4 - “On the Plane to Bishkek or in the Airport of Tashkent”: Transnationalism and Notions of Home in Recent German Literature

Summary

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSNATIONALISM, a term that has been well established among social scientists since the late 1990s, has recently become popular among scholars of literature and culture as well. The MLA bibliography lists 185 entries with some combination of “transnational” and “German” since 2000, the majority of them journal articles. Definitions and, more importantly, applications vary across fields. Sociologist Steven Vertovec, in his recent book-length introduction to the topic that focuses on migrant communities and their economic and communication practices, stresses the importance of “non-state actors” and their “sustained linkages and on-going exchanges” (3) across national boundaries as central to any definition of transnationalism. Paul Jay, in his 2010 study Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, takes economic globalization together with postcolonialism as his conceptual points of departure for his examination of the effects these developments have on contemporary literature, arguing that contemporary literature has become transnational as a result of its engagement with globalization. Invoking oppositional pairings, such as global and local, economic and cultural, East and West, Jay insists that “mobility is the key process here” (12). Within the field of German studies, the term transnationalism has most often been used in the context of migrant communities and their depiction in literature and films typically produced by artists presumed to be representatives of these groups. The characterization of Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akın as a “preeminent transnational director” is just one example. In the case of Germany, perhaps more so than in other national contexts, economic and particularly cultural transnationalism remain closely linked to the national and to definitions of German identity. Claudia Breger, though not explicitly referring to Germany, writes in her study An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance (2012) that the “national and the transnational are not to be positioned in opposition to one another. Rather,” she continues, “the constitution of national imaginaries, identities, and institutions has always been an effect of transcultural flows.”4 Anke Biendarra makes a similar argument when she proposes that we “read contemporary German-language literature as glocal,” referring to the fusion of the local and the global.