A TRANSNATIONAL CRITICAL OPTIC, NOW

JESSICA BERMAN

In winter 2017, I prepared to teach Sarah Orne Jewett as I usually

do, by focusing on Jewett’s New England roots, her female friend-
and mentorships, and her importance to American regionalism. But
as the students in my American Realism class and I delved into Jew-
ett’s fiction, we became struck by its powerful transnational themes
and currents, which contest the common understanding of Jewett
as primarily a regional writer. One character in “The Queen’s Twin”
travels to see the Queen of England, convinced that since they
share the same birthday, they are twins.1 Another pulls old Indian
muslin, a waistcoat of “strange old-fashioned foreign stuff,” and “old
French and Spanish and English gold” out of a sea chest after her
father’s death in the story, “In Dark New England Days.” There are
constant references to sailors off to the Spice or South Sea Islands.
And most compellingly for my class, the story “The Foreigner” re-
volves around events in Kingston, Jamaica that bring a “French”
Catholic woman back to protestant Dunnet Landing, Maine, and
showcase the lonely life she lives as “the foreigner” in town. Despite
the fact that she is befriended by the narrator, Mrs. Todd, the pres-
ence of the foreigner, Mrs. Tolland, at first shocks and later haunts
the town. In developing the gothic dimensions of this tale, Jew-
ett shows us the uncanny power of the omnipresent “stranger” in
our midst as well as the ongoing challenge transnationalism poses

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 44.4 Fall 2017

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476  COLLEGE LITERATURE  |  44.4 Fall 2017

to many of our standard narratives of shared identity. Her work

shows us yet again that American literature is and has always been
transnational, that one can’t separate the “foreign” among our texts
from the “home grown” and that, in an age of nationalist resur-
gence, recognizing those facts becomes a necessarily transgressive
act. By the end of the course, when we tackled Dinaw Mengestu’s
wonderful novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, and Ramin
Bahrani’s underappreciated film, Man Push Cart, our joint reading
had exposed the inescapable transnational debts and investments
of US literature and their complicated intersection with other is-
sues of identity, especially questions of gender.
I begin with this example to argue for the importance of reading
with a transnational critical optic, now. I understand this optic as a
way to see how particular texts or media practices gesture beyond
and critique national categories of identity and meaning making
and also to recognize the deep imbrication between discourses of
nationality and the rigid binary system of gender that undergirds
contemporary regimes of nation-state power. While scholars have
often used the term “transnational” to describe the web of interre-
lationships linking a collection of texts worldwide or as an adjective
defining a new canon of work that operates within global rather
than national frames (Ashcroft 2009, 13). I want to claim that we
might best deploy the transnational as a critical optic or practice
that engages with the discursive categories of nationality while
recognizing activities that critique and transcend them. Through
this optic the term “transnational” comes to function through
the power of its prefix, indicating a position, action, or attitude
toward the nation and its cultural apparatuses, rather than as a way
of describing a given set of texts or a canon of writers. The trans­
national thus becomes available as a practice that requires activity
from us. Now more than ever, in an age of rising nationalism, it
seems necessary to embrace that activity and to take up a broadly
capacious, transnational practice.
My use of the term “transnational” bears affinities with the ways
that those like Bill Ashcroft or Jahan Ramazani use the term, even as
I hope to extend it beyond reference to a specific geographical space
or nation or to the specific travels, influences, or allegiances of writ-
ers and their texts. Ashcroft proposes “the concept of transnation to
extend the post-colonial critique of nation, (or more specifically the
linking of nation and state) and to argue with the entrenched idea
 Jessica Berman  |  Critical Forum 477

of diaspora as simply defined by absence and loss.” He posits that

“national borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian
constructors of identity that they have become” but recognizes that
this is a “utopian idea” that might best be applied only to a few select
cultural entities, like India. “Transnation is the fluid, migrating out-
side of the state (conceptually and culturally as well as geographi-
cally) that begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious in
India where the ‘nation’ is the perpetual scene of translation.” Cer-
tainly, we might claim that the United States fulfills some aspects
of Ashcroft’s imagined “transnation” and that these aspects of our
cultural life are precisely those now coming under attack. Yet, today
it seems utopian—or at least premature—to argue for the existence
of an American identity that is both beyond or “outside of the state”
but “begins within the nation” (2009, 13, 17).
Ramazani posits the transnational as a way to ask how we might
read differently “if the nationalities and ethnicities of poets and
poems, often reified by nation-based histories, anthologies, and syl-
labi, were genuinely regarded as hybrid, interstitial, and fluid imag-
inative constructs.” He argues convincingly in “A Trans­ national
Poetics,” for example, that “modernists translated their frequent
geographic displacement and transcultural alienation into a poetics
of bricolage and translocation, dissonance and defamiliarization”
(2006, 333). Yet for me Ramazani does not go far enough. I would
argue that the text need not be explicitly preoccupied with themes
of dislocation, hybridity, or transculturation, nor the author an exile
or itinerant, for a text to be profitably viewed from a transnational
perspective. Or, as my Jewett example shows, even the most reso-
lutely local, regional, or even nationally-oriented texts may reveal
trans­national debts and aspirations under a certain kind of gaze. And
both Ashcroft and Ramazani stop short of linking trans­national
attitudes or practices to other “trans” activity, most notably, that
which critiques the binary sex/gender system.
As I have elsewhere argued, a broader understanding of the work
of the prefix “trans” in “transnational” and its connection to the
“trans” in transgender theory is both productive and necessary.2
The prefix “trans” contributes the oppositional valence to such
words as “transgress” and “transform.” When we use it to mean
not just “across,” “on or to the other side of” but also “beyond, sur-
passing, transcending,” the prefix represents a challenge to the nor-
mative dimension of the original entity or space, a crossing over
478  COLLEGE LITERATURE  |  44.4 Fall 2017

that looks back critically from its space beyond.3 In contemporary

trans­gender and transsexual theory, the prefix “trans” has come to
stand not just for gender or sexual identities that have moved from
one side of a binary field to the other, but rather for “anything that
disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates and makes visible” the links
we assume to exist between a sexual body and the social roles it is
expected to play. As Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean
Moore put it, considering the “relationality of [the hyphenated pre-
fix] ‘trans–’” rather than its attachment to substantive terms like
gender or nation helps us see “the categorical crossings, leakages
and slippages” in and around the term and to recognize its capacity
to “disrupt or unsettle conventional boundaries,” disciplines, and
ideas (2008, 11).
Let me be clear, in no way do I want to equate transgender iden-
tities with transnational attitudes. The lived experiences of trans­
gender individuals must be recognized as specific, multitudinous,
and valued in and of themselves. Every day in the United States
transgender people face challenges to their rights and to their lives
which demand recognition and response. Rather, I am suggesting
that transgender theory opens up important new avenues for under-
standing how the prefix trans instigates a potentially productive
practice which has implications for transnational critical work.
Transgender theory invites us to recognize the deep connection
between transgender phenomena and the discourses of power in
which they are inscribed—including but not limited to national-
ity—to challenge their normativity, and to recognize the ethically
and politically productive dimension of that challenge.
The connection between transgender experience and surrounding
discourses of power has long been understood by trangender theo-
rists. Leslie Feinberg (1998) and Stryker have both commented that
transgender studies has always been linked “to a broader struggle for
social justice,” which is ongoing (2004, 212). In particular, we should
remember that trans individuals often have had difficulty obtaining
the full rights that flow from citizenship, which makes clear the chal-
lenge that trans status poses to the legal and social regime of the
nation/state. As has been made even more clear in recent months,
the rights of transgender individuals vary greatly from state to state
within the United States, from nation to nation within the Euro-
pean Union, and certainly among other states around the world. The
potential disenfranchisement faced by trans men and women under
some of the recent US state voter identification laws and the ongoing
 Jessica Berman  |  Critical Forum 479

controversy surrounding the regulation of restrooms also point to the

continuing challenge that transgender identity poses to models of
civic citizenship and civil rights that are based in immutable, binary
categories of gender within the United States.4
Currah and Moore point out that the problem of inaccurate iden-
tification documents is not only one of access, but also of the enforce-
ment of immutable binary categories by governmental power.
How is a mutating, trans-sexed body to be fixed, kept in place,
and securely moored to the document that purports to describe
its subject? What happens when state actors, insisting on the
immutability of sexed bodies and their stable alignment to gen-
der identities, are confronted with those whose bodies and gender
identities fail to conform to gender expectations?” (Currah and
Moore 2009, 113)

Because the state has a clear and continuing interest in assigning and
regulating the identities of its subjects, which is an essential com-
ponent of its ability to govern, even increased recognition of trans-
gender peoples’ right to accurate documentation will not make this
problem disappear. As Currah and Moore put it, “although the tax-
onomies used to classify individuals as of this or that type (race, sex,
national origin, for example) may shift as newer accounts of social
difference displace earlier reigning disciplinary knowledges and
ontological cartographies, the legitimacy of the traditional ‘police
powers’ of the state to establish classifications remains intact”
(2009, 114, emphasis in original). The impetus of the state to classify
individuals and fix identities in order to exert control has only grown
during the recent resurgence of nationalism and has bearing across
many different categories of identity. We seem farther and farther
away from the utopia of Ashcroft’s “transnation.”
Like the critique of the sex/gender system instigated by trans­gender
theory, but different from the current critical categories describing
“world,” “global,” or even “planetary” literature, a transnational crit-
ical optic, as I conceive it, decenters the “national tradition” as an
object of inquiry, exploring texts in relation to other, transnational
horizons of expectations, even while recognizing the challenge that
it can pose to local discourses of identity formation. In this guise,
it functions as catechresis, much as postcoloniality does for Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, “reversing, displacing and seizing the appa-
ratus of value-coding” rather than attempting to argue as though
from entirely new ground (1990, 228). In other words, it marks the
480  COLLEGE LITERATURE  |  44.4 Fall 2017

struggle with the ongoing problematics of nation, empire, and globe

while striving to open up a space of resistance to their hegemony,
and to the other discourses of identity that undergird it.
And it becomes clearer why it is important to conceive the trans-
national as a critical optic or practice linked to other trans prac-
tices and part of that “broader struggle for social justice.” Reading
Jewett’s “The Foreigner” in that light raises questions about the
grounding of Dunnet Landing’s wealth in the racist economies of
the Caribbean sugar trade, the implications of its Protestant reli-
gious conformity, as well as key questions about female agency and
propriety. Having made her way in Kingston by singing for money,
Mrs. Tolland, the foreigner, scandalizes the Maine town when she
dances during a women’s social circle, so that she is branded as liking
“other ways better’n our’n.” She is feared for her propensity to cook
with herbs: “She’d act awful secret about some things too, an’ used
to work charms for herself sometimes, an’ some o’ the neighbors
told to an’ fro after she died that they knew enough not to provoke
her.” Clearly, even before the spectral vision that haunts the end of
the story, Mrs. Tolland is associated with witch-like transgressive
power, and her presence in the story shows the deep imbrication of
gendered notions of propriety with national identity.
If we are to consider the transnational dimension of Jewett, of
Mengestu, of Bahrani, or any number of other texts or films, in our
scholarship, our teaching, and in our work with our students, then
we must understand its intersections with other gendered and raced
discourses of identity and power as well as its implications for lived
experience in the United States, here and now. Our age of resurgent
nationalism demands that we read with a transnational critical optic,
informed by transgender—and critical racial theory—and motivated
by the transgressive—and productive—power of the prefix trans.

NOTES
1
All references to texts by Jewett are from The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Proj-
ect, Coe College. http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/m-index.htm.
2
I draw on my recent essay, “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in
Transgender?,” Modernism/Modernity 24.2 (2017): 217–244, here and in
much of what follows. Used with permission.
3
“trans-, prefix.” English Oxford Living Dictionaries. https://en.oxforddictio
naries.com/definition/trans-.
 Jessica Berman  |  Critical Forum 481

4
According to the 2009 report of the National Transgender Discrimina-
tion Survey, “of those who have transitioned gender, only one-fifth (21%)
have been able to update all of their IDs and records with their new gen-
der. One-third (33%) of those who have transitioned had updated none
of their IDs or records.” See Jaime M. Grant, Lisa A. Mottet, and Justin
Tanis (2011, 5).

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are’: Contesting Sex Designations in New York City Birth Certifi-
cates.” Hypatia 24.3: 113–35.
Feinberg, Leslie. 1998. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Grant, Jaime M., Lisa A. Mottet, and Justin Tanis. 2011. Injustice at Every
Turn: A Report on the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Wash-
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and Lesbian Task Force.
Jewett, Sara Orne. “The Queen’s Twin.” The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project,
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   . “In Dark New England Days.” The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project,
Coe College. http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/m-index.htm.
   . “The Foreigner.” The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project, Coe College.
http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/m-index.htm.
Ramazani, Jahan. 2006. “A Transnational Poetics.” U.S. Literary History
18.2: 332–59.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. “Poststructuralism, Marginality, Post-
coloniality and Value.” In Literary Theory Today, edited by Peter Collier
and Helga Geyer-Ryan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stryker, Susan. 2004. “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin.”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2: 212–15.
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JESSICA BERMAN is Professor of English and Director of the

Dresher Center for the Humanities at the University of Mary-
land, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Modernist
Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge
482  COLLEGE LITERATURE  |  44.4 Fall 2017

2001) and Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational

Modernism (Columbia 2011), co-editor (with Jane Goldman) of Vir-
ginia Woolf Out of Bounds, editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf
(Wiley-Blackwell 2016) and editor of the annotated edition of
Iqbalunnisa Hussain’s Purdah and Polygamy (Oxford, forthcoming,
2017). Berman is a co-editor of Futures of Comparative Literature, the
American Comparative Literature Association’s decennial Report
on the State of the Discipline (Routledge, 2017) and also co-ed-
its, with Paul Saint-Amour, the Modernist Latitudes book series
at Columbia University Press. In 2016–17 she served as president of
the Modernist Studies Association.
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