This is a comparative course on the effects of transnational displacement and dislocation on culture, identity, and place as depicted in contemporary literature and cultural theory. In the era of globalization and the transnational movement of people, capital, technology, and media, as well as just about everything else, what kind of transnational modes of belonging, subjectivity, community, spatiality and temporality have been created? Historians, writers, and critics have documented the various ways in which the nation emerged as an imagined community (Benedict Anderson); we have yet to fully examine the diverse types of imagined communities, identities, and matrices of place and time (Bakhtin’s chronotopes) generated by transnational displacement. If the concepts of people belonging to a bounded and sovereign territory, community conceived as horizontal brotherhood, as well as homogeneous, empty time are the chief attributes of the nation, what takes their place in transnational literatures and cultures?

To be sure, all transnational displacements are not the same, and we will examine important paradigms featured in critical discussion on the topic: transnational migration (the movement of peoples from one nation to another); diaspora (scattered communities displaced over wide distances but held together by myths of the homeland); borderlands (transnational space centered on a geopolitical line).

Required course materials: Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez; Edouard Glissant, The Fourth Century; Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman; Francisco Jiménez, The Circuit,
and a Course Reader.