The proliferation of multi-national corporations and increasing movement of people around the globe continues to push culture in a transnational direction. As the dominance of identity politics and multiculturalism is challenged, new concepts need to be formulated that better articulate the predicaments in which people find themselves. The current categories set by the nation-state, i.e. citizen, immigrant, alien, etc., do not allow for a political engagement that provides possible spaces of resistance. However, millions of people live each day as the exception to the political categories. These are the denizens of the contemporary world that find themselves in the evolving position outside of political categorizations and as a challenge to conventional politics. To this end, we need to do as Rosi Braidotti suggests and “track down these shifting locations and account for them through adequate figurations in politically informed cartographies that combine accountability with the quest for possible sites of resistance” (Transpositions 264). This project would turn the object of politics away from the state and onto singular lives by ethically responding to the diversity and particularity of life.
I take this as a question and a challenge to literary studies: how/can literature open up spaces of resistance that challenge the existing political categories and allow the denizen to emerge as a figure of change? Can transnational texts take up this challenge and be catalysts for change, thus enabling denizens to move forward with the process of becoming even in the face of uncertain outcomes? I would argue that it can and does in texts like Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, Sebastian Barry's The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine. In its singular engagement with other identities, literature proves to be a means of ethically responding to those outside of political figurations.
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