5 - Transnationalism, Colonial Loops, and the Vicissitudes of Cosmopolitan Affect: Christian Kracht's Imperium and Teju Cole's Open City

Summary

THIS CHAPTER DISCUSSES transnationalism and cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of two recent novels, Christian Kracht's Imperium (Empire, 2012) and Teju Cole's Open City (2011; 2012). Kracht's novel about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century dropout and South Seascolonizer August Engelhardt is thematically significant in this context, particularly insofar as colonialism—as a historical context marked by extremely asymmetrical transnational movements—constitutes a crucial backdrop for contemporary uses of the term. In contrast to Herrmann and Taberner in this volume, however, this chapter argues that Kracht's novel cannot therefore be called transnational in a more programmatic sense. As detailed below, the publication of Imperium unleashed a major feuilleton controversy in Germany. On the one hand, the author was accused of right-wing sympathies and racism; on the other hand, that charge was attributed to a lack of appreciation for the literary form of the novel, specifically its uses of irony. Critically engaging the terms of this debate (and thereby affirming the significance of aesthetics also for political readings of literature), my own close reading of the text suggests that the narrative voice, intertextual archive and rhetoric of Imperium's literary fantasy return audiences into a colonial loop. The ironic inflections of its German narrator's voice, I demonstrate, do not translate into a clearcut intervention against the colonial mentalities he is evoking. Despite its thematic focus on transnational movements, Imperium thus does not resonate with the, in my view, most productive layer of transnationalism in its recent conceptualizations. As developed in the central section of this paper, I understand transnationalism (in the programmatic sense, and differing from its contextualization in the introduction to this volume) as a methodological perspective that foregrounds a critique of nationalist mythologies. This perspective does not imply the insignificance of nationbuilding, but it investigates the contingent historical processes through which nations came into being, and specifically the imperialist and racist mythologies supporting the process of German nation-building in the colonial era.

With its literary failure to effectively critique these mythologies, Kracht's novel is arguably indicative also of broader challenges for contemporary German literature as produced and read in a context still marked by these legacies of imperialist (and later fascist) nation-building.