Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature (Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature)

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects.The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies. Cover 1 Endorsement 2 Half Title 4 Series Information 5 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 Table of Contents 8 Acknowledgments 9 1 Introduction: Ambivalent Transnational Belonging 12 Transnational Ambivalence 14 The Transnational, the Aesthetic, and the Affective 18 Recognition 23 Liberalism, Sentimentalism, and Cosmopolitanism 26 Notes 31 2 Olaudah Equiano’s Liberal Authorial Subject of the circum-Atlantic Middle Passage 35 Equiano As “illegitimate” Speaker 39 Legitimization Through the Narrative Act 41 Equiano’s Intimate Narrative 48 Recognition and the Limits of Literary Imagination 52 Notes 56 3 Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Clarence, Sentimental Kinship, and the Transnational American Novel of Manners 61 Sentimentalism and Affective (Trans-)national Belonging 63 Clarence, Exceptionalism, and the American Novel of Manners 68 From Blood Kinship to Kinship As Trans-Atlantic Imaginary 75 Readerly Affect and Sentimental Kinship Formation 80 Notes 84 4 Cosmo-Nationalist Aesthesis and Essentialized Womanhood in henry James’s Daisy Miller 91 Transnationalizing Henry James 95 Daisy Miller and the Study of Destabilized American Taxonomies 100 What he Sees is What We Get 106 Ambivalence, Aesthesis, and Transnational Sociality 111 Notes 116 5 Precarious Intimacies and Narratives of the Transnational Care Economy in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy 120 Lives, Both Intimate and Precarious 122 Precarious Intimacies and Difficult Aesthetics in Lucy 128 Intimate Precarity as Aesthetic Experience 136 Notes 141 6 Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Transnational Ambivalence at the Limits of Multiculturalism 144 9/11 and the Limits of Fictional Representation 150 Transnational Ambivalence and “You”-Narratives in The Reluctant Fundamentalist 155 Cosmopolitanism and Empire 161 Nationalism, Patriotism, and the End of Flexible Citizenship 167 Notes 170 Coda 174 Notes 180 Works Cited 181 Index 201 Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonistsâ•• complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects.The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies. __Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature__