. This, then, may well be another factor that contributes to the high ‘mappability’ of the text.

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to think about where to walk. Routine takes over as the Magistrate walks himself into an almost meditative state of mind, which allows him to ­perceive possible past and future translocal connections far beyond the immediate environment: He found he could clear his mind when walking. It was as though the act of perambulation was complemented by a mental wandering, so he could be in two, or more, places at the same time. His physical side being tied to geography and the rules of physics, his mental side free to wander far and wide, to traverse through the past, present and future, free from limits, except the scope of his own imagination. (Huchu 2015, p. 13)

In other words: taking such a familiar route—one he walks every day—so close to the main anchor of his cognitive map of Edinburgh allows the Magistrate to switch to a different mode of perception. As Mike Crang observes, repetition and routines are central not only to urban life in general but also to deviations within the framework of typical urban behavioural patterns: the sense of rhythm and repetition connects provocatively with ideas of routinisation—and the suggestion then of the relationship between societal pressures and individual life. Indeed Lefebvre suggests that ‘everyday life’ only became visible as urbanization allowed the observation of uniform and repetitive aspects of social existence. (2001, p. 193)

What Crang here fails to mention is that in Everyday Life in the Modern World Lefebvre also points out that “readers were suddenly made aware of everyday life through the medium of literature” (1972, p. 2), conceptualising the potent interplay of literature, cityness and routines that Huchu also makes use of. The Magistrate’s routine outwardly resembles that of many locals and tourists alike. Something as commonplace as a walk around Arthur’s Seat on a common route implies a common relationship to the urban space that is navigated. It is the insight provided into the character’s mind that shows how, while performing a common routine, the Magistrate nonetheless creates a unique translocal space. The Magistrate fills the marker-less stretches of his walk with memories of Bindura that he projects onto Edinburgh after first pointing out the two cities’ topographical similarity—a hill in the middle—thereby effectively blending Bindura’s and Edinburgh’s spatial and cognitive anchors into

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one. After establishing this basic parallel, a more intricate picture of Bindura is painted: Right then the saudade hit him pretty bad and, for a moment, he could see Bindura, the low prospect, the giant mine chimneys in the distance, but the memory was like a flicker from an old videotape that had been dubbed over. He could only hold the image in his mind for a brief second before it vanished into the mist hovering over the Forth. (Huchu 2015, p. 18)

The image of the overwritten VHS tape—a modern palimpsest—visualises how “different cities are perceived to coexist and come together in one single location” (2015, p. 1) as Maria Ridda puts it in her analysis of the literary trajectories between Bombay, London and New  York.12 In the translocal urban palimpsest, the layered locations not only mingle in the dimension of space but also combine and conflate different points in time. Present Edinburgh can be layered with an experienced past Bindura and an imagined present or future Bindura, all within the same narrative instant. As Ridda goes on to explain, such a dynamic interplay of time and space “dismantles the holistic constructions of the nation to signify a wider space that contains multiple layers of time and extends beyond national borders” (2015, p.  28). Since all of these scales and time spheres are anchored to space by a meticulous mapping and the suggestion of a routine repeated countless times before and after the narrated day, the cognitive map created in the reading process is not disrupted but extended by the added layers of time and space. The Magistrate utilises the routine of the walk to look, not past, but beyond and through the space surrounding him.13 12  A similar oscillation of locations, worlds and zones is described by Brian McHale in the context of postmodernist fiction. McHale calls this a “flickering effect” (2004, p. 32) with reference to Ingarden. He additionally provides several interesting images of similar processes involving different locations or different fictional worlds in a chapter entitled “In the Zone”. His conception of the triptych in particular bears similarities to translocal overlaps. 13  Looking through and beyond space is connected to simultaneity as well as to the palimpsest, as it requires a mode of perception described, somewhat vaguely, in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as superposition or ‘Überdeckungstransparenz’: “Thanks to this phenomenon, everything potentially taking place in this one single room is perceived simultaneously. The space winks at the flaneur: What do you think may have gone on here?” (1999, pp. 418–419). The superposition of space enables a walker, in the right state of mind, to perceive a space’s present and its translucent layers of past actions as simultaneous (cf. also Chap. 3 in this study and Gurr 2015).

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Farai, on the other hand, looks right at the city. Compared to the Magistrate’s careful and ritualised movement through Edinburgh, Farai’s shortcuts and fast pace seem almost careless. This is due to the fact that Farai’s mapping is one that is not rooted in streets and landmarks, but in local knowledge.14 The reason I categorise it as such is not simply because it is obvious that Farai has local knowledge; in order to map out his movement through the city with exactitude, local knowledge is required of the reader or researcher as well. Unlike the Magistrate’s chapter, Farai’s chapter does not always provide locations and street names easily found on Google Maps, but is instead riddled with more and less obvious hints and clues as to where exactly the character is moving. At the beginning of the chapter, the reader is informed that Farai is “caught up in what passes for congestion in Edinburgh” (Huchu 2015, p. 25), suggesting he is driving in the centre of the city. Farai is also heading “towards North Bridge” (Huchu 2015, p. 26), which still leaves the reader with several options as to where exactly his car is located. It is only when he mentions that “the 22 cruises by in the bus lane” (Huchu 2015, p. 25) that his exact location can be determined—with the added information that Farai is coming from his home in Leith and provided the reader or researcher has detailed knowledge of the route of bus 22. Detailed knowledge of a bus route has, of course, in recent years, become much more accessible as, in this case, Lothian Buses, Edinburgh’s main bus service, provides an interactive online map that functions much like my interactive map of Huchu’s novel, while also providing arrows indicating the direction of the route at each bus stop. Utilising this map, I have reconstructed the process of moving from a general area of the city to a precise location in Maps 4.7 and 4.8. The largest circle indicates the, at times congested, heart of Edinburgh around the main transport hub, Waverley Station, and between Arthur’s Seat and Castle Rock. The smaller circles indicate the four streets leading towards North Bridge that generally have the densest traffic. If we add to this map the direction of Leith and the route of bus 22 in Map 4.8, then we can deduce that Farai’s location is either within or in close vicinity of the small green circle.

14  Naturally, all characters in the novel live in Edinburgh and therefore have local knowledge. What I refer to here is firstly a large amount of local knowledge and, secondly, an insider knowledge that can only be gained through frequent interaction with locals, local space and local history.

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Map 4.7  Farai’s possible locations in the beginning of the novel. The green circle marks his actual location

Farai’s local knowledge is further indicated by his fast pace, his tendency to use short cuts and the density of locational markers along his path, which, unlike the Magistrate’s, are spread along his entire route rather than being located primarily at decision points. As another contrast to the Magistrate, the textual clues for spatial markers Farai uses are often extremely short, corresponding to the brief, text-message style prose of his chapters. In the map below, for example, the fact that he takes Forrest Road, as opposed to Bristo Place, to reach The Elephant House at the end of his chapter, can be deduced from only one word: “Doctors” (Huchu 2015, p. 26), which is a pub at the corner of Teviot Place (which continues, as visible on Map 4.9, as Lauriston Place) and Forrest Road. In Kevin Lynch’s terms, Edinburgh in its entirety seems to be highly ‘imageable’ for Farai, whereas for the Magistrate, at least in his early chapters, it is mainly the area surrounding Arthur’s Seat that is easy to memorise and/or navigate. As Lynch points out, questions of imageability also depend on the observer: “the perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption of his basic image, and

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Map 4.8  Lothian Buses map of the route of bus 22 with an added directional arrow to confirm Farai’s location

each new impact would touch upon many previous elements” (1960, p. 10). Since Farai has both acumen and local knowledge, he can add a multitude of impressions to his mental map of Edinburgh while leaving it intact, including those impressions that are very detailed and those that are translocal. Before Farai walks through the university complex, past Doctors and to The Elephant House, he parks his car behind the central mosque. He greets the car park attendant saying “Asalaam Alaykum” (Huchu 2015, p. 26) and jokes that he will not convert unless he receives a free meal each day from The Mosque Kitchen, indicating the first of three restaurants of almost identical names (The Mosque Kitchen, The Original Mosque Kitchen, Mosque Kitchen Restaurant), all located very close to each other. While this Mosque Kitchen is the most inconspicuous of the three, it is also the oldest and cheapest and therefore frequented mainly by locals who are ‘in the know’. Farai then comments on how “the mosque, a gift from the Saudis, is a blocky solid building, fusing Islamic architecture with a baronial style that blends in with the stocky, gothic architecture of the

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Map 4.9  The location of Doctors indicates that Farai takes Forrest Road from Teviot/Lauriston Place

rest of the city” (Huchu 2015, p. 26).15 The mosque, completed in 1998, is described as a connecting point to distant places in the sense that it was financed mainly by funds from Saudi Arabia, but also in its very structure which ‘blends’ and ‘fuses’ its innovative architectural style with that of much older buildings. The translocal bonds of language, locatedness and architecture are so strong that it becomes hardly discernible where the local space is transfused with another location. From Farai’s perspective, the translocal is not simply a layer that is similar to but also distant from Edinburgh; it is deeply embedded in the cityscape itself, a part of its buildings, streets and people. Describing the city, in this sense, as an ideal cosmopolitan observer on a continuous glocal scale, Farai’s local knowledge 15  A very similar comment has been made by Geza Fehervari, professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at London University: “The architectural elements and decorative details, while basically relying on Islamic, mainly Turkish traditions, successfully interact with the architectural and decorative age-old customs of Scotland” (1989, p. 26).

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perspective fulfils a task that, according to Denis Wood et al., is the essential ‘work’ of maps: “Maps convert energy to work by linking things in space. They achieve their linkages by bringing together onto a common presentational plane propositions about territory” (2010, pp. 1–2). Farai describes a space in which representing and linking on an equal plane a variety of localities, no matter their perceived closeness or distance, is not the exception but the most natural perspective to take where the cityscape offers it. A similar sense of linking places by presenting ideas about them on the same scale and in the same place is projected by the Magistrate’s last map of Edinburgh. Throughout the novel, the Magistrate has become more familiar with the cityscape by working in various parts of the city, which he accesses by bus. At first, this new mode of transportation disorients him and prompts him to miss the “tiredness in his muscles, the full topographical awareness of how he was oriented on a gradient, a connectedness not possible at the same level of consciousness on the bus” (Huchu 2015, p. 55). Getting to know more people, rhythms, lifestyles and areas of the city, however, soon makes him feel more connected to it—a process which is reflected by a new appreciation of bus rides, for which the Magistrate starts to bring along a Walkman and tapes filled with Zimbabwean music. As he is about to leave Edinburgh for London at the end of the novel, he buys a map of Edinburgh at the airport, studies it and then draws his own map: The Magistrate took a piece of paper and drew on it what he remembered of the city so that he could have some perspective on what he had seen and where he had been. This way he hoped that, when his memories abandoned him, they would return if only he played his cassettes. (Huchu 2015, p. 286)

Anticipating a Proustian moment triggered by a synaesthetic sense of place, the Magistrate constructs a very personal map of ‘his’ Edinburgh that is still, possibly even more deeply, suffused by Bindura and Zimbabwe. As this map is inserted as an image alongside the text and has been created by the author of the novel, I call this type of map authorial pictorial mapping. The map, shown here as Map 4.10, is composed of the Magistrate’s regular walks, indicated by footsteps, and bus routes, drawn as lines supplemented by the numbers of the buses and the names of the Zimbabwean musicians the Magistrate listens to en route. In addition to this mapped movement, the map puts an emphasis on his spatial ‘anchors’, such as Arthur’s Seat.

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Map 4.10  The Magistrate’s authorial pictorial map of Edinburgh (Huchu 2015, p. 286)

What is noteworthy about this map is, first of all, that Scottish space is no longer presented as separate from Zimbabwean space, as was the case with the image of the VHS tape. In that image, the frames of the film become spatial frames which exist in close proximity to each other but do not overlap entirely. Those same spaces have now merged into one plane instead of oscillating in the same location. Thinking again about the power relations inherent in maps, it is also interesting that, in the beginning of the novel, the Magistrate uses ritualised performance of Edinburgh space to conjure up images of Bindura, whereas he now uses Zimbabwean music to summon up Edinburgh. This inversion of north and south is also reflected in the orientation of the authorial pictorial map, which consequently also flips east and west in another spatialised ‘writing back’. The flipped map can also be read as a progression, a story in a single image: read from bottom left to top right, we begin with the Magistrate’s walks around the city and Arthur’s Seat, continue on several bus routes and end at the airport where the distinctly African, aged stick figure is replaced by an aeroplane that literally takes the Magistrate off this map.

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Having used this detailed, but by no means exhaustive, exploration of several distinct types of maps and mappings in The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician as an example of what a very precise mapping can contribute as a tool of analysis, I will now explore different ways in which translocal novels deal with maps on the level of the text. Four broad categories emerge here: descriptions of maps, maps as metaphors, digital maps and authorial maps and mappings.16 The lines between these categories can at times blur: while the description of a physical map in a novel clearly differs from the metaphorical usage of a non-existent or impossible map (e.g. a map to a lover’s heart), the physical map’s description can often also be read as having a metaphorical layer to it that uses the map as both vehicle and tenor.17 Nonetheless, most cases still clearly belong to one category and only suggest elements of another. In order to discuss the different functions of maps in each category and present how they add to translocal narratability, I will provide a range of examples from different novels for each of the four categories and present the most central features of all of them in the following second half of this chapter.

Description of Maps In translocal novels, the description of maps frequently revolves around maps that are insufficient, outdated or disorienting. Their incapability of doing the work maps are supposed to do is deeply rooted in the translocal 16  For a helpful summary of different ways to categorise interplays of maps and literature, see Rossetto (2014, pp. 515–516). The categories I have identified here—excluding digital maps—roughly correspond with Papotti’s “methodological issues (the graphic map located within the text, the verbal description of maps, the verbal description of space aimed at replacing a concrete map)” (Rossetto 2014, p. 515). Papotti’s verbal description is then what I have used as a basis for my mapping of Huchu’s novel. 17  A striking example for this effect can be found in Thomas Bourke’s The Consolation of Maps, which is a translocal novel about a team of antique map collectors and traders. Set in Japan, the United States and Italy, the novel reflects on the value, history and political implications of maps and describes processes of mapmaking but even more than that includes the restoration, cataloguing and curating of maps into the narrative in meaningful ways. On the last pages of the novel, the reader learns that “the stained-glass maps of the old American Geographical Society are still missing. It is strange how these objects seem as restless as ourselves” (Bourke 2018, p. 208). While detailed descriptions of the stained-glass maps, the way they were made and their purpose recur throughout the novel, the maps here also become metaphorical extensions of the translocal place attachments of the main characters. Throughout the novel, a gradual shift from one category (description) to the other (metaphor) takes place.

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nature of the narratives. My unsuccessful attempts to create an even minimally functional map that shows several places at once mirror the frustration many characters experience with maps. In Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2017), which like most of Smith’s novels begins in and returns to Willesden in London, the cast of map-frustrated characters hails from everywhere around the globe. Starting with two very different girls (Tracey and the unnamed protagonist) who meet at a community dance class and become fast friends on the basis of their almost identical skin colour and their desire to leave life in the housing estates behind, the novel questions notions of success and happiness by allowing both girls to experience what these mean in different geographical, socio-economic and professional contexts. Tracey briefly glimpses life as a West End dancer and the protagonist vicariously lives a life of fame and luxury working as an assistant for Aimee, an Australian pop star who in turn made it from small-town girl to global sensation. When the unnamed protagonist, of course a London native, takes Aimee and her American bodyguard on a bike tour, the American cannot refrain from stopping every now and then to take an A-Z out of his pocket and furiously study it. He was from Harlem, originally—‘where we got a grid’—and the inability of Londoners to likewise number their streets was something he couldn’t forgive, he’d written off the whole city on account of it. (Z. Smith 2017, p. 105)

The not particularly likeable local protagonist experiences difficulties finding her bearings outside of Willesden herself and offers no help with the map. Even though she lacks proper orientation, her account of the tour still mocks both the American lamenting the lack of a grid and the Australian, who is presented as unaware of the full extent of the city: But Aimee’s London, like those little maps you pick up at the airport, was a city centred around St James’s, bordered to the north by Regent’s Park, stretching as far as Kensington to the west—with occasional forays into the wilds of Ladbroke Grove—and only as far east as the Barbican. She knew no more of what might lie at the southern end of Hungerford Bridge than at the end of a rainbow. (Z. Smith 2017, p. 104)

Here more explicitly than in my example from The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, a character’s mental map is likened to a tourist map to express unfamiliarity and disorientation. Unlike in Huchu’s novel, in

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which the Magistrate consciously attributes the outsider position to himself in a narrative situation that is focalised through him, the superficial relationship to the London cityspace is here ascribed to Aimee by a homodiegetic narrator focalised through her unnamed assistant. The tourist map image is used to ridicule and degrade Aimee’s relationship to the metropolis, although she appears to be the only character of the three who is not frustrated by maps. The clear limitations of the map are drawn sharply to underline Aimee’s perceived shortcomings and naiveté. In the course of the novel, the protagonist implies several times that Aimee’s mental map of the world is just as limited. The flaws of Aimee’s perception of London can be transposed onto the entire globe because, in the protagonist’s view at least, it is not only her map but also her mapmaking process that is flawed. Scaled onto the global sphere, limits and miscalculations simply become more obvious. When Aimee and her team plan on building a girl’s school in a small nation in Africa, the protagonist is among the first to visit the chosen village well before Aimee does. Referring to the discrepancies between data about a place and the actual experience of a place, she points out “the chasm between a ‘viability study’ and life as it appears before you on the road and the ferry, in the village and the city, within the people and in a half-dozen languages, in the food and the faces and the sea and the moon and the stars” (Z. Smith 2017, p. 165). The protagonist contrasts her own awkward introduction to the village, and her doubts about the project, with the projected (and necessarily incomplete) data, which, for her, symbolises Aimee’s unbroken yet ultimately uninformed enthusiasm and optimism. In her attempt to objectively describe this interpersonal struggle, she nonetheless accurately describes a problem her colleagues seem to be much more aware of the difficulty of capturing translocal places or of capturing places translocally. In their previously referenced article, “The Translocal Street”, which takes Walworth Road in South London as its main object of research, Hall and Datta start by citing statistics on migration and population in the area, just to clarify that “however acute these numeric descriptions are, they do little to render a complex or fine-grained explanation of the everyday practices of mobility as situated within local places” (2010, p. 69), thereby pointing to the same problem. A quantitative evaluation of something as complex as lived space always needs to be complemented by qualitative methods. Still, especially when the complicating factor of translocality is added, claiming an accurate description of a place in a single study is always a questionable feat.

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Nonetheless, the similarities between the way in which cities—London, New York, Bendigo in Australia and the unnamed village in the Gambia— are mapped in Smith’s novel and the way in which the whole world is perceived reveal not only problematic or incomplete conceptions of place. The subjective narrative voice renders visible the manifold experiences of the same place and different ways in which they can be questioned, enriched and corrected. This process is catalysed by presenting the reader with a heroine who obviously struggles with envy and misconceptions of her own. Referring to Rushdie’s likening of the city to a global map, Ridda describes how “a literary map of the city becomes ‘a map of the world.’ Locating cities at the crossroads of a number of real and imaginary locations shows the potential of fiction as an act of subversion” (2015, p. 9). The subversion in Smith’s novel is subtle, as the location of the reader is added to this intersection of places. The reader needs to identify the subversion in the form of multiple conflicting stories told of the same place. This (self-)positioning at the intersection of different truths and the indirect involvement of the reader and the reader’s location is typical for translocal novels in general and becomes particularly visible in the description of maps.18 A much more practical frustration with maps is experienced by Mr Lee in Thayil’s Narcopolis. Upon fleeing political perils in his home country China, Mr Lee assumes he can find his way to India with an outdated map of Asia: He found a map of old Asia. Names change but geography stays the same, he told himself, and he put his trunks into the jeep and drove south and never once looked back. […] He stopped in Sian and Chengtu and Kunming. He found that his map was so out of date it was inaccurate. He burned it and bought a new one. (Thayil 2012, p. 118)

Interestingly, the troubles he must have experienced with the map are never described. This is especially surprising as the novel generally spends lengthy passages on the description of places and the experience of localities. Writing this neglect off as if it were simply used as comic effect would not do justice to the intricate narration. Firstly, this short episode can be 18  Simultaneity is another tool in translocal writing that makes this tension between positions particularly tangible. If a text narrates multiple events taking place at the same time in different locations, the reader is gently pushed to ask themselves: Where was I when that happened?

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read as an indirect comment on the processes of naming and renaming,19 as well as on the redrawing of borders, that characterise colonial and postcolonial power struggles. Secondly, the character’s frustration with the map stems from a misperception of the relationship of time and space that can be surprisingly prevalent: time is perceived to move forward while space is regarded as fixed. Muehrcke and Muehrcke observe that “since geographical maps deal predominantly with space, cartographers have found it convenient to hold time relatively constant through elaborate temporal averaging or time-­ slicing techniques. […] maps do give the illusion of stopping time” (1974, p. 334). Wood et al. complicates this notion by pointing to the different codes of time within a map and the intricate ways in which they influence the mapmaking process, ultimately stating that “we cannot squeeze time out of the map, only onto it” (2010, p. 96). What Thayil makes us aware of is that the temporal variables of the map are certainly less visible in a paper map than they are in the digitised and digital maps we have so quickly grown accustomed to using. The brief episode ‘squeezes time back onto the map’ and reminds the reader of the constant flux that is inherent to space. What follows is that neither a literary nor a seemingly objective rendering of space, such as a map, can ever be entirely true, up-to-date and accurate or consumed without at least a minimum of frustration. In The Consolation of Maps, a novel that deals with antique maps, their vendors and their collectors, the relationship of maps and time is equally frustrating for Kenji, the Japanese protagonist. Where he views the history of cartography as a story of progression, his new American employer Theodora Appel wants him to see maps as “timestamp[s]” (Bourke 2018, p. 89) and to understand that “they are maps of then, when maps had a cosmos, unlike now” (Bourke 2018, p. 89). Kenji’s and Appel’s views of cartography come together in a perception of maps as stories, deeply embedded in their society, politics and circumstance—a view that map 19  Naming and renaming are common tropes in translocal novels, not just in the context of locations but also regarding the renaming of characters. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2004), for example, deals with a protagonist who is frustrated with his uncommon name— Gogol—which he receives only because a translocal connection between Cambridge and Calcutta temporarily malfunctions, whereas his father’s personal connection to Russian writers is ever-present. Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao is also named and renamed in the course of the novel. In Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), the Chinese protagonist Zhuang renames herself Z for her year in London, since none of the Westerners she encounters can pronounce her name.

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historian Ute Schneider stresses as well. Nonetheless, the tension between Kenji’s perspective and Appel’s own culturally shaped view of maps is often a source of frustration, especially when they look at and describe maps together. Returning to the ending of Thayil’s Narcopolis, the nameless narrator, recently returned to Bombay from New York, reveals how relevant an up-­ to-­date mental map of the city can be to a sense of belonging, to a ‘local identity’. When he enters a taxi, he is asked a simple question that is tailored to reveal how well he knows the city at its present moment: He said, Okay, which way do you want to go, the highway or the inner road? It’s completely up to you. I understood that it was a way of testing my knowledge of the city. Depending on which route I chose he’d know if I was a first-timer (and he could cheat me a lot) or an old Bombay hand (and he could only cheat me a little). (Thayil 2012, p. 268)

Whether the highway or the inner road would have been the ‘correct’ choice is not revealed to the reader. Neither do we find out which choice the narrator makes. The readerly status as outsider to both the diegesis and the narrated place is thus subtly reinforced. Even if the question of whether the highway or the inner road would be the better choice were easy to research, then which route would have been faster, easier or more secure at that precise moment in time is most likely impossible to find out. This mapping, therefore, shows another type of orientation-related frustration: that of the reader. While both of these novels then combine the description of maps with detailed passages that emulate maps, they do not map all of their settings equally. Where Thayil describes Bombay, Shuklaji Street in particular, with minute attention to detail, the large distance travelled from China to India is contained in only a few sentences and a burnt map, already pointing to issues of scaling that will be discussed in the next chapter. The reduction of travelled distance also manifests itself in the magical doors of Exit West; doors that transport a person from one place to another in the blink of an eye. Just as Zadie Smith leaves the African village unnamed in Swing Time, Exit West also presents the reader with a nameless city, although several hints imply that this city may well stand in for Aleppo. While the cityscape of the unnamed city remains anonymous, the cities the protagonists later travel to are described in a map-like manner with street names, districts, neighbourhoods, anchors and routes. The sparse prose denies the reader

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the multi-sensory sense of place most translocal novels create, but still allows for orientation. In the unnamed city, the unnamed streets and neighbourhoods are described in a more familiar manner, but—due to this very lack of designation—seem less accessible. This reflects the disorientation experienced by the war-torn city’s inhabitants while at the same time underlining the reader’s position as an outsider looking into an unfamiliar space: Neighborhoods fell to the militants in startlingly quick succession, so that Saeed’s mother’s mental map of the place where she had spent her entire life now resembled an old quilt, with patches of government land and patches of militant land. The frayed seams between the patches were the most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs. Her butcher and the man who dyed the fabrics from which she had once made her festive clothes disappeared into such gaps, their places of business shattered and covered in rubble and glass. (Hamid 2017, p. 69)

The image of a once familiar and unified mental map as a quilted blanket that is about to fall apart creates a curious tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. While the image is obviously negative, an ‘old quilt’ is generally associated with fond memories and something that has been the same way for a long time. Hamid may here point to the fact that images of destroyed and divided cities are, sadly, more familiar than they should be, their universality being underlined by the lack of names. Cities in a state of decay and violence have already become part of a mental map of global conflict. In her monograph about The Intelligible Metropolis, which mainly takes its examples from London literature, but is also a collection of insightful observations on the literary metropolis in general, Nora Pleßke explains that “all urban novels rely on a psychological and internalised urban landscape that determines the sensual experience of the city and overtly affects human consciousness” (2014, p.  138). The mental map Hamid describes activates such an ‘internalised urban landscape’ and the associated sense impressions presented daily on the news: that of the city at war. There is no need to describe the soundscape as it is integrated into this particular image of urban space and its destruction. Hamid adds the butcher and the dyer to the map in order to remind us that this city, not long ago, was not very different from a city at peace. Instead of invoking the deaths of the two men, they vanish into the cracks of a broken mental map which, also not long ago, was whole. Even more overtly than Smith

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or Thayil, Hamid uses the description of maps as a means of protest and political commentary. In general, political connotations appear to be more prominent in the description of maps than in other categories.

Map as Metaphor Descriptions of maps or map-like descriptions of spaces can often be read as metaphorical to a certain degree. However, despite the somewhat blurry line between categories, the map as metaphor fulfils a different function in translocal texts than the description of maps. Since “a map is by nature interdisciplinary, and all imaginable fields of learning may be brought to both making and reading it” (P. C. Muehrcke and J. O. Muehrcke 1974, p.  331), it holds immense potential as a metaphor for just about anything.20 While this also holds true for the more narrow field of contemporary translocal writing, the most dominant usage of metaphorical maps seems to revolve around issues of place attachment. This category thus has a tendency to privilege content that is more personal than political, despite the overlap of these categories. In What We All Long For, Oku, who is hopelessly in love with Jackie, seeks to romantically approach her by exploring her neighbourhood and her routes through Toronto, where the novel is mainly set. Oku attempts to understand Jackie by gauging her sense of place attachment. He, therefore, keeps a small collection of flyers and business cards discarded from Jackie’s handbag: “Not that this junk was important to her, he was sure— just ephemera—but he had looked at them through the day, the cards and posters, hoping that in them was a map to her, to Jackie” (Brand 2005, p. 81). The reader is presented with an indented block of text consisting of all the writing on the bits of paper and is thereby drawn into Oku’s ‘archival’ research. The reader could potentially look up the events and 20  The versatility of the map metaphor is, in fact, explored in so many forms of literature and research that geographers, in particular, have long become disgruntled with a perceived over- and misuse of maps and mapping-related terminology. In an attempt to clarify the relationship between real map and metaphorical map, Roger M. Downs, for example, seeks to distinguish between analogy and metaphor. This endeavour, proposed in a 1981 article for The Professional Geographer, has since been attacked and regarded as failed many times. In answer to Downs, also in The Professional Geographer, Elspeth Graham claims not just that his distinction is impossible, but also that terms such as ‘mental mapping’ should not be used at all. More than 30 years later, we still find similar debates on how and where research methods and representations should be likened to maps (cf. Rossetto 2014 or Ramos 2011).

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locations mentioned to create Oku’s map to Jackie, which brings a certain ‘authenticity’ to Oku’s research. Oku explores a number of places he relates to Jackie, but the most central one is certainly her neighbourhood, Alexandra Park, where she grew up with her parents: “The research he’d been doing was walking through the park. If he got to know Alexandra Park, he figured he’d know something about Jackie” (Brand 2005, p. 256). During one of his walks, Oku’s close investigation of Jackie and her locations and paths even enables him to identify a fellow walker as Jackie’s father—despite the fact that they have previously never met. While this is not a particularly realistic scenario, the success of Oku’s method is proven: his ‘map’ may not have led him to Jackie herself but to one of the most important people in her life. In the chapters between Oku’s initial idea of a map to Jackie and this meeting, a number of flashbacks recount Jackie’s parents’ experience of Alexandra Park when they first moved there. The idea that Oku really could find his way into Jackie’s heart by exploring her neighbourhood in a somewhat psychogeographical approach becomes more likely with the growing number of personal connections to Alexandra Park Jackie recounts. The effect is analogous to that of place attachment, of “how biographical experience with a locale can transform the local landscape into a symbolic extension of the self by imbuing it with the personal meanings of life experiences” (Hummon 1992, p. 258). In Oku’s mapping of Jackie’s Toronto, both characters are deeply connected to the ‘local landscape’. Throughout the entire novel, Toronto is frequently referred to as a mothering entity, a body, something the characters are connected to by “umbilical cords” (Brand 2005, p.  67), further emphasising this sense of the place as an extension of its inhabitants. A similar recurring theme can be found in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2014), which interestingly—like What We All Long For—also carries in its title a collective desire of the first-person plural. A physical connection to the Zimbabwean soil in which ancestral bones are buried and on which protagonist Darling grew up is frequently referenced, although the severing of this connection is mentioned just as often. Maps could be posited as another motif of the novel and often appear in the form of souvenirs carried by tourists desiring the place attachment other characters despise. Likenesses of the African continent appear as necklace pendants, broken clocks and on slabs of ivory. None of these maps is described as functional, and all of them express an unfulfilled desire for place attachment, rather than an actual sense of belonging.

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The characters that are attached to Zimbabwe, at least in the first part of the novel, conversely wish to break these ties and leave Paradise, an ironically named settlement that, in the eyes of protagonist Darling, seems to have less to offer than any other. In order to simulate belonging to a different nation, the children of Paradise play ‘country-game’, a game which requires a type of map as playing field: Soon we are all busy drawing country-game on the ground, and it comes out great because the earth is just the right kind of wet since it rained yesterday. To play country-game you need two rings: a big outer one, then inside it, a little one, where the caller stands. You divide the outer ring depending on how many people are playing and cut it up in nice pieces like this. Each person then picks a piece and writes the name of the country on there, which is why it’s called country-game. (Bulawayo 2014, pp. 48–49)

In a form of symbolistic play, the children take back the agency to draw and adapt borders, slicing up space in a dynamic and fluid way, dividing it equally among the players. The game and its map reflect an episode at the very beginning of the novel, when the children walk from Paradise to a rich neighbourhood called Budapest to collect guavas in the deserted streets. In an analysis of globalised existence in Bulawayo’s and Adichie’s novels, Camille Isaacs comments: This children’s game of intra-national diasporic travel later prefigures the deterritorialization that Darling will engage in with international travel. Although the children do not cross any international borders, they practice separating place names (Budapest) from physical geography, creating a tenuous link between place-name and territory. (2016, p. 181)

It becomes clear in the unfolding of ‘country-game’ that the connection of place-name and geographical space gives way to a connection that is considered more important: that between place-name and power. Every child wants the privilege of ‘being’ the United States in the game; nobody even considers being Zimbabwe. The shared disdain for their home country is expressed in bodily images and similes when the children describe Zimbabwe and similarly impoverished nations as a “kaka place” (Bulawayo 2014, p.  44) or as “a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart” (Bulawayo 2014, p.  49), the latter of which is a reference to Chinua

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Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1959).21 These negative, scatological ways of describing their place of belonging may lead one to believe that there is a lack of place attachment. Whether an attachment is positive or negative, however, does not have much impact on how strong this attachment is. As David Hummon explains in his exploration of community attachment and local space, making reference to Hayden White’s ‘cultural memory’, attachment is neither positive nor negative but instead constituted by a “sense of insideness [that] is at once physical, social and autobiographical—of living within a known terrain; within an order of community life; within a landscape of remembered events” (1992, p. 258). Whether this connection leads one to like or dislike the place does not impact the degree of attachment. The (negative) bodily descriptors make abundantly clear how physical the sense of being in the familiar place is. Playing ‘country-game’ is then a social and communal expression of how deeply anchored all children feel to their birthplace. Since these communal experiences, descriptions, games and narratives link all characters so closely to space, I would question Isaacs’ usage of the term ‘deterritorialisation’ in this context. Protagonist Darling may present Paradise as unsatisfactory and eventually leave it for Detroit, but at no point in the novel do locality, attachment and community become any less relevant. The map here serves as an image of agency and communal reflection on place attachment. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is interesting in this context since it intertwines positive and negative modes of place attachment in unique map metaphors. Although Roy’s novel was published in 1997, several years prior to most of the texts in my corpus, it clearly serves as a forerunner of the more recent wave of translocal texts. The novel is composed in an almost musical way with recurring phrases that are introduced and repeated until all of them are reprised together to resonate in a narrative crescendo. In the rhythms of repetition, each phrase is imbued with more and more levels of meaning and its recurrence is anticipated. While

21  Another telling example of countries being likened to both excrement and linked to the experience of hunger is the following: “We just eat a lot of guavas because it’s the only way to kill our hunger, and when it comes to defecating, we get in so much pain it becomes an almost impossible task, like you are trying to give birth to a country” (Bulawayo 2014, p. 16). A Chinese man observed by the children is described as so obese that he looks as if he swallowed a country (cf. Bulawayo 2014, p. 45). In both cases, the country becomes part of the human body, although the second example also shows a fear of being swallowed up by international investors and contractors.

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this entire structure is fascinating,22 one of the recurring phrases explicitly uses maps as metaphors: “waxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps gossiped in sibilant, papery whispers” (Roy 1997, p.  53). The “map-breathed ancestors” (Roy 1997, p.  125) live in the History House, which is in itself a metaphor taking physical shape. The heightened metaphoricity of Roy’s writing has been the subject of many studies, but it is the relationship between these metaphors that is even more intriguing. Focusing not on maps or the History House, but on the recurring image of a beloved family car, the blue Plymouth, Alex Tickell’s analysis of the cosmopolitan elements in the novel reveals “just how closely Roy engages with power in the form of systems, hierarchies and scientific taxonomies in The God of Small Things” (2003, p. 77). Tickell’s examples of such taxonomies here also include the biological classification of a particular moth that returns time and again and on different narrative time levels or the banana jam that can no longer be legally sold as its consistency matches neither jam nor pickles and it has to exist between or outside of categories. I would argue that the interaction of the repeated metaphors and images is equally reliant on systems, categories and hierarchies. The History House, an old building that the young twins who are the protagonists of the novel are not supposed to enter, is a building which in their minds contains the history of the entire world. This history for them consists equally of the local and cultural history of Ayemenem, where the novel is set, and of British and American popular culture. Within the History House, the smaller units in the system or hierarchy are the ancestors who perform as characters in the stories belonging to the house. The ancestors are described like mummies or pages from a history book, deteriorating with age, and still they breathe. Their ‘map-breath’ constitutes an even smaller unit: the means by which they tell their stories. Roy here choosing the image of old paper maps instead of the more obvious choice of old history books, which she still invokes with the very sensual description of old paper, reflects the powerful role geography and mapping plays in history. The history of Kerala, where Ayemenem is located, is marked by colonial power seized by extremely violent means and reinforced by means of mappings. The influx of Anglophone popular culture into the 22  For an in-depth analysis of narrativity, structure and narrative techniques in The God of Small Things, see Madhu Benoit’s insightful article “Circular Time: A Study of Narrative Techniques in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things” (1999).

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narrative present also reveals a geographical trajectory, from the United States and the United Kingdom to Kerala. This small reference to maps, seen within its system of hierarchies and narrative repetition, therefore reveals a powerful spatial imaginary.

Digital Maps and Mappings Maps remain powerful images of orientation, disorientation, place attachment and locality as well as translocality, but in recent years, their usage and their depictions have increasingly shifted towards digital maps and mappings. The accessibility of GPS-based mapping systems and their close integration into our daily lives carry over into the literary sphere. This relates to translocality insofar as this technology enables us to navigate unfamiliar and spatially remote places in ways not unlike our movement through familiar and physically close or accessible spaces. The viewpoint of digital maps is frequently no longer bird’s view, but mimics instead the visual perspective of a driver or walker.23 Additionally, we can pick and choose what the map reveals to us about our surroundings: the fastest route, the nearest bank, the best-rated gluten-free restaurant. Despite the fact that what is mapped is obviously still controlled by the mapmakers,24 maps can be customised and react to their user’s wishes and demands in real time. The usage of digital maps to characterise a spatial imaginary in literature is therefore not simply a reflection of new technology, but also encompasses more subjective ways of looking at and navigating space, in particular when it comes to translocal spaces and translocal movement. In Hamid’s Exit West, smartphones are frequently referenced as the most essential tool for victims of forced migration. The versatility of this tool is emphasised early in the novel: “His phone could send messages, his 23  Interestingly, this ‘new’ perspective of the map is, in fact, reminiscent of some of the earliest city maps that were generally produced from an angle, as if the person looking at the city was standing on a hill. For an overview of the history of maps, cartography and perspective, see Ute Schneider’s insightful study Die Macht der Karten (2004). 24  In a thought-provoking article that draws attention to the fact that only two to five per cent of mapmakers are women and explains how many places and tags are excluded from maps because of this fact, Sarah Holder also reveals how companies shape the contents of maps. To name only one example, “when commercial companies like Google decide to map the not-yet-mapped, they use ‘The Starbucks Test,’ as OSMers [Open Street Mappers] like to call it. If you’re within a certain radius of a chain coffee shop, Google will invest in maps to make it easy to find. Everywhere else, especially in the developing world, other virtual cartographers have to fill in the gaps” (2018, n.p.).

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phone could take pictures, identify celestial bodies, transform the city into a map while he drove” (Hamid 2017, p.  40). This variety of functions makes the phone useful but also renders each image of space it provides less stable since the imaged space could always be complemented by numerous others. Space becomes a kaleidoscope of sets of images, which later in the novel allows translocal impressions to slip in almost seamlessly. The smartphones in Exit West naturalise spatial versatility and diverse perspectives existing side by side or within the same device: protagonist Saeed can contact a person in the city, take a picture of its buildings, find orientation in constellations of stars and planets above it or turn the cityscape into a map at the touch of a button. In particular, the phrase “transform the city into a map” (Hamid 2017, p. 40) suggests that space is a dynamic entity that changes depending on who looks at it or uses it when and in which way. The reference points by means of which Saeed defines and adapts his identity and location are tethered to him by lines of telecommunication: his partner Nadia, his parents and later the communities and people the couple encounters in London and Marin are reached by means of his phone. During their time in London, Nadia follows the news on her phone, in particular those that relate to herself as a member of the large refugee community that has arrived in London. At one point, she sees an image that she—for only a split second—misidentifies as herself and experiences a rupture in time that echoes ruptures of space and identity (cf. Hamid 2017, p. 157). Again, the smartphone is used as a canvas for this experience of shifting points of orientation. Hamid uses smartphones, GPS navigation and digital maps to show how the characters perform space and enact movement, but also how they relate to both space and movement. As Rossetto explains, “from a post-­ representational perspective, maps are viewed and researched as contingent, relational, embodied, fluid entities that are performed and manipulated by users in their meanings, as well as in their concrete material consistency” (2014, p. 514). The different types of maps that can be pulled up on a smartphone to be selected, shifted and adapted by their user are a perfect example of this, especially since this type of technology is particularly malleable to its user’s needs and desires. As Hamid writes, by extension, about the thousands of people who are forced to abandon their homes every day and for whom the versatility of digital mappings and communication is not simply a convenience but a necessity, his depiction of digital maps becomes particularly relevant. The way in which this technology is used not only reveals aspects of the characters’ movements and

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spatial surroundings, but also speaks of their social roles, relationships, identity and place attachments. Where this perspective on digital maps lends their users additional agency, another typical way of presenting both smartphones and digital maps is as blinders that actively reduce their user’s world and hold power over them. In translocal writing, this outlook appears less frequently than those perspectives that suggest ways in which digital mappings provide agency. Still, we find it, for example, in Helen Oyeyemi’s Opposite House. The novel is set mainly in a house in which a mystical set of doors connects London to an imagined Lagos and a magical Cuba peopled by Yoruba gods and goddesses. Both cityscapes are intimately linked to respective sides of the protagonist’s character and life story. In an episode that blends real and imagined cityscapes, we are presented with an image of busy urban walkers paying no attention to their magical surroundings: He hides behind the door of his ramshackle, crazy-beamed house, watching the people who hurry up and down his crossroads like so many dusty-backed beetles. Some people are speeding past so quickly, so intent on their maps, that they don’t even notice Elegua’s house rocking nonchalantly on the heels of its stilt-feet like Baba Yaga’s hut getting ready to run. (Oyeyemi 2007, p. 36)

This excerpt does not specify that ‘their maps’ are digital, but the accelerated walking speed and the general reflections on modern urban life strongly suggest the usage of smartphones or similar devices. The reason the devices are referred to as maps can be found in the alienation of the mythical onlookers, peering out from a house that is likened to a Slavic fairy-tale dwelling. In contrast to the mindless insect-like urban walkers, the building is provided with more agency and potential for autonomous movement than the human beings are. While the maps could potentially also be read as tourist maps, those would slow down the people’s movement and prompt them to stop and look. Additionally, when using a tourist map, the map-user is generally aware that the map prescribes the type of information he or she receives and the paths that are more or less likely to be taken. In Oyeyemi’s novel, the map-users seem as unaware of the fact that their perception of space is manipulated by maps or digital devices as they are unaware of the moving fairy-tale house. Another loss of agency is added when we consider that GPS-enabled devices do not only map, but that their movement can also be mapped—often without the user’s

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knowledge. A similar disillusionment with digital space, although not strictly map-related, is presented in Camille Isaacs’s analysis of social media in Adichie’s Americanah, when she refers to the illusion of open space, of equal access and participation within the nation; even the digital spaces she [Ifemelu] engages in are ultimately controlled by hegemonic structures and capitalist apparatuses over which she, as a colonized, marginalized body and consumer, has little control (e.g. she is at the mercy of her Internet provider). (2016, p. 177)

A focus on digital spaces and maps can then lead to a different perspective on questions of hegemony, power structures and agency than the maps of physical locations I have provided in the first part of this chapter. A novel that blurs agency and non-agency with regard to the internet and digital maps is Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013). The plot of the partly autobiographical25 novel is prompted by Japanese-­ American protagonist Ruth finding a young Japanese girl’s diary on the shore of the remote island she lives on in British Columbia. The novel then alternates between Ruth’s life in Canada and Nao’s diary set in Sunnyvale, California, and Tokyo. Ruth is drawn further and further into Nao’s life26 and attempts to find out whether she may have become a victim of the tsunami that caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, known in Japan as 3/11. Whenever Ruth researches people or locations mentioned in the diary to find out whether Nao may have been in the Fukushima area on 3/11, the websites, articles and entries she discovers mysteriously vanish before she can read or download them. It is revealed much later in the novel that this is due to a tool Nao’s father has developed, which allows one to eliminate all traces of one’s existence from the World Wide Web (cf. Ozeki 2013, p. 383). On the one hand, this tool lends its users agency by giving them control over their online presence, 25  Some readings of the text, such as Masami Usui’s, suggest that Ozeki in fact writes herself into the novel: “A Tale for the Time Being challenges the narrative style in which the author is included as the character who gradually encodes the stories, revealing the hidden aspect behind those stories. As a Japanese American, Ozeki enlarges the possibilities for her contemporaries, by launching into the world where people are connected beyond the different places and times where they can reach the true meaning of life” (Usui 2015, p. 94). 26  In several dream sequences, Ruth’s sleeping mind transports her to Nao’s Japan, highlighting the translocal nature of the text by blurring the boundaries between the distant places and fictional and non-fictional realities.

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but on the other hand, the programme only deletes a piece of information when it has been searched, thereby limiting the reach of the searching person. Ruth finds, for example, an article about Nao’s grandmother, only to have every mention of it erased during her failed attempt to download it. With the many clues Ruth can gather regarding Nao’s identity, family and location, it would seem that it should be easy enough to find, for example, her grandmother’s temple on Google Maps. Her continuous attempts to map Nao’s diary, however, remain fruitless. Where descriptions of maps are often political and maps as metaphors tend to be more personal, these digital maps or mapping attempts then raise questions of agency on both of these levels. Another frustrating experience with regard to digital maps and agency is shared by Ruth and her partner Oliver when they download Yure Kuru,27 an app that Nao uses to be alerted of earthquakes in her surroundings. ‘This sucks,’ Oliver said. ‘I can download Yure Kuru, but it only works off data from the Japan Meteorological Agency. It won’t tell us anything about earthquakes in Canada.’ Ruth stared into the flames. ‘I thought Canada was safe.’ ‘No place is safe,’ Oliver said. ‘Okay, I’ve got it. Now we’ll know all about seismic activity in Japan.’ ‘Maybe we should go to Japan so you can use the app.’ ‘Maybe we don’t have to, since Japan is coming here.’ ‘What?’ ‘Japan is coming here.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘The earthquake,’ Oliver said. ‘It moved the coast of Japan closer to us.’ ‘Really?’ Oliver looked puzzled. ‘Don’t you remember? The release of subduction caused the landmass near the epicenter to jump about thirteen feet in our direction.’ (Ozeki 2013, p. 202)

27  Yure Kuru is a real app that the novel describes accurately, even with respect to the mythological origins of the fish and the thunderbolts in its logo. A component not mentioned in the novel is a function that encourages one to share a personal impression of how strong the earthquake felt—“Let’s share the seismic intensity that you felt” (RC Solution Co. n.p.)—and to indicate this impression by choosing the most appropriate smiley face icon. This curious mixture of a disaster evacuation tool and social media mirrors the style of Nao’s diary that oscillates between high-school drama, Buddhist lessons and historical research.

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Although the app is accessible in Canada, it requires maps and data of a different place, suggesting an interesting digitalised but dysfunctional translocality. Ruth’s playful suggestion to go to Japan of course barely masks her actual desire to find Nao, but Oliver, well educated in geographical and environmental issues, is focused on the problem at hand: a lack of data. His knowledge of the factually true but irrelevant movement of the landmass of Japan acquires symbolic value for Ruth’s and Nao’s translocal ‘communication’ and Ruth’s desire to be closer to Nao, to find and protect her. Ozeki’s novel also comes equipped with an interactive cover. After downloading the appropriate app, a smartphone’s camera can turn the cover into an augmented reality version of itself. Once the app is activated, a look at the book through the camera and screen of a smartphone first animates the three layers that are partially visible on the physical book’s cover: a red dot—part of the Japanese flag—is peeled back to reveal an ocean, the shores of an island and, finally, the face of a Japanese girl blinking at the app user. The animation moves with the camera and is accentuated by sounds of seagulls and waves. A female voice then introduces herself as Nao by lending her voice to the opening lines of the novel: “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you” (Ozeki 2013, p. 3). Still in the augmented reality setting, a menu then appears on the book cover offering further information on the novel, the author and the audiobook. Apart from enticing the reader to make a purchase via the publisher’s website, the interactive cover therefore lends the reader a certain amount of agency over the paratext. The layered images of the Canadian and Japanese shores, combined with the national symbol of the flag, are not maps but somewhat abstracted depictions of different spaces, which makes them map-like to an extent. The face, voice and ocean sounds mimic an interaction with a person and a distant place that the novel will relate to us. Since all of these images and sensory impressions fade into each other in quick succession, Japan moves closer, not only to Canada but also to the location of the reader. This creative take on digital mapping then does not only lend the reader additional agency but also layers map-like images translocally in a way actual maps are unable to.

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Translocal Book Covers and Maps A small number of the other novels in my corpus use maps or map-like images as parts of their—non-digital—cover designs. A larger share of the design styles adheres to the colour schemes that publishers tend to prefer for the nationality of the author, a problematic tendency Ishaan Tharoor discusses in a 2014 article for the Washington Post,28 but the map-like covers take a different approach. In most editions, Teju Cole’s Open City and Salman Rushdie’s Fury are printed with more or less stylised images of cityscapes and skylines on their covers, focusing on the novel’s setting rather than the author’s place of birth. John Lanchester’s Capital (2012), a novel that is less overtly concerned with translocality but still offers an intriguing take on the issue, is—again in most, but not all editions— adorned with variations of an image of small stylised houses that accumulate in the form of a globe, invoking how the map of a city can metaphorically become a map of the world in translocal literature. In a popular edition of NW by Zadie Smith, bits of a simple black and white map can be made out in the large letters of her name and the title of the novel. The N and the W are connected by an abstracted image of a bridge, doubling as a hyphen. The few locations one can derive from the partial letters and structure of the map are locations in London (Mount Vernon Hospital in Northwood, New End in Hampstead) although not all of them appear to lie within the NW postcode districts. The most interesting cover probably belongs to the UK edition of The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician (see Fig. 4.1). The map on its cover shows the central axis of Edinburgh from Castle Hill to Arthurs Seat at a slightly angled bird’s view with a group of masked figures in the foreground. While the contrasting styles of the way the map and the masks are drawn obviously aims at transculturality, the map image is also strangely reminiscent of the style of engraved copper and woodcut maps that, in Europe, were popular for the representation of cities around the sixteenth century. One such map is a copper engraving entitled Edenburg—Edenburgum, Scotiae Metropolis by German and 28  Tharoor bases his article on responses to a viral blog post on Africa is a Country and a subsequent interview with a book cover designer at Knopf. The original post shows innumerable book cover designs (including an edition of Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie) all consisting of a solitary acacia tree against the backdrop of a reddish-golden sunset. Tharoor also comments on a subsequent tweet with a collage of extremely similar cover designs for South Asian writers that ironically reads “Danger of ‘Multiple’ Book Covers: Orientalism, Racial & Gender Tropes” (Varatharajah quoted in Tharoor 2014, n.p.).

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Fig. 4.1  Cover and back cover of Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician with a map of Edinburgh and masked figures in the foreground (Cover design: Veena Bhana; Cover art: “Know and Don’t Believe” by Tafadzwa Gwetai)

Flemish mapmakers Braun and Hogenberg that dates back to 1581 (see Fig. 4.2). The figures in the foreground—not masked here—inform the map reader of the sartorial habits of the local nobility at the time.29 The city’s history is therefore drawn into the novel and layered with transculturation before the book is even opened. All in all, the cover designs should of course not be overrated as they are hardly ever the author’s choice and generally dictated by marketing practices. Nonetheless, it is possible to read the more complex cover images that use abstracted cities and maps as a new trend that may replace the focus on the nationality or 29  Finding out about the local style of dress was, in fact, only one purpose of the figures in this popular city atlas: “Bruin [or Braun] said further that the city views had been enlivened with human figures for a dual purpose. Not only in illustration of native customs and dress, but also in order to prevent the Turks from being able to use the pictures in their wars of conquest, since their religion prohibits the portrayal of human beings” (Keuning 1968, p. 42).

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Fig. 4.2  Copper engraving entitled Edenburg—Edenburgum, Scotiae Metropolis (1581) by German and Flemish mapmakers Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg

ethnicity of the author. This, of course, would strongly  support my assumption that translocal writing is an influential current trend.

Authorial Maps and Mappings After this excursion on the topic of cover designs of translocal novels, I will now briefly return to what I have earlier defined as authorial maps and mappings. The inserted map in Huchu’s novel is presented as a drawing by the Magistrate and inserted within the pages of the narrative. A more common way to print maps in books is as a paratext before the novel begins. Genres such as travel writing, adventure and fantasy in particular have a tendency to include this type of map: a map of a world that is foreign to readers and, at least partially, to the characters. These types of maps

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“stimulate […] travel and adventure” (P. C. Muehrcke and J. O. Muehrcke 1974, p. 324); Muehrcke and Muehrcke cite Heart of Darkness and The Lord of the Rings as popular examples. The only novel in my corpus that includes such a map is The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner, which is, in a way, a very atypical travel account as it is written as a series of vignettes that provide only a very surreal sense of time or place. The US-American protagonist Kaplanski travels to Namibia and stays for roughly a year at a school in the middle of the desert. His impression of the school he works at and its surroundings is frequently distorted by heat, boredom and an intense love affair with Mavala Shikongo. Orner’s map presents us with a large image of the Goas school that is sketched and annotated in a way that evokes a hand-drawn map but still provides much topographical detail. The small icon-like drawings of the school buildings are surrounded by buildings marked as ‘Auntie’s house’, ‘mission garage’ or ‘singles quarters’. This accumulation of buildings is framed by the banks of the Kuiseb River and the Erongo Mountains on one side and the C32 highway on the other. The map, therefore, suggests authenticity while at the same time giving local details that we can assume will be relevant for the story but may not be accurate mappings of geographical locations. On the bottom left corner of the map, a smaller map is inserted that shows Namibia in its entirety and marks only the locations of Goas and Windhoek, the country’s capital. The shape of the country is set within a grey square and on each side of the square annotations, but no drawn borders or landmarks inform us of what lies in each cardinal direction: Angola to the north, Botswana to the east, South Africa to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. Zambia, which shares a land border with Namibia, and Zimbabwe, which is only separated from Namibia by the Zambezi River, are not included. In this smaller map we, therefore, find the same tension between authenticity and restriction of information to what is relevant to the local sphere and the story. The bipartite map— split between the local and the national, the fictional and the real—therefore shows what Barbara Piatti, in her comprehensive study of the geography of literature, refers to as the precarious but highly important point of intersection between the worlds in- and outside of literature (cf. Piatti 2008, p. 19). Speaking again with Marie Louise Pratt’s terminology in mind, there is a type of ‘contact zone’ between physical reality and literary fiction. Piatti explains that this zone, point or selectively permeable membrane between both spheres is so fascinating because, when we consider action, characters and setting as the three main constituents of a

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storyworld, the setting is the only possible point where the reader can, in a way, access the world presented in the diegesis.30 By inserting this map, Orner therefore provides easier access to the real physical location his story is based on but also includes fictional locations that entice the reader to discover their relevance, their part in the adventure.

Conclusion In an interview included in the reading group guide at the end of his novel, Orner himself comments on the relevance of place, locality and translocality in his writing: I loathe novels and travel books that go out of their way to announce ‘I know this exotic place and you don’t.’ You know what I mean? I wanted this book to feel familiar to readers, whether they were born in Des Moines or Usakos, Namibia. And I think this should always be the case. I’ve found that certain aspects of love, politics, gossip (especially gossip) don’t change a lick when you cross borders. The same basic concerns prevail. Tip O’Neill’s phrase ‘all politics is local’ applies also to fiction—all literature is local. […] And are there any truly exotic places? I think you’d have to find a place that wasn’t inhabited by actual people for it to be exotic. (2006, p. 6)

By pointing out the relevance of the local and at the same time dismissing notions of ‘exotic’ places, Orner stresses the commonalities between places, be they real or imaginary, and shows why distant localities can connect so easily in translocal writing: no matter how different they are, they still have more similarities than differences. While their maps may contain unfamiliar names, those maps are still as readable as the settings are narratable. In a note at the end of Swing Time, Zadie Smith also comments on 30  Piatti’s study is written in German but includes many Anglophone examples. In the original text, the passage referenced here reads: “Denn Literaturgeographie besetzt exakt die heikle Schnittstelle zwischen inner- und außerliterarischer Wirklichkeit, eine Grauzone, in der, vorsichtig formuliert, ein Kontakt zwischen Fiktionen und einer wie auch immer gearteten ‘Realität’ zustande kommt. Wenn man nämlich, wie das traditionellerweise geschieht, Geschehen, Figuren und Handlungsraum als die drei Konstituenten der fiktionalen, im engeren Sinne epischen und dramatischen Welt voraussetzt, dann kommt dem Schauplatz (und ihm allein) die spezifische Funktion zu, eine durchlässige Membran zwischen den Welten zu sein. An die Figuren und an die Handlung bzw. die Erzählgegenwart ist in der Regel aus der Position des Lesers, der Leserin kein Herankommen möglich, an den Schauplatz – mit einer Reihe von Einschränkungen – aber schon” (2008, p. 19).

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the relationship of narrated and physical place: “A note on geography: North London, in these pages, is a state of mind. Some streets may not appear as they do in Google Maps” (Z. Smith 2017, p. 454). While her claim that geography can be ‘a state of mind’ harks back to Piatti’s, Westphal’s and Prieto’s observations about the intersections of geographical and narrated spaces, her reference to Google Maps as the ultimate representation of ‘real’ space underlines the relevance of digital maps. Both Smith and Orner, therefore, reflect on the relationship of geographical and literary places, as well as the translocal imaginaries connected to them, on the basis of maps and mappings. In conclusion, the function of descriptions of maps, maps as metaphors, digital maps and authorial maps in translocal texts is manifold. Maps and mappings can act as a tool for analysis, a strategy employed by authors but also forms a part of the readerly reception. Actual maps created by scholars, authors or readers,31 and descriptions of maps, maps as metaphors or digital maps, have all been observed to borrow from mapmaking processes of other scholarly disciplines, which makes an analysis that takes the term ‘map’ literally particularly fruitful. Detailed mappings of a text produced by researchers, or at times readers, reveal new perspectives through a degree of abstraction and a stricter focus. Since translocal novels always have strong geographical components, a careful mapping with different mapping tools and strategies is particularly insightful. On the level of the text, descriptions of physical maps in novels often point to a political point of view. Maps used by characters are often disorienting, outdated or inaccurate, which diminishes their function and offers only frustration to the map reader. When maps are used as metaphors, by contrast, they generally point to more personal issues. Both categories of textual map use deal with place attachment whereas digital maps put more of an emphasis on 31  Maps of literary locations, of course, have a long history, also in literary tourism. From the avid readers and fans that flood Dublin on Bloomsday to walk in the steps of Joyce’s most famous protagonist to the New York Public Library mapping out “The Best New York City Novels by Neighborhood” (Aravecz), these types of mappings spark the interest of readers and institutions alike. Crowd-sourced platforms such as Placing Literature (Bardin Williams and Colin Williams) can be found beside individual and more specific projects such as “The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips” (Kreitner and Melendez) and readers who simply map books they enjoy, as Kentaro does on the website Literary Map of NYC. Borrowing strategies of digital mapmaking without producing a geographical map, Literature-Map is an online ‘map’ that dynamically groups authors closer together when they attract a similar readership.

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questions of agency, access and spatial hierarchies. Authorial maps and mappings are rather rare and tend to mix elements depicting real-world locations with fictional locations or pictorial elements that already tell parts of the story. With translocal texts, a more literal understanding of maps and mappings in literature is highly productive as these novels generally have very close ties to geographical space and make extensive use of literary strategies that relate to localities. From mental maps to place attachment, translocal novels rely on every aspect of spatial perception to make their settings narratable and draw readers into the places they write.

Works Cited Corpus

of

32 Main Novels

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2014. Americanah. London: Fourth Estate. Bourke, Thomas. 2018. The Consolation of Maps. London: Riverrun. Brand, Dionne. 2005. What We All Long For. New York: Dunne. Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2014. We Need New Names. London: Vintage Books. Hamid, Mohsin. 2017. Exit West. New York: Riverhead Books. Huchu, Tendai. 2015. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician. Cardigan: Parthian. Orner, Peter. 2006. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. New  York: Back Bay Books. Oyeyemi, Helen. 2007. The Opposite House. London: Bloomsbury. Ozeki, Ruth. 2013. A Tale for the Time Being. Edinburgh and London: Canongate. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo. Smith, Zadie. 2017. Swing Time. London: Penguin. Thayil, Jeet. 2012. Narcopolis. London: Faber and Faber.

Further References Ameel, Lieven. 2017b. The City Novel: Measuring Referential, Spatial, Linguistic, and Temporal Distances. In The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. T. Robert and J.R. Tally, 233–241. London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. London and Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bieger, Laura. 2016. Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 64 (1): 11–26. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Cooper, David. 2012. Critical Literary Cartography: Text, Maps and a Coleridge Notebook. In Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance, ed. Les Roberts, 29–52. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Crang, Mike. 2001. Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion. In Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. John May and Nigel Thrift, 187–207. London: Routledge. Dissanayake, Wimal. 2006. Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood. In Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations, ed. Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer, 25–44. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Fehervari, Geza. 1989. Faith in Tradition. Building Design Magazine 940: 26–27. Ferguson, Erika L., and Mary Hegarty. 1994. Properties of Cognitive Maps Constructed from Texts. Memory & Cognition 22 (4): 455–473. Gurr, Jens Martin. 2015. The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural Analogies between ‘City’ and ‘Text’: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades Project. In Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry, ed. Kornelia Freitag, 21–38. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hall, Suzanne, and Ayona Datta. 2010. The Translocal Street: Shop Signs and Local Multi-Culture along the Walworth Road, South London. City, Culture and Society 1 (2): 69–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2010.08.001. Holder, Sarah. 2018. How Maps Look Different When Women Make Them. CityLab. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/03/who-­maps-­the-­world/ 555272/?utm_source=SFFB. Accessed 26 Mar 2018. Hummon, David M. 1992. Community Attachment: Local Sentiment and Sense of Place. In Place Attachment, ed. Irwin Altman, 253–278. New  York: Plenum Press. Isaacs, Camille. 2016. Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence Through Social Media in the Work of Adichie and Bulawayo. Safundi 17 (2): 174–188. Keuning, Johannes. 1968. The ‘Civitates’ of Braun and Hogenberg. Imago Mundi 17: 41–44. Lefebvre, Henri. 1972. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New York: Harper and Row. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The Technology Press & Harvard University Press. Mattheis, Lena. 2016a. Tendai Huchu. In The Literary Encyclopedia. https:// www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13763. Accessed 6 Aug 2020. McHale, Brian. 2004. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. McLeod, John. 2011. Sounding Silence: Transculturation and Its Thresholds. Transnational Literature 4 (1): 1.

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Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso. Muehrcke, Phillip C., and Juliana O.  Muehrcke. 1974. Maps in Literature. Geographical Review 64 (3): 317–338. Piatti, Barbara. 2008. Die Geographie der Literatur: Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Pleßke, Nora. 2014. The Intelligible Metropolis. Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels. Bielefeld: Transcript. Prieto, Eric. 2011. Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond. In Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally, 13–27. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramos, Maria C. 2011. Global Positioning from Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Narratives of Travel. In Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally, 177–194. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Ridda, Maria. 2015. Imagining Bombay, London, New  York and Beyond. South Asian Diasporic Writing from 1990 to the Present. Oxford: Lang. Rossetto, Tania. 2014. Theorizing Maps With Literature. Progress in Human Geography 38 (4): 513–530. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. 2016. Narrating Space/ Spatializing Narrative. Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Tharoor, Ishaan. 2014. Why Do All These Books About Africa Look The Same? The Washington Post, 16 May. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ worldviews/wp/2014/05/16/why-­do-­all-­the-­covers-­on-­books-­about-­africa-­ look-­the-­same/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.adcb6fbaf066. Accessed 15 Jul 2018. Tickell, Alex. 2003. The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38 (1): 73–89. Usui, Masami. 2015. The Waves of Words: Literature of 3/11 in and around Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale of the Time Being. Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 208: 91–95. Wood, Denis, John Fels, and John Krygier. 2010. Rethinking The Power Of Maps. New York and London: Guilford Press.

CHAPTER 5

Scaling

Scales are strange. They can make things easier or more difficult to see. They can provide a sense of objectivity as easily as they can distort. They pose curious questions about the relationship of a perceived ‘whole’ and its parts. Timothy Clark illustrates this strangeness in a wonderfully eccentric example: You are lost in a small town, late for a vital appointment somewhere in its streets. You stop a friendly-looking stranger and ask the way. Generously, he offers to give you a small map which he happens to have in his briefcase. The whole town is there, he says. You thank him and walk on, opening the map to pinpoint a route. It turns out to be a map of the whole earth. The wrong scale. (2012, p. 148)

In thinking about scales and scaling, I keep coming back this example and hope the reader of this chapter will keep it in mind as well. Despite their strangeness, notions of scale are so central to the storying of translocal cityscapes that the tropes used to express them are already commonplace images. In the album trailer for Let Them Eat Chaos (2016), poet Kate Tempest uses a familiar succession of scaled images: she zooms in from the solar system—the earth a peaceful blue ball hung in a fascinating diorama—to the general threats of earthly existence and ends up with a single human being realising they are no more than a speck of dust. Like © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_5

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the opening and connecting sequences of Jim Jarmusch’s translocal urban classic Night on Earth (1991), Tempest starts at an extremely great distance just to zoom in on the most personal details of a group of characters who are connected only by the fact that all of them live on the same street in London and all of them are awake at 4.18 a.m., experiencing a sense of impending doom. According to a Guardian review, “these individual narratives are projected, puppet-style, on to a much larger canvas, in which the global financial crisis, migration, environmental catastrophe and police brutality rotate; ‘massacres, massacres, new shoes,’ as the lyric goes” (A. Clark 2016, n.p.).1 The opening section of Lancaster’s Capital moves in the opposite direction: from a street in London to the global developments that result in the gentrification of the area and the anthropomorphisation of the street’s houses. The universe, the world, the country, the city, the street, the person—all of these represent different scales. The movement between them—scaling—is where they become essential for translocality. The layering of dissimilar spaces, experiences and stories naturally requires changes in scale, not only to narrate global effects or local implications but also to make distant stories relatable to each other and to the reader. A week on a farm in the middle of the Namib cannot neatly be layered over an hour in dense Cincinnati traffic. Translocal texts frequently stretch or compress time and space, as has become evident in all previous chapters, in the translocal urban palimpsest in particular. Scaling is therefore clearly an important tool of translocal writing. In order to show how scaling produces translocal narratability, I will group my observations in this chapter around the following questions: (1) Can constantly shifting scales be defined as a narrative device or are they rather an underlying cultural development that affects writing in a different way? Could they be both? (2) In how far should the seemingly natural hierarchy of scales (local < national < global) be questioned when it is used to measure the relevance of these scales? Which scales are the most relevant ones in translocal novels? (3) What is the impact of specific changes in scale on translocal narratability? This last question will take up the largest part of the chapter, but before I can answer any of them, there is the question of definition: 1  Note in particular the vocabulary relating to different types of scales: ‘projecting’, ‘puppets’, the ‘larger canvas’ and ‘the global’. The image of puppet-like humans is also fairly common in translocal narratives and historically a part of urban writing from an elevated vantage point (which makes the city dwellers look like puppets or ants), an early example being Sir John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” (1642).

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What Is Scaling? What then is scaling? First of all, it is important to note that I am concerned with changes in scale taking place within the diegesis. Additionally, I mainly consider scales of the narrated built environment and of storyworlds. The physical expansion of a text (e.g. by adding images or footnotes) or its compression (in abridged works or shortened editions for young readers) is not relevant to this discussion.2 A change in scale, in the sense in which I employ it, may then cause two or more related items to increase or decrease in a linear, predictable manner. As computer scientists or climatologists,3 for instance, know well, this is not necessarily true in all systems, networks or equations: most programmes can only adapt to certain changes in scale. If the scale becomes too large, then the outcome may be less predictable or the whole system could break down. The same is true, in a way, for narratives. They can only cope with limited changes in scale. A novel narrating in detail the life of every person on earth over a span of 500 years is simply not narratable.4 As explored in the context of simultaneity, the synecdochic allusion to partial narratives across the globe can create the illusion of a story at a global scale, but even the action drama about the solitary astronaut in space saving the entire planet Earth from extinction is, in the end, a fairly ‘small’ story about one hero. Nonetheless, there are phenomena that span the entire planet and that need to be put in a narratable story. Two obvious examples here are climate change and the Anthropocene. In an article on the relevance of how the Anthropocene is scaled and storied, Siri Veland and Amanda Lynch comment: The Anthropocene debate has so far been closely tied up with concerns for exceeding planetary boundaries. The epoch is human-centered, not just because of anthropogenic signals in stratal sections, but because of the ethical issues these signals engender for human societies. If it is to be a ‘human’ epoch, it must take into account the social construction of nature, recognizing that the Anthropocene presents an unprecedented opportunity to also speak about human coexistence at planetary scales. (2016, p. 4)  As Carlos Spoerhase shows, a look at the creative processes and societal changes that mark the abbreviation or extension of a literary text is most definitely worthwhile (cf. 2018, pp. 668–670). I would like to thank Ricarda Menn for drawing my attention to this issue and this text. 3  Scaling and scale effects of course affect the work of anyone building quantitative models. 4  Due to my focus on more or less ‘typical’ novels, I disregard avantgarde narrative styles and epic series of novels that may at least partly achieve the narration of a spectacularly large story. 2

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Storying “human coexistence at planetary scales” (2016, p. 4) is of course already a demanding challenge, but it seems to be one translocal novels increasingly (attempt to) tackle. As climate change fiction also deals with enormous scales, a critique of commonly human-centred narratives is frequently inherent to such texts. Despite the fact that some translocal novels, such as The Inheritance of Loss or Happiness, deal with nature as a central actor in a global space, the way in which nature is manipulated and used as a mirror image for society clearly shows not only the focus on humans but also the “social construction of nature” (Veland and Lynch 2016, p.  4). Where criticism of climate change fiction and climate change narratives, in general, has already produced varied insights on issues of scaling,5 scholarship on translocal novels has only vaguely touched on this issue. A revised perspective on large-scale narratives is therefore necessary. Nonetheless, some concepts from the realm of climate change fiction, or cli-fi, can be transferred to the study of translocal fiction. The call for a consideration of the lived human experience when discussing a scale as large as that of the 1.5 °C threshold, for example, should be central to many stories and analyses.6 Global warming is also one of the central topics in Timothy Morton’s monograph Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013).7 Morton introduces the concept of hyperobjects specifically to tackle entities that are too large to be perceived as items or problems on a regular human scale. Hyperobjects exceed, and therefore virtually cancel out, the kinds of temporal or spatial scales and scalings we can see, touch, talk about or put in a story: Hyperobjects, then, are ‘hyper’ in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not. Hyperobjects have numerous properties in common. They are viscous, which means that they ‘stick’ 5  See in particular Roman Bartosch’s extensive body of work on the issue. Refer also to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” or Derek Woods’s “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene” (2014) and note that Hubert Zapf’s Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (2016) works with assumptions based on global and local scales and scalings. 6  Note also how similar the scholarly language is here to that of research on translocality: “More fundamental narrative questions—such as how ecological language of invasion, colonization, and extinction shape intercultural collaborations for sustainability; or, how the spatial and temporal scales of climate models and the Anthropocene epoch align with lived experience—need addressing” (S. Veland et al. 2018, p. 45). 7  The line of thought that connects global narratives to both Morton’s hyperobjects and Clark’s scales is indebted to Jens Gurr and his seminar on Global Anglophone Fiction which I attended in the winter semester of 2014/2015.

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to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal; in other words, any ‘local manifestation’ of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject. They involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to. […] And they exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects. (Morton 2013, p. 1)

Hyperobjects can therefore only become part of a narrative when and where they ‘touch the ground’. The hyperobject cannot be represented ‘directly’, as Morton puts it, or in its entirety, but an impression of the hyperobject can emerge from a reading of a novel that describes a variety of partial manifestations of the hyperobject. Although translocality does not necessarily fulfil all of Morton’s criteria, it bears strong similarities to a hyperobject, which explains why such a varied arsenal of narrative tricks and techniques is necessary to put it into storied form. Like a hyperobject, translocality is a conceptualisation that needs to move between and through scales and places because it is an extremely large phenomenon. I therefore argue that translocality, in and of itself, produces a variety of scales when put into a narrative form. Since the phenomenon is too large to fit into one scale, it can only burst into and out of scales. At a small local scale, for example, we can guess at the true dimensions of the translocal network spanning the entire globe via the extreme density of details provided.8 Here, the storied entity produces different scales and requires scaling as a narrative device. Timothy Clark, however, takes a different position. In his view, it is the researcher who needs to learn to read at different scales since in sum, reading at several scales at once cannot be just the abolition of one scale in the greater claim of another but a way of enriching, singularizing and yet also creatively deranging the text through embedding it in multiple and even contradictory frames at the same time. (2012, p. 163)

I believe that a combination of both perspectives is most productive and additionally propose to enhance it by a third dimension: translocality—as a kind of hyperobject—produces different scales in the text, should be analysed by the researcher at different scales and also requires scaling of authors  This is one point in which I clearly diverge from Morton’s definition of the hyperobject: translocality is not ‘nonlocal’. It can produce non-places but it can just as easily result in a high degree of localisation. One should also note that Morton’s argument is not always as convincing as his definition of the hyperobject is. 8

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and readers to make the phenomenon narratable. As a final complication, Clark stresses that “non-cartographic concepts of scale are not a smooth zooming in and out but involve jumps and discontinuities with sometimes incalculable ‘scale effects’” (2012, p. 149, italics original), meaning that it is not only the nature of the multi-scalar or scale-­exceeding object but also the perspective of the onlooker or researcher that can be distorted through scaling. Although Bartosch works with transculturality and ecology rather than with translocality, I agree with his assessment that such “derangements of scale Clark identifies at work in the Anthropocene [can] therefore be reconceptualised as moments of imaginative confusion and, possibly, resistance; and thus as productive affordances and opportunities for learning and understanding” (2018, p. 3). Distortions produced by scalings or conflicted scales are generally productive in translocal literature as well.

Shifting Scales as Narrative Devices and as Cultural Developments Having thus established the directions in (and levels at) which scaling can take place, I will now return to the first guiding question of this chapter: Can constantly shifting scales be defined as a narrative device or are they an underlying cultural development that affects writing in a different way? Firstly, shifting scales—the local being impacted by the global, the national affected by the regional—are nothing new. As Stephen Greenblatt aptly puts it in his introduction to Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, “literary and historical research has tended to ignore the extent to which, with very few exceptions, in matters of culture the local has always been irradiated, as it were, by the larger world” (2010, p. 4). Much of the recent research in translocality and transculturality still seems to be all too deeply rooted in the idea that there once was a type of ‘pure’ culture, unaffected by the rest of the world. This is also part of the reason why there is hardly any conceptual research on translocality as such, but an abundance of studies focused solely on the connections between two or three nations or cultures. While the acceleration and amplification of translocal processes in the age of fast travel and the Internet are undeniable, cultures have always shared, exchanged and connected—at much slower paces and generally smaller scales. Cultures have always been and still are, especially in this day and age, mobile and at least selectively permeable. I, therefore, agree with Greenblatt when he criticises the ways in which “established analytical tools have taken for granted the stability of cultures, or at least have assumed that in their

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original or natural state, before they are disrupted or contaminated, cultures are properly rooted in the rich soil of blood and land and that they are virtually motionless” (2010, p. 3). We need new tools. Both the historic connections between cultures and the more recent increase in translocal developments indicate that, instead of trying to locate the elusive heart of one culture, our tools should carefully examine what is happening between cultures. This is where scaling—as a concept that incorporates the co-presence of a large number of scales as well as scale effects and other distortions—can be helpful. According to Edward Soja’s influential work on the postmetropolis, the conventional discourse on globalization has been almost entirely entrenched at these three scales [global, local, national]. But in many ways the most interesting developments arising from globalization and postfordist economic restructuring can be found in the ‘in-between’ spaces, the new geographies of power emerging between the national and the global and the national and local scales. (2000, p. 205)

In between the scales is of course where scaling happens. It is also where we find more nuanced scales that scholars in numerous areas of study frequently overlook. This tendency is due to the fact that each field of study tends to stick with its established scales, rather than attempting to find out which scales are truly at work in the situation, material or text at hand. One way to find the appropriate tool for an analysis is therefore to closely scrutinise which scales exactly are involved in a given issue, to also try to look between those scales and to identify the scale effects. This approach is complemented by a point Wimal Dissanayake stresses in an essay on “Globalization and the Experience of Culture”: The well known anthropologist Clifford Geertz is surely right when he calls attention to the need in social understanding and cultural redescription for a continual tracking between the most local of local details and the most global of global structures in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view. (2006, pp. 25–26)

This being only one of the productive intersections of scaling and simultaneity, a perspective that can take in different scales at once is essential to living in a globalised translocal world. As discussed in detail in my chapter on simultaneity, representing two things at once is not necessarily a strength of literature in general. It is, however, the strength of translocal texts.

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I therefore argue that scale effects, shifting scales, nuanced scales and co-present scales are present in the cultural developments translocal novels emerge out of and which they narrativise. At the same time, the novels use these same scales and scalings as narrative strategies. An increased presence of scaling is thus a phenomenon that occurs in literature and culture more or less simultaneously.

The Hierarchy of Scales This brings me to my second guiding question: In how far should the seemingly natural hierarchy of scales (local < national < global) be questioned when it is used to measure the relevance of these scales? Which scales are the most relevant ones in translocal novels? The perceived hierarchy of the relevance of spatial scales, briefly hinted at with my opening examples, is clearly obsolete and needs to be re-evaluated for every text and context. In translocal novels, the national scale is not necessarily ‘larger’ or more important than, for example, the urban scale, which happens to be pivotal to most translocal novels. Arguing from a perspective of global economic structures and global cities, Saskia Sassen emphasises the need to rethink not only the hierarchy of scales but also their definitions and boundaries: These features of the global economy underline the need to rethink the distinction between the global and the local, notably the assumption about the necessity of territorial proximity to the constitution of the local. This means rethinking spatial hierarchies that are usually taken as given, such as local < national < global. For example, both international professionals and migrant workers operate in contexts that are at the same time local and global, disrupting conventional hierarchies of scale. (Sassen 2001a, p. 272)

Sassen makes several important points here. Firstly, she claims that two spaces need not be physically located near each other in order to belong to the same local space and scale. Secondly, traditionally perceived hierarchies need to be revised. Thirdly, two seemingly dissimilar scales can be simultaneously present. The second and third points are deeply embedded in all intersections of translocality and scaling, while the first point is the prerequisite and foundation of all translocal spaces. How exactly then, is this translocal co-presence constructed not in but through different scales? Returning to Dissanayake, the answer may lie in both the production of the local and its interplay with global scales:

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When we seek to interrogate the intersecting narratives of the global and the local, what we are aiming to do is to focus on the production of the local and its ever changing contours in response to the imperatives of the global. The local is never static, its boundaries, both temporal and spatial, are subject to ceaseless change. (2006, p. 25)

The local interacts directly with the global without having to move through a traditional hierarchy that would put the national between them. Through its constant shifting, expanding and constricting, the local has, I argue, not only constantly moving boundaries, as Dissanayake describes them, but also fuzzy edges that enable it to interpenetrate other scales while remaining, at its core, local. While this results in the co-presence of local and global which Sassen describes, the fuzzy edges where scales can bleed into each other account for some of the distortions that are frequently used as narrative strategies in translocal novels relying heavily on scaling.9 Writing about spatial hierarchies, Soja describes not fuzzy edges exactly but ripple effects that echo through all scales and thereby shake traditional orders of priority: In rethinking localization, for example, it is recognized that we always act (and think) locally, but our actions and thoughts are also simultaneously urban, regional, national, and global in scope, affecting and being affected by, if often in the smallest way, the entire hierarchy of spatial scales in which our lives are embedded. (Soja 2000, pp. 199–200)

Soja here technically still subscribes to the idea of a hierarchy but at the same time describes an interaction of scales that is only thinkable with fuzzy edges. He also points, first of all, to the predominance of the local in most cognitive processes and actions, as well as to the bidirectionality of cause and effect through spatial scales. The local can affect the global; the global can affect the local. Soja also puts an emphasis on how minimal the effects and causes that ripple through scales usually are. With a few exceptions—for example, Rushdie’s Fury, a novel which blows scales and scale effects out of proportion—the distortions that travel along the fuzzy edges of scales in translocal novels are also generally subtle or centred on extremely local details rather than global implications.  Translocal novels also create fuzzy edges between disciplines of research in literature and culture. As Arif Dirlik suggests in an essay on transnationalism and narrative, “ethnic or transnational literatures present a challenge, not only to historical ways of thinking, but also to the ways in which we have organized the study of the world in terms of nations, areas, and regions” (2006, p. 99). 9

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This brings me to those scales which are most relevant in translocal novels, the very local and the global being two of them. Examples of extremely local scales would be a street or even a group of houses; in novels such as The Opposite House or NW, even a single house can be the centre of a translocal narrative. Actions taking place at or affecting entities at global scales often take on the nature of hyperobjects. They can therefore never be fully present but are often implied or partly represented by intercontinental scales and movements. Present in the highest number of translocal novels, the urban or neighbourhood level is the most important scale in contemporary translocal writing. While some novels, for example What We All Long For, narrativise the city as a (more or less) unified whole that can be perceived in the same way a body or character can—anthropomorphising them in the process—many novels focus on specific neighbourhoods instead. As Kevin Lynch proposes, “the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time” (1960, p. 1). Seen in this way, the city approaches the status of a hyperobject, making a neighbourhood easier to narrate than a metropolis. While it differs from novel to novel whether it is an entire city or a specific neighbourhood that takes centre stage, it seems that both are representative of the urban scale and the urban experience in the respective texts. Having thus established that translocal novels employ scalings that can lead to both extremely ‘large’ and unusually ‘small’ stories, can operate outside of traditional hierarchies, create scales with fuzzy edges and are generally concerned mainly with urban, local and intercontinental scales, the rest of this chapter will tackle my third and last guiding question: What is the impact of specific changes in scale on translocal narratability? In attempting to answer this question, I will return to and expand on some of these initial reflections, thereby clarifying what it is exactly that scaling does to, for and with narratability.

Bird’s Eye Versus Street Level In her novel We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo confronts readers with one of the most typical scale changes of urban representation but does so, interestingly, in a non-urban setting. Protagonist Darling describes the view from a popular hilltop called Fambeki that is located in the province of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.10 Due to its industrial base and high cooling 10  Looking at the city from above is in fact a very traditional topos of urban writing; it existed before the actual viewpoints did: “The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it” (Certeau 1984, p. 92).

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towers, the city of Bulawayo is known by different nicknames making reference to smoke and elevation, but Darling lives in Paradise, an informal settlement comprised entirely of tin shacks. After having narrated private spaces in Paradise on the first pages of the novel, Darling now switches to the entirely different view of the settlement she has from the top of Fambeki, being able to perceive her home in the context of a much larger scale: When I’m on Fambeki like this I feel like I’m God, who sees everything. Paradise is all tin and stretches out in the sun like a wet sheepskin nailed on the ground to dry, the shacks are the muddy color of dirty puddles after the rains. The shacks themselves are terrible but from up here, they seem much better, almost beautiful even, it’s like I’m looking at a painting. Then I look up at the sky and see a plane far up in the clouds. First I’m thinking it’s just a bird, but then I see that no, it’s not. Maybe it’s a British Airways plane like the one Aunt Fostalina went in to America. (Bulawayo 2014, p. 34)

This passage, in which Darling enjoys her godlike perspective, bordering on omniscience, is surprisingly similar to de Certeau’s description of the view from the World Trade Centre: His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. (Certeau 1984, p. 92)

Both describe this type of elevated viewpoint as something reserved for gods which results, first, in an uplifting emotion or euphoria that may make the city seem more beautiful and, second, in a sense of order, direction and control. What differs from the walking perspective is of course not only the scale but also the viewpoint: bird’s-eye instead of street level. The aerial view is essential, but it is a means to an end, this end being the ability to take in a larger scale. Contrasting the street level with the voyeur, looking down from above is a narrative strategy employed by countless urban novels11 for precisely this reason: it combines the knowledge of the 11  Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Dickens’ Hard Times or The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo, to only name a few examples of this particular contrast of scales constituting a central feature in urban novels.

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city with the pleasure of being outside of the small scales of everyday life. The second part of the quotation from Bulawayo’s novel reveals more of the almost omniscient knowledge the view from above provides since Darling’s reflections about the plane strongly foreshadow her own trip to Detroit to live with Aunt Fostalina. The view from above and at a large scale also brings order to a disrupted lived environment that does not always make sense to a young Darling, who has had her home bulldozed by an authoritarian regime. When she first looks down, she describes the settlement not as a set of complete buildings but instead through materials and colours, comparing Paradise to wet leather and a muddy puddle. The earth tones contrast with the harsh glare of tin and the water hints at destruction but also implies fluidity and rebirth. After this initial fragmented impression, Darling contrasts her dislike for the tin shacks with the elation resulting from her elevated position. Paradise comes together as a complete, satisfying image—“a painting” (Bulawayo 2014, p.  34). In his comprehensive study on city novels, Volker Klotz observes a similar effect of the contrast of bird’s eye (large scale) and street level (small scale), especially when analysing the view from the famous cathedral as depicted in Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). Klotz describes the “tension-filled interplay between distance and a sense of being deeply moved” (Klotz 1969, p.  102, my translation)12 and points out how large scales make the cityscape’s constant state of flux visible. Like Klotz, Lynch also mentions in how far a large-­scale bird’s-eye perspective can bring a sense of order to seemingly strange urban forms and impressions, despite the fact that it is not as natural to us as is the walker’s small-scale perspective in the streets: “we must learn to see the hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities. We are not accustomed to organizing and imaging an artificial environment on such a large scale; yet our activities are pushing us toward that end” (1960, p. 12). What Lynch refers to here is the increasing complexity of the urban environments we live in and how this necessitates new perspectives and different scales in urban perception. Since Lynch wrote this passage in 1960, his observation has become truer but also more achievable through 12  The original German text reads: “das spannungsvolle Wechselspiel zwischen Abstand und Ergriffenheit” and continues to describe the competing views of a sober description and a strangely conjured-up image of a constantly changing cityspace, visible only from above: “Es rührt sich zunächst im Wettstreit zwischen nüchtern beschreibender Bestandsaufnahme der Pariser Lokalität und der eigenwilligen Beschwörung ihrer ständig sich ändernden Erscheinungsformen” (Klotz 1969, p. 102).

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tools like GPS and smartphones being available to most urban dwellers. Darling, however, relies on the physical change in perspective that still holds potential for elation and euphoria in a world of drones and phones. It seems then, that this particular contrast of scales is a historical constant of urban writing as well as of urban theory. In translocal novels, this shift in perspectives is used to layer distant spaces, as is the case, for example, in The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, and to foreshadow future translocal connections—such as the Magistrate’s accidental entanglement with the Zimbabwean government. Another prominent example of this is Rushdie’s novel Fury, which, on its first pages, delivers a detailed description of the miniature city at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This miniature not only triggers the protagonist’s obsession with dolls, but also becomes the first in a strange series of events that has some of the dolls come to life and create their own reality. Considering the obvious parallels to Rushdie’s life, the author, the author-god playing with characters and dolls and the protagonist oscillate (cf. Parashkevova 2013 or Eder 2001) and merge in the figure of the ultimate urban voyeur who knows the city at every scale—a curious translocal puppet master I will get back to later. Other instances of translocal foreshadowing through a shift to the bird’s-eye view and large scale occur in Free Food for Millionaires (2017) by Min Jin Lee,13 in which protagonist Casey Han plans out the next steps of her life in New York and reflects on the conflicts with her Korean family on various rooftops, or in The Virgin of Flames, where all storylines and foreshadowed details converge in a grand finale on a rooftop with painter Black literally embodying the virgin of flames.

Translocal Temporal Scales and Emotions The element of foreshadowing already suggests that in addition to the main focus on spatial scales, temporal scales need to be considered in translocal writing as well. As is the case with the translocal palimpsest, scalings take place on the levels of time and space simultaneously. Discussing the value of old buildings and antique maps, Kenji, the Japanese protagonist of The Consolation of Maps, explains, “It’s the past that costs us so much” (Bourke 2018, p. 60), talking about maps but hinting at the same time at a lost love affair that drives his American employer Theodora to buy a very old and very expensive palazzo in Italy where she used to live 13  With its focus on investment banking—the novel literally deals with ‘free food for millionaires’—Lee’s book also draws attention to an entirely different set of global issues.

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with her former lover. Structures or movements we perceive in space would be incomplete without their temporal component. The relevance of certain temporal scales, however, varies as much as spatial scales in translocal texts and contexts do: the monetary value of the palazzo is dictated by the large scale of its history, but Theodora is interested in buying it because of her much shorter personal history with the building. Writing about the relationship of maps—typically but incorrectly perceived as purely spatial entities—with time, Dennis Wood comments: “The map employs a code of tense, concerning its temporal topology, and a code of duration, which concerns it temporal scale” (2010, p. 94, italics original). While translocal mappings tend to be more concerned with morphing the temporal topology, translocal scalings generally operate on the second-coded level, that of duration. If a map is useable for a long time, then it operates at a large temporal scale. The more detailed, localised or even personal these maps become, the smaller the temporal scale at which they function. Translocal scalings are necessary because this localised detail (or ‘brief duration’, in Wood’s terminology) needs to be combined, or at least simultaneously presented, with much larger temporal scales or longer durations. Irenosen Okojie’s Butterfly Fish (2015), like Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), tells the story of a family curse and traces it, not only via three temporally distinct settings—contemporary London, London of the 1970s and nineteenth-century Benin—but also via a number of scales that stretch or condense time in symbols and images. The very opening of the novel throws a miniaturised version of Benin into London, briefly foreshadows the main events of the Benin storyline and then lets the image of Benin disintegrate. The first paragraph makes the reader aware of the distortions caused by temporal and spatial scaling through the denying of the relevance of any of these scales or scale changes: A green palm wine bottle rolled on the wet London Street. Its movements were audible gasps made of glass. It didn’t matter how the bottle had arrived at its location under the curious yellow gaze of the lamppost or whether the messenger had been a postman delivering for both God and the dancing devil. The image unfurling inside the bottle shimmering like moonlight trapped in glass mattered. Lick the edges of the picture presented and you could taste the sour, sweet traces of palm wine and trap your tongue in a different time; 19th century Benin, Nigeria. (Okojie 2015, p. 3)

Brief scenes taking place in Benin are described in the next paragraphs and all take place within the bottle. While it is suggested that the main setting

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is contemporary London, it may also be the London of the 1970s as the heading of this part of the novel indicates that it will take place in all three settings: it quite simply reads “Modern London, London 1970s & 19 Century Benin” (Okojie 2015, p.  1). London of the 1970s blurs into contemporary London on London Street and becomes a gloomy and lifeless backdrop to the disjointed events taking place in the Benin bottle. The reader is assured that no aspect of the bottle’s journey, through temporal and spatial scales, matters. The distorting effects of this confusing mélange of scales are underlined by a type of scaling synaesthesia when the narrator suggests that tasting the bottle and its images could transport one’s tongue—note: not the entire reader—to a different time and place. The nightly street in two ‘Londons’ becomes a stage for the synecdochic miniature performance of an entire lifespan of events in long-ago Benin and still there seem to be fuzzy edges through which the reader could cross into a different story and scale. The minuscule Benin visions could become life-sized and double London vanishes to the present. De Certeau describes a similarly blurring, if not as disorienting, effect when he contrasts the ordered view from above with the everyday movement through crowded streets: “a migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (1984, p. 93, italics original). The large scale is readable, whereas the small scale contains too many possible viewpoints and distorts its seemingly linear relationship to the larger picture of the city. De Certeau is here not writing about temporal scales, but about the opacity of the city image that comes with increased mobility. This mobility is clearly the basis for a layered, distorted and multi-scaled city image such as the one created by Okojie. As the examples from The Consolation of Maps and Butterfly Fish show, the relevance of a specific scale and in how much detail it is narrated is often guided by a character’s emotional connection to a time or place. In Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House, the emotional attachments of the protagonist enable her to create border spaces that transcend time and space and distort them to an extent that makes it difficult to tell reality from dream and imagination from memory. Her father calls her out on her unusual attitude towards time and space when he says: I mean, Maja, these gods or whatever, these beliefs don’t transcend time and space; they stretch them unnecessarily, stretch the geography of the world like an elastic band. And you can’t do that. You can’t erase borders and stride over Spanish into Yoruba like that. You can only pretend that you have. (Oyeyemi 2007, p. 76)

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What Maja’s father describes here is, in fact, an accurate analysis of how the novel makes the close connections between locales narratable. The novel stretches scales, creates fuzzy edges and erases borders by simply ignoring any spatial or temporal distance. This way of looking at the world, however, is presented clearly to be an exceptional point of view made possible by Maja’s overflowing emotions and the memories that resurface with them. While she appears to follow a process that makes perfect sense to her, neither the reader nor her partner can often make sense of her unusual, unproductive or even dangerous behaviour patterns. The decision, for example, to ignore signals of distress during her pregnancy, appears to be guided by Yoruba gods and goddesses and distorted childhood memories of Cuba. Her operating simultaneously at different spatial, temporal and emotional scales causes scale effects. Clark explains this when he demands literary scholars should read at numerous scales: “As a result of scale effects what is self-evident or rational at one scale may well be destructive or unjust at another” (2012, p. 150). It seems that what is self-evident to Maja in her private Cuba imaginary does not make sense in her London life and ultimately seems destructive to her partner and father. Her behaviour only becomes less elusive to the reader when they can read it at all scales from the intimately private to the family to the generational history of migration. Unlike Clark, who presents scalings as something that is done to the text by readers or researchers, I then argue that the text itself performs scalings and additionally offers readers or scholars possibilities to add their own scalings. Since possible scalings are at least partially determined by the text, I believe that texts, in fact, have more agency over scalings than readers or scholars do. In Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, spatial distances are similarly equated with temporal and emotional ones. After the novel opens in Ghana with the death of the Sai family’s father Kweku, the second chapter takes the reader to Boston, where son Olu Sai learns about his father’s death. Since both men are renowned surgeons, the space of the hospital represents a connection not only in Kweku’s death but also of their lives: He’ll have no way of knowing how the day broke in Ghana; he’ll be miles and oceans and time zones away (and other kinds of distances that are harder to cover, like heartbreak and anger and calcified grief and those questions left too long unasked or unanswered and generations of father-son silence and shame), stirring soymilk into coffee in a hospital cafeteria, blurry-eyed, sleep-deprived, here and not there. (Selasi 2013, p. 6)

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This sentence alone moves through a whole variety of scales: the son, in Boston, wonders about the father in Ghana. The hospital setting, on a much smaller scale, connects their respective locations via the father’s death and their shared profession. It thereby constitutes a potent translocal link, through which two local spaces of the same scale (the hospital in Ghana and the hospital in the United States) are connected.14 “Miles and oceans and time zones” (Selasi 2013, p. 6), conversely, suggest the vague presence of the hyperobject of global migration across generations, since those scales are too large to accurately describe and additionally mix units of measurement with topography and time. The emotional distances described in the brackets move from the smaller scale of a limited number of incidents that have caused “heartbreak and anger” (Selasi 2013, p. 6) to “calcified grief” (Selasi 2013, p. 6)—an emotion that consists of accumulated feelings over many years. The generations of “silence and shame” (Selasi 2013, p.  6) then open up a temporal scale that spans several lifetimes. Both the unbracketed and the bracketed emotional sets of scales move from the personal to the universal only to return to the very specific setting of the hospital and thereby to the initial translocal connection, strengthening it in the process. As this example shows quite clearly: the text itself scales. The parallel construction of emotional scales and spatial ones —both complemented by temporal scaling—then underlines the importance of emotion as an amplification of translocal questions of connection, identity and narratability. In her seminal work on affect, body and emotion in the field of cultural politics, Sarah Ahmed suggests that ‘figures of speech’ are crucial to the emotionality of texts. In particular, I examine how different ‘figures’ get stuck together, and how sticking is dependent on past histories of association that often ‘work’ through concealment. The emotionality of texts is one way of describing how texts are ‘moving’, or how they generate effects. (2004, pp. 12–13)

14  In a conversation that also touches Selasi’s coining the controversial term ‘Afropolitan’ and her influential essay “African Literature Doesn’t Exist” (2013), Selasi explains how she lived in a translocal sphere from her early childhood onwards: “That was my world. I’d ride my bike home from school—Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts … unlock the door and go inside … to Lagos—then come out again and ride my bike through Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts until the school year ended and we’d actually go to Lagos. That was my world” (Bady and Selasi 2015, p. 159). Chestnut Hill, an affluent suburb of Boston, is connected to both experiences of Lagos (the Lagos existing within her home in Boston and the actual city) on nearly exactly the same scale in the author’s subjective experience.

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In her analysis of non-fictional texts, Ahmed is particularly interested in metonymy and synecdoche as devices that produce specific emotions about policies, citizenship or nationhood.15 Very similar “histories of association” (Ahmed 2004, p. 13) are at work in translocal novels, which frequently deal with questions of migration, belonging and identity. To take the above-quoted excerpt from Selasi as an example, “generations of father-son silence and shame” (Selasi 2013, p. 6) can be associated with any conflicted father-son relationship, with the rupture migration might cause in a family history or with a son repeating his father’s mistakes, as is the case with Kweku and Olu. Even in the very beginning, when the reader does not yet know much about their relationship, a whole range of associations is triggered by this simple expression. The text here offers the readers the opportunity to add their own scaling to that which the prose has already performed. The ‘concealment’ of what exactly has put a strain on Olu’s and Kweku’s relationship allows for both empathy and imagination to build up, especially since the paternal conflict is already ‘stuck’ to figures of migration, to use Ahmed’s terminology. The emotional scales then stick to the spatial scales to complicate and, at the same time, enforce the translocal bond from hospital to hospital.

Miniatures and Localities in Fury and Open City Rushdie’s novel Fury already carries a powerful emotion in its title. In the novel, protagonist Malik—Mumbai-born and Cambridge-educated like Rushdie himself—flees England for the United States after a sudden outburst of rage prompts an almost insurmountable desire to murder his wife and children in their sleep. Not unlike Maja in The Opposite House and Black in The Virgin of Flames, Malik traces his anger back to a suppressed childhood memory much later in the novel. Read on a personal scale, this suggests that Malik, Maja and Black all had to relive their pain to work through a suppressed trauma in order to come to terms with their present lives. Read on a scale of intercontinental migration, the same storylines can be read in three ways: (1) as making the respective characters’ countries of 15  Ahmed interestingly also uses the concept of imagined hierarchies when she comments on discriminatory and fearmongering language: “The hierarchy between emotion and thought/reason gets displaced, of course, into a hierarchy between emotions: some emotions are ‘elevated’ as signs of cultivation, whilst others remain ‘lower’ as signs of weakness” (2004, p. 3). As is the case with the imagined hierarchies of scales, some are prioritised over others with no reasonable thought process to base the hierarchy on.

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origin places of pain and suffering, (2) as narrating their lives in Western countries as causing the suppression of old emotions or (3) as their lives in the West being the reason they can finally resolve their traumas. All three readings are highly problematic in different ways. Rushdie addresses these perspectives on violence, deprivation and the white saviour myth through a complicated system of mirror images of places and conflicts: In Rushdie’s modernized Swiftian analogy, Lilliput-Blefuscu appears a paradigmatic, and thus abstract or stereotypical, Third World country. Its name bears the trauma of its history of colonial exploration and reminds of its diminutive scale within the larger geopolitical operations of Europe/global capitalism. (Parashkevova 2013, p. 172)

Lilliput-Blefuscu is also the culmination of the many miniatures, models, puppets and dolls that have introduced the theme of scales and scaling from the beginning of the novel, in which we, for example, learn about Little Brain, a time-travelling doll character Malik invented, and which has since taken on a life of its own.16 The most prominent entity at a diminutive scale, which Malik keeps returning to in his mind, is the miniature city at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The shrunk cityscape inspires him to transfer this newfound perspective onto the life-sized city of Amsterdam—much in the way Timothy Clark urges literary scholars to do. The apocalyptic visions clouding both Malik’s impression of the miniature and, much later, LiliputBlefuscu, are already foreshadowed in his initial description of the diminutive city: They were open-fronted, as if bombs had knocked away their facades; or like little theatres, which he completed by being there. He was their fourth wall. He began to see everything in Amsterdam as if miniaturized: his own hotel on the Herengracht, the Anne Frank house, the impossibly good-looking Surinamese women. It was a trick of the mind to see human life made small, reduced to doll size. Young Solanka approved of the results. A little modesty about the scale of human endeavour was to be desired. Once you had thrown that switch in your head, the hard thing was to see in the old way. (Rushdie 2001, p. 15)  With Little Brain and other characters like her, Rushdie also poses questions of how and where scale effects have an impact on the relationship of fiction and reality: “Like Hawkeye or Sherlock Holmes or Jeeves, she had transcended the work that created her, had attained the fiction’s version of freedom. She now endorsed products on television, opened supermarkets, gave after-dinner speeches, emceed gong shows” (Rushdie 2001, p. 97). 16

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Most analyses of Fury consider this device a reflection on Rushdie’s and Malik’s roles as author or ‘puppet master’.17 The change in scales, however, has at least as much to do with settings as with character, narrator and author. In an essay on what he perceives as Rushdie’s realignment with a cosmopolitan centre, Kunow comments on “what happens when a subject position is multiply determined, when somebody does not write from one place but many, from a sequence or series of locations, when somebody is not merely ‘positioned’ but multiply positioned” (2006, p. 369). Kunow bases his observations on Stuart Hall’s ‘positionality’ and James Clifford’s ‘roots and routes’ but seems to neglect the intricacy of the spatial scales at which these concepts apply. The tiny post-apocalyptic city changes Malik’s life and position at least as much as his geographical relocation—in fact, it might have been a slow trigger for the emotion that motivated his moving to New  York. I also believe that while “multiply positioned” (Kunow 2006, p. 369) can be an appropriate formulation, “a sequence or series of locations” (Kunow 2006, p.  369) simplifies the translocal nature of spatial and scalar co-presence. The façade-less and theatre-like miniature city causes Malik to think about the co-presence of different spatial and temporal scales and also about possible untold stories, silences and absences. He notices that the small city lacks inhabitants and subsequently imagines their tiny corpses rotting, hidden in basements or concealed spaces: After he had this idea, the place began to revolt him. He started imagining back rooms in the museum filled with giant heaps of the miniature dead: birds, animals, children, servants, actors, ladies, lords. One day he walked out of the great museum and never went back to Amsterdam again. (Rushdie 2001, p. 16)

After having previously established that once Malik had transposed his way of looking at the miniature onto life-sized Amsterdam, it was difficult to “see it in the old way” (Rushdie 2001, p. 15); the reader will be enticed to 17  In a particularly well-phrased review in The New York Times, Richard Eder captures what most scholarly texts about the novel centre on: “Fury is clearly intended to be its own puppet play; to suggest the relation between artistic creation and creator. Puppets who slip their strings, puppet masters who assume them: Malik and Rushdie, Malik’s dolls and Malik. Rushdie, for that matter, and the West that supports and celebrates his invention of it” (2001, n.p.). Especially in the field of postcolonial studies, a perceived ‘Americanisation’ of Rushdie and the move away from his typical settings in England and Mumbai to New York City are also frequently discussed.

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assume the same of the apocalyptic vision of a tiny city of the dead, especially since it is not just the Rijksmuseum that Malik does not return to; he consequently evades all of Amsterdam. The large, real city is tainted by the small, imaginative copy. An idea or vision can travel through scales. In Fury it seems that negative and destructive emotions and ideas travel scales more quickly than others. The multiplying mirror-worlds and miniatures start decaying through conflict almost as soon as they are created and connected. This fatal touch of Fury’s multiple scales can be read as a nuanced critique of certain tendencies of globalisation: Rushdie is even-handed in his critique of a homogenizing globalism and nationalist, ethnic, or indigenous localist articulations which emerge as a response to it. Globalization and localization appear not so much in tension with each other but as interrelated processes which produce each other as well as oppositional cultural forms and political behaviours. (Parashkevova 2013, p. 176)

Parashkevova is correct in pointing out that Rushdie does not present extreme localisation or even isolation as productive counter-reactions to an increasing presence of the global scale in a local space. In fact, the aim of the novel may well be to show the global and the local as producing each other. In order to come to this conclusion, however, a reading that abstracts from the multiple conflicts that arise in the friction of scales is required. The source of conflict here generally seems to be worlds, narratives and characters outgrowing their scales—becoming hyperobjects to their own universes, in a way. The miniature city only becomes revolting when Malik imaginatively expands its timeline, backstory and boundaries. Little Brain only bothers him when she is anthropomorphised in various ways through a growing franchise. Galileo-1, the planet where Malik’s new online puppet play takes place, erupts into the conflict of Liliput-­ Blefuscu with violent protesters wearing masks of the franchise. By contrast, the already overwhelming setting of New York City seems to take changes in scale, as well as complex interrelations of scales, remarkably well. Rushdie’s depiction of this quintessential global metropolis in fact is quite similar to de Certeau’s vision of New York, in which he describes it as a texturology in which extremes coincide. […] A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. (1984, p. 91)

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By no means would such a view of New  York suggest that the city is a space void of violence or conflict. Both Rushdie and de Certeau seem to see it as a structure that can adapt to sudden ruptures, changes and scale effects without sinking into chaos. New  York City becomes a type of archetypal urban fabric that shows how cityspace behaves at the intersections of scales, of which there are many in metropolises that function as nodes on a global and/or translocal network. Parashkevova sees the city as a place that sustains translocal connections but also assimilates them into commodities or mere parts of itself: On his way to his ‘comfortable Upper West sublet’, serviced by Punjabi construction workers, a Polish cleaner and a German Jewish plumber, Solanka walks the streets of Manhattan, consuming its cosmopolitan display of the cultures of the world, which have been subsumed and transformed by the metropolis into its mere sub-cultures. (2013, p. 158)

While this is true for certain parts of the novel, I believe that the complexity of the cityscape presented in Fury would be reduced by describing it as a megalopolis swallowing up spaces along translocal scales. Fury’s New York City can also be read as the global capital that spreads chaos across the world: “As Malik tells and retells it, the contemporary world, with New York as its Rome, is corrupted by the voracity and hideous waste of America’s hyperthyroid economy” (Eder 2001, n.p.). Considering that the narrative centres of various cities continuously increase in size, this particular version of New York City could just as well be read as capital of the world in the sense that it is not a city but instead a type of everycity. All of these readings are present in the text, but it seems to me that the most astonishing aspect of the narrated cityscape is how easily and quickly it adapts to superhuman scale jumps. This underlines once again the extremely high potential of cities to productively deal with translocality. In Open City, an even more translocal image of New York is created, although the changes in scale at first glance appear to be mainly temporal. Twice in the novel, the city is narrated as a miniature: first in the form of a strange sense of scale switch—not unlike that experienced by Malik— when protagonist Julius first walks through the grand hall of Wall Street Station and then again, later in the novel, when his plane approaches Brooklyn and he remembers a model of the city he had once seen at the Queens Museum of Art. Although no analysis I am aware of pays particular attention to the miniatures as potent devices in the novel, Open City is frequently presented as a prime example of narratives of migration scales,

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the confluence of the urban and the global and the postcolonial or multiply attached flâneur (see, e.g. Hartwiger 2016 or J. Wood 2011). Pieter Vermeulen criticises James Wood’s reading of the novel as one that adapts flânerie in a more globally cosmopolitan fashion when he writes that this reading seems to bring the novel in line with the dialectic figure of the flâneur, as well as with forms of cosmopolitanism that do not require a full-­ scale detachment so much as a dynamic of re-attachment or multiple attachment in which a confidently rooted subject never fatally loses itself. I have been arguing that the novel does not endorse this program. (Vermeulen 2013, p. 52)

As I have critiqued Kunow’s reading of Fury as using the idea of multiple positionality in a reductive fashion, Vermeulen sees this fairly similar diagnosis as overly simplifying in the case of Open City. Vermeulen instead focuses on the ending of the novel, in which Moji reveals that Julius has raped her many years ago and his detached manner suddenly appears sociopathic and eerie. He describes Julius’s compulsive walking and his apparent lack of memory as indicators that Julius is a fugueur and not a flâneur.18 The disassociation from both his environment and his own actions—and the ensuing bleak outlook on cosmopolitanism Vermeulen diagnoses in Cole—appear to be symbolically foreshadowed by the surreal visions of the city as miniature. At Wall Street Station, Julius steps off the train with no obvious intention apart from the fact that nobody else does so and, somewhat ironically, enjoys leaving behind “this assortment of inwardly focused city types” (Cole 2011, p. 45). He is then surprised by what he already suspects to be an optical illusion: a grand European-style hall in lieu of the shabbily functional tunnel system he expected. Getting closer, the ceiling tiles suddenly look like Lego, the pillars seem to be made of plastic and “this feeling of being in a large-scale model” (Cole 2011, p. 46) overtakes Julius’s impression of the place. He observes the people scattered around the hall and “the slowness of their movements […] [does] nothing to correct […] 18  “Open City’s sabotaging of its own aesthetic successes through the use of a fugueur narrator gives an indication as to why the fugue resists literary elaboration. It is no coincidence that the fugueur differs from the flâneur in this respect. Indeed, Hacking makes clear that the fugueur can be considered as a dark counterpart to the flâneur. While the latter was part of an emerging discourse that exalted mobility and tourism as ‘exceptional, admired travel, a heightened form of travel,’ the fugueur’s ‘ambulatory automatism’ served as the shadow side of this new-won mobility.” (Vermeulen 2013, p. 54).

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[his] impression of being among life-size mannequins” (Cole 2011, p. 47). The feeling that the hall is in fact an oversized model peopled by dolls produces a surreal sense of place; the surreal place in turn produces surreal people. The relationship between place and people thus becomes curiously circular. Here, Julius’s outsider position does not trigger, and is not triggered by, a strong emotion. It seems rather, as Vermeulen’s fugue state reading suggests, that in the perceived scale change Julius’s constant dissociation becomes more obvious. The scale effect is a distorting detachment that prevents the protagonist from building any meaningful human connections. This detachment comes with a self-centredness that makes Julius—who constantly gives voice to the unheard histories of the many—always put the small scale of his personal experience of space a little ahead of the larger scale he would otherwise seem to be more interested in. As Lieven Ameel points out in his insightful analysis of the semiotic dimension of the novel: It is important to note Julius’s first impulse when confronted with the signs of radical change. Although he is able to connect these to larger, indeed global, phenomena, his first interest is with how they affect his own personal sphere of experience—his ‘mental landscape’. (2017a, p. 270)

What turns Open City into a vaguely unsettling reading experience then is not just the fugueur’s automatism or Julius’s lack of a reaction to being confronted by his rape victim.19 The novel is made ‘strange’ by lacking an interpersonal scale. The urban scale and the intercontinental scale are overly present; the personal scale is prominent, but a scale that would connect Julius to a local community is all but absent. When Julius interacts with others, he mainly repeats their stories without engaging with them emotionally or socially. Instead, the focus lies mainly on disentangling the interconnections of global and urban scales and “narrating the urban environment in Open City […] [as] a constant semiotic endeavour” (Ameel 2017a, p. 269), in which signs and their interpretation leave little room for emotional engagement. Julius’s obsessive attempts at reading the signs of the city transform urban 19  Rebecca Clark, among others, points to “the fact that it is nearly impossible to surface re-read Open City after this revelation. Moji’s rape temporally and ethically alters the text in a way in which the other episodes that a surface reading of the novel might slot into the same pattern do not” (2018, p. 183): Julius becomes even more strange when one realises that a re-reading of the novel would reveal an utterly different character.

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space into an abstract skyline of ideas. This way of looking at the city is turned into a powerful scaling image when Julius—upon his return from Brussels—looks out of the window of the plane and sees New York sprawling below him like a miniature of itself (cf. Cole 2011, pp.  150–151). Immediately struck by a strong sense of déjà vu, he remembers that he has seen the city in the same way before when he visited the Queens Museum20 (formerly Queens Museum of Art) a year earlier. Interestingly, Julius describes the model as showing “the true form of the city” (Cole 2011, p. 150) as if it were more accurate than the city itself. Where other translocal novels often focus on the urban by means of a synecdochal representation through a particular neighbourhood, Open City aims to narrate the city on a truly urban scale. Since a metropolis like New York is too large to actually be contained in one story, the constant historical excursions, the semiotic and palimpsestic layers and references to scaling are used to overcome this difficulty. Whereas Julius’s first view of the model surprised him by matching the city at every point he compared—although it seems impossible to be able to take in such an enormous entity all at once—this impression is later reversed in his view from the plane: “it was the real city that seemed to be matching, point for point, my memory of the model, which I had stared at for a long time from a ramp in the museum” (Cole 2011, p. 151). The additional information that he looked at the model from an elevated position takes me back to my reflections on bird’s-eye and street-­ level perspectives. Julius looking down from a high viewpoint at the model of the city presents a dual abstraction, two distancing scalings removed from the street-level perception which Julius, on the surface of the narrative, seems to prioritise. An additional jump in scale is added by the ultimate bird’s-eye position the plane offers when compared to the view from a high building or hill. Arguably, even Julius’s street-level perspective adopts aspects of the view from above since the 20  Commissioned to architectural model makers Raymond Lester & Associates on the occasion of the 1964 World Fair, the model is truly meticulous in its level of detail: “Comprising an area of 9335 square feet and built to a scale of 1:1200 where one inch equals 100 feet, the Panorama is a metropolis in miniature. Each of the city’s 895,000 buildings constructed prior to 1992 and every street, park and some 100 bridges are represented and assembled onto 273 individual sections comprising the 320 square miles of New York City. In this miraculously scaled cityscape, the borough of Manhattan measures a seemingly vast 70 × 15 feet and the Empire State Building is a towering 15 inches tall while the Statue of Liberty is only 1–7/8 inches in height. Long Island and New Jersey peek onto the model as black shadowy masses to the east and west” (Queens Museum n.p.).

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sweeping range of knowledge—or at least abundance of factoids—that Julius recalls at a moment’s notice as he aimlessly wanders the city seems to mimic a bird’s-eye view, a privileged perspective that can pan out to see, read, and map the whole, from a subject position of disinterested omniscience (or at least omni-vision). (R. Clark 2018, p. 186)

The “avian bookending” (R. Clark 2018, p. 186) of the novel—the framing images of migratory birds discussed in much detail in almost every analysis of Open City—underlines such a reading.

Between Scales In both examples of miniatures and models in Open City, the real and the model city curiously oscillate, jumping back and forth between scales. This oscillation not only emphasises the urban and global scale—or the lack of an interpersonal one—but also accentuates the boundaries and spaces between scales. In a conversation with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the 2018 Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ali Smith reflected on the relevance of the novel as a tool to understand current cultural and political developments and expressed the thought that “the most powerful place is where the voice meets the border and sees that it is Other” (A.  Smith 2018). This image comes as no surprise, seeing that fields such as border studies have become omnipresent in academia and similarly involved discussions on the true nature, function and raison d’être of the border take place around the globe—with strongly varying results. Although translocality implies at its basis a connection that transcends boundaries, the realities of space (including travel and scalings focused on the crossing of borderlines, such as the ones described in Open City) point to how almost all translocal novels are also concerned with “the transitive boundary as the complex space of navigation. The novels work all the way from the small to the large scale, from intricate matters of identity, to location, to the national and the transnational” (Clingman 2012, p. 26). Where Clingman focuses on navigational spaces in transnational novels, most novels in my translocal corpus deal with the crossing of boundaries as a form of scaling. As opposed to Timothy Clark, who describes scaling as something that needs to be done to the text by readers or scholars, Clingman writes about scalings as a distinguishing quality or power of texts themselves. While I believe that both the text and the reader or scholars can scale, I agree with Clingman insofar that the scalings already inherent in texts are more powerful than those that are merely

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externally imposed. Given the role of borders and boundaries in translocal texts, it is crucial that Clingman additionally marks the boundary as the place where most scalings take place and also as the most central tool novels use to produce scalings. The boundary or border as a confrontation with an Other may not immediately strike one as a jump in scales, but take this example from Rushdie’s Fury: “now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation” (Rushdie 2001, p.  74). Just like when Cole’s Julius replaces the reference point of the ‘real’ city with a model or sees people as life-sized mannequins, dolls and women exchange places, quite literally, in Fury. Malik’s love interests constantly criss-cross the border between their human characters and the dolls resembling them. Unstable boundaries, not unlike the ones in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, are also built into the built urban environment of the novel: “the narrative continuously refers to the cracks in houses and on roads, to crumbling, sloping and landslides. Such references serve, in turn, to challenge the rigidity of borders and communal divisions. All boundaries in the novel are impermanent and slippery” (Parashkevova 2013, p. 46). Such extreme cases of scalings—with a very high frequency of scale changes and unnatural scales—therefore render boundaries unstable and put into question which side of the boundary is other, foreign, artificial or real.

Larger-than-Life Scales These examples of miniature scales also raise another question: We have seen several instances of characters being reduced or reducing themselves to smaller scales. What happens, conversely, when a human being operates at a scale that is larger than life? Zadie Smith tackles this question in her novel Swing Time, which I have introduced in Chap. 4. A first reflection on the relevance of both urban and global scales in the novel, and for Australian pop star Aimee in particular, is introduced when the unnamed protagonist, who is Aimee’s personal assistant, explains that Aimee’s “theory was that a star has New York and LA in their pocket, a star can take Paris and London and Tokyo—but only a superstar takes Cleveland and Bendigo. A superstar takes everybody everywhere” (Z.  Smith 2017, p.  133). The famous metropolises of stardom and showbiz are important, but a global success is marked by reaching less-connected localities, by creating a truly global network of fandom. This superhuman vision Aimee has of herself is replicated all throughout the novel and, in particular, through the protagonist’s

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admiration and envy. In one instance, when the protagonist visits a small African nation to lay the groundwork for a school Aimee wants to build there, she decides to compare the country’s GDP to Aimee’s net worth. To her shock, “in the comparison, as it turned out, Aimee came out a little ahead. And just like that the GDP of an entire country could fit into a single person, like one Russian doll into another” (Z. Smith 2017, p. 181). While the Russian doll simile suggests a neat and linear scaling with no large difference between the scales, the difference in scale between a single person and a country being reduced to nil seems almost perverse. One might argue that with her seemingly superhuman abilities, looks, fame and income, Aimee herself becomes not a doll but a hyperobject that cannot be fully contained on any conventional scale. In any case, “scaling allows for an embodied experience of the complexity of the phenomena at hand” (Bartosch 2015, p. 71)—quite literally in this case.

Conclusion After having presented an increasingly complex and distorted as well as distorting range of scales and scalings in a variety of translocal novels, the relevance of local, urban and intercontinental scales can surely be confirmed, although the global scale also frequently appears as a hardly narratable hyperobject. The scales range from spatial to temporal and emotional and even take into account ‘human’ and ‘other’ scales. In contrasting scales, translocal novels creatively recombine common tropes of urban literature and often refer back to perceived hierarchies of scales only to undermine them. The fuzzy edges of certain scales create confusing confluences that question the nature and relevance of boundaries and borders. While readers and characters are intermittently disoriented by frequent scale changes, which at times can be destructive, the city is an entity that seems to be capable of incorporating an endless number of extreme scalings and scale effects into its fabric without failing or falling apart. As Soja points out, “understanding the postmetropolis requires a creative recombination of micro and macro perspectives, views from above and below, a new critical synthesis that rejects the rigidities of either/or choices for the radical openness of the both/and and also” (2002, p. 190). One reason for this is that the postmetropolis already contains more perspectives, scales and openness than any other space or type of environment. It is one of the few structures that can exist and function under such conditions: the urban fabric possesses the necessary flexibility.

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The city is then the ultimate place to make translocality narratable because it can adapt to all shifts and scalings necessary to connect a large variety of locales. With my broad selection of examples of scalings— encoded in the texts as bird’s eye versus street level, emotional versus dissociative perspectives or miniatures, hyperobjects and distortions occurring along boundaries—I have shown why scalings are particularly relevant for translocal writing and which scales are the most crucial ones in translocal movements. More importantly, my aim was to shed a light on the complex interplay of scales beyond all perceived hierarchies and why the city is the ideal place to reflect and contain them.

Works Cited Corpus

of

32 Main Novels

Bourke, Thomas. 2018. The Consolation of Maps. London: Riverrun. Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2014. We Need New Names. London: Vintage Books. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. New York: Random House. Díaz, Junot. 2008. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. London: Faber and Faber. Lee, Min Jin. 2017. Free Food For Millionaires. London: Head of Zeus. Okojie, Irenosen. 2015. Butterfly Fish. London: Jacaranda. Oyeyemi, Helen. 2007. The Opposite House. London: Bloomsbury. Rushdie, Salman. 2001. Fury. London: Cape. Selasi, Taiye. 2013. Ghana Must Go. New York: Penguin Press. Smith, Zadie. 2017. Swing Time. London: Penguin.

Further References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ameel, Lieven. 2017a. Open City: Reading Signs of Uncertain Times in New York and Brussels. In Mielikuvituksen maailmat / Fantasins världar / Worlds of Imagination, ed. Merja Polvinen, Maria Salenius, and Howard Sklar, 265–283. Turku: Eetos. Bartosch, Roman. 2015. The Climate of Literature: English Studies in the Anthropocene. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 26 (2): 67–80. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clark, Timothy. 2012. Scale. In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, ed. Tom Cohen, 148–166. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Clark, Alex. 2016. Kate Tempest: Let Them Eat Chaos Review—A State-of-the-­ World Address. The Guardian. 9 October. https://www.theguardian.com/

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stage/2016/oct/09/kate-­tempest-­let-­them-­eat-­chaos-­review. Accessed 15 Sep 2018. Clark, Rebecca. 2018. ‘Visible only in speech’: Peripatetic Parasitism, or, Becoming Bedbugs in Open City. Narrative 26 (2): 181–200. Clingman, Stephen. 2012. The Grammar of Identity. Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dissanayake, Wimal. 2006. Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood. In Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations, ed. Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer, 25–44. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Eder, Richard. 2001. The Beast in Me. The New York Times, 9 September. https:// www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/books/the-­beast-­in-­me.html. Accessed 20 Sep 2018. Hartwiger, Alexander Greer. 2016. The Postcolonial Flâneur: Open City and the Urban Palimpsest. Postcolonial Text 11 (1): 1. Klotz, Volker. 1969. Die erzählte Stadt. Ein Sujet als Herausforderung des Romans von Lesage bis Döblin. München: Hanser. Kunow, Rüdiger. 2006. Architect of the Cosmopolitan Dream: Salman Rushdie. Amerikastudien / American Studies 51 (3): 369–385. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The Technology Press & Harvard University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Parashkevova, Vassilena. 2013. Salman Rushdie’s Cities. Reconfigurational Politics and the Contemporary Urban Imagination. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sassen, Saskia. 2001a. Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization. In Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 260–278. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Ali. 2018. Ali Smith with Nicola Sturgeon, Edinburgh International Book Festival, 20 August. Soja, Edward W. 2000. Postmetropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002. Six Discourses in Postmetropolis. In The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 188–196. Oxford: Blackwell. Veland, Siri, and Amanda H. Lynch. 2016. Scaling the Anthropocene: How the Stories We Tell Matter. Geoforum 72: 1–5. Vermeulen, Pieter. 2013. Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism. Journal of Modern Literature 37 (1): 40–57. Wood, James. 2011. The Arrival of Enigmas. The New  Yorker, 28 February. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/28/the-­a rrival-­o f-­ enigmas. Accessed 25 Oct 2018. Wood, Denis, John Fels, and John Krygier. 2010. Rethinking The Power Of Maps. New York and London: Guilford Press.

CHAPTER 6

Silence, Absence and Non-Place

Utopia, atopia, gap, non-place—places that are not places—hold an enduring fascination in the humanities. Especially in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries, numerous theories have ‘unplaced’ place. Although what is generally thought of as the spatial turn has also led many scholars to properly ‘place’ place, this paradigm shift was equally productive with regard to placeless spaces. While there are therefore countless different conceptions of such un-, no-, a- or non-places, two forms of places that are not places are particularly relevant to translocality: those created by an excess of connections and those constituted by a lack of connection. For Foucault, for example, “the nonplace is first and foremost the vacancy or blank left gaping at the heart of modern anthropologism with the announced ‘death of man’” (Bosteels 2003, p. 120). Although Marc Augé, the figure most prominently associated with the idea of non-place, only briefly references Foucault, the zeitgeist Augé gives voice to in Non-­ places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992)1 is deeply rooted in (particularly French) theory. Tracing the origins of the non-­ place, Bosteels draws connections to cognate thoughts in the works of Foucault, Derrida, Badiou and Jacques-Alain Miller—in addition to the scholar Augé himself references directly: Michel de Certeau. As Peter 1  Augé’s monograph was originally published in French in 1992 with the title Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_6

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Merriman points out, Augé’s thoughts are equally entangled in spatial and urban theory: his narrative of speeding-up, shrinkage, increasing mobility, connectivity, disembedding and changing conceptions of time, space and individuality echoes the observations of other writers on the economics, sociologies, politics or geographies of globalization, capitalism, modernity, postmodernity, nomadism, the global media and other related concerns (see e.g. Harvey, 1989; Giddens, 1990; Jameson, 1991; Benko, 1997; Castells, 2000; cf. Thrift, 1995). (2016, p. 148, original references)2

With his brief and compelling volume, Augé seems to have hit the mark several schools of thought had been working towards. His ever-present mantra constitutes the non-place as a space that is not relational, historical or constitutive of identity, which subsequently defines a place as an entity that fulfils all three criteria: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which can-not be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (Augé 1995, pp. 76–77).3 Of course, it is not quite as simple as that. If we take Augé’s equally notorious example of the airport—non-place for traveller, place for airport employee—it becomes obvious that “place and non-place are always relational, contingent and continually folded into one another, but academics tend to overlook Augé’s statements on the rewriting and relationality of these spaces when they point to the proliferation of non-places in the contemporary world” (Merriman 2016, p. 149). This tendency to take the non-place as simply a space entirely devoid of human connection or to uncritically claim that just any transit space is a non-place is surprisingly prevalent. In a study on places of transit in German literature, Lars Wilhelmer equally criticises an unreflected, absolutist usage of Augé’s terminology. He points out how, in fact, the place and the non-place are 2  Merriman’s references here also already hint at the interconnections between non-place, urbanity and translocality. David Harvey’s work on global capitalism and the city, Fredric Jameson’s perspective on modes of literary production, Manuel Castells’ space of flows and Nigel Thrift’s insights into human geography and cultural transformations all informed my preliminary considerations on the subject of urbanity and translocality. 3  The original text reads: “Si un lieu peut se définir comme identitaire, relationnel et historique, un espace qui ne peut se définir ni comme identitaire, ni comme relationnel, ni comme historique définira un non-lieu” (Augé 1992, p. 100).

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always—to a degree—present in one another (cf. Wilhelmer 2015, p. 33). In other words, there is still placeness to be found in a non-place. To expand on the aforementioned typical example, airports are non-places if we think about them as spaces that countless travellers pass through without ever arriving in them or forming bonds with them. They are fairly similar all over the world and if you have a three-hour layover in Abu Dhabi, you would most likely not claim to have been to Abu Dhabi or feel that you have a reliable idea of what Abu Dhabi is like. To you, Abu Dhabi International Airport is a non-place. If, however, you were a security guard, employed at the same airport since its inauguration in 1982 and with a large part of your social network, livelihood and everyday routines being constituted by, through and at Abu Dhabi International Airport, it would very much be a place. Additionally, many places of transit with high theoretical ‘non-place potential’ do not match Augé’s three main criteria. To claim, for example, that Grand Central Station in Manhattan, a major transport hub for a vast metropolitan area, was ahistorical, not relational or had nothing to do with the identities of New York and New Yorkers would simply be incorrect. Wilhelmer’s reflections on Augé further distinguish his non-places from those of de Certeau by explaining how in the latter’s view almost any place could potentially become a non-place (cf. Wilhelmer 2015, p. 40), whereas Augé focuses more on the specific structure of non-places, which “can be described as a transitory network of places” (Wilhelmer 2015, p. 43, my translation).4 This of course connects productively to translocal places which, due to their linkages through space, are also network-like structures. In fact, translocal places are different from other places precisely because of the strong and numerous linkages that connect them to distant locations. This network-like structure, however, connects specific and clearly narratable locations. In contrast to this, non-places become unusual because they are transitively linked with so many different places that those linked places become indiscernible as individual locations. One example of this effect would be international business hotel chains (the word ‘chain’ already implying the linkages) that are so similar all across the globe, one could wake up in a hotel room and not be certain whether it was located in Tokyo, Cape Town or Seattle. Even the food, physical layout and 4  In the German original, Wilhelmer explains: “damit bezieht sich Augé stärker als de Certeau auf die Struktur der Nicht-Orte, die sich als transitorisches Netzwerk von Orten beschreiben lässt” (Wilhelmer 2015, p. 43).

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training of the members of staff are generally so similar in such environments that they become non-places by being part of a network. Although this is evidently not the same as the very subjective notions of translocality discussed thus far, it is a related phenomenon: both translocal places and non-places are defined by their connections to other places, although the nature of these connections is then quite different. At times, translocal places and non-places even overlap, connect or distort each other. In this chapter, I will therefore explore ways in which translocal spaces can become non-places or vice versa and trace how narratives make use of the tensions and similarities between non-place and translocal place. Another similarity between non-places and translocal places is that they are commonly thought of as ‘new’ types of places. As I have previously argued, it is not true that translocality is an entirely new phenomenon; what is new is the extreme density and acceleration of translocal processes. Density and acceleration are typical features of translocal and urban space5 and are also the basis for Augé’s surmodernité or supermodernity as an age of hyper-acceleration. Merriman’s judgement that Augé “overstates the novelty and difference of contemporary experiences of these spaces” (2016, p. 147) still seems a bit harsh. Just like translocal places, non-places did not appear in the world quite as suddenly as some scholars would have us believe but there is, in my view, still quite a bit of novelty in the diffusion of both types of places—both in the world and in theory. Merriman also criticises what he perceives as Augé’s disregard for the heterogeneity and materiality of the environments and networks he describes. Although I would argue that Augé does not neglect these factors entirely, they are surely not at the centre of his thinking. If one were to infuse the global, transitory, network-like structure of the non-place with all the heterogeneous and material social linkages entangled in the stories of the people passing through them, this would create spaces that would resemble translocal places much more than non-places. Although this is not what Merriman asks us to do, it is an interesting line of thought to follow: if this particular ‘blank’ in the non-place was filled in, the non-­ place could become a translocal place.

5  Mike Crang, as just one of a multitude of scholars, writes poignantly that “the popular account of metropolitan life is one of increasing pace” (2001, p. 188) and also refers back to “Simmel and Tönnies, whose accounts of dense urban life were written in terms of overload, speed up and the bombardment of increasingly isolated individuals by signs and information” (Crang 2001, p. 189).

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Whether Augé exaggerates this blank or not, non-places are clearly created by a lack or an absence. They are defined by and criticised for what they are not. That same lack or absence, however, is in fact the result of an abundance of potential connections. At an airport, for example, so many people and places could potentially form bonds that, in order to remain functional, all people and places are turned anonymous—both by structures inherent to the space itself, such as uniform layouts and numbered gates, and by the people moving through it, who need to block out most of the potential connections in order to not be overwhelmed. The strange tension between lack and abundance is not only due to the network-like structure of the non-place but also relates to the scale at which non-places function. In Augé’s sense at least, the sum of all non-places of one type forms a global phenomenon that fits Morton’s criteria for hyperobjects, discussed in detail in Chap. 5. One of the main characteristics of hyperobjects is that they are what Morton terms ‘nonlocal’. He explains that “because they so massively outscale us, hyperobjects have magnified this weirdness of things for our inspection: things are themselves, but we can’t point to them directly” (2013, p.  12).6 Similarly, we cannot point at a business hotel and call it a non-place. It is the much larger entity of the chain, tied to acceleration, globalisation and ‘supermodernity’, that turns the hotel into one part of a massive non-place network. Although this non-place network might be too large to point to or perceive it as a whole, it is important to point out that Augé’s non-places are always actual places. They exist both in the mind and in the physical world. In this sense, they are the opposite of the utopia: “The non-place is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society” (Augé 1995, pp. 111–112).7 Not to be confused with dystopias either, non-places exist in the world but shelter or house, the better translations in my view, no organic society. They only briefly contain disjointed agglomerations of people that hardly even communicate with each other. Still, the non-places as well as the people moving through them can be studied in theory but also in practice, through their stories as well as through observable behaviours and patterns. This consideration of the ‘real’ physical place is then 6  Morton, in fact, takes the idea even further: “When I think nonlocality in this way, I am not negating the specificity of things, evaporating them into the abstract mist of the general or the larger or the less local. Nonlocality is far weirder than that. When it comes to hyperobjects, nonlocality means that the general itself is compromised by the particular” (Morton 2013, p. 54). 7  Augé’s original text reads: “Le non-lieu est le contraire de l’utopie: il existe et il n’abrite aucune société organique” (1992, p. 140).

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another parallel to how translocal texts treat narrated cities and their realworld counterparts. Augé, of course, is also very much aware of the relevance of boundaries and borderlines in any type of space.8 In both an inward and an outward movement, borders and the spaces they contain constitute and defend group identity. A world composed entirely of non-places then would be borderless but also devoid of identity. This being only one of the many reasons a world of non-places is also necessarily an impossible world; such ideas seem to nevertheless be conceived as the lingering threat behind globalisation, translocality or glocality: Some people would have us believe that the local and the global are totally interactive, so that now all of us are glocal. […] The term casts a veil over the fact that the relation between the local and the global is a process full of breaks, interruptions and unsolved conflicts evolving when borders are moving in yet unknown directions. (Larsen 2017, p. 23, italics original)

So-called glocal places are not non-places; non-places simply mark some of the breaks, gaps and borders between global and local spheres, places, spaces and scales. This then is the reason why non-places take on such varied forms in translocal writing. We firstly find non-places in the sense of Augé, but also redescriptions of typical non-places that put an emphasis on their placeness. Secondly, non-places in translocal novels are depicted both as containing too many and too few connections. Lastly, the idea of the non-place 8  Augé explains that “it is hardly surprising that the terms of this discourse should tend to be spatial, once it has become clear that it is the spatial arrangements that express the group’s identity (its actual origins are often diverse, but the group is established, assembled and united by the identity of the place), and that the group has to defend against external and internal threats to ensure that the language of identity retains a meaning” (1995, p. 45). The French text reads: “Le dispositif spatial est à la fois ce qui exprime l’identité du groupe (les origines du groupe sont souvent diverses, mais c’est l’identité du lieu qui le fonde, le rassemble et l’unit) et ce que le groupe doit défendre contre les menaces externes et internes” (1992, p. 60). Augé explains that “it is hardly surprising that the terms of this discourse should tend to be spatial, once it has become clear that it is the spatial arrangements that express the group’s identity (its actual origins are often diverse, but the group is established, assembled and united by the identity of the place), and that the group has to defend against external and internal threats to ensure that the language of identity retains a meaning” (1995, p. 45). The French text reads: “Le dispositif spatial est à la fois ce qui exprime l’identité du groupe (les origines du groupe sont souvent diverses, mais c’est l’identité du lieu qui le fonde, le rassemble et l’unit) et ce que le groupe doit défendre contre les menaces externes et internes” (1992, p. 60).

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is iterated in terms of both time and space by creating a chiasmic link to absence and silence. The following section of this chapter will successively explore all three of these fields of tension by providing sets of examples from translocal novels for each one.

Non-Places with Different Degrees of Placeness While the most typical example of a non-place—the airport—figures prominently in several of the novels in my corpus, the translocally narrated airport tends to be presented with an almost exaggerated degree of placeness. A narrated space that actually fits Augé’s definition of the non-place is instead the supermarket in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician. In my previous analyses of mappings, translocal urban palimpsests and suspected simultaneity in the novel, I have focused on only two of the three main characters; the reason for this being that the third character, the Maestro, produces a surreal sense of place in his parts of the narrative. As his story progresses, the Maestro falls deeper and deeper into a severe depression and depicts his surroundings in a manner so detached, one can only trace a distorted sense of place or space. He dissociates from himself and the world around him, reading frantically to enter the thoughts and worlds of others and finally rids himself of all of his material possessions to live in a city park and die in the cold in front of his only friend’s house.9 Before this breakdown, he leads an unsatisfied but basically functional life mainly structured by his workday at Tesco, a British multinational retailer that counts among the largest in the world. He describes his impression of the supermarket as “twenty-four hours of reality TV with a cast and an audience that didn’t even know they were taking part in an act in the ultimate playhouse, a performance replicated in every city and town” (Huchu 2015, p. 41). The supermarket seems unreal (or even fake) and hyperreal at the same time, being likened to a media event reminiscent of The Truman Show. At the same time, shopping at a large 9  This entire episode also alludes to one of the most celebrated city texts in recent decades: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. As I have explained elsewhere: “The distinct voice of each narrator [in Huchu’s novel] is underlined by a large variety of intertexts, such as Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes, Demons (1872) by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Moon Palace (1989) by Paul Auster. For example, like Marco, the protagonist of Auster’s novel, Huchu’s Maestro starts living in his city’s park, first idealising the experience as transcendentalist and thoreauesque, before the changing weather becomes (nearly) fatal. Both are found by their love interests in a hallucinatory and desperate state” (Mattheis 2016a, n.p.).

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international chain supermarket is presented as one of the most basic and mundane shared human experiences. What could be more real than a trip to Tesco, the text seems to ask. By likening this action to a meticulously scripted performance that is constantly repeated all around the world, the supermarket gains an eerie stability and uniformity through time and space, consequently turning it into a non-place. The shop’s inherent conformity, not just with other Tesco branches but with Walmart or Aldi shops all over the world, adds to the sense of a lack of local identity, relationality and history. The Maestro further suggests a temporal distortion that quickens time outside of the shop while retarding it endlessly inside: “That’s what this place did to the fourth dimension; outside of it time rushed by too quickly, but inside it was dilated by some sort of Tardis effect” (Huchu 2015, p.  43).10 This observation, likening the shop to a spaceship, first of all points to how unusual of a place the supermarket is for the Maestro and secondly attributes this abnormality to a lack of time, meaning here that a ‘portion’ of time appears to be missing from it. This approximation of timelessness may be equated with ahistoricity when taking into account the Maestro’s previous observation. Although this collocation is not unusual, opting to describe time as “dilated” (Huchu 2015, p. 43) rather than ‘slowed’ transfers this lack of time onto the dimension of space. A vacuum is created that affects each person and action existing and moving inside of it. The way in which I am arguing here, following the Tardis image Huchu provides, presupposes a certain separation of time and space. Although a number of scholars working in the wake of the spatial turn have adopted the notion that no clear-cut separation exists here, a certain degree of division between time and space is generally still assumed. Doreen Massey has produced some of the most seminal theoretical work that insists on thinking time and space as fused. In a brief but very insightful essay written in the context of a festschrift for Stuart Hall, Massey explains how when she and Hall commuted to work together, they would not simply return to the same London in the evening, but instead arrive at a London that they first had to catch up with: “we can no more go back

10  The TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space) is Doctor Who’s famous spaceship in the guise of a British police box. In the cult series, the space ship frequently has a mind of its own and distorts not only time but also space as it has “a larger capacity than its outward appearance suggests” (Tardis, n.: Oxford English Dictionary)—it is bigger on the inside.

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in space, return to whence we came, than we are able to go back in time” (2000, p. 225). She expands this notion to reflect on current tales of ‘globalization’ [that] evoke images of capital’s virtually frictionless movement, across a ‘space’ which has been frozen, smoothed over and de-historicized: a passive surface before the unstoppable dynamism of modern capitalism. Again, we rob others of a history, their stabilization providing the solid ground for our own story. (2000, p. 231)

It is exactly this ‘tale’ that the Maestro picks up on in his description of the supermarket as non-place: space is a smooth surface that can be copied, stripped of its inherent and moving temporal trajectories, all by means of global capital. Even the presentation of the Maestro’s chapters as stream-­ of-­consciousness-like blocks of text, without any paragraphs or any other structuring devices visible in the mise en page, reflects this smoothness of the timeless, or at least time-poor, non-place. Of course, not all places in translocal novels are non-places (or, for that matter, translocal). Places, translocal linkages and non-places exist side by side, but can also be layered, combined or contrasted. Not all non-places in translocal novels, therefore, exhibit all typical features of Augé’s non-­ place. Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand (2008), a novel set in Britain and Nigeria, revolves around and constantly returns to an all-inclusive holiday a British couple takes in the Niger Delta. This trip is located at the heart of the novel, constantly alluded to but never fully explained in the first half of the novel, frequently invoked and referred back to in the last part. It gains its significance by deeply affecting the British couple and the lives of two Nigerian sisters by effectively ending the lives of one of the sisters and of the husband. While Sarah and her husband are enjoying a beach vacation, Little Bee and her sister are chased by the men who wiped out their entire village and now want to kill them too. When the two groups meet on the beach, Sarah sacrifices a finger in order to save Little Bee’s life but cannot save her sister. Sarah’s husband later commits suicide after receiving a phone call from Little Bee who has arrived in England as a stow-­ away. Sarah and Little Bee subsequently enter a close relationship in the course of which Little Bee is eventually deported and accompanied back to Nigeria by Sarah and her young son. In contrast to these dramatic and traumatic events, the decision to go on a beach holiday in the Niger Delta is repeatedly described as ignorant and mundane. Sarah’s wish to go on an unusual holiday with an instagrammable beach is at least as commonplace

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for the 2010s as chain hotels are. Sarah describes sorting through an entire selection of similar vacation packages (cf. Cleave 2008, p. 142) before settling on Nigeria: “Out fell two open-ended airline tickets and a hotel reservation. It was as simple as turning up at the airport with a bikini” (Cleave 2008, p. 142). Sarah is not just behaving in an ignorant manner; her environment seems to push her to remain that way. While Little Bee has lived through immense struggles to end up on the beach, Sarah and her husband even have a guard who attempts several times to keep them safe and to remove them from the situation, back to the secure non-place of the generic hotel complex. Had they not insisted on disregarding his advice, they would have had the same all-inclusive holiday they could have enjoyed anywhere else in the world. The hotel, plane, airport, bikini and ocean seem so interchangeable to them that Sarah’s husband even attempts to use a standard response to a situation he does not understand by claiming he is one of the few tourists who know how local spaces and behaviours function: “‘This is fuckin’ bullshit. This is a classic Nigeria scam. Come on, we’re going back to the hotel’” (Cleave 2008, p. 152). This tension between the pretence to have insider knowledge about this specific situation in this specific country and the generalisations that actually produce these assumptions is clearly identified by the narrator with bitter sarcasm through a repeated reference to the unpractical bikini being all one needs for a beach holiday. It resembles “the idiosyncratic oscillation between structural confirmation and dissolution that marks the transit place significantly” (Wilhelmer 2015, 38, my translation).11 Just as travel destinations seem interchangeable to Sarah, her husband is clearly presented as a person who would make the same statement about a supposed Vietnamese, Namibian or Peruvian scam. Even in their quest for an interesting and adventurous holiday, the couple follows such typical structures that the trip they planned had a large potential to mainly take place in non-places. The beach is only transformed into a distinct historical, relational and identityrelated place for the couple by the violent events taking place on it. In his analysis of Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, John Masterson captures exactly this tension inherent in a generic place that is presented as having potential to become either place or non-place for the respective characters. Masterson also brings in the elements of class, race and 11  The German original text reads as follows: “das eigenwillige Changieren zwischen struktureller Bestätigung und Auflösung kennzeichnet den Transit-Ort maßgeblich” (Wilhelmer 2015, p. 38).

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locational privilege that Cleave too paints a painfully sharp picture of. To understand how these become significant in the setting of the airport, Masterson focuses his reading on the image of infection and contagion Desai creates when she describes, for example, Indian families as “squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps” (Desai 2006, p. 285): The airport, like the hotel, might seem a shiny monument to the glories of globalization when seen through the Gucci-bespectacled eye. Take the designer shades off for a slightly closer look, however, and it becomes clear that the arrangement of, and activities taking place within, such structures distil those dominant power relations existing beyond their air-conditioned shells. Accordingly, when considering those discourses surrounding the contagion-carrying ‘alien’ touched on above, Desai’s ‘big bacterial clumps’ image is multiply significant. The idea that Euro-American travellers must be inoculated from these globalized ‘others’, rather than mingle with them, is literally and figuratively realized in the building’s spatial design. (2006, pp. 420–421)

Where the privileged passengers perceive a sterile non-place, the “globalized ‘others’” (Masterson 2010, p. 421) contaminate that same space (or their part of it) with placeness—in keeping with a power structure that is clearly visible to them. The built environment,12 its materiality and the conditioned behaviours contribute to the dual nature of Desai’s airport as both non-place and place. Where Cleave depicts how a non-place suddenly becomes a place, transformed by a violent and far-reaching event, Desai reveals how both versions of the same space exist side by side or even at the very same location. By closely associating privileged and Western travellers with the non-place side of the airport, they start to become ‘non-­ humans’ in the eyes of the ‘others’: it was a long trek to where the European-North American travellers came and went, making those brisk no-nonsense flights with extra leg room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans

12  Masterson quotes a lengthy passage to make his point about the built environment. The division that creates the ambiguity of Desai’s airports becomes most overt in her depiction of London’s Heathrow airport: “The first stop was Heathrow and they crawled out at the far end that hadn’t been renovated for the new days of globalization but lingered back in the old age of colonization” (Desai 2006, p. 285).

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at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named The Milano. (Desai 2006, p. 285)

The Western travellers have no emotions, no bodily functions, standardised appearances and even a uniform lunch—ironically named after a famous place—meaning that like the non-places they frequent they have no history, identity or relation. The other passengers, however, emphasise the placeness of the airport by the same means by which the “European-North American travellers” (Desai 2006, p. 285) turn it into a non-place: through their habits, their appearance, their emotions and bodily functions. Desai describes the pungent odours of old sweat from journeys lasting several days, the home-­ cooked meals in plastic containers, the crumpled clothes and celebratory mood in her characteristically sensuous prose but she begins the chapter by explaining how all the ways in which this airport experience differs from a Western one are exactly the factors that produce a comfortable sense of place: Like a failing bus laboring through the sky, the Gulf Air plane seemed barely to be managing, though most of the passengers felt immediately comfortable with this lack of oomph. Oh yes, they were going home, knees cramped, ceiling level at their heads, sweat-gluey, fate-resigned, but happy. (Desai 2006, p. 285, italics original)

Non-place and place do not only exist side by side but are results of the same types of processes and shifts in spatial experience. For Biju, the person whose journey home to Kalimpong from the United States is described in these passages, the familiar scents, cramped conditions and heat on the numerous planes he needs to take appear to make him feel more at home than his actual arrival in Kalimpong where many things have changed. Non-place and a strong sense of location are therefore not opposite but coexisting conditions. In her reflections on the diaspora space, Avtar Brah observes a very similar dynamic: The concepts of border and diaspora together reference the theme of location. This point warrants emphasis because the very strong association of notions of diaspora with displacement and dislocation means that the experience of location can easily dissolve out of focus. (2002a, p.  180, italics original)

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The airport as a point, where many borders and potential crossings meet, is a place so frequently used as an exemplary non-place that it is equally important to remember to think its locational properties as well. In her short chapter about a succession of airports, Desai manages to present the reader with both the locatedness and dislocation of the diaspora space— associated in the example above with the sense of home that already greets Indian passengers in an old part of Heathrow airport. Most translocal novels depict such ambiguities and in-between spaces alongside non-places and in fact subvert the established notion of the airport as non-place by writing about it as a significant place. In translocal novels, the airport therefore frequently functions as a backdrop for life-­ changing decisions, the first point of contact with a significant person, family or culture or as an environment people take over and make their own. The subversion of the well-established narrative of the airport as non-place emphasises the significance and narratability of the airport as a translocal setting. One example of the airport as a setting with an abundance of placeness is to be found in Olumide Popoola’s When We Speak of Nothing (2017), when the young transgender protagonist Karl travels from London to Port Harcourt in Nigeria to meet his father for the first time. Although he has been instructed by his Nigerian uncle on what to expect from the airport, the climate and the manners, his arrival overwhelms him immediately. As soon as he exits the plane, the airport is nothing like a non-place but is instead foreign and specific, bordering on hostile, in any way imaginable: “Karl was heading into the gooey air Uncle T had warned him about. The seasons. Different to the UK. Even the rain” (Popoola 2017, p. 56). Wishing he could call his friend Abu, whose storyline taking place during the 2011 London Riots is interwoven with Karl’s trip to Nigeria, Karl attempts to come to terms with the new location and find familiar structures. He quickly fails and needs his uncle to tell him where to queue. Subsequently left by himself for a few minutes, he grows more and more nervous due to his inability to read and correctly interpret the behaviour of the security guards who seem to take issue with his passport. The reader is equally disoriented since Karl’s transgender identity and the fact that his passport still carries a female gender marker have not yet been revealed. Karl’s impression of the airport is then described as a deluge of novelty: “It was hard enough to stay level with this much newness. The sounds, the smells, the colourful outfits interspersed with sports and business wear. He felt lost” (Popoola 2017, p. 58). The airport becomes a translocal place

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where the clash between Karl’s London perspective and a place he will soon feel at home in produces a dual sense of place and puts an emphasis on the ways in which Karl himself often feels ‘in-between’ identity categories. With all its discomforts and unfamiliarity, the airport appears to mirror quite clearly Karl’s state of mind, relationships and identity.13

Overabundance or Lack of Connections Having thus provided, as it were, a spectrum of degrees of placeness in translocal non-places—from ideal-typical non-place devoid of placeness, to ambiguous non-places, to typical settings for non-places with a nonetheless high degree of placeness, or low to high degrees of placeness—this section will focus on the density of connections found in translocal non-­ places. According to Augé’s definition, non-places are created by an overabundance of global and translocal connections which can, however, result in a lack of local connections. That same dynamic of ‘too much’ resulting in ‘too little’ can be found in any account of metropolitan life, most notably in Simmel’s conception of the ‘blasé attitude’ (cf. Simmel 2004, p. 14), which a city dweller needs to develop in order to not be overwhelmed by the continuous onrush of sense impressions that characterise the city (cf. also Lynch 1960 or Crang 2001). In the above example from Popoola’s novel, Karl has the proper blasé attitude for his busy and conflicted London life but lacks one that would aid him in navigating a crowded, loud and colourful Nigerian airport. In 1903 already, Simmel laid the foundation for theories regarding both this type of translocal experience and for the non-place by observing the simultaneous and correlative overstimulation and apathy inherent in the cosmopolitan and urban experience: On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities. (Simmel 2004, p. 19)

13  In Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, the Magistrate only fully develops his strong place attachment to Edinburgh at the airport, drawing a map while waiting for a flight to London. For a detailed discussion of this episode, see Chap. 4.

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This same tension between excessive connection and stimulation and an extreme disconnect, associated with uniformity, is explored in translocal non-places. In order to first shed light on the pole of disconnection and apathy, I will briefly return to Huchu’s Maestro. His death, following an episode of extreme social isolation, is reflected on by Farai (the Mathematician), who has never met the Maestro but agrees to accompany his flatmate to the Maestro’s funeral. Driving from the first part of the funeral to the second, Farai ponders possible intersections between his life and that of the dead white Zimbabwean: He imagines that maybe the dead guy used to travel on this same route, that they are crossing time streams, but he doesn’t even know what the guy looked like. He could have been any one of a million white guys in the city. Because that’s what cities do, they make people anonymous. (Huchu 2015, p. 274)

While potential connections are alluded to with the reference to travelling on the same path and “crossing time streams”,14 Farai ultimately paints a picture of a cityscape filled with anonymous blank faces. For Farai, this dearth of connection only becomes noteworthy because he and the deceased have both migrated from the same country: Zimbabwe. The urban non-connection becomes a translocal disconnect. Although Farai initially identifies the Maestro’s whiteness as the main source of the disconnect, driving through the Maestro’s neighbourhood—the high-rises of Calder Park in Edinburgh—appears to help him identify with the deceased. Neither Edinburgh nor Zimbabwe are here described as non-places, but the effect of the tensions between them in combination with Farai’s view of urbanity (reminiscent of Simmel) has a similar effect: erasing or masking identity, relation and history. In Swing Time, the nameless protagonist confronts the reader with a socio-economically and narratologically different kind of translocal disconnect. When the protagonist first enters Australian pop star Aimee’s house in London, she describes it as follows:

14  It is also noteworthy that Huchu here effectively applies Doreen Massey’s reflections on how time and space are deeply intertwined.

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The walls were hung with many dark Victorian oils, portraits of the gentry in front of their grand houses, but there was nothing from her own century, and nothing recognizably Australian, nothing personal. This was meant to be Aimee’s London home and yet it didn’t have a thing to do with her. (Z. Smith 2017, p. 103)

In the protagonist’s eyes, neither the time nor the place which Aimee’s home reference appears to ‘match’ her. Since the story is focalised solely through the protagonist, one can only guess in how far and why Aimee does feel at home in her London house. It is clearly suggested throughout the entire novel that the narrator’s perspective is coloured, or even skewed, by envy and a certain condescension of Aimee’s attitude towards new places, which the protagonist reads as naiveté. This belittling point of view only emphasises the narrow-mindedness that drives the protagonist to assume Aimee would need things from her home country or from her formative years in order to connect to a place. What the protagonist perceives is a type of non-place: an environment created by decorators and geared towards the general global and timeless taste of the rich and famous. Aimee’s home decor is therefore presented as evidence of her lack of place attachment. As one of the few theorists who distinguish between different kinds of non-attachment, David Hummon devotes three of the five categories of attachment he develops to a lack of attachment.15 Maria Lewicka frequently employs his typology and sums it up as attitudes toward places that implied a lack of place attachment. ‘Place alienation’ was associated with dislike for the place and estrangement from it, ‘place relativity’—with an ambivalent and conditionally accepting attitude toward the residence place and finally, ‘placelessness’ meant place indifference and no need to create emotional bonds with places. (2011, p. 677)

In this article about her empirical study on the issue (conducted in Poland, as opposed to Hummon’s American survey), Lewicka points out that place relativity and placelessness are at times difficult to distinguish, which is why I believe both of them are suitable to describe the type of non-­ attachment fostered by non-places. What Lewicka terms “emotional 15  This typology of attachments is Hummon’s contribution to Altman’s and Low’s fundamental collection of essays on place attachment from 1992. An updated collection on the advances of the research on place attachment, edited by Catherine Lynne Manzo, was published in 2014.

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bonds with places” is roughly equivalent to what I describe as connections. Accordingly, the narrator sees Aimee’s home as placeless because it seems unconnected to her translocal lifestyle. From an entirely different perspective, one could see the house as evidence of a deep attachment since Aimee not only wishes to live part of her life in London but also furnishes her home to reflect the history and identity of the place she chooses to dwell in. A third interpretation, or rather a layer of both previous interpretations, would be that a life consisting of jet-setting around the globe presupposes a degree of place relativity. Lastly, it might in fact be her strong attachment to her hometown in Australia that allows her to lead a less ‘rooted’ life. As I have stressed many times, translocality does not equal place relativity. Nonetheless, this fallacy can be found in much theory on transnationalism and globalisation. This might just be one of the reasons why non-attachment and the non-place are such frequently used devices in current translocal writing: to address faulty assumptions and turn established notions on their heads. The narrative situations in both Swing Time and The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician clearly support such a reading as they are presented as extremely subjective and not entirely reliable. Characters are assessed from the outside as placeless or place-­ relative actants. This assessment is projected onto the spaces they occupy, which are thereby designated as non-places by the focalising character. To provide an example of a text that uses, by contrast, a self-assessment of a character’s (non-)attachment and to also move to the notion of too many connections creating a non-place, I will briefly return to The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani. I have already discussed the novel’s usage of palimpsestuous street art in some detail and will now focus on a passage that reveals how this extremely urban text depicts place attachment in more general terms. Just before the following excerpt, protagonist Black needs to step out of The Ugly Store where he had attended a concert that left him overwhelmed with emotion. He seeks refuge in the anonymity of a busy East LA street, the description of the crowded urban space nicely contrasting with the Mathematician’s evaluation of the Maestro’s non-­ attachment in Huchu’s novel: In the busy artery of the street, he felt there was no way to hide, and no need. The city had swallowed him up. It would shelter him from harm. Just then a police car passed and he stepped back into the shadow of The Ugly Store’s door. The tall grass covers the antelope, he thought (remembering

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an old proverb that Bomboy had told him), but the hunter’s bullet still finds him. (Abani 2007, p. 254)

Black uses a body metaphor to describe the sheltering city—another parallel to Brand’s What We All Long For. The street is a “busy artery” transporting drivers away from the heart of the city—thereby suggesting place relativity or non-attachment in the busy crowd of commuters. Black is overwhelmed, “swallowed […] up” by the masses and abundance of potential connections, but unlike the Maestro, he does not vanish. What might be a transit-heavy non-place for others—a space turned into a blank by anonymous masses—Black perceives as a comforting shelter. The element of threat is only introduced when he remembers a proverb his friend Bomboy likes to use. Bomboy frequently questions and attacks Black’s fluid identity, claiming that his paternal Igbo heritage means he is an ‘African man’ and nothing else (cf. Abani 2007, p. 195). What Black fears is not the multitude of potential connections that Bomboy finds disorienting and uneasy; Black dreads being tied down to one identity, one gender, one country.16 Although East LA is narrated with much site-specificity and place attachment in some passages, Black enjoys the ambiguity of the occasional non-place created by the metropolitan transit areas. The innumerable possible connections that he embraces and constantly moves between are what make the city his home. Having presented a scale from a low to a high degree of placeness in non-places in the previous part of this chapter, this example thus concludes the movement from a small to a large number of connections creating translocal non-places.

Time and Space, Absence and Silence The final field of tension that is relevant for the constitution of translocal non-places lies between time and space, absence and silence. While absence is generally a spatial phenomenon and silence manifests itself in time, translocality often blends time and space, thereby also conflating silence and absence. In Peter Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, for example, Kaplanski, a young man from Cincinnati, moves to a school in rural Namibia and suddenly experiences time and space in entirely new 16  In addition to his questioning gender identity, Black also moves from identifying as Navajo, to Salvadorian or to Igbo (cf. Abani 2007, p. 37) and can generally pass, due to his ambiguous looks and skin colour (cf. Abani 2007, p. 30).

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ways. While this novel is the only one in my corpus that is not strictly speaking urban, the slow and unchanging life at the Goas school is frequently contrasted with the urban experience of both Cincinnati and Windhoek, Namibia’s capital.17 Although Goas is clearly not a non-place, it seems to share with the non-place a strange sense of timelessness, here not created by a fast pace but by an extremely slow way of life, made even more glacial by means of the contrasted cities. This timelessness then of course affects the perception of place in the novel. Several chapter titles, such as “Zambezi Nights” (Orner 2006, p. 135), “English Night” (Orner 2006, p.  119) and “Hostel (Night)” (Orner 2006, p.  304), point to a close connection of temporal and spatial units. Already suggested by the languid pace of the narration,18 the novel describes a slowing down of time that almost drifts into timelessness, thereby affecting the perception of space as well. On a typical Goas day, time is a thing of little consequence: “Spacious days yawned on. We put off everything we had to do, because there would always be time for it later. This afternoon was tomorrow. Night was Madagascar” (Orner 2006, p. 102). The conflation of time and space, combined with an extreme retardation, creates a distorted reality in which both spheres (time and space) lose relevance. This sense of timelessness is underlined by the perception of the landscape, since “seasons at Goas, as much as you can call cold, hot, and more hot seasons, catapult into each other. Days too. Winter mornings bleed to summer afternoons. And memory is as much a heap of disorder as it is a liar” (Orner 2006, 17  The absent city is in fact an established theme of urban literature, although it is not very prominent in translocal urban novels. In 1981, Burton Pike points out how “many cities in contemporary literature are etherealized or disembodied, like Biely’s St.Peterbsburg, Musil’s Vienna, or Eliot’s London” (1981, p. 120) and also mentions Proust’s Venice and Chekhov’s Moscow. The latter metropolis may in fact be the most famous example of the absent city in literature. In Chekhov’s play Three Sisters (1900), every character appears to be longing for the capital in one way or another. 18  “Peter Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is a collection of vignettes loosely strung together like macaroni on yarn.” (Michael 2006, n.p.)—this first sentence of Brien Michael’s review perfectly describes the ever-retarding structure of the novel. A possible reason for this effect is given in a review from The New York Times, which suggests that Orner “reworked some of the text from stories published years before. Even the chapters are perfect miniatures, averaging two pages” (Schone 2006, n.p.). The gaps between these short chapters, which oscillate at times between stream-of-consciousness and dense poetic language, are either very long or difficult to estimate, since the only thing that truly changes in Goas is the absence or presence of Mavala Shikongo. Therefore, the fragmentation does not speed up the narration, as would be typical for the city. On the contrary, the narration would be slowed down into timelessness, if it was not for the reappearance of Mavala.

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p. 27). It becomes harder to distinguish different times of day or seasons of the year. Memories are no longer a linear, chronological archive but a confusing maze of images. The lack of stimuli at Goas results in constant introspection, which is, in a way, a blasé attitude caused by too little instead of too much sensory input. Silence is generally measured through time, but the close connection between timelessness and placelessness created by non-places can result in a spatialised silence. In translocal novels, silence is thus often used to express a translocal disconnect. Silence may also reveal a difficulty to come to terms with past events that affect the narrative present. These often traumatic events have taken place elsewhere long ago but still take their toll and can even distort present narrative structures. A prominent example of such a narrative that deals in translocal silences is Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—a novel which combines unusual narrative situations in order to reveal how much of the protagonist’s family and national history is in fact shrouded in silence. The violence inflicted upon, in particular, the women of protagonist Oscar’s family tree under the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo19 in the Dominican Republic is not discussed openly. Instead, the pain inflicted by Trujillo is filtered doubly: through a character who turns out to be Oscar’s sister’s love interest and acts as a narrator for most of the novel and through formal devices such as footnotes or blank pages. The narrative, therefore, distances itself from its own past, just as Oscar’s family did when they moved to the United States. Locale and narrative structure are deeply interwoven through the unusual point of view and form. As Monica Hanna observes: This story is filtered by Yunior, Oscar’s sometime friend and our mysterious narrator, whose identity and involvement in the story are only slowly revealed and whose name is not even mentioned until almost two hundred pages into the book. Throughout the narration, Yunior self-consciously struggles and experiments with how best to accomplish his task because in the process of his research, as he attempts to uncover both the story of the family and the history of the nation, he is continually confronted with silences, gaps, and ‘páginas en blanco’ left by the Trujillo regime. (2010, p. 498) 19  Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961. While his regime was marked by unprecedented violence and bloodshed, a personality cult briefly emerged around him and he was deified by his followers. The ongoing fascination with his person is expressed by numerous fictionalised and non-fiction accounts of his life and dictatorship; Wikipedia alone lists 20 books and films about Trujillo.

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Hanna’s focus on fragmentation and historiography in the novel supports my view that the spaces, absences and silences between the narrated fragments are as important as the story that is told. This already becomes obvious in the visual presentation of the story on the page. The text is riddled with lengthy footnotes containing crucial information regarding the background of the story being told in the main text, visually underlining the impression that the story is incomplete. The colloquial tone of the footnotes clashes with their scholarly, objective connotation and produces further fragmentation (cf. Harford Vargas 2014, pp.  13–14). Although some narrative gaps are closed, occasional blanks filled, the casually worded information also results in further questions and points the reader to otherwise invisible silences. In her monograph on silence in the spoken and the written word, fittingly called Une forte absence, Katrin Meise explains that “just as the mere passing of time is not preserved in writing, that which is not spoken there is simply considered non-existent here and vanishes irretrievably between the lines of the printed text”20 (1996, p. 91). The absence of words can be marked or symbolised but not simply expressed as absence. Silence needs to be encoded in order to be transferred onto the page. Basing some of her ideas on Mallarmé’s conception of blanc and néant, Meise continues to describe this process: This points, at the same time, to writing as the main place of that poetry in which silence seems to have exchanged its previously indispensable component of time with space and, to quote Philippe Jaccottet, becomes ‘a different name for space’. ‘Nothing will have taken/takes place but place’ is apparently the maxim here, in the context of primarily ‘written’ silence, whereas the temporal-linear nothingness in oral communication could rather be described with ‘Nothing comes to pass but the time that passes.’21 (1996, p. 93, my translation) 20  In the German original, this very fitting description of the difficulties in transferring the silence of the spoken word onto the page of written communication reads as follows: “so wie bloßes Zeitverstreichen nicht in Schrift konserviert wird, gilt, was dort nicht (aus)gesprochen wurde, hier einfach nicht als existent und verschwindet unwiederbringlich zwischen den Zeilen des gedruckten Textes” (Meise 1996, p. 91). 21  In the German original text, Meise does not translate the French quotes and references to Philippe Jaccottet because his play on words does not translate into German. Since an English translation can at least partly transfer the double meaning of the verb construction, I have translated the French quotations as well. Nonetheless, please see the original passage for a more exact phrasing in the original languages: “Damit ist gleichzeitig auf Schrift und Schriftlichkeit als den

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An expression of silence in the written word entails a transformation of time into space since it creates a blank space on the page. This gives the reader the power to determine the length of this silence: the eye can skip over the spatial representation of silence. If the silence is described to avoid this, it loses its ‘blank’ quality. Taiye Selasi attempts to solve this problem by printing the word “Silence” (Selasi 2013, p.  93) on a new page and leaving the rest of it blank. This ‘silent’ page appears after a half-­ empty page following the death of the Sai family’s father Kweku and closes the first part of the novel, which is entitled “Go” and deals mainly with the end of Kweku’s life and his children’s unsuccessful attempts to reconnect with him and each other. The second part is then called “Going”, suggesting that the silence is a familiar between-space of silence and absence which precedes an action or is inserted between command and execution. This type of empty, undetermined spacetime is described in detail in the very beginning of the novel and also in connection with Kweku’s death. His son Olu, a successful surgeon like his father, reflects on this particular chronotope—empty, in-between spacetime—that seems to contain so little but determines so much of his life: All those minutes in the gap. Between first pang and last breath. Those particular moments Olu’s greatest fascination, an obsession all his life, first in childhood as an athlete, then in adulthood as a physician. The moments that make up an outcome. The quiet ones. Those snatches of silence between trigger and action. (Selasi 2013, p. 7, my emphasis)

The reader being thus prepared for the significance of silences, between-­ spaces and gaps, the near-empty page will not, as Meise suggests, be skipped but should be understood as an important caesura that allows the reader a moment of quiet reflection before the action continues. Translocal novels are, however, also frequently concerned with more practical manifestations of absences and silences. Many of the protagonists wesentlichen Ort dieser Lyrik verwiesen, in der das Schweigen seine bislang so wichtige Komponente der Zeit gegen die des Raumes eingetauscht zu haben scheint und, mit Philippe Jaccottet, «un autre nom pour l’espace» wird. «Rien n’a(aura eu) lieu que le lieu» gilt offenbar nunmehr hier, im primär‚ schriftlichen ‘Schweigen, während man für das sich zeitlich-linear erstreckende Nichts in der mündlichen Kommunikation eher sagen könnte: «Rien ne se passe que le temps qui passe»” (Meise 1996, p. 93).

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in translocal texts cross borders and have to leave words, names and languages behind to make room for new ones. Sometimes, the new and the old exist side by side, but quite often the latter is experienced as absent or silent. In The Namesake (2004) by Jhumpa Lahiri, for example, protagonist Gogol longs to leave his ‘embarrassing’ name behind whereas his mother longs for all the names she and her family left behind in Calcutta. Silenced or absent names are also a central concern in Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Insanities. Ömer is forced to adapt his name in both its written and spoken forms to better assimilate to his new American life. For him, ‘Omar’ is neither the same name nor a new one; it represents a lack: When you leave your homeland behind, they say, you have to renounce at least one part of you. If that was the case, Ömer knew exactly what he had left behind: his dots! Back in Turkey, he used to be ÖMER ̇ ̇ ̆ LU.  Here in America, he had become a OMAR ÖZSIPAHI OG OSZIPAHIOGLU. His dots were excluded for him to be better included. (Shafak 2004, p. 5)

This new environment and his partially silenced name make him miss Istanbul but allow him entry to a more multi-layered America than the one he had expected to encounter. Further into the narrative, Ömer realises that the same fragmentation he sees in his name, the blanks left by a movement across continents, also colours his perception of the United States. His image of the country started out as a simple “snapshot” (Shafak 2004, p. 75) with just a few missing aspects to be filled in. After he spent some time living there, however, the United States become just as multifaceted as his home country, only with more meanings he has not yet fully grasped: Probably in a similar vein, before he started living here, Ömer Özsipahioğlu had the country’s snapshot and chronicle clear and trim in his mind; all he needed was to fill in the holes, to work on the shady parts, and to catch the details. Before his second month was over, all he was left with were those holes and parts and details, the general text having evaporated sometime somewhere. (Shafak 2004, p. 75)

Translocal novels like Shafak’s acknowledge that every culture and place contains absences and silences that shift according to which perspective they are observed from. The richness of a translocal experience can only be appropriately depicted when the impossibility of describing it from all

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sides and in all aspects is captured as well. In a discussion of how the transprefix appears to guide much contemporary research and of how the silence at transcultural thresholds can be a productive tool in marking “a consciousness of the limit of one’s standpoint” (McLeod 2011, p.  11), John McLeod22 analyses the incommensurability of difference most famously rendered in Spivak’s question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Postcolonial critique insists that we suspect the apparent transparency and communicability of difference via a mode of representation that appropriates more than it articulates. One’s perspective of other peoples is not so easily focused and realised. What we sometimes hear amidst the blether of conversation is silence, one that marks an uncrossable threshold in the global contact zones of the contemporary. (2011, pp. 9–10)

As Ömer moves closer and closer towards this threshold, the silences duplicate on both sides of it, allowing Ömer to scrutinise the world around him with a deepened understanding. Although silences are frequently associated with a lack of understanding, this example, as well as Selasi’s silent page, points to how translocal novels reinterpret silence to signify reflection and an approach to understanding (and thresholds of understanding) in much the same way as McLeod describes it. In Open City, by contrast, protagonist Julius creates silences, gaps and blanks by integrating other narratives into his own and not giving room to different perspectives—without making this process obvious to the reader until the very end of the novel. Describing him as ventriloquising the stories of others without being able to confront his own past, Rebecca Clark explains how the visibility he seems to give to others’ stories is tempered, even tainted, by a violation of their otherness that renders them effectively invisible. To wit, there are no quotation marks in the book, i.e., nothing to set off the speech of other people, no identification of when they are speaking and when he is. (2018, p. 193)

22  John McLeod has explored the trans-prefix in depth in his 2015 monograph on transcultural and transpersonal movements, concepts and texts, entitled Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption. His 2004 monograph Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis is a widely received study in postcolonial and translocal (although McLeod does not use this term here) urban studies.

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In addition to the silences built into the narrative situation and punctuation of the novel, Julius’s description of New  York City as a space of silenced stories, absences and non-places adds nuanced spatial silences to the narrative one. What is most notable here is the description of the National September 11 Memorial site as a traumatising event taking the shape of a place that no longer exists: And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster. I remembered a tourist who once asked me how he could get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones. (Cole 2011, p. 52)

The absence of the towers connotes a moment in time; the place is no longer a place but a spatialised memory. The term ‘metonym’—rather than synecdoche—is used to describe this effect, meaning that the place and the event are closely associated, although one might equally argue that the place is a synecdochic part of the trauma. Describing it as a metonymy turns the place into a mere backdrop for the event, rendering it placeless to a certain degree. While the city with all its absences and silences appears to take centre stage here and in almost every other part of the novel, Lieven Ameel argues that “rather than being about the absence of the Twin Towers, or the economical, ethnic or other dislocations encountered in the cityspace, the novel presents Julius himself as an absence” (2017a, p. 279). Ameel further explains that, instead of moving outwards towards the realities of New York as a place, the novel aestheticises Julius’s ongoing attempts to locate himself. While this does not turn the city into a non-place, it lends a placelessness to the narrative voice that silences all others.

Conclusion Non-place, silence and absence, then, are clearly related phenomena that are frequently employed in translocal novels, in particular, to point to issues regarding the narrative situation and subjectivity of narrators. When these narrators cross borders or in-between spaces, translocal novels frequently employ non-place-like depictions to underline the—subjective or objective—status of such places and spaces. Although many texts in my corpus use fairly typical non-places that fit all of Augé’s criteria, this

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chapter has also revealed the manifold other forms placelessness can take. Ranging from a uniformly replicated space devoid of locality to questions of (non-)attachment originating from characters or narrative situations rather than settings, examples from translocal texts can be found for every facet of the non-place spectrum. Due to the structural and conceptional similarities between translocal places and non-places, actual non-places infused with translocality, such as the Maestro’s supermarket, were contrasted with places often thought of as non-places but given placeness through translocal movements, such as Biju’s airport. Where non-places contain at once too many and too few connections, this potential or lack of potential for place attachment can result in a whole range of translocal experiences. What seems confusing, disorienting or disconnecting to some characters makes others feel right at home. In general, a translocally oriented character seems to have less trouble dealing with an abundance of (possible) connections. Non-places are network-like structures and chronotopes that suggest a specific connection of time and space. They therefore deal with absence, which is generally thought of as a lack on the spatial plane, as well as with silence, generally presented in terms of time. Translocal texts bring silence and absence together in unusual ways to engage the reader, create unusual places and non-places and shed light on shifting perspectives, thresholds and contact zones. Silences and absences can function as textual gaps and blanks and can thereby question or support the non-place nature of a space or setting. My initial reflections on the non-place started out with Bosteels and his review of related concepts in French theory. Bosteels comes to the conclusion that—although the reductive readings of non-places in general and of Augé in particular, which Wilhelmer also cautions us against, are unfortunately common—non-places are much more than airports or shopping malls. Rather, non-places are a productive and thought-provoking tool or model that allows for a closer scrutiny of what place, time and setting truly mean. They allow, in a way, a look at a phenomenon and its photographic negative. By turning an idea on its head, one can observe it from new angles. Non-place, absence and silence are therefore deeply intertwined techniques, which—through their interconnection—produce translocal narratability on several planes at once. In Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, a novel in which silence is prevalent, this silence is translated into an absence of words on the page. In Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the

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Mathematician, a supermarket is narrated as a non-place through the perspective of a reticent character and an absence of human connection. Most notably, however, translocal novels present non-places in unusual ways and reinfuse them with placeness. Both the contrast to the typical (placeless) non-place and the similarity between the network-like structures of both non-places and translocal places heighten translocal narratability. To provide one last illustration of this, I would like to close this chapter with a passage from Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo in which Obadiah, a teacher at the Goas school in the middle of the Namib, ‘listens’ to a silent radio. Throughout the entire novel, fast-paced cities and new media are contrasted with the slow lifestyle of Goas where the news are old by the time they reach the inhabitants. All teachers constantly lament that nobody on the news speaks about Goas, the Namib or Namibia to begin with. Absence, silence and non-place therefore collide in Obadiah’s thought process and his desire for translocal connection: Not yet morning and Obadiah sits in the paling darkness in his blue chair and caresses his new Grundig radio. The batteries are spent and the generator’s been off for hours, but he still imagines what it might tell him or what song it might play. So much going on—even now, even all the way out here—in this silent little box. A cacophony of unheard voices, and there he sits in a robe and slippers listening to a possibility. Astonishing, isn’t it, that there is ever silence in a world so vast and full of voices? (Orner 2006, p. 37)

Works Cited Corpus

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32 Main Novels

Abani, Chris. 2007. The Virgin of Flames. London: Vintage. Cleave, Chris. 2008. The Other Hand. London: Sceptre. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. New York: Random House. Desai, Kiran. 2006. The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Grove Press. Huchu, Tendai. 2015. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician. Cardigan: Parthian. Orner, Peter. 2006. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. New  York: Back Bay Books. Popoola, Olumide. 2017. When We Speak of Nothing. Abuja and London: Cassava Republic.

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Selasi, Taiye. 2013. Ghana Must Go. New York: Penguin Press. Shafak, Elif. 2004. The Saint of Incipient Insanities. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Smith, Zadie. 2017. Swing Time. London: Penguin.

Further References Ameel, Lieven. 2017a. Open City: Reading Signs of Uncertain Times in New York and Brussels. In Mielikuvituksen maailmat / Fantasins världar / Worlds of Imagination, ed. Merja Polvinen, Maria Salenius, and Howard Sklar, 265–283. Turku: Eetos. Augé, Marc. 1992. Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (English Edition. trans. John Howe). London and New York: Verso. Bosteels, Bruno. 2003. Nonplaces: An Anecdoted Topography of Contemporary French Theory. Diacritics 33 (3/4): 117–139. Brah, Avtar. 2002a [1996]. Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Clark, Rebecca. 2018. ‘Visible only in speech’: Peripatetic Parasitism, or, Becoming Bedbugs in Open City. Narrative 26 (2): 181–200. Crang, Mike. 2001. Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion. In Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. John May and Nigel Thrift, 187–207. London: Routledge. Hanna, Monica. 2010. Reassembling the Fragments’: Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Callaloo 33 (2): 498–520. Harford Vargas, Jennifer. 2014. Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. MELUS 39 (3): 8–30. Larsen, Svend Erik. 2017. Literature and the Experience of Globalization. Texts Without Borders. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Lewicka, Maria. 2011. On the Varieties of People’s Relationships With Places: Hummon’s Typology Revisited. Environment and Behavior 43 (5): 676–709. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The Technology Press & Harvard University Press. Massey, Doreen. 2000. Travelling Thoughts. In Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, ed. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, 225–232. London: Verso. Masterson, John. 2010. Travel and/as Travail: Diasporic Dislocations in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45 (3): 409–427.

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Mattheis, Lena. 2016a. Tendai Huchu. In The Literary Encyclopedia. https:// www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13763. Accessed 6 Aug 2020. McLeod, John. 2011. Sounding Silence: Transculturation and Its Thresholds. Transnational Literature 4 (1): 1. Meise, Katrin. 1996. Une Forte Absence. Schweigen in Alltagsweltlicher und Literarischer Kommunikation. Tübingen: Narr. Merriman, Peter. 2016. Driving Places. Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4-5): 145–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404046065. Michael, Brien. 2006. Review: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner. The Quarterly Conversation 5. http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-­ second-­coming-­of-­mavala-­shikongo-­by-­peter-­orner-­review. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pike, Burton. 1981. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schone, Mark. 2006. Review: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. The New  York Times, 21 April. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/arts/ review-­the-­second-­coming-­of-­mavala-­shikongo.html. Accessed 29 Nov 2018. Simmel, Georg. 2004 [1903]. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden, 12–19. London: Routledge. Wilhelmer, Lars. 2015. Transit-Orte in der Literatur. Eisenbahn—Hotel—Hafen— Flughafen. Bielefeld: Transcript.

CHAPTER 7

Haunting

Prominently spearheaded by Marx haunting Derrida,1 the spectral turn—a rising cultural, literary and philosophical preoccupation with spectres, spirits and ghosts—clearly bears a mark on translocal writing and translocal theory respectively. Literary ghosts generally appear in three forms: as metaphors, as supernatural phenomena and as figures of thought2 that relate to the nature of narrative and textuality. In translocal writing, however, these forms tend to blend into each other to produce a variety of haunting scenarios. Where within the framework of other techniques and strategies explored in this study, I have shown how some subcategories or styles are more likely to produce translocality, no such trend emerges in the context of haunting. All forms of haunting have much translocal potential. This is due to how, “in many ways, spectrality appears as a global figure. Across the world, there exist imaginative and social traditions involving ghost-like beings and other elusive phenomena” (Blanco and 1  As María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren put it in their introduction to The Spectralities Reader: “The publication of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx in 1993 (and its English translation, Specters of Marx, in 1994) is commonly considered the catalyst for what some have called the ‘spectral turn’” (2013a, p. 2). The spectral turn is not quite as essential to translocal narratability as the spatial and narrative turn are, but it is relevant nonetheless. 2  For a more conceptual approach to figures of thought, see Jens Gurr’s article “‘Without Contraries Is No Progression’: Emplotted Figures of Thought in Negotiating Oppositions, Funktionsgeschichte and Literature as ‘Cultural Diagnosis’” (2013).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_7

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Peeren 2013c, p.  91). In other words: all corners of the world are ‘haunted’, and while the specifics vary significantly, such a thing as a ghost exists in every culture. Haunting is therefore relevant to translocal narratability in all its shapes and forms. In order to provide an overview of the quickly accumulating studies surrounding the spectral turn, María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren have put together The Spectralities Reader (2013)—a useful collection of excerpts from and commentary on seminal essays and monographs in the field. Although most scholars featured in it return to Derrida at some point, Blanco and Peeren have included a variety of non-Western viewpoints to do justice to the global nature of haunting. In their general introduction, they explain that ghosts, spirits, and specters have played vital roles in oral and written narratives throughout history and across cultures, appearing as anything from figments of the imagination, divine messengers, benign or exacting ancestors, and pesky otherworldly creatures populating particular loci to disturbing figures returned from the dead bent on exacting revenge, revealing hidden crimes, continuing a love affair or simply searching for a way to pass on. Their representational and socio-cultural functions, meanings, and effects have been at least as manifold as their shapes—or non-shapes, as the case may be—and extend far beyond the rituals, traditions, ghost stories, folktales, and urban legends they populate. (2013a, p. 1)

In her 2012 monograph on ghost-watching, placed between the fields of American and postcolonial studies, Blanco additionally refers to the particular types of hauntings different cultures and places are prone to: “culture, location (both temporal and spatial), and language produce specific styles of haunting. In turn, as I argue, haunting becomes itself a stylization of space” (2012, p. 8, italics original). Places, cultures and ghosts are always closely connected but the ways in which they connect vary. Blanco’s “stylization of space” then describes the way in which haunting narratives from a particular time and culture shape a setting. In this chapter, I will explore the manifold styles of haunting and attempt to trace how they stylise translocality and translocal settings. Not unlike my own approach, Joanne Lipson Freed’s Haunting Encounters initially reflects not on a type of ghost but on a type of text, which Freed calls ‘Third World fiction’. While her terminology is

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problematic, her approach to such texts is intriguing and provides some overlap with translocal writing: I focus on a particular subset of contemporary ethnic and Third World fiction that consciously addresses itself, at least in part, to privileged outsiders (frequently white and/or Western) across boundaries of cultural difference. In important ways, these works complicate familiar models of narrative ethics, both those that credit fiction with a special ability to inspire empathy and fellow feeling, and conversely, those, like Spivak’s, that cite alterity, or difference, as the necessary foundation for ethical relationships. Haunting is a recurring theme in these works and is an apt way of describing the possibilities and dangers involved in staging cross-cultural encounters in and through fiction. (2017, p. 4)

Lipson Freed’s focus on the tension between othering and empathy reflects the uncanny familiarity of haunting ghosts. Both the relationship between the reader and the text and that of the character and the ghost are marked by a tentative recognition of similarities and an awareness of strange differences at the same time. Lipson Freed therefore identifies haunting as not a stylisation of space, but a stylisation of a narrative’s effect on the reader: My central concern, in what follows, is with the way haunting manifests itself in the dynamic interactions between works of fiction and their readers at a distance. […] For readers who are cultural outsiders, the immersive experience of reading may indeed feel like a supernatural collapsing of time and space that delivers them into an unfamiliar world. […] By repeatedly and intentionally disrupting the mimetic illusion that draws readers in, haunted fiction invites a reading practice that recognizes not only the limits of one’s ability to know another, but also the limits of the fictional form to traverse distances of time and space that are also, inevitably, differences in power. (2017, p. 5)

Haunting here becomes a metafictional device that parallels the haunted character and the haunted far-away reader, rendering their respective locations simultaneously present in ways quite similar to those that have emerged in Chap. 2 with regards to translocal simultaneity. Julian Wolfreys’s understanding of haunting is less literal than Lipson Freed’s but also puts a focus on reading. Being concerned, however, with the text itself much more than with settings or readers, Wolfreys describes

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haunting as a stylisation of textuality and explains that “we speak and write of texts in strange ways. We often place them in a heritage or tradition, much as we would our ancestors” (2013, p.  71). Where Lipson Freed focuses on the reader interacting with the strange settings or characters in the texts, Wolfreys is concerned with textual haunting. Put simply, people are haunted by texts and texts are haunted by people because of the curious properties of textuality. The text has ‘a life of its own’ but it is one that could not exist without readers, since “what reading does in effect is to bear witness to the existence of something other, which is neither ‘read into’ the text nor of the text itself in any simple fashion” (Wolfreys 2013, p. 72). Reading, in its attempt to grasp something that lies between two different planes of existence, is then a spectral as well as a potentially translocal activity. The relationship of texts and ‘others’,3 of absence and presence, and of reader and character are central concerns in all studies of haunting referenced here and will also be focal points of my analysis. Whether the haunted translocal novels deal with ghosts as metaphors, as supernatural phenomena or as narrative figures of thought, the liminal location of haunting corresponds productively with translocal settings. Additionally, the intriguing relationship haunting can create between characters and readers adds to the narratability of unusual stories.

Narrative Structure of Haunting To firstly turn to narratives that use particular structures on the level of form and typography to produce or reflect on haunting, I will compare two novels that use sets of chapters in italics to produce haunting; I will then return to Díaz’s Oscar Wao to see how footnotes can haunt a text and will finally consider how narrative situations can reflect haunting. As María del Pilar Blanco points out in her monograph on ghost-watching, the ways 3  A number of more specialised studies deal with the interceptions of ghosts and Others in intriguing and surprising ways. The collection of essays Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (2006), edited by Ann Laura Stoler, for example, explores the conversation between American and postcolonial studies (a focal point in Blanco’s abovementioned monograph as well) with a particular focus on unseen relationships and presences that are often familiar and strange at the same time. Terry Castle, to include a more unusual but equally fascinating example, wrote The Apparitional Lesbian (1993) after noticing how frequently queer women were othered to the point of invisibility in popular culture, history, literature and cinema.

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in which haunting shapes or reshapes the very form of a narrative is all too often neglected and therefore deserves more careful consideration: Although it may seem an obvious clarification, it is surprising to note how few critics working on haunting have actually produced readings that take into account the singularity of ghosts and apparitions, and how they constitute distinct transformations in terms of the narrative’s form itself, opting instead to see these figures as traumatic symptoms of something that is often hidden, rather than actual presences that need to be reckoned with in a narrative. (2012, p. 8)

Ghosts can be symptoms of a trauma but usually—and especially in translocal novels—they are much more than that. By haunting the text, ghosts reshape narrative and textual structures and even impact the relationship of text and reader. In a similar vein as Blanco, Holloway and Kneale highlight the (site-)specificity of haunting when they point out that “the ghost may haunt the same places in the same way, [but] each haunting is different because it concerns different observers, and produces different relationships between ghost and observers” (2008, p. 300). The following section will therefore not only explore how haunting affects the form of a text but also put a focus on how this form reflects on the respective positions and locations of ghost and reader. In Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, protagonist Tuyen’s long-­ lost brother Quy haunts her, her family and Toronto via his brief first-­ person point of view chapters inserted between the regular chapters, which are narrated in third person and multiply focalised through Tuyen and her friends. Quy therefore “haunts his family as he haunts the novel, interrupting the numbered chapters with his unnumbered first-person soliloquies. His encounter with his own kin may be like the accidental intimacies of cities” (Smyth 2008, n.p.). Heather Smyth’s analysis here draws attention to some of the main characteristics of haunting which Blanco and Peeren identify as being “dreamlike” (2013b, p. 396), producing a “sense of alienation and disorientation” (2013b, p. 396) and a general “ungroundedness and spatio-temporal disjointedness” (2013b, p. 396). Quy’s numberless chapters appear to be in chronological order but are told in a time frame that differs greatly from the story time allotted to the other characters. Mere weeks pass in Tuyen’s Toronto while Quy’s entire lifespan and his travels through various countries are narrated. His life story is therefore presented as an anomaly, a series of spatiotemporal distortions that

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seem much less real or relatable than Tuyen’s unrequited love for her roommate or her desire to become truly independent from her family. Although Tuyen recognises her lost brother immediately when she finally meets him towards the end of the novel, her sense of recognition is first presented as one of the “accidental intimacies of cities” (Smyth 2008, n.p.) that she frequently documents in her artwork. Recognition quickly turns into alienation when Tuyen sees that the man standing before her is indeed her brother, but he is no longer the small child her parents had elevated to an almost saint-like position in the family. Tuyen is quickly forced to realise that her brother’s life, spent mainly in refugee camps and other temporary homes, has left him deeply scarred and traumatised—an aspect of his character that she had never previously considered: “Why shouldn’t he be ferine and cold? He was entitled. He could not simply live in their imagination perpetually innocent, perpetually pure” (Brand 2005, p. 297). The actual brother cannot live up to the storied Quy who lives as a martyr in the family’s core story. This passage points to the convoluted structure of narrative haunting: within the regular diegesis, young Quy haunts the family, whereas the chapters narrated by an older Quy haunt the narrative structure from a position that is both in and outside of the primary diegesis. Both versions of Quy haunt the reader in the attempt to make sense of a trauma that disturbs all narrative strands. Since the reader is confronted with Quy’s reality quite early in the novel, the lost brother is initially more real to the reader than he is to his own sister: Quy is distant, since he is the only mobile character and not part of Toronto immigrant life, but otherwise, he is as real as Tuyen. Although his part of the narrative might be less easily relatable and strange already in its form, Quy is clearly a character somehow belonging to the rest of the novel. As Julian Wolfreys explains: “we ‘believe’ in the characters, assume their reality, without taking into account the extent to which those figures or characters are, themselves, textual projections, apparitions if you will, images or phantasms belonging to the phantasmatic dimension of fabulation” (2013, p. 73). The doubly metanarrative haunting structure Dionne Brand uses in her novel shows how the suspension of disbelief can create a curious situation in which the reader ‘forgets’ that characters are spectres he or she chooses to believe in. The precarious positionality of the textual ghost—between text and reader—is echoed by Tuyen’s relationship to Quy as a figure that is ever-present and absent at the same time. The location of the ghost (in-between worlds) in turn mirrors the translocal subject. He or she can touch the materiality of a location and

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move through a space but is often perceived to be elsewhere simultaneously, just like a ghost that never truly re-enters the world but can nonetheless affect it strongly by haunting it. This brief example has already shown how productively the concept of haunting intertwines many of the other strategies and techniques I have identified as strongly translocal: simultaneity and absence, for example, come together here to emphasise the in-between positionality of the ghost. An important aspect to keep in mind, however, is that this does not mean that ghosts or translocal subjects are not local: in many instances their precarious presence anchors them more strongly to places. Just like ghosts in a haunted house cannot, within the logic of the narrative, simply be reduced to spirits of the previous inhabitants,4 translocality is more than the sum of two locales and translocal haunting is not a suspension of locality. In his seminal reflections on “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, Jerome Bruner shows why narrative is so well suited to contain the complex interactions of in-between spaces and tensions between planes and positions that cannot be determined definitively: The normativeness of narrative, in a word, is not historically or culturally terminal. Its form changes with the preoccupations of the age and the circumstances surrounding its production. Nor is it required of narrative, by the way, that the trouble with which it deals be resolved. Narrative, I believe, is designed to contain uncanniness rather than to resolve it. (1991, p. 16)

Bruner links the power of narrative to present conflicting and undetermined existences to its ability to adapt fluidly to temporal and spatial changes in context. Narratives can therefore easily tolerate translocal ambiguity and the cultural distances between translocal characters and readers.5

4  They can also be angry poltergeists, supernaturally altered versions of their former selves or projections created entirely by the current inhabitants—a type of place attachment I will comment on later with reference to Maria Lewicka’s scholarship on attachment. 5  Joanne Lipson Freed approaches the same unresolvable tensions and the in-between spaces they create from a more contemporary perspective. Basing her preliminary considerations on the contrasting positions of Gayatri Spivak and Martha Nussbaum, as well as Jim Phelan’s considerations of reading and empathy, Freed asks: “How do we approach those works that challenge us with paradoxical demands to both recognize difference and forge meaningful connections across it?” (2017, p. 3).

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Although narrative can contain the uncanniness produced through both translocality and haunting, the ghostly parts of the text are still marked as Other. In both Brand’s What We All Long For and Forna’s Happiness, the spectral parts of the novels are separated from the rest of the text as differently formatted chapters. In Brand’s novel, the text of the ghostly chapters is not justified like the rest of the text but only aligned on the left. The chapters are unnumbered and carry Quy’s name as a heading in italics. In Happiness, the haunting chapters are justified but also unnumbered and printed entirely in italics. Whereas the regular chapters are numbered and headed by a weekday, the chapters in italics carry a more exact date and an indication as to where they take place. The very first chapter of the novel, for example, is entitled “Greenhampton, MA. April 1834” (Forna 2018, p. 1) and also takes place there, although the main portion of the novel is set in contemporary London. A close relationship between places and the wildlife inhabiting them is negotiated in this chapter, which echoes from the past to the present, from the United States to Great Britain. The past of Greenhampton, where protagonist Jean used to live in the United States, haunts London, where she lives now. The same dynamic applies to the second main character, Attila from Accra, whose presence in London is haunted by the background knowledge readers gain from chapters narrating his past sojourns in Sierra Leone, Eastern Bosnia and Iraq. Some of these spatiotemporally distant chapters relate more or less directly to the main narrative, but others simply seem slightly surreal—even within a storyworld composed mainly of unlikely coincidences. In both novels, one main urban setting and a small time frame are contrasted with a series of chapters taking place in many different locations and at different times. Although this is a fairly typical strategy to make confusing translocal structures more narratable, the further similarities in these haunted textual structures are remarkable. The use of italics and the contrast of numbered and unnumbered chapters in particular turn an insignificant paratextual feature of the novel into a meaningful stylistic device. The usage of italics is so common that even the basic definition used in a specialised work on typography does not, at first glance, appear to reveal much new information: Italics originated as typefaces in their own right but modern-day practice has placed them firmly in the role of an accompaniment to roman. In this they have three main purposes. 1. They denote the titles of artistic works […]. 2. They denote foreign words and phrases […]. 3. They can also denote a

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particular tone of voice (but can become irritating if used too much for this purpose). (Baines and Haslam 2005, p. 196)6

Read carefully in the context of haunting, however, this simple definition can show how italic print is used by both Brand and Forna to mimic haunting. The parts of the text printed in italics only accompany those existing “in their own right” and thereby take on a doppelganger7 function. Italics represent the spectral plane, the slightly distorted shadow version of the actual text and type. Additionally, italics “denote foreign words and phrases” and thus implicitly refer to distant settings and strange divergent plotlines. Lastly, italics can easily become irritating8 when overused, because although they are perfectly legible, they always produce a sense that this part of the text is abnormal in some way. Italics are also commonly used to mark dreamlike sequences, which causes the reader to question the reality of a chapter printed in italics even when no other aspect of it is unusual. The haunting chapters can therefore not exist without the main narrative and can become irritating and confusing when they appear too often. Their more surreal or less rational nature with regard to the main narrative is additionally emphasised by their lack of numbers. Through this seemingly minor formal feature, the haunting chapters are immediately marked out as less chronological, interrupting the flow of the narrative. The lack of numbers, in addition to denoting an absence, may also imply that the ghostly chapters are in a way attached to the numbered chapter preceding 6  The examples provided for each of the three purposes have been omitted here as they provide no further insight into the nature of italics. The definition is otherwise reproduced in its entirety. 7  Doppelganger figures like Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, Poe’s Madeline Usher or Nabokov’s Quilty are generally used to reflect the darker side of main characters while still bearing strong similarities to them. Most doppelgangers are implicitly supernatural and “tend to be associated with evil and the demonic; thus one can infer that the Doppelgänger presents a notion of the subject/subjectivity that is defective, disjunct, split, threatening, spectral” (Vardoulakis 2006, p. 100). Vardoulakis mentions Jean Paul’s coinage of the term doppelganger but focuses on re-evaluating Freud’s essay on the uncanny to trace the doppelganger’s potential in revealing tensions between subjectivity and relationality. 8  In a brief essay sketching out the beginnings of spectro-geography, Maddern and Adey describe an “unfolding concern for the just perceptible, the barely there, the nagging presence of an absence in a variety of spaces” (2008, p. 292). Their usage of the term ‘nagging’ to describe the ghostly almost-presence is very similar to Baines’s and Haslam’s description of italics as ‘irritating’.

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or following them and therefore do not require their own numbers. This state of being ‘attached’ to a chapter taking place in another spatiotemporal setting reflects on both the shadow-like nature of italics and ghosts and the translocal layering of different settings. Achille Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony (2001) and several influential essays on Johannesburg’s role as an African metropolis, draws on Foucault and Freud to describe this liminality of the “ghostly sphere” (Mbembe 2013, p. 137), specifically in non-Western writing: We penetrate into the ghostly realm through its border, across the edges. From this perspective, the ghostly sphere is a lateral space. But it positions itself equally as a décor. It is found not at the periphery of life but on its edges. It constantly spills out over its assigned time and space. (2013, p.  137, my emphasis)

Mbembe here describes exactly the type of positionality I identify in translocal haunting: ghosts do not haunt (from) a far-away periphery but exist right at the borderlines of translocal settings, chapters, numbers and even typography. Ghosts, even when they are ‘resurrected’ like Quy finally is, are therefore not only symbolic reflections of traumatic events, but actual presences so strong they distort the very fabric of the narrative. They demand to be accommodated and penetrate all layers of a text. As Joanne Lipson Freed points out, “like the encounter with a fictional other, which flouts the rules of time and space, the encounter with the ghost is supernatural, impossible yet captivating” (2017, p. 17). Again, Lipson Freed refers to the similarities between Others and ghosts and additionally mentions the distortions of time and space both can cause. These spatiotemporal irregularities surrounding the supernatural have a long tradition in literature and are most prominent in Gothic and Modernist texts. Translocal novels tend to already have an unusual relationship to time and space to begin with,9 and the urban nature of the settings often escalates this tendency. In Happiness, for example, the city is described as timeless—existing “in the eternal twilight that was darkness in the city” (Forna 2018, p.  214)—a common conception of urban space as well as supernatural realms.10 9  Irregularities and distortions of time and space also play a central role in my chapter on scaling, in particular with regard to translocal scale effects. 10  As Michael Thurston, for example, points out: “Hell itself is timeless” (2009, p. 11). The city as hell is a fairly common image as well (cf. e.g. Burton Pike (1981), Falconer

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In addition to a lack, condensation or expansion of time and space, repetition is a common spatiotemporal distortion as well as a stylistic device to approach the uncanny. As Blanco and Peeren point out, “repetition of events, images, and localities is one of the recurrent motifs of the uncanny” (2013b, p. 396). Depending on how subtle the repetitions are, a sense of déjà vu can be triggered in both characters and readers. Haunting therefore works with both the literal return and repetition associated with death and trauma,11 as well as with repetition as an aesthetic effect. While Lipson Freed’s assumption that the readership of global novels is composed entirely of privileged white Western readers is problematic, her more general description of the effect of repetition, haunting and reader responses is quite accurate: Repeating these images out of context, however, not only captures a character’s feeling of being possessed by an intrusive, visceral memory ([…] the smell of Velutha’s blood), but also ensures that readers notice them and recognize their significance. In this way, too, readers are encouraged to adopt a perspective that, like that of the characters, is often radically foreshortened. (2017, p. 81)

The constant reference to Velutha’s blood smelling of old roses,12 an image repeated countless times in Roy’s The God of Small Things, takes on an irritating quality not unlike that of extensively used italics. At the same time, the frequently mentioned smell seems more and more connected to traumatic events readers and characters alike are only able to perceive out of the corners of their eyes. Towards the end of the novel, when the source of the smell is revealed, the shocking and senseless violence reverberates back through the entire narrative, touching every instance at which the image was repeated. Similarly, in What We All Long For, Tuyen spotting men with childlike faces that could or could not be her lost brother Quy is an image that is repeated throughout the entire text. The image changes (2005), or D. Lawrence Pike (2007)) and plays into the relationship of haunting and translocal texts. 11  In a similar vein, Holloway and Kneale argue: “Haunting often represents a return of some sort, with ghosts coming back to attend to unfinished business, or because the wrongs done to them have not been redressed” (2008, p. 299). 12  The reader only finds out quite late in the novel that it is Velutha’s blood that produces the smell of old roses that wafts through the text from the beginning. The revelation that he was brutally beaten to death for a crime he did not commit comes even later.

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its significance gradually when the reader first learns that Quy is alive and then that he might in fact have already arrived in Toronto. In Rushdie’s Fury, (dead) dolls appear, reappear and echo one another. Countless further examples could be listed here since repetition—also connected to the previously mentioned doppelganger—is such a well-established strategy to tell stories of ghosts. To turn to another unusual device used to present translocal haunting on the level of structure, Jennifer Harford Vargas’s extensive analysis of the usage of footnotes in Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao provides an insight into how form subversively reflects power relations in the novel: the footnotes evade the limitations imposed on narrative development much in the same way that a dissenting subject rhetorically evades and subverts power through indirection. As marginalia, the footnotes appear below the main narrative, visually resembling forms of undercover storytelling. That is, the footnotes structurally mimic the ways in which subaltern agents navigate repressive power by communicating information indirectly, secretly, and below the radar of the repressive regime’s gaze. The spatiality of the notational apparatus in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao reproduces the asides and interruptions constitutive of oral narrative. For oral narratives do not strictly follow one single line of thought, often veering into associative connections and tangential narratives that build an interrelated network of details and sub-stories around the primary story. (2014, p. 20)

The divergent, associative style of the footnotes stands in stark contrast to their form, which suggests a linear argument and academic objectivity (cf. Harford Vargas 2014, p. 13). This divergent style, however, is well suited to contain supernatural narratives. The title of the novel clearly suggests that Oscar himself will die within the scope of the narrative and the family curse haunts him through the footnotes. Written in narrator Yunior’s highly informal style and speckled with frequent neologisms and references to both local and popular culture, the story of the family curse is a ghostly presence in the sense that it recounts an entire assemblage of haunted generations. Whether the family currently resides in the United States or the Dominican Republic, the ghosts and the curse are equally present although the distance between the footnotes and the main text could also stand in for the spatial distance. Lastly, Yunior’s motivation for inserting the extensive background information is of course triggered by Oscar’s death, meaning that the narrator is haunted by the main character.

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The relationship between Yunior and Oscar reveals another formal feature that is relevant to the representation of translocal haunting: the narrative situation. Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011) is composed almost entirely in the unusual first-person plural point of view, which parts of the footnotes in Díaz’s novel take on as well. Briefly touched on in the context of simultaneity, this particular feature of Otsuka’s novel has prompted me to include it here, although it does not fulfil all of the criteria for my translocal corpus as its setting is not contemporary but starts in the interwar period, telling the stories of Japanese mail-order brides sent to the San Francisco area in the 1920s. Otsuka skilfully uses the first-­ person plural to place tension between the shared experience of the brides and the subjective specificities of that same experience. This tension between commonality and subjectivity, which also forms the basis for my conception of translocality, therefore lies at the very core of her narrative. Otsuka’s innovative narrative situation is relevant in the context of haunting since, as Delphine Munos points out, this ‘we’ gives voice to both the living and the dead and thereby fuses the generally opposite conceptions of absent ‘we’ and ‘we’ as co-presence (cf. Munos 2018, p. 68). The first-­ person plural, in a way, haunts itself. While the ‘we’ first connotes a shared translocal experience, most of the brides are at some point displaced, interred or even killed. Nonetheless, the tight-knit ‘we’ is only slightly and temporarily altered into a ‘some of us’ and it seems that the initial displacement continues to connect all brides—living and dead, absent and present. The narrative voice is inherently haunting.

The Haunted Urban Palimpsest Just like certain narrative forms are produced by or conducive to haunting, urban settings have a natural affinity with translocal haunting.13 Whereas we may imagine a lonely local ghost haunting a mansion in the woods or a castle on a hill, the sheer mass of different types of ghosts one can attribute to a densely populated metropolitan area is more likely to allow for translocal haunting. As Holloway and Kneale point out: 13  A particularly well-known haunted urban novel is Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky. André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja (1928) is another example that also poses questions of (narrative) absence, presence and silence. While translocal connections are minimal in these novels, they do show that the connection of haunting and cities is present beyond the scope of Anglophone texts.

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Cities appear to be exemplary haunted sites, as Pile makes clear, because they are anonymous but highly charged spaces. Nigel Thrift suggests that we are haunted by ‘apparitions which are the unintended consequences of the complexity of modern cities, cities in which multiple time-spaces are being produced, which overlap, interact, and interfere’.14 (2008, p. 298)

The palimpsestic nature of urban space with all its diverse chronotopes creates countless spaces for ghosts to inhabit. The multitude of people living or working in cities continuously adds their ghosts in a process that often runs parallel with processes of place attachment.15 Maria Lewicka, in one of her studies on place attachment, describes this as follows: we inherit places, whether it is our new office or neighborhood, together with the ‘ghosts’ of those who lived there before us. These ghosts give meanings to the place and help us feel one with it but, as time goes on, we replace them with our own ghosts—a sign that we have appropriated the place and made it our own. (2014, p. 57)

Lewicka rightly stresses the point that ghosts are a significant part of any place we form attachments to. However, I disagree with her assumption that we ‘replace’ the resident ghosts with new ones. Instead, I argue that we add our ghosts to the haunted urban palimpsest and simultaneously deepen our understanding of the ghosts that already haunt the place we now make our own. Rather than being a process of erasure, place attachment enriches haunted urban spaces further. Since so many attachments clash and overlap in cityscapes, the possibilities for translocal haunting are endless. As Holloway and Kneale, with reference to Steve Pile’s work on the ghostly city, already hint at, the crowded urban environment can not only create a variety of attachments; it can also lead to anonymity—both with regard to place and to the ghosts themselves. While Lewicka uses the 14  Thrift is here quoted from his essay “With Child to See Any Strange Thing: Everyday Life in the City” published in A Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson and published with Basil Blackwell (2000, pp. 398–409). 15  Steve Pile also identifies the city as a space uniquely prone to haunting and overly attached ghosts. Pile describes the variety of urban ghosts and how their haunting runs simultaneous to our living: “These ghosts, moreover, do not simply go away once the catastrophe is over: they hang around, haunting the places where they made their appearance. Ghosts, then, live-after, among us, all the time. Cities, in this light, are places where diverse ghosts, given the opportunity, can gather in large numbers” (2005, p. 159).

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notion of haunting to describe a highly personalised place and experience, the representation of ghosts as anonymous masses of grey, uniform or faceless figures is just as common.16 As Burton Pike writes in his influential monograph on The Image of the City in Modern Literature: This perception of city people as a depersonalised mass, whether by character, narrator, or author, introduces a new way of seeing into the literature of the city, as well as a new device for indicating the most extreme form of depersonalization: the individual is opposed no longer to a collection of other people grouped together as a community, but to the mass as a depersonalized animate object. (1981, p. 116)

In this type of image, city dwellers become less than themselves; they are reduced to shadow versions of their past selves. This lesser, depersonalised shadow is of course the very definition of a ghost: a more flat, static character reduced to a task the ghost never fulfilled when still alive or a sentiment they cannot let go of. In a way then, the anonymous urbanite going to their depersonalised workplace becomes a ghost. Their ghostly path, in turn, becomes a layer of the urban palimpsest that is only partly legible. Quy’s story from the previous section is a perfect example of this process: it is retrospectively suggested that he is present as a quiet observer in the background before the reader even knows he exists.17 Suggestively, in the same chapter in which Quy is invisibly present, an anonymous authorial narrator comments on how “anonymity is the big lie of a city” (Brand 2005, p. 3), because, in the narrator’s view, it is rather commonality being mistaken for anonymity. It seems to me that anonymity is a commonality shared by urban dwellers around the world. Another facet, which translocality adds to the haunted urban space, is then an awareness of the fallacy of urban anonymity. Although many existences may seem depersonalised and ghostly within the context of dense 16  See, for example, the passage from Eliot’s The Waste Land that describes the crowds of urbanites and/or ghosts flowing over London Bridge and in which Eliot translates Dante’s utterance upon his descent into the inferno: “I had not thought death had undone so many” (Eliot 2011, p. 66). 17  An entire paragraph describes a man observing Tuyen laughing with her group of friends, although this man could only be identified as Quy if the reader returned to the first chapter after having finished reading the novel. The paragraph does, however, end with a brief foreshadowing of Quy’s tragic story: “The laughter pierces him, and he thinks that he’s never heard laughter sound so pure, and it is his first week in this city. Only when he was very, very little—a boy—then he heard it, he remembers” (Brand 2005, p. 4).

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urban populations, translocal urban ghosts frequently remind us that every character has their own ghosts that we may or may not be aware of. Brand, in the same introductory chapter, describes this as follows: And on the sidewalks, after they’ve emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they’ve hoarded, all the ghosts they’ve carried, all the inversions they’ve made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition— the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. There’s so much spillage. (Brand 2005, p. 5)

A heterogeneous assemblage of ghosts is a commonality between urban and translocal lives and may result in an anonymity, which—nonetheless— is better understood as a silence, a story not yet told. María del Pilar Blanco comes to a similar conclusion with her conceptualisation of ‘dynamic haunting’: This dynamic version of haunting seeks to look at ghosts as representations not of occluded pasts, or buried secrets, but as manifestations of an increasing awareness of simultaneous landscapes and simultaneous others living within unseen, diverse spaces […]. By ‘simultaneity’ I mean a ‘now’ that is happening in a different location (near or far) at the same time. (2012, p. 7, italics original)

Blanco bases her concept of ‘simultaneous landscapes’ on Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson and thereby allows me to, again, connect haunting to another central technique that produces translocal narratability: simultaneity. In Chap. 2, I have identified the encouragement of the reader by the text to reflect on their own experiences as one of the reasons simultaneity is so productive for translocal narratability. Blanco, and even Lipson Freed, appear to come to similar conclusions. Another technique that comes into play here is, naturally, the translocal urban palimpsest that dynamically combines layers from a variety of times and places. One of the most prominent novels in the context of translocal urban palimpsests—Teju Cole’s Open City—uses haunting frequently. First of all, New York and Brussels as the two main cities, where protagonist Julius spends time in Open City, are rendered simultaneously haunted by a number of references to both cities as cities of the dead (cf. e.g. Cole

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2011, pp. 93-94, 150).18 As usual, Cole does not simply suggest distortions of time and space but instead has Julius—in his scholarly and theory-­ driven manner—describe, identify and partly analyse this phenomenon that often precedes or accompanies spectral apparitions: “That afternoon, during which I flitted in and out of myself, when time became elastic and voices cut out of the past into the present, the heart of the city was gripped by what seemed to be a commotion from an earlier time” (Cole 2011, p. 74). Julius can suddenly feel the translocal urban palimpsest shifting. He identifies strongly with the city and it seems that when he ‘flits out of himself’, he gains deeper insights into ‘the heart of the city’. Shortly after this initial and more vague spatiotemporal distortion, American history returns to haunt New York City with a very clear image: What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The figure was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind. (Cole 2011, p. 75)

The crowd is actually present although the adjective ‘listless’ hints at an image, reminiscent of a zombie apocalypse, of the anonymous hordes of the dead and the dense ghostly population of any city. The lynched body, in contrast to the physically present crowd, turns out to be a figment of Julius’s imagination. Nonetheless, the construction site, as well as the spatiotemporal distortions, remind the reader that the ghost and the body of the killed person are actually present: buried in the past of slavery and colonialism. All throughout the novel, Julius encounters construction sites and, without fail, they remind him of graves or prompt him to reflect on paved-over or forgotten burial grounds (cf. e.g. Cole 2011, pp. 52, 93, 220). Here, the associative process runs in the opposite direction: construction sites do not turn into graves, but a dead body transforms itself into a construction site. Ameel, in his analysis of Open City, focuses on a 18  As discussed in my chapter on scaling, the image of the city of the dead is also the essential catalyst for all complexly layered storylines in Rushdie’s Fury. Almost every event in the novel can be traced back to the moment protagonist Malik visits the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to look at the famous miniature city there. After realising there are no miniature humans peopling the small-scale city, Malik is struck by a vivid fantasy of how they were all killed by a doll-sized disaster and their corpses now lie rotting in backrooms of the museum (cf. Rushdie 2001, pp. 15-16).

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different passage reminiscent of an underground city of the dead, but also identifies this as a prominent image in the novel: “it also chimes in with other references in the novel to a palimpsestic city of the dead, hidden in plain sight and with high modernist and symbolist readings of the city” (2017a, p. 271). Especially during his sojourn in Brussels, Julius brings up various cities of the dead in his matter-of-fact reflections. A more nostalgic representation of the translocal urban palimpsest as a haunted space is employed by Dionne Brand to tell the backstory of Jackie’s family. Jackie is a member of Tuyen’s group of friends and one of the characters the focalisation shifts to regularly. Walking through her neighbourhood—Alexandra Park in Toronto—Jackie frequently imagines buildings to look as they must have looked when her parents first came to Toronto. The ever-changing urban palimpsest, marked again by construction sites, on the one hand prompts the frequent flashbacks to Jackie’s parents’ past experiences in the still-standing buildings. On the other hand, these flashbacks focus both Jackie’s and the reader’s attention on what is no longer there: How does life disappear like that? It does it all the time in a city. One moment a corner is a certain corner, gorgeous with your desires, then it disappears under the constant construction of this and that. A bank flounders into a pizza shop, then into an abandoned building with boarding and graffiti, then after weeks of you passing it by, not noticing the infinitesimal changes, it springs to life as an exclusive condo. (Brand 2005, p. 183)

The way in which Jackie’s chapters shift seamlessly between scenes from the past and the present sites of Alexandra Park makes it seem as if spectres of memories haunt the neighbourhood. The fluid passage between past and present therefore produces ghosts and absences of buildings, people and lifestyles that are no longer there but have led to the current impression of the space. The family’s journey to Toronto is included as one of the flashbacks, which points to the translocal elements of this haunted urban palimpsest. Jackie’s relationship with Toronto, spanning almost her entire life, is contrasted with her parents’ experience as newcomers. As Fellner points out in an analysis that focuses on subversive mobility and challenges of urbanity, Toronto thereby becomes a space of cultural translation, a contact zone in which the protagonists translate the city’s cultural and spatial divisions by creating points of contact that,

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on the one hand, open up dialogues between different groups of people and, on the other, create silences that point to failed encounters. (2010, p. 232)

The spectral presence of Jackie’s parents and their past lives, which is activated by her walking through Alexandra Park with a nostalgic awareness of the urban palimpsest, marks both a point of contact and the silence of ghosts, experiences and buildings that no longer exist. Urban spaces are therefore already prone to manifold hauntings and translocality adds additional spectres to an already excessively haunted environment. This process is facilitated by the many types of place attachment, which are possible in urban regions and networks. These instances of attachment are often contrasted with a ghostly urban anonymity.

Living Graveyards Oftentimes contained within the haunted urban palimpsest is another type of space, which—by nature—houses many ‘ghosts’: cemeteries. In translocal texts, even spaces reserved for the dead become dynamic and layered, which is why we frequently encounter cemeteries filled with life and various images of the dead returning to interfere with the living. In Forna’s Happiness, American protagonist Jean studies urban foxes in London and goes on daily runs that take her through London’s famous Nunhead Cemetery. The chapter that introduces the cemetery and its history in some detail is prefaced by a section in italics that describes the first time Jean touches a wild coyote in the context of a previous research project: in the middle of Massachusetts’ snowy landscape, Jean sedates a coyote with a dart and equips it with a radio collar. The transition to London is marked by a heading explaining that it is now ten years later. Both parts of the chapter describe Jean’s interaction with nature, although the urban greenery of Nunhead Cemetery is marked as distinctly unusual, also by a comparison to New England’s austere graveyards. In order to experience nature in the city, Jean turns to a place created by the London Necropolis Company and which is contrasted with the American wilderness. Although Jean clearly has a stronger affinity with wilderness rather than with the city, she is filled with wonder and admiration in the face of nature bringing to life a place reserved exclusively for death:

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A few decades later the cemetery was locked and later most of it was deconsecrated. Left to die, instead it thrived. Saplings sprang up, prising open graves, toppling obelisks and urns, knocking angels from their pedestals. Snowdrops burst from the soil in winter and in the spring bluebells, primroses and daffodils raised their heads. (Forna 2018, p. 49)

Instead of being haunted by centuries of dreary London ghosts, the cemetery bursts to life through the power of nature. For Jean, this also brings back memories of successful research trips. The cemetery here is therefore a space that inverts all expectations. Instead of being about deceased human beings, it is about thriving nature. Instead of being presented mainly as a famous site in London, it draws in images and memories of New England. Instead of being a place of mourning, it helps Jean celebrate her new life and appreciate her own success. In the introduction to their section on “Ghosts of the Global Contemporary”19 Blanco and Peeren explain that one common denominator in global haunting phenomena is “their ambivalent multiplicity— the reference to the liminal form of being (and thinking) encompassing life and death, human and non-human, presence and absence” (2013c, 91). While my study explicitly touches on phenomena that lie between presence and absence, and the human interaction with the built environment is also a frequently recurring issue, the above example from Forna’s novel shows the liminal spaces between human and non-human (and, naturally, life and death) even more clearly. The cemetery ceases to be a human space inducing negative emotions and instead celebrates nature and life. In NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names, cemeteries are by contrast presented as being surprisingly full of human life. The graveyard protagonist Darling lives close to is called Heavenway and to young Darling it seems as if people cannot wait to be on their way to heaven: Heavenway is mounds and mounds of red earth everywhere, like people are being harvested, like death is maybe waiting behind a rock with a big bag of free food and people are rushing, tripping over each other to get to the front

19  The title of this section, as well as the authors chosen to be featured in it—Arjun Appadurai and Achille Mbembe in particular—suggest that Blanco and Peeren see a connection between haunting, global flows and translocality that is similar to what I suggest in this chapter.

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before the handouts run out. That is how it is, the way the dead keep coming and coming. (Bulawayo 2014, p. 132)

Mourners, funerals and death are all a part of Darling’s everyday life and since death is part of life, the dead seem surprisingly active and mobile. The closeness of life and death is emphasised when Darling explains why she does not fear the cemetery: “There is just no sense being afraid when you live so near the graves; it would be like the tongue fearing the teeth” (Bulawayo 2014, p. 132). Like the tongue and the teeth work together to eat or speak, living and dying are simply different parts of the same process. However, the closeness of life and death can also be interpreted much more pessimistically: Darling and the people living and dying around her are treated as spectres, as not really there, by an oppressive regime and by the rest of the world20 which becomes painfully obvious in Darling’s interaction with foreign aid workers, for whom she and her friends seem interchangeable, or when her home is bulldozed by the government. An even more overtly bleak image of graveyards suddenly filled with life and activity is given by Teju Cole. As hinted at earlier, construction sites gain significance in Open City. While they produce something new and could therefore be read as a sign of life and growth in the built urban environment, Cole’s protagonist Julius generally perceives them as wounds in the urban fabric and as connected to death and ineffectual attempts to cover up guilt and trauma. Although, as discussed earlier, this motif runs through the entire novel, it becomes particularly prominent in the following passage: Into this earth had been interred the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand blacks, most of them slaves, but then the land had been built over and the people of the city had forgotten that it was a burial ground. […] Then the dead returned when, in 1991, construction of a building on Broadway and Duane brought human remains to the surface. (Cole 2011, p. 220)

20  Lipson Freed describes the absence-presence, or “almost-presences” (Holloway and Kneale 2008, p. 302) as Holloway and Kneale put it, of haunting as a driving factor of postcolonial fiction in general: “haunting is a generative metaphor for the dynamic tension between sameness and difference that animates a wide range of ethnic and postcolonial fiction: the ghost is at once familiar and strange, present and absent, a figment of the past or the elsewhere intruding into the here and now” (Lipson Freed 2017, p. 18). Thinking also about Abdelmayek Sayad’s ‘science of absence’, the haunting mélange of absence and presence is even more essential in translocal texts.

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Cole here describes factual events21 but does so using phrases that relate to the supernatural—“the dead returned” being the most prominent one. In keeping with this, the account of the burial ground also adheres to what Holloway and Kneale describe as typical for supernatural events in urban spaces: “the ‘not-quite-there-ness’ of spectrality, manifested in shifting objects and bodies, renders space unfamiliar and unsettling. The unsettling nature of this repositioning emerges through lack of security of what actually causes the transformation” (2008, p. 306). The building site suddenly shifts from being a space of novelty and creation to an uncomfortably self-evident reminder of the dead slaves whose bodies and labour many buildings and riches had been built on. The buried bodies become more present (both in the temporal and the spatial sense) than the creation of a new building or business as they are, literally, shifted and unsettled. The supernatural imagery in the middle of a realist novel refocuses the reader’s attention and thereby heightens narratability. All three of these examples are descriptions of actual cemeteries that become the vehicle of metaphors with different tenors relating to translocality and (forced) migration. Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi, by contrast, describes New York City as part of a larger graveyard when she has her Iranian protagonist describe the city with her “back to a conglomeration of fake cloisters that have been dismantled from real French abbeys and reassembled here. As if the Old World were a mausoleum. What a laughable lack of perspective” (van der Vliet Oloomi 2018, p.  31). The city becomes a graveyard of uprooted buildings, detached from their history and culture. In a process of transplantation, these buildings lose their authenticity and become ‘fake’ and lifeless. This very bleak perspective turns the idea of a translocal urban graveyard on its head yet again. Cemeteries, in sum, gain translocal significance by being or becoming something they are not supposed to be. This enhances the liminal quality that is already inherent in a place that denotes a crossing-over from life to death. Whether translocal texts invert the expected focus from human to nature, from sadness to happiness, or even reverse the direction of the crossing with the dead being un-interred, the reversal of a supernatural element is used to employ the highly productive functions of ghost stories but at the same time affirms the reality of the described phenomena. 21  For more background information, see, for example, Rothstein’s article in The New York Times or the National Park Service’s documentation of the history of the site: “History & Culture—African Burial Ground National Monument” (2010).

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Bodies and Apparitions To move from spaces to bodies, translocality can, at times, lend a ghost-­ like appearance to characters. It is important to note that in translocal novels, this is generally a temporal impression and one projected by other characters rather than internalised by the character that is presented as ghost-like. Nonetheless, the image of ghostly bodies and apparitions makes translocality more narratable as it physically represents the (simplistic) assumption that a translocal existence automatically implies being less present or attached. Although, as has been the case with regard to all strategies of translocal narratability, this notion is always complicated, challenged or subverted, the ghostly body remains an easily narratable image to lay the foundation for further reflections on translocality. Again, the urban environment underlines and magnifies this effect. In cities, haunting is as commonplace as translocality: the urban environment is conducive to both. Since translocal ghostly bodies and apparitions are such a quotidian part of city life, their presence and the connections, traumas and hidden layers of the translocal urban palimpsest they connote are easily overlooked. Making reference to Freud, Pile explores the role of grief, mourning and forgetting in cities: In cities, grief-work—whether mourning or melancholia—is continually being conducted. London does not just house the dead, its dead crowd its streets. Cities are places where ghosts can gather, uncannily, spookily. They are also places of mourning and forgetting, where the ordinary violences of everyday life are simply lived through; where few give ghosts much attention, and not for long when they do. Simmel caught something of this in his study of the city and its mentality of indifference. (Pile 2005, p. 160)

A certain indifference towards death coloured most of the excerpts in the previous section on living graveyards. The parallels Pile draws here to Simmel’s blasé attitude are particularly interesting because Simmel conceptualises this “mentality of indifference” (Pile 2005, p.  160) as an impact urban space has on sensory perceptions and thereby on bodies as well.22 Urban crowds in particular can easily become ghostly and 22  “There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved to the city as the blasé outlook. It is at first the consequence of those rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves which are thrown together in all their contrasts and from which it seems to us the intensification of metropolitan intellectuality seems to be derived” (Simmel 2004, p. 14).

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reminiscent of hordes of the dead in katabatic narratives, because the sheer mass of people necessitates a certain indifference; they can no longer be perceived as individuals. In Aminatta Forna’s Happiness, however, one of the less central characters becomes ghostly exactly because he does not blend in with the crowded street: street performer Osman poses as a living statue painted in silver. When Jean happens to meet Osman on his way to his usual spot, she suddenly imagines him to be a ghost from the 1930s: From a distance, moving through the crowd in his silver suit and bowler hat, he looked like the spectre of a long-dead stockbroker from another time, one who had thrown himself off Waterloo Bridge and whose ghost, every weekday of every year, boarded a train in Surrey to disembark at Waterloo Station. Jean caught up with Osman and clamped a hand on his shoulder. (Forna 2018, p. 282)

Osman’s physical appearance shifts the layers of the urban palimpsest in Jean’s perspective and renders the past trauma of this particular location simultaneous to the present and thereby visible. So far, this may seem everything but translocal and, by contrast, a very typical depiction of the urban palimpsest that only allows for movement on the axis of time, keeping a fixed location: Waterloo Bridge. Haunting and trauma emphasise this process. The translocal element comes in through the previously introduced backstory for Osman. Originally from Bosnia, Osman’s family moved to Rotterdam when he was 12 years old (cf. Forna 2018, p. 129) and he migrated to London later in life. In Jean’s fantasy, triggered by his unusual work attire rather than by trauma or fear, he becomes a part of local London history. The conversation in which Osman tells her where he is from is in fact framed by a brief history of Waterloo Bridge from 1844 till 1978 and by Jean’s stories about how quickly nature took over Nunhead Cemetery. Both in Jean’s haunting vision and in the structure of this chapter, Osman’s translocal life story is seamlessly integrated into local London history. Another important point is that Jean ends the vision by physically touching Osman and thereby confirming his bodily presence in the current time and place. In Brand’s What We All Long For, Quy also looks like a ghost to Tuyen, but in this case, the eerie sensation lingers—even after Tuyen, pushed to do so by her brother Binh, touches Quy:

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Tuyen was propelled by Binh’s hand and an ineffable dread toward the man. She reached involuntarily for his shoulders. He felt like nothing, a ghost. She sensed something malevolent and withdrew her arms. (Brand 2005, p. 297)

One main difference here is that while Jean knows Osman’s story, Tuyen has spent her entire childhood surrounded by the surreal legend of the lost brother, who is elevated to a saint- or martyr-like status by her parents. She knows nothing of the real person Quy, who, by comparison, can only seem less kind, pure or forgiving than she would have imagined him to be. Holloway and Kneale explain how essential knowing or not knowing, telling or not telling, can be in haunting: “in fact knowing why a ghost haunts is one way of loosening its hold over us. Once it can be narrated it ceases to be a mystery or threat” (2008, p. 300). Although the reader is familiar with Quy’s story, Tuyen is not, which is why she perceives her brother as a threatening presence. Even when she attempts to break the spell by reaching for him, he feels “like nothing, a ghost” (Brand 2005, p. 297). Without knowing his true story, his presence remains dubious and irritating. The power of (a lack of) narrative outweighs bodily presence. In the beginning of Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel Call Me Zebra, protagonist Zebra and her father flee Iran on foot and describe their bodies as being reduced to a zombie-like appearance and a lack of presence as they approach the border. Their strenuous path transforms their bodies and it seems like their journey marks them in a more profound sense as well: We were reduced to desperation by our aimless path, which seemed to fold over itself a million times before delivering us to the border. Our bodies had metamorphosed. We were skeletal, ragged, dirty, stupid from the rough blows of our journey towards nothingness. On the rare occasions when we saw villagers moving across the landscape, ambling into the light and crossing out of it again, they pretended not to see us. It was as if we didn’t exist. (van der Vliet Oloomi 2018, p. 20)

As Achille Mbembe puts it, “we do not penetrate the ghostly theater without a certain bodily struggle” (2013, p. 140). Zebra and her father, on the one hand, appear to be pushed into a ghostly sphere by their bodily struggle. On the other hand, the main reason they take a longer and more strenuous path is to give them a certain anonymity, which means they

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choose to put themselves through additional physical hardships to become ghostlier. No matter how much of their physical transformation is intentional, they become clearly and physically marked as ‘exiles’ as Zebra puts it throughout the novel. Arjun Appadurai describes how locality is inscribed onto bodies by certain trials and rituals in a rather similar way: a great deal of what have been termed rites of passage is concerned with the production of what we might call local subjects, actors who properly belong to a situated community of kin, neighbors, friends, and enemies. Ceremonies of naming and tonsure, scarification and segregation, circumcision and deprivation are complex social techniques for the inscription of locality onto bodies. Looked at slightly differently, they are ways to embody locality as well as to locate bodies in a socially and spatially defined community. (2000, p. 179, italics original)

Appadurai stresses that, while the actual location in which one’s life takes place (he uses the term neighbourhood for this) is equally constructed by such rituals of naming and inscribing, locality for him is something different. In his view, locality is “relational and contextual” (2000, p. 178) and “a complex phenomenological quality” (2000, p.  178). Zebra and her father go through rites of passage and become locals in the ghostly sphere of exile, relating to other people in exile much more than to the local villagers they meet while still in Iran: “a person of no particular nation, Zebra is left situated in her own body and mind” (McNamara 2018, n.p.).23 The ghostly body becomes an important component of locality in the relational and contextual sense of Appadurai, rather than in the physical sense of ‘neighbourhood’. Ghostly bodies and apparitions can thus be used to anchor a translocal character in a physically fixed setting (as is the case with Osman in Happiness) or in a locality in the sense of Appadurai. The ghostly bodies additionally point to the power of narratives to alter the physical world as well as the properties of a locality. Whether or not a body can be touched, 23  This type of locality, haunted from the outside, may not exactly be what Appadurai has in mind with his definition of locality as opposed to neighbourhood. Nonetheless, it reveals one of the forms translocal novels take on: a text driven by introspection and a more theoretical and relational approach to space and setting. Although McNamara does not use the term in his article, like Cole’s Open City, Call Me Zebra can be described as a ‘theory generation’ novel and the sheer amount of theory presented in the novel—from Benjamin to Said—is clearly a focal point of McNamara’s analysis.

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for example, is dictated by the translocal narrative within which the body is embedded. Supernatural phenomena interfering with the laws of physics, rendering bodies or objects translucent or unstable, is another very common feature of ghost stories that is picked up and adapted to the translocal context. In all examples, a familiar type of ghost story is slightly altered to accommodate the translocal dimension, thereby making use of the resulting uncanny effect of defamiliarisation and enhancing narratability through the use of well-established narrative patterns.

Conclusion Haunting—in all its varieties—is not only relevant to translocal narratability because both make use of the relationship of texts and Others and subvert readerly expectations; translocal haunting also shows remarkably well how deeply the narrative techniques of translocal writing are intertwined and can work simultaneously. This is, first of all, due to the liminal locations central to both haunting and translocal narratives: both move, in a way, between the layers of the text and the (urban) palimpsest. From this liminal location, haunting can then shape and reshape the form of a narrative, making it more uncanny and more translocal at the same time. This reshaping frequently makes absences and silences, that would otherwise go unnoticed, more prominent. Palimpsest, simultaneity, absence, and silence can all be employed to add to the translocal effect of the haunting narrative. Additionally, all hauntings described here take place in urban settings. As a city is generally excessively haunted (to the same degree in which it is densely populated), the sheer number of possible ghosts creates its own distortions—in addition to the spatiotemporal distortions caused by haunting and translocality in the first place. Ghostly as well as urban anonymity are contrasted with different forms of place attachment, which are in turn marked by layers of hauntings imported to a place by each new resident. Furthermore, what a setting means to a character (who forms a translocal attachment to it by bringing their ghosts along) appears to frequently be the opposite of what that place is intended to be: graveyards spring to life and flourishing construction sites or new buildings become graves. This reversal, in many cases, amplifies the uncanny or subversive nature of the narrative. Although the ways in which translocal narratives are haunted thus vary significantly, all of them appear to work with either a type of reversal or a

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doppelganger-like structure. The ghost story is used as a basic image for simplified conceptions of translocal existences, settings or attachments since it may seem, to both readers and other characters, that a translocal narrative must demote several of its locations to a ghost-like status: somehow present, but not quite. The use of italics is one example of this. The reversals and twists added to the typical haunting narrative structures then complicate this notion. Well-established narrative patterns are thereby used to enhance narratability while at the same time allowing for subversive modifications of forms and expectations.

Works Cited Corpus

of

32 Main Novels

Brand, Dionne. 2005. What We All Long For. New York: Dunne. Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2014. We Need New Names. London: Vintage Books. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. New York: Random House. Forna, Aminatta. 2018. Happiness. London: Bloomsbury. Rushdie, Salman. 2001. Fury. London: Cape. Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen. 2018. Call Me Zebra. London: Alma Books.

Further References Ameel, Lieven. 2017a. Open City: Reading Signs of Uncertain Times in New York and Brussels. In Mielikuvituksen maailmat / Fantasins världar / Worlds of Imagination, ed. Merja Polvinen, Maria Salenius, and Howard Sklar, 265–283. Turku: Eetos. Appadurai, Arjun. 2000. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baines, Phil, and Andrew Haslam. 2005. Type and Typography. London: Laurence King Publishing. Blanco, María del Pilar. 2012. Ghost-Watching American Modernity. Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination. New  York, NY: Fordham University Press. Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, eds. 2013. The Spectralities Reader. Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2013a. Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del

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Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 1–27. London and New  York: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2013b. Possessions: Spectral Places/Introduction. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 395–402. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2013c. Spectropolitics: Ghosts of the Global Contemporary. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 91–102. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry 18 (1): 1–21. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge. Falconer, Rachel. 2005. Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fellner, Astrid M. 2010. ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and the Challenges of Urbanity. In Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment, ed. Stefan Brandt, Winfried Fluck, and Frank Mehring, 231–246. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. Gurr, Jens Martin. 2013. ‘Without Contraries Is No Progression’: Emplotted Figures of Thought in Negotiating Oppositions, Funktionsgeschichte and Literature as ‘Cultural Diagnosis’. In Text or Context: Reflections on Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Rüdiger Kunow and Stephan Mussil, 59–77. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Harford Vargas, Jennifer. 2014. Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. MELUS 39 (3): 8–30. Holloway, Julian, and James Kneale. 2008. Locating Haunting: A Ghost-Hunter’s Guide. cultural geographies 15 (3): 297–312. Lewicka, Maria. 2014. In Search of Roots: Memory as Enabler of Place Attachment. In Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, ed. Lynne Catherine Manzo, 49–60. Abingdon: Routledge. Lipson Freed, Joanne. 2017. Haunting Encounters. The Ethics of Reading Across Boundaries of Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Maddern, Jo Frances, and Peter Adey. 2008. Spectro-Geographies. Cultural Geographies 15 (3): 291–295. Mbembe, Achille. 2013. Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 131–150. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

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McNamara, Nathan Scott. 2018. The Straight Way Was Lost: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra. Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 February. https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-­straight-­way-­was-­lost-­azareen-­van-­der-­vliet-­ oloomis-­call-­me-­zebra/. Accessed 20 Jan 2019. Munos, Delphine. 2018. We Narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such A Full Sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American? Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4 (1): 66–81. Pike, Burton. 1981. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pike, David Lawrence. 2007. Metropolis on the Styx. The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pile, Steve. 2005. Real Cities. Modernity, Space, and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. London: SAGE. Rothstein, Edward. 2010. African Burial Ground, and Its Dead, Are Given Life. The New York Times, 25 February. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/ arts/design/26burial.html. Accessed 17 Jan 2019. Simmel, Georg. 2004 [1903]. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden, 12–19. London: Routledge. Smyth, Heather. 2008. ‘The Being Together of Strangers’: Dionne Brand’s Politics of Difference and the Limits of Multicultural Discourse. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 33 (1): 272–290. Thurston, Michael. 2009. The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry. From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2006. The Return of Negation: The Doppelganger in Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’. SubStance 35 (2): 100–116. Wolfreys, Julian. 2013. Preface: On Textual Haunting. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 69–74. London and New  York: Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

What makes a translocal novel narratable? In the course of this study, I have identified a number of narrative techniques and strategies that allow stories to take place in multiple settings at once, with an effect that blends and oscillates between locations rather than creating clear-cut and fixed delimitations. By grouping these techniques under various categories, types or terms, I have learned much about the nature of translocality and translocal writing. Most importantly, however, I hope to have shown that (how and why) translocality is not simply an alternation between separated storyworlds but the creation of a new kind of storyworld in which distance does not equal disconnection. In his novel All Our Names (2015), Dinaw Mengestu tells the story of Isaac and Helen in a small town in the American Midwest, as well as the story of Isaac and his nameless friend (who later turns out to be the Isaac of Helen’s story) in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. As the novel progresses, the chapters and settings bleed into each other through similar revelations the characters live through in their respective locations. Thought processes begin in Uganda and continue in the United States. As this process builds up slowly, it is only in the last few chapters that the novel becomes truly translocal. Roughly in the middle of the novel, Isaac’s friend (nicknamed ‘Dickens’ by Helen) reads Great Expectations in a courtyard in Kampala:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3_8

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I didn’t read the book so much as I recited it; I could have gone minutes without looking down at the page and not lost a word, just as I knew my father and uncles must have done with the stories they told me and their own children. The stories were lifeless until they made something out of them, and that was what I did that morning. London was now Kampala; Pip, a poor African orphan wandering the streets of the capital. (Mengestu 2015, p. 164, my italics)

The novel itself here provides an illustration of the power of stories to produce translocality. What this excerpt points to are not the narrative techniques I mainly focus on in this study, but a particular type of reading that can render a narrative translocal. London becomes Kampala as Isaac’s friend breathes life into a story that might otherwise seem unrelatable in his current location. This excerpt then points to a tendency of translocal writing that I had not necessarily anticipated: the involvement of the reader’s location. In each of my chapters, I have found examples of texts and tools that invite readers to think their own location, city or neighbourhood as possibly connected to locations, cities or neighbourhoods narrated in the translocal novel. Whether that be as a layer of a fragmented translocal urban palimpsest in Abani’s The Virgin of Flames, in the form of speculative simultaneity in Hamid’s Exit West or as a scale effect in Okojie’s Butterfly Fish, the reader’s physical environment gains significance. This is also the reason I have reflected, on several occasions, on the relationship of ‘real’ cities to their storied counterparts, which is too often neglected. In addition to producing narratability and posing worthwhile questions about the nature of (narrative) space, this aspect of the narratives emphasises commonality: the reader’s world is not so different from that (those) of the story. The points of connection and of friction between storylines and realities, which is particularly self-evident in Shamsie’s Home Fire or Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, clearly underline an assumption that has been part of my conceptualisation of translocal narratability before I had even settled on this particular terminology: “both sameness and difference are essential” (Lipson Freed 2017, p. 30) in making translocality narratable. Commonality and specificity, my preferred terms, can be found, analysed and contrasted in each novel of my corpus and in just about every theoretical approach I have adopted and adapted in the course of this study. To truly speak about commonality rather than about the common experiences shared merely by a larger group of people or characters, I have found

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it necessary to look at a large number of novels and to prioritise the tracing of particular narrative techniques over a reading that attempts to mention all main features of each novel. This focus on commonality by no means diminishes the specificity inherent in each narrative but simply puts it in a dialogue with other texts and settings. Although I have learned much about the commonalities between contemporary translocal texts, my contrasting readings, as well as the categories and typologies I have developed, have also emphasised their specificities. Composing an analysis of not one, two or three translocal novels, but of thirty-two, was therefore an interesting and productive experience. Narrative techniques that seemed dominant in my initial readings turned out to be much less significant in the context of the bigger picture of translocality. Other techniques remained relevant but have already been discussed extensively by several scholars (the urban palimpsest in Cole’s Open City would be an example) and could therefore be referenced without adding another detailed discussion of a particular text or technique. This strategy allowed me to focus on those narrative techniques, strategies and tools that most clearly serve to produce translocal narratability and to also select those that are particularly innovative, surprising or interesting. In most chapters, I have identified a number of strategies, types or qualities the novels in my corpus display or employ to produce translocal narratability. For each strategy, type or quality, I then provide several examples from different novels to show how the narrative becomes translocal or makes its translocality more narratable. In general, I have found this to be the most efficient method to explore each concept and trace commonalities. Not all 32 novels are mentioned in each chapter, and some novels serve as examples much more frequently than others, not because they are more important or more translocal but simply because they use a larger variety of narrative techniques. The only chapter that focuses mainly on two novels and a more specific topic is Chap. 3, which deals in large parts with translocal urban palimpsests and/as street art in Abani’s The Virgin of Flames and Brand’s What We All Long For. Due to the ubiquity of the palimpsest, especially in literary urban studies, my aim here was to use a clear-cut focus (on street art and on only two novels) in order to be able to narrow down potential examples of palimpsests. I was, therefore, able to identify qualities and types of palimpsests that otherwise may have remained hidden in the sheer mass of possible palimpsests. In my chapter on mapping, Chap. 4, I use many novels as examples but only provide a detailed mapping of Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the

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Mathematician. Since my aim with this mapping method was to zoom in on details of specific translocal texts, using brief examples from several novels would have defeated the purpose. One example provided with more depth was sufficient to show what this approach can achieve. It was, at times, challenging to find a balance between such sections that necessitate a narrower focus or a lengthier analysis of one text and those predominant parts of my study that use brief examples from several texts. Providing just enough background and context for these brief readings while keeping the strict focus on translocal narratability was another key challenge. Whether I have accomplished the tasks I have set is for others to judge, but I believe that this style of analysis, between distant and close reading, is extremely worthwhile. Through this style of analysis, many features of translocal narratives have emerged as new and innovative although much of their translocality has clearly been shown to be grounded in a long history of transculturality, global movement and local-local connections. By making references to texts that are not contemporary, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land or numerous city novels from James Joyce to Victor Hugo, and pointing out similar techniques or topics, I have placed translocal writing in a context that spans a geographical and temporal breadth that is frequently underestimated. Both Tendai Huchu and Teju Cole in fact allude to and analyse a whole range of urban classics and thereby place their own works in a tradition that is centuries old. With narrative arches that move from Accra to London, from Edinburgh to Bindura, from Beijing to Lausanne to Chicago to London, the centrality of cities to contemporary translocal writing is undeniable. As places where multitudes of local-local connections meet, urban spaces are extremely conducive to translocal narratability. The translocal urban palimpsest in Brand’s What We All Long For, the onrush of sensory impressions resulting in a sense of simultaneity in Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Insanities, and the mappability of narrative locations in cities, evidenced by Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, were the main intersections of urbanity and translocality, which I had anticipated in the early stages of my research. The fact that urban environments react extremely well to drastic changes in scales and allow novels, such as Rushdie’s Fury or Cole’s Open City, to play with exaggerated scales and layer different locations at various scales, was more surprising in its great impact on the narrative. Although it can easily be presumed that the fabric of the urban environment is flexible and adaptable, it is still fascinating

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that a city setting can smoothly accommodate such enormous jumps in scales, from miniatures to hyperobjects. The various haunting scenarios, as well as the atypical non-places, revealed another effect of translocality on typical city motifs and tropes: they are alluded to, only to be inverted in one way or another. Non-places with an abundance of ‘placeness’ in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss or Popoola’s When We Speak of Nothing, graveyards bursting with life in Forna’s Happiness or Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, or similar creative twists on common urban topics and images are not unusual in the novels of my corpus. Since readers can easily recognise stories and anticipate developments, the use of well-established narrative patterns enhances narratability. When the established pattern is then imaginatively reinterpreted, the story additionally becomes more memorable—again enhancing narratability. What I believe can be taken away from this study, in addition to a deeper insight into the workings of translocality, commonality, narrative space and narratabilty, is the confirmation that attempting to find new or unusual types of analyses—such as distant reading, mapping or an analysis of an unusually large corpus of texts—is always a productive activity. Although I have worked with several ideas that ended up being failures— the creation of a functional map of several places at once, for example—I was still able to adapt these failures into new perspectives on an issue that I previously believed had already been studied from most angles: the mapping of literary spaces, for example. Working with a large and varied corpus of novels breaks with several traditions in literary studies, not the least of which is a clear boundary between American, postcolonial and British literary studies, a delimitation which is made largely obsolete by precisely the type of texts I have discussed here. Including primary and secondary literature from all of these fields and their intersections has allowed me to find further commonalities that move beyond strict borders of nations, cultures and disciplines. This point then brings me back to Taiye Selasi, whose talk ‘Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, Ask Me Where I’m A Local’ I refer to in my opening reflections on translocal narratability. In 2015, roughly a year after presenting her talk on locality, Selasi commented on a similar issue: Those who claim that I’m not Ghanaian mean only that I do not live out one version of Ghanaian–ness. But it doesn’t mean that my father is not Ewe. It doesn’t mean that my favorite food isn’t groundnut soup. It doesn’t

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mean that I don’t know Accra like the back of my hand. Or rather, one part of Accra; I don’t know the whole city. We’re all experiencing our particular versions of these cities, of these identities. I just have to give myself the right to have my version of Ghanaian-ness, to have my version of Nigerian-ness. (Bady and Selasi 2015, p. 163)

What makes Selasi ‘a local’, then, is her particular experience of place: place attachment through heritage, appreciation of the local food, knowledge of particular neighbourhoods but not of others, make Selasi a local of a particular version of Accra. Her personal version of the city is equated with one part of her identity but also layered with her ‘Nigerian-ness’. Both her identity and her city become translocal, especially considering that she also draws local-local connections from Accra to Rome and New York. By commenting on how “we’re all experiencing our particular versions of these cities, of these identities” (2015, p. 163), Selasi sums up translocality in the simplest way: one local place is connected to another. In conclusion, I hope that my study has shown what translocal narratability then actually examines: the way most of us experience cities, local attachment and shared stories.

Works Cited Corpus

of

32 Main Novels

Mengestu, Dinaw. 2015. All Our Names. London: Sceptre.

Further References Bady, Aaron, and Taiye Selasi. 2015. From That Stranded Place. Transition 117: 148–165. Lipson Freed, Joanne. 2017. Haunting Encounters. The Ethics of Reading Across Boundaries of Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Works Cited

Corpus of 32 Main Novels Abani, Chris. 2007. The Virgin of Flames. London: Vintage. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2014. Americanah. London: Fourth Estate. Bourke, Thomas. 2018. The Consolation of Maps. London: Riverrun. Brand, Dionne. 2005. What We All Long For. New York: Dunne. Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2014. We Need New Names. London: Vintage Books. Cleave, Chris. 2008. The Other Hand. London: Sceptre. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. New York: Random House. Desai, Kiran. 2006. The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Grove Press. Díaz, Junot. 2008. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. London: Faber and Faber. Forna, Aminatta. 2018. Happiness. London: Bloomsbury. Guo, Xiaolu. 2014. I Am China. London: Vintage. Hamid, Mohsin. 2017. Exit West. New York: Riverhead Books. Huchu, Tendai. 2015. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician. Cardigan: Parthian. Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2004. The Namesake. London: Harper Perennial. Lee, Min Jin. 2017. Free Food For Millionaires. London: Head of Zeus. Mengestu, Dinaw. 2015. All Our Names. London: Sceptre. Okojie, Irenosen. 2015. Butterfly Fish. London: Jacaranda. Orner, Peter. 2006. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. New  York: Back Bay Books. Otsuka, Julie. 2013. The Buddha in the Attic. London: Penguin Books. Oyeyemi, Helen. 2007. The Opposite House. London: Bloomsbury.

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Ozeki, Ruth. 2013. A Tale for the Time Being. Edinburgh and London: Canongate. Popoola, Olumide. 2017. When We Speak of Nothing. Abuja and London: Cassava Republic. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo. Rushdie, Salman. 2001. Fury. London: Cape. Sahota, Sunjeev. 2015. The Year of the Runaways. New York: Knopf. Selasi, Taiye. 2013a. Ghana Must Go. New York: Penguin Press. Shafak, Elif. 2004. The Saint of Incipient Insanities. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Shamsie, Kamila. 2017. Home Fire. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Smith, Zadie. 2013. NW. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2017. Swing Time. London: Penguin. Thayil, Jeet. 2012. Narcopolis. London: Faber and Faber. Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen. 2018. Call Me Zebra. London: Alma Books.

Further References Tardis, n.: Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/24736 9?redirectedFrom=tardis&. Accessed 3 Dec 2018. Abbott, H.  Porter. 2009. Narrativity. In Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 309–328. Berlin: de Gruyter. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. TEDGlobal, 23 Jul. 2009, Oxford. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_ the_danger_of_a_single_story. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Altman, Irwin, ed. 1992. Place Attachment. New York: Plenum Press. Ameel, Lieven. 2015. ‘It’s six a.m., do you know where you are?’ Framing the Urban Experience in Literary Beginnings. In Literature and the Peripheral City: Literary Explorations, ed. Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, and Markku Salmela, 40–55. London: Palgrave. ———. 2017a. Open City: Reading Signs of Uncertain Times in New York and Brussels. In Mielikuvituksen maailmat / Fantasins världar / Worlds of Imagination, ed. Merja Polvinen, Maria Salenius, and Howard Sklar, 265–283. Turku: Eetos. ———. 2017b. The City Novel: Measuring Referential, Spatial, Linguistic, and Temporal Distances. In The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. T. Robert and J.R. Tally, 233–241. London: Routledge. Anderson, Benedict R. 1991. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

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Index

A Anthropocene, 137, 140 Appadurai, Arjun, 20, 220 Augé, Marc, 165–171, 178, 190 B Bird’s eye perspective, 119, 125, 144, 146, 147, 159 Blanks, 60, 86, 185, 187, 188, 190 Blasé attitude, 73, 178, 184, 217 Book cover, 124–127 Border, 5, 10, 33, 41, 100, 111, 116, 149, 160–162, 170, 177, 204 Brah, Avtar, 5, 21, 35, 65, 70, 176 C Chronotope, 27, 31, 186, 190, 208 Cityness, 7, 14, 29, 99 Climate change, 138 Commonality, 69, 74, 75, 207, 209, 210, 226, 227

Cosmopolitan, 37, 89, 104, 118, 154, 157, 178 Cultural mobility, 140, 141 D Datta, Ayona, 4, 6, 7, 109 De Certeau, Michel, 145, 149, 155, 165 Diaspora, 3, 5, 21, 41, 55, 65, 176 Digital, 29, 119–122, 124 Distant reading, 10, 84, 229 F Fuzzy edges, 143 G Gaps, 86, 96, 170, 185, 186, 188, 190 Global city, 3, 6 Globalisation, 5, 7, 89, 155, 169, 170, 181 Glocal, 54, 170

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3

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250 

INDEX

H Home, 21, 34, 44, 55, 70, 120, 180, 187 Hypermobility, 30, 89 Hyperobject, 138, 139, 144, 151, 155, 162, 163, 169 I Imagined communities, 33, 55 Implied participation, 22, 35–44 Interactive, 95, 101, 124 Italics, 77, 79, 202–204, 213 L Lesbian, 66 Liminal, 16, 35, 37, 198, 204, 214, 216, 221 Local-local, 4, 5, 16, 69, 79, 87, 228, 230 Lynch, Kevin, 6, 23, 24, 97, 102, 144, 146 M Mental map, 23, 53, 57, 103, 108, 112, 113 Metonymic, 25, 28, 29, 71 Metropolitan, 27, 28, 178, 182, 207 Mobility, 21, 29, 35, 69, 89, 109, 212 Multilocal, 6 Multi-positionality, 154, 157 N Narratable, 9, 54, 86, 129, 137, 140, 150, 202, 225, 226 Navigation, 25, 28, 35, 70, 160

O Other, 74, 160, 161, 198, 202, 204, 221 Othering, 197 P Palimpsestic, 51, 56, 58, 67, 78, 79 Palimpsestuous, 56, 59, 61, 62, 67, 68, 71, 77–79 Place attachment, 8, 114, 115, 117, 180, 181, 208, 221, 230 Postcolonial, 3, 7, 68, 89, 111, 157, 188, 229 Q Queer, 65 S Sassen, Saskia, 4, 6, 142 Scale effects, 15, 140–143, 150, 156, 158, 162, 226 Silenced, 62, 187, 189 Simmel, Georg, 27, 73, 178, 217 Spectral, 16, 195, 196, 198, 202, 203, 211, 213, 216 Speculative simultaneity, 14, 22, 35–45 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 62, 188, 197 Street art, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 61–63, 66, 67, 72, 75 Street level, 15, 144–147, 163 Subaltern, 62, 65, 188, 206 Synecdochic, 21, 23–25, 28, 45, 71, 137, 189

 INDEX 

T Time, 6, 23, 28, 31, 32, 35, 51, 52, 100, 111, 136, 147–149, 151, 172, 173, 182, 183, 186, 190, 202, 204, 210 Transcultural, 3–5, 9, 57, 65, 67, 69, 125, 140, 188 Transgender, 54, 177 Transnational, 3, 5, 20, 25, 29, 68, 69, 87, 160

Trans-prefix, 5, 6, 188 Typography, 198, 202, 204 U Urbanity, 2, 7, 37, 54, 69, 179, 212, 228 W Worldmaking, 8, 37, 38, 71 Writing back, 91, 106

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