Alternate Worlds

Abstract

James Clifford ends his critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) by asking, “Must the intellectual… construct a native land by writing like Césaire the notebook of a return?”¹ While Clifford implies that such a construction cannot satisfy, exiled and migrant novelists of the twentieth century have increasingly contested the boundaries between fiction and national identity. Novels have become the sites of experiments in cultural fusion, hybridity, and alternative identity categories. Both novels and nations teach us to read the people around us as either like or unlike ourselves and provide a logic for the demarcation of national and cultural boundaries. For that reason, novels can also redefine the motives and materials of such demarcations, showing how voluntary commitment to a community can trump even the familiar narratives of history. The fictions of transnational writers can bring readers a nation-like consciousness of shared identity, replacing traditional markers such as language and geography with the less tangible common grounds of exile, bilingualism, or outsider status. Such texts draw on an established tradition of nationalist novels. At the same time, they also subvert the fundamental premises of nationalist movements by suggesting that communities are not formed by a shared culture but by shared attitudes toward culture.