WHAT IS TRANSNATIONALITY?

The idea of transnationality is an important one

in contemporary theory for a variety of reasons.

Perhaps the foremost concern of scholars today

is to make connections across and between enti-

ties that were formerly theorized as discrete and

autonomous. The term ‘transnational’ with the

emphasis on the transallows this type of rela-

tional theorizing. Furthermore, it encourages it in

a number of different arenas – from examina-

tions of the interactions and literal back-

and-forth movement of goods, people and ideas

across national borders, to the theoretical supple-

ness of poststructuralist thought across contain-

ing and linear narratives and disciplinary

confines.

Theorizing transnationality, considered within

this broad rubric, is inherently transgressive. The

emphasis on relations betweenthings and on

movements acrossthings forces a reconceptuali-

zation of core beliefs in migration and geopoliti-

cal literatures, which formerly emphasized

state-centric narratives and territorially defined

national borders. It forces a rethinking of

economic categories, which exclusively privi-

leged highly abstracted global forces such as

capitalism. It also forces a rethinking in broader

areas of epistemological inquiry, including ques-

tions of identity, subjectivity formation and

foundational beliefs about space and time. In the

best work on transnationality, the border crossings

evident in rethinking these literatures of the past

decade have come together in a fruitful dialogue.

Thus, issues related to the changing relationship

of the nation vis-à-visglobal economic and poli-

tical forces, and the shifting understandings of

categories and foundational cultural narratives,

are interrelated in complex and interestingways.

In the following sections I examine some of the

ways that thinking ‘transnationally’ problema-

tizes older categories, then go on to discuss con-

temporary transnational research in cultural

geography and some of the questions and dilem-

mas that it raises.

THE CONDITION OF

TRANSNATIONALITY

In a prominent discourse on the nature of modern-

ity, Marshall Berman (1982) defined moderniza-

tionas a process of change characterized by a

number of key forces, especially the urbaniza-

tion, industrialization and bureaucratization that

were occurring with accelerated intensity in

Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth

century. He defined modernismas the cultural

fallout of these processes – the expression of

change evident in the art, music, architecture and

literature of that time. Modernity, for Berman,

was the overall experience of change that was

felt by both urban and rural residents as the land-

scape literally shifted beneath their feet.

These divisions are useful for considering

transnationality as well, as the term has become

ubiquitous across disciplines and often loses its

coherence as a result. Transnationaland transna-

tionalismare terms favoured by cultural studies

and literary theorists and generally refer to the

poststructural concepts of in-betweenness or

ambivalence, especially with reference to the

nation. They are also frequently used to denote

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Cultural Geographies of Transnationality

Katharyne Mitchell

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