7 - Europe's Invisible Ghettos: Transnationalism and Neoliberal Capitalism in Julya Rabinowich's Die Erdfresserin

Summary

Sie zogen durch Kleinasien nach Europa und nahmen ihre Schätze mit sich, und so lange diese dauerten, waren sie überall willkommen; wehe aber allen Armen in der Fremde.

[They wandered through Asia Minor and brought their treasures, and as long as these lasted, they were welcome everywhere; but woe to all the poor in foreign lands.]

—Achim von Arnim, Isabella von Ägypten

Introduction

IN HER TIMELY NOVEL Die Erdfresserin (The Woman Who Eats Dirt, 2012), Julya Rabinowich thematizes the confluence of a myriad of concerns affecting contemporary migrants in Europe, whose fates are shaped by matters of intersecting ethnic, religious, and gendered identities. Her novel thus engages issues also addressed by a now sizable body of Germanophone literature concerned with cultural transnationalism. However, Rabinowich's novel ultimately points to the fact that transnational social spaces are increasingly infringed upon by global capitalism. Her text thereby highlights that however important and interconnected matters of identity and its recognition are, they cannot be properly addressed if individuals’ basic needs, such as food, shelter, and access to medication, have not been met. As Rabinowich's grim depiction of the fate of a transnational illegal sex worker clearly shows, for the estimated half-million illegal immigrants in contemporary Western Europe, they are not. Forming part of a growing European precariat, these immigrants’ plight is representative of the more wholesale failure of contemporary European nation-states to protect both denizens and citizens from globalization in its current shape of neoliberal capitalism.

Globalization, Transnationalism, and Neoliberalism

Much scholarship on the transnational stresses its distinctiveness from globalization. Victor Roudometof distinguishes between globalization and transnationalism, arguing that transnationalism is properly defined as the “emerging reality of social life under conditions of internal globalization or glocalization,” here understood as the local manifestations of globalization in everyday life. Taking a closer look at the nature of these transnational effects of economic globalization, it becomes clear that transnationalism describes a predominantly cultural phenomenon concerned with issues such as individual and community identity. Roudomentof, for example, details that transnational social spaces include “spaces of transnational sexuality, popular music, journalism, as well as spaces fostering the construction of a multitude of identities (ranging from those based on gender to those based on race, religion, or ethnicity).”