Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences Department of Communication Sciences Communication Sciences INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN THE THIRD SPACE: IN-BETWEENNESS AND HYBRIDITY IN MIGRANT WOMEN WRITERS’ TRANSNATIONAL FICTIONS Özlem ATAR PhD Dissertation Ankara, 2022 INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN THE THIRD SPACE: IN-BETWEENNESS AND HYBRIDITY IN MIGRANT WOMEN WRITERS’ TRANSNATIONAL FICTIONS Özlem ATAR Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences Department of Communication Sciences Communication Sciences PhD Dissertation Ankara, 2022 i ACCEPTANCE AND APPROVAL ii YAYIMLAMA VE FİKRİ MÜLKİYET HAKLARI BEYANI Enstitü tarafından onaylanan lisansüstü tezimin/raporumun tamamını veya herhangi bir kısmını, basılı (kağıt) ve elektronik formatta arşivleme ve aşağıda verilen koşullarla kullanıma açma iznini Hacettepe Üniversitesine verdiğimi bildiririm. Bu izinle Üniversiteye verilen kullanım hakları dışındaki tüm fikri mülkiyet haklarım bende kalacak, tezimin tamamının ya da bir bölümünün gelecekteki çalışmalarda (makale, kitap, lisans ve patent vb.) kullanım hakları bana ait olacaktır. Tezin kendi orijinal çalışmam olduğunu, başkalarının haklarını ihlal etmediğimi ve tezimin tek yetkili sahibi olduğumu beyan ve taahhüt ederim. Tezimde yer alan telif hakkı bulunan ve sahiplerinden yazılı izin alınarak kullanılması zorunlu metinlerin yazılı izin alınarak kullandığımı ve istenildiğinde suretlerini Üniversiteye teslim etmeyi taahhüt ederim. Yükseköğretim Kurulu tarafından yayınlanan “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” kapsamında tezim aşağıda belirtilen koşullar haricince YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi / H.Ü. Kütüphaneleri Açık Erişim Sisteminde erişime açılır. o Enstitü / Fakülte yönetim kurulu kararı ile tezimin erişime açılması mezuniyet tarihimden itibaren 2 yıl ertelenmiştir. (1) o Enstitü / Fakülte yönetim kurulunun gerekçeli kararı ile tezimin erişime açılması mezuniyet tarihimden itibaren ... ay ertelenmiştir. (2) o Tezimle ilgili gizlilik kararı verilmiştir. (3) 01/06/2022 Özlem ATAR 1“Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” (1) Madde 6. 1. Lisansüstü tezle ilgili patent başvurusu yapılması veya patent alma sürecinin devam etmesi durumunda, tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulu iki yıl süre ile tezin erişime açılmasının ertelenmesine karar verebilir. (2) Madde 6. 2. Yeni teknik, materyal ve metotların kullanıldığı, henüz makaleye dönüşmemiş veya patent gibi yöntemlerle korunmamış ve internetten paylaşılması durumunda 3. şahıslara veya kurumlara haksız kazanç imkanı oluşturabilecek bilgi ve bulguları içeren tezler hakkında tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulunun gerekçeli kararı ile altı ayı aşmamak üzere tezin erişime açılması engellenebilir. (3) Madde 7. 1. Ulusal çıkarları veya güvenliği ilgilendiren, emniyet, istihbarat, savunma ve güvenlik, sağlık vb. konulara ilişkin lisansüstü tezlerle ilgili gizlilik kararı, tezin yapıldığı kurum tarafından verilir *. Kurum ve kuruluşlarla yapılan işbirliği protokolü çerçevesinde hazırlanan lisansüstü tezlere ilişkin gizlilik kararı ise, ilgili kurum ve kuruluşun önerisi ile enstitü veya fakültenin uygun görüşü üzerine üniversite yönetim kurulu tarafından verilir. Gizlilik kararı verilen tezler Yükseköğretim Kuruluna bildirilir. Madde 7.2. Gizlilik kararı verilen tezler gizlilik süresince enstitü veya fakülte tarafından gizlilik kuralları çerçevesinde muhafaza edilir, gizlilik kararının kaldırılması halinde Tez Otomasyon Sistemine yüklenir * Tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulu tarafından karar verilir. iii ETİK BEYAN Bu çalışmadaki bütün bilgi ve belgeleri akademik kurallar çerçevesinde elde ettiğimi, görsel, işitsel ve yazılı tüm bilgi ve sonuçları bilimsel ahlak kurallarına uygun olarak sunduğumu, kullandığım verilerde herhangi bir tahrifat yapmadığımı, yararlandığım kaynaklara bilimsel normlara uygun olarak atıfta bulunduğumu, tezimin kaynak gösterilen durumlar dışında özgün olduğunu, Doçent Doktor Gülsüm DEPELİ SEVİNÇ danışmanlığında tarafımdan üretildiğini ve Hacettepe Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Tez Yazım Yönergesine göre yazıldığını beyan ederim. 01/06/2022 Özlem ATAR iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The cave of making can be a dark and desperate place. From time to time, the darkness is dispelled by flashes that dazzle the obscurity. These sudden impulses are too bright to illuminate an idea or light up a thought; they make the night more impenetrable, the cave more unbearable. And yet, the memory of light lingers on, and leads you further into a darkness that slowly reveals its own geography of insight and ignorance. Then voices begin calling to you from beyond the cave—voices of instruction and encouragement, half inscripted and half intuited, half heard and half imagined. (Bhabha, 2009, p. ix) The ‘cave’ of creating this doctoral dissertation was dark, too. My teachers and friends called to me from the mouth of cavernous reading sessions of my own making. Their cheers and instructions have sustained me. To begin with, I would like to say a heartfelt “thank you” to my supervisor Associate Professor Dr. Gülsüm DEPELİ SEVİNÇ for her endless patience and invaluable support. I could not hope for a more careful reader and listener. She has coaxed my dissertation into being. I am also indebted to the members of my supervisory committee: Professor Dr. Fatma Burçin EROL, Professor Dr. Ayşe Nur SAKTANBER, and Professor Dr. Meldan TANRISAL. Burçin Hocam retired before I was able to complete the project, so she could not see how I incorporated her brilliant ideas in the revised chapters. I would like to say a sincere “thank you” for her invaluable feedback. Ayşe Hocam was the first person to urge me to consider the relationship between space and gender. Meldan Hocam joined my committee at a later stage of conducting research. I feel honored to have this accomplished American Culture and Literature scholar on my supervisory committee. I must also add that her undergraduate course on ‘ethnic’ American literature piqued my curiosity about im/migrant women`s writing. It is thanks to you, Meldan Hocam, that Amy Tan`s The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. I extend my gratitude to the internal and external examiners, Assistant Professor Dr. Burcu CANAR and Assistant Professor Dr. Engin SARI, for carefully reading my dissertation and offering vital critique and suggestions during the oral defense exam. There are also behind the scenes contributors I must mention. I am indebted to Professor Emeritus Sandra Olney for her significant contributions to my overall wellbeing. Our weekly conversations have helped me remain enthusiastic. In addition, I am thankful to my supervisor at Queen`s University, Professor Dr. Petra Fachinger, for her patience. I might have been her v only student enrolled in two doctoral programs and her silent encouragement meant I was able to ‘steal’ time to complete this project while delaying the other. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude towards my former students and friends who have contributed to my writing in indirect ways. Özgür UYAR offered his guestroom in Ankara at the final stages of polishing my dissertation. Merve ATLIOĞLU fed me delicious mantis and dolmas. Dilek KAYA BAKAY listened to me whenever I vented my frustrations. Colin FARRELY was my surrogate family while writing the second half of this dissertation in Kingston, Ontario. I keep our conversations over dinner dear to my heart. His tongue-in-cheek words of encouragement will ring in my ears for years to come. vi ABSTRACT ATAR, Özlem. Intercultural Communication in the Third Space: In-Betweenness and Hybridity in Migrant Women’s Transnational Fictions, PhD Dissertation, Ankara, 2022. This study underscores the transformative impact of migration and considers transnational fiction by im/migrant women writers as a source for Intercultural Communication research. Chapter 1 opens with the notion of “transnationalism” in migration research and distinguishes between transnational writing and cognate terms with reference to American literary studies. In addition to transcending national boundaries as finished products, transnational works take, as their main theme, various forms of border-crossing, intercultural contact, and cross fertilization. They feature linguistic hybridity to signal cultural hybridity and in-betweenness. In its more general sense, hybridity involves mixing and blending. However, if one emphasizes the process, which involves negotiating world views and values across cultural boundary lines, hybridity becomes a more elusive concept. Intercultural encounters occur in power networks, and the accompanying hybridization challenges participants differentially. I insist that Intercultural Communication inquiry on culture and identity, two key terms in the field, turn to literary texts and consider how they represent hybridity and in-betweenness. Chapter 2 proposes a tool kit to read transnational fictions from the perspective of Intercultural Communication. Chapter 3 analyzes Saffron Dreams by Shaila Abdullah and The Night Counter by Alia Yunis. Chapter 4 explores hybridity and in-betweenanes in Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande and Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez. Chapter 5 juxtaposes the findings and considers the ways in which Intercultural Communication can use transnational fiction as a rich source for intercultural communication research. I propose Literary Intercultural Communication as a new research area within Intercultural Communication inquiry. Keywords literary intercultural communication, transnational literature, im/migrant experience, in- betweenness, hybridity, the Third Space, women`s writing vii ÖZET ATAR, Özlem. Üçüncü Alanda Kültürlerarası İletişim: Göçmen Kadın Yazarların Ulusötesi Kurmaca Yazınında Aradalık ve Melezlik, Doktora Tezi, Ankara, 2022 Bu çalışma, ulusötesi yazın örneklerini kültürlerarası iletişimin bir kaynağı olarak incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Çalışmada göçün dönüştürücü etkileri vurgulanıp Amerika Birleşik Devletleri`ne (ABD) göçen kadınları konu alan dört ulusötesi yazin örneği irdelenmiştir. Ulusötesilik, aradalık, melezlik, ve Üçüncü Alan çalışmanın temel kavramlarını oluşturmaktadır. Birinci bölümde öncelikle göç literatüründe ele alındığı şekliyle ulusötesi kavramı üzerine odaklanılmış, ulusötesi kavramının ABD bağlamında edebiyat çalışmalarındaki seyri serimlenmistir. Daha sonra, ulusötesi yazın kavramı, ilişkili kavramlarla birlikte değerlendirilerek ulusötesi edebiyat kavramını onlardan ayıran anlatı teknikleri ve temalar belirlenmistir. İkinci bölümde Kültürlerarası İletişim alanında nitel araştırma yöntemleri üzerine literatür taranmış, ulusötesi yazın örneklerini alanın penceresinden okumaya olanak sağlayacak bir sorular kiti geliştirilmiştir. Üçüncü bölümde, Shaila Abdullah`in Saffron Dreams romanıyla Alia Yunis`in The Night Counter romanı birlikte okunmuş, bu iki eserin 11 Eylül 2001`'den sonra Arap ve Müslüman karşıtı tuttumlara göçmen kadın kahramanların melez kimliklerini vurgulayarak cevap verdikleri ortaya çıkarılmıştır. Dördöncü bölümde Meksika'dan ABD`ye kayıtdışı göçü konu alan iki örnek olarak Reyna Grande`nin Across a Hundred Mountains ve Julia Alvarez`in Return to Sender romanları irdelenmiştir. Beşinci bölümde analizdeki bulgulardan hareketle araştırmanın üçüncü ve dördüncü soruları cevaplanmış, ulusötesi edebiyat örneklerinin Kültürlerarası İletişim çalışmalarında nasıl kullanışlı olabileceği düşünülmüştür. Son bölümde, araştırmanın bulguları bir kez daha kısaca gözden geçirilmiş, çalışmanın amacı doğrultusunda yöneltilen soruları belirlenen temel kavramlar ve geliştirilen metin inceleme yöntemi doğrultusunda ne derece yerine getirdiği değerlendirilmiştir. Çalışmanın özgünlüğü, edebi kurmaca eserleri Kültürlerarası İletişim`in penceresinden okumayı sağlayacak bir sorular kiti geliştirip ulusötesi yazın ile Kültürlerarası İletişim alanlarını kesiştirmesinde yatmaktadır. Anahtar Sözcükler kültürlerarası iletişim, ulusötesi edebiyat, göçmen deneyimi, aradalık, melezlik, Üçüncü Alan, kadın yazını viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACCEPTANCE AND APPROVAL ........................................................................................... i YAYIMLAMA VE FİKRİ MÜLKİYET HAKLARI BEYANI .............................................. ii ETİK BEYAN............................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................ vi ÖZET ......................................................................................................................................... vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................ viii INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: DELIBERATIONS ON THE KEY TERMS ................................................. 22 1.1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 22 1.2. IDENTIFYING THE TRANSNATIONAL IN LITERATURE .......................... 22 1.3. THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN IN AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES ...... 27 1.4. TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURE AND COMPETING RUBRICS .............. 31 1.5. LINGUISTIC HYBRIDITY IN TRANSNATIONAL WRITING ...................... 38 1.6. HYBRID CULTURAL IDENTITIES IN TRANSNATIONAL WRITING ....... 44 1.7. HYBRIDITY AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION ......................... 47 1.8. GENDERED REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN`S MOBILITY ................... 48 CHAPTER 2: LITERAZING INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATON RESEARCH THROUGH A FOCUS ON TRANSNATIONAL FICTION BY WOMEN ........................ 56 2.1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 56 2.2. QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGIES IN IC RESEARCH ............................... 57 2.3. ARTICULATING THE PARADIGM THAT GOVERNS THIS PROJECT .... 63 2.4. SOURCES OF DATA AND ETHICAL CONCERNS ......................................... 64 2.5. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS PROCEDURES ................................. 66 ix 2.6. LITERARY IC INQUIRY: A PRELIMINARY TOOL KIT .............................. 67 2.6.1. Appraise the Im/migrant Character in the Text ............................................ 70 2.6.2. Build a Verbal Map of the Transnational Geographical Spaces ................... 71 2.6.3. Canvass the Sociopolitical Concerns and Incidents the Texts Portray ......... 72 2.6.4. Document the Hybrid Linguistic Space the Texts Create ............................ 73 2.6.5. Evaluate the Im/migrant Authors` Literary Intervention .............................. 73 2.7. REFLECTIONS ON MY ROLE AS A SITUATED RESEARCHER ................ 74 CHAPTER 3: HYBRIDITY AND IN-BETWEENNESS IN SAFFRON DREAMS AND THE NIGHT COUNTER .......................................................................................................... 78 3.1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 78 3.2. FINDINGS ................................................................................................................ 82 3.2.1. Saffron Dreams ............................................................................................. 83 3.2.1.1. Arissa`s Transnational Map in Saffron Dreams .............................. 83 3.2.1.2. The Sociopolitical Context in Saffron Dreams ............................... 84 3.2.1.3. Linguistic and Cultural Translation in Saffron Dreams .................. 87 3.3.1.4. Gendered Migration and Narration ................................................. 89 3.2.2. The Night Counter ........................................................................................ 93 3.2.2.1. Transnational Arab American Space in The Night Counter ............ 93 3.2.2.2. The Sociohistorical Space of The Night Counter ............................ 96 3.2.2.3. Hybrid Linguistic Space in The Night Counter ............................. 107 3.2.2.4. Gendered Space of The Night Counter: Focus on Women ........... 109 3.3. DISCUSSION: FROM WORD TO THE WORLD ............................................ 111 CHAPTER 4: HYBRIDITY AND IN-BETWEENNESS IN ACROSS A HUNDRED MOUNTAINS AND RETURN TO SENDER ........................................................................ 115 4.1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 115 4.2. FINDINGS .............................................................................................................. 121 4.2.1. Across a Hundred Mountains ..................................................................... 121 x 4.2.1.1. The Migrant`s Transnational Space .............................................. 121 4.2.1.2. Portrayal of the Sociopolitical Context ......................................... 125 4.2.1.3. Hybrid Language, In-Between Identity ......................................... 126 4.2.1.4. Gendered Crossing and Intercultural Encounter ........................... 128 4.2.2. Return to Sender ......................................................................................... 130 4.2.2.1. Transnational Migrant Spaces in Return to Sender ....................... 130 4.2.2.2. Sociopolitical Space in Return to Sender ...................................... 133 4.2.2.3. Hybrid Language and Cultural Identity ........................................ 139 4.2.2.4. Gendering Migration, Gendered Narration ................................... 142 4.3. DISCUSSION: FROM WORD TO THE WORLD ............................................ 144 4.3.1. The Authors ................................................................................................ 144 4.3.2. Immigrant Authors, Im/Migrant Characters ............................................... 146 CHAPTER 5: PERFORMANCES OF HYBRIDITY IN THE THIRD SPACE AND LITERARY INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION .................................................... 151 5.1. WOMEN COMMUNICATING IN THE THIRD SPACE ................................ 151 5.2. OPENING A CAPACIOUS ROOM FOR LITERATURE IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH ........................................ 171 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 184 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................ 194 APPENDIX 1. ETHICS BOARD WAIVER FORM ........................................................... 213 APPENDIX 2. ORIGINALITY REPORT ............................................................................ 214 1 INTRODUCTION Your place in the world is solid my place in the world moves … my place drifts between Here and There West and East sometimes gets lodged In-Between “After a reading by Khaled Mattawa” (Halaby, 2012, pp. 77-78) This dissertation considers hybridity and in-betweenness in four fictional narratives by im/migrant women. Published in the United States after September 11, 2001, the four tales of cultural hybridity and in-betweenness feature diverse geographical and sociological topographies transgressing the confines of the United States. In addition, the writers` persistent reliance on the vocabularies of distinct languages other than English both renders these texts linguistically rich tales and marks their characters` culturally hybrid identities. Their im/migrant characters confront the myths of homogeneity and boundedness by foregrounding gendered experiences of transnationality and in-betweeness. Borrowed expressions from their native tongues occupy the textual surfaces of the narratives. The texts have a pivotal objective: the authors and their central female characters invite the assumed audience, Anglophone readers in the United States, to participate in intercultural dialogue. They engage in cultural translation as a necessary step for a gradual shift in societal attitudes towards the categorical alien as opposed to the citizen or the perceived foreign. The texts center around the nation’s others in terms of race, ethnicity, religion and immigration status and feature moments of imagined intercultural contact. As such, the novels are potent sources of Intercultural Communication (IC) inquiry. I aim to make a considerable contribution to IC by bringing the study of transnational literary texts that focus on migration to the purview of IC research. Given its connections with multiple disciplines, IC research relies on paradigms varying from positivist to interpretive, critical, and constructivist approaches. Depending on their research paradigm, IC scholars draw on a multitude of methods ranging from questionnaires, surveys, interviews, discourse completion 2 tasks, ethnography, and corpus analyses. As a text-based analysis method, critical discourse analysis, for instance, probes political speeches, asylum interrogations, and so on to critique the relations of power and ideology in society (Fairclough, 2013; Van Dijk, 2013; Wodak, 2008; Wodak & Meyer, 2016). Such text-oriented investigations may reveal the shifts in discourse in social and political arenas, as well as the ways in which these switches are enacted in particular contexts and employed to instill new ways of being (O`Regan & Betzel, 2016). Constituting a specific historical moment that is relevant to my dissertation, the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have radically changed attitudes to im/migration and im/migrants. The rhetoric around counterterrorism has discursively conflated im/migration with terrorism, leading to stringent immigration and border management policies as well as repressive monitoring and governance of im/migrant communities in the United States. A typical critical discourse analysis project focuses on the processes of Othering, i.e., the processes in which the foreign is imagined as alien to ‘us’ and our ‘normal’ (Adrian Holliday, Hyde, & Kullman, 2021). Comprehensive analyses of written narratives from the perspective of IC are still scarce, but it is possible to observe an uptick in attention to publicly available cultural texts. Nevertheless, fictional literary narratives have not been extensively used in IC research so far. In this study, I adopt literary texts written by and about those deemed to be the Other in the post-9/11 United States. I reveal how the racialized Other or the foreign talks back to assert their positioning as the culturally hybrid in-between character. An effective means of exploring issues of intercultural communication might be conducting analyses of literary texts. This insight comes from Condon (1986), whose co-authored 1975 textbook, An Introduction to Intercultural Communication, offered a significant contribution to the field. Given that this prominent IC researcher endorsed the use of literary fictions as legitimate sources of analyses, one would expect a sustained focus on literary texts as viable sources of and about intercultural communication. Nonetheless, few IC scholars focus on literary texts (Neumann, 2020). This is because conventional IC research situates itself within social sciences and relies on methods from psychology, sociology, and anthropology to predict or interpret the nature of intercultural encounters between members of different cultural groups. Many IC researchers often imagine themselves as engaging in ‘objective’ social science research through surveys and questionnaires. For humanities, in contrast, “the illusion” of objectivity and neutrality is irrelevant (Condon, 1986, p. 155). It is for this reason that IC inquiry has marginalized literary texts. 3 My study is important because it aims to overcome the schism between social sciences and humanities. A sustained focus on literary texts may enhance IC research in various ways. Literature may represent intercultural encounters as a major theme. It may also portray conflictual intercultural relationships and interactants` identity negotiation processes. At the same time, literary texts engage in intercultural communication with the assumed reader by detailing their fictional characters` unique experiences in certain contexts and, in some cases, by explicitly appealing to readers` sense of compassion, tolerance, and justice. Furthermore, as Bhabha (2004) notes, through the act of cultural translation, literatures of intercultural encounter go beyond representation; they also (re)produce cultural difference. It is for this reason that IC needs to offer more capacious space to fictional representations. Literary texts are adopted for instruction in educational institutions with the goal of catalyzing intercultural understanding and tolerance. In keeping with this practice, the study of literary texts with an IC lens needs to go beyond tokenistic mentioning in key IC textbooks in the field (e.g., Piller, 2017). This is to say that IC research needs to be “literized” (Ikas & Wagner, 2009) and migrant authors` transnational cultural products need to be brought under academic scrutiny to reveal their manifold potential as intercultural mediators, bridge builders, and the contestants of exclusionary accounts of national identity and history that hanker for some imagined national unity free from migration and the mingling of peoples and values to form hybrid new cultures. Carefully crafted transnational novels are attentive to transborder social and political contexts and, as such, should be adopted by IC investigators for closer scrutiny. There is a major benefit to placing fiction about hybridity and in-betweenness of female transnational migrants at the center of IC research. Analyzing literary migration narratives affords us a glimpse into the minute details of the migrant`s experience. Though social scientific research on migration is abundant and diversified, it hardly depicts what it may be like to be an im/migrant (King, Connell, & White, 2003). Literary accounts, in contrast, offer meaningful insights into the state-sanctioned and clandestine border crossing experience and other attendant issues. To quote King, Connell, and White: Literary accounts focus in a very direct and penetrating way on issues such as place perception, landscape symbolism, senses of displacement and transformation, communities lost and created anew, exploitation, nostalgia, attitudes towards return, family relationships, self-denial and self-discovery, and many more. Such insights are often infinitely more subtle and meaningful than studies of migrants which base themselves on cold statistics or on the depersonalized, aggregate responses to questionnaire surveys. (King et al., 2003, p. x) 4 Literary narratives represent the experience of fictional migrants through the individual author`s eyes. Also, migration narratives may include texts written by the migrants themselves recounting their own journey. This ‘non-academic’ literature may offer impressive insights into the process of migration and post-migration experience. I refer to the narratives in my corpus as transnational novels. Until recently, the notion of “transnational literature” lacked a clear definition, but as I detail in Chapter 1 several literary analysts have conceptualized the term in relation to world literature, postcolonial literature, minor literature, and diasporic writing. Seyhan (2001) provided specifications of transnational literature in her study of Turkish-German writers in Germany and Chicano/a writers in the United States. For Seyhan, transnational literature concerns literary texts by those who have crossed national and linguistic borders, who write in second or third languages, and who address issues facing deterritorialized cultures. Transnational fictions, as she put it, “are the voices of transplanted and translated subjects” (Seyhan, 2001, p. 9). As a result, translation attains a special status in these fictions. Walkowitz (2006) was less interested in the biography of the writer in classifying transnational writing than in the transnational circulation of books through the combined efforts of writers, translators, anthologists, and publishers. She wrote: “literary classification might depend more on a book’s future than on a writer’s past. What has happened to the writer is less important (…) than what happens in the writing and in the reading, though the biography of the writer may influence the way that books are written and received” (Walkowitz, 2006, p. 534). In Walkowitz`s sense, then, transnational literature describes books that travel across national and linguistic borders. Adopting a “navigational approach” to reading literature that attends to the temporal and spatial shifts, Clingman (2009) specified a series of features for transnational literature. In Clingman`s view, transnational literary works may be written by “writers who have travelled, often more than once across national boundaries” (p. 7, emphasis in original). At the same time, he noted that “transnational fiction is written by, and directed towards, migrant and multi-lingual communities, who exist in multiple and in-between spaces” (p. 8). However, this is a misleading categorization because though the literary authors themselves may be im/migrants, they cannot always control who reads their works. Their cultural texts may be read by im/migrant or non- im/migrant audiences. Clingman further suggested that transnational fiction was “a migrant and 5 migrating literature” and added that transnational fiction encompasses “works that travel, no matter the provenance or trajectories of their authors” (p. 9). In sum, Clingman`s characterization brings transnational literature too close to other, albeit kin, literary categories, from which I distinguish transnational literature in Chapter 1. The most substantive theorizing on transnational writing was developed by American literary scholar Paul Jay in two volumes. Jay (2010) focused on the transnational forces at work in the creation of such works. Jay (2021) conceptualized transnational literature in two different ways. One conception focuses on the comprehension that storytelling has always been mobile; therefore, transnationality in the sense that ideas and stories have always transcended national borders is an inherent quality of literary texts. Such conceptualization emphasizes the transnationality of literary texts in terms of both production and circulation but resembles transnational literature to world literature, a category from which I distinguish transnational literature in Chapter 1. Following Jay`s most recent theorization, I take transnational writing as a distinct kind of literature that has emerged at a specific historical moment. Transnational fiction and research on transnational writing have boomed since the 1990s. The texts comprising the body of transnational literature a share a set of recognizable subject matters and literary devices (Jay, 2021). As Jay shrewdly observes, transnational texts emerge from, and offer a commentary on, transborder interdependencies. Considering this brief overview of scholarly literature about transnational writing and relying on key texts such as Seyhan (2001) and Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2013), and Jay (2021), I deploy the notion of “transnational novel” to define the works of fiction in my corpus. These samples of transnational literature have several key features in common: first, they are works written by authors who have experienced migration. Narratives of transnational mobility may not necessarily be linked to the experience of colonialism, postcolonialism or neocolonialism. Secondly, these works are composed in a language, often English or another widely spoken code, that is not the writer’s mother tongue. In Bakhtinian terms, the texts are written in an “alien” language (Bakhtin, 2008, p. 430). Production in an alien language may call to mind minor literature, but, as I elaborate on in Chapter 1, transnational writing is different from minor literature. Third, transnational literature feature cross-cultural subject matters. For instance, themes of literal and figurative crossing of national and linguistic borders, intercultural encounter and clash including the concerns about alienation and othering processes, ambivalent attitudes about home and host societies, sharpened attention to language shifts and translation are some definitive themes of transnational literature. The novels in my corpus underscore the 6 connection between transborder migration and a host of other intersecting factors including gender, sexuality, and religiosity. These transnational texts reflect the voices of the transplanted and are spaces of self-translation (Seyhan, 2001). Naturally, national borders, languages and literary canons cannot bind stories that originate from border crossings. An im/migrant writer who writes in a language they learned later in life and possibly due to their own migration experience creates from the in-between linguistic and cultural space they occupy. The surface of their text will appeal English, or whatever code in which they produce, but its interior texture will inevitably include threads from her mother tongue, thus adding a foreign feel to the story. Moreover, if the transnational author chooses to portray “transmigrants” in their fictions, their narratives are likely to act out im/migrant in-betweenness and hybridity (Schiller, Basch, & Blanc, 1995). Drawing upon Bhabha (2004), I define im/migrant writers’ bilingual and bicultural writing as their third space. The Third Space enables manifestation of multiple identities and poses a challenge to the understanding of a homogeneous culture and society. The Third Space of enunciation facilitates the emergence of transnational fictions. As referenced in the title, the key concept in my dissertation is “hybridity.” The notion of “hybridity” is used to describe processes of interracial contact (Gilroy, 1993; McClintock, 2013; Young, 2005); colonization and decolonization (Bhabha, 2004), globalizing processes (Canclini, 2005; Pieterse, 2019); travel and border crossing (Clifford, 1997), artistic and literary fusions born from a borderland consciousness (Anzaldúa, 1987; Gómez-Peña, 2005); and transcultural literatures (Dagnino, 2015). I discuss hybridity in relation to adjacent terms and consider its theoretical underpinnings and implications for the definitions of nation and national culture in Chapter 1; however, a brief explanation is due here. In my project, I use hybridization to talk about “sociocultural processes in which discrete structures or practices, previously existing in separate form, are combined to generate new structures, objects, and practices” (Canclini, 2005, p. xxiv). Hybridity signals both the threat of ‘contamination’ of supposedly pure and authentic forms and is celebrated for its transgressive power. In my analysis, hybridity indexes the linguistic heterogeneity and cultural in-betweenness of the migrant characters represented in the primary texts. Discrete hybrid forms emerge from the spaces of intercultural encounter. Nonetheless, these new forms are not inferior to the two forms that transform each other and bring about the new form. 7 The term “linguistic hybridity” refers to blending, mixing, and combining elements of two distinct languages in one literary text. My definition of linguistic hybridity is informed by Bakhtin’s consideration of the novel as a hybrid form. Bakhtin (2008) defined hybridity as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance” (p. 358). The term signifies “an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor” (p. 358). Bakhtin regarded mixing of two, and potentially more, languages within the boundaries of one utterance in the novel “conscious” or “intentional” hybridity but also acknowledged the role which unintentional hybridization plays in the evolution of new languages. He wrote: an intentional and conscious hybrid is not a mixture of two impersonal language consciousness (…) but rather a mixture of two individualized language consciousnesses (…) and two language-intentions as well: the individual, representing authorial consciousness and will, on the one hand, and the individualized linguistic consciousness and will of the character represented, on the other. (Bakhtin, 2008, p. 359) While Bakhtin’s notion of hybridity does not discuss the integration of different ‘national’ languages in a primarily English text, his discussion of distinct social languages appearing in one utterance implies the representation of different socio-economic classes in the novel. To reiterate, in Bakhtin`s formulation, hybridization is the mixing of two or more different “linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in time and social space” within a single utterance (p. 429). Bakhtin examined novelists’ use of an “alien” language to draw attention to their conscious efforts to represent different social classes. I deploy this Bakhtinian notion of linguistic hybridity to refer to the coexistence of at least two distinct ‘national’ languages in one text: Spanish and English, Urdu and English, or Arabic and English. When considering novels by migrant authors who write in their second language and about transmigrants, the hybridization processes become multilayered: there is the bilingual author who draws on her dual linguistic repertoires and the migrant character who asserts her bilingual and bicultural identity through her dual language use. When considering the cultural hybridity and in- betweenness of the female migrant author and her female migrant character, I adapt Bakhtin`s linguistic term. Accordingly, I postulate that: The (…) hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented (...) but is also double-languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, (…) two socio-linguistic consciousnesses, two epochs (...) that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance (....) It is the collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms (...) [make] such unconscious hybrids (…) profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new 'internal forms' for perceiving the world in words. (Bakhtin, 2008, p. 360) 8 Bhabha (2003) adopted this Bakhtinian term to discuss the culturally hybrid postcolonial subject. In his theorization, the hybrid is an androgynous subject. In contrast, in this study, the hybrid is a woman who may or may not originate from a postcolonial country but who is deemed as the Other of the nation in the United States. In literary criticism, the notion of “hybridity” is often associated with the postcolonial critic Bhabha, but it began its journey as a biological term, first used to describe the outcome of a crossing of a distinct plant or animal species (Young, 2005). Mixing remains the central element in hybridization processes. The mixing of differently racialized social groups provoked anxiety in the context of colonialism. Racial ‘contamination’ met reactive impulses, from launching administrative strategies to prevent the emergence of racially hybrid individuals to schemes designed to promote interracial encounters to encourage assimilation of the colonized. Anderson (2006) cites efforts at ‘hispanicizing’ the Indigenous populations in the Americas. The anxieties of globalization resulted in the production of volumes on hybridity in the 1990s. Following Bhabha (2003, 2004), Garcia Canclini (2005), and other scholars of hybridity, whose intellectual perspectives I map in Chapter 1, if we accept that the processes of cultural hybridity bring about something new and different, we also need to think about the site where this newness emerges: the Third Space. The term was discussed by Lefebvre (1991) and is related to what Soja (2009, p. 56) calls “thirding-as-Othering.” According to Bhabha (2003, 2004), the Third Space is the site where hybridity emerges in the struggle for cultural difference as opposed to diversity. However, despite its name, the Third Space in Bhabha’s theory is not a space or place in the traditional geographic sense. It is more of a site in time, which indicates the colonial encounter. Young (2009) resembled it to: a shifting caravan site, a place where people come unobserved and where they go without a trace, the place which determines their lives for the moment they pitch their tents there, a place which is not a space because it is the sight of an event, gone in a moment of time. (Young, 2009, pp. 81-82) Young’s invoking of “a shifting caravan site” allows us to see that Bhabha talks about a metaphor when he uses the term. The Third Space denotes an instance of production in time— the very moment of speech or writing. For Bhabha (2004) and Young (2009), the Third Space is the site of enunciation, the very instance of articulation. In Young`s words, the Third Space is the moment where the culturally hybrid subject’s thoughts “fall into language” (2009, p. 82). This falling into language is in no way the kind of falling that the Turkish idiom, “dile düşmek” connotes: “being gossiped about.” In the context of migrant women`s literary writing, it 9 resembles the notion which Irzık and Parla (2011) invoke in their edited volume. It denotes the moment when women become the subject of language, culture, and history through their writing. The Third Space, then, is the site where migrant women authors speak through their literary fiction. In linguistic terms, it is the act in which an individual “fuses langue and parole in the momentary event when he or she opens his or her mouth” and thus gains agency (Young, 2009, p. 88). The notion of Third Space is a metaphor to consider gendered articulations of cultural hybridity. I analyze four novels published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I consider Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (Abdullah, 2009b) together with Alia Yunis’s The Night Counter (Yunis, 2009). Exploring the tragedy of September 11 from the perspective of a Muslim widow, Saffron Dreams treats immigrant identity at its intersection with race, gender, and religion. The book strongly challenges the image of the silenced Muslim woman and the veil as the prime symbol of religious and patriarchal subjugation of women`s body. The Night Counter features on an elderly immigrant woman, whose ancestral home in Lebanon haunts her in post-9/11 Los Angeles. Fatima cannot decide to which descendant she should leave her beloved house, an imaginary home both the senile matriarch and the reader discover was destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War. Yunis intricately weaves Fatima’s personal American story and her descendants’ survival strategies after September 11 against the backdrop of larger political events in the United States and the Middle East. Reyna Grande`s debut novel Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) chronicles a female migrant`s journey into the United States and back to her hometown in Mexico years later. The novel features Juana García, a fourteen-year-old girl who leaves her home in Mexico in search of her father. The narrative illustrates the challenges of migration from Mexico to the United States by focusing on the hardship those left behind face, the dangers involved in crossing the US-Mexico border clandestinely, and the migrant’s splintered sense of belonging. I juxtapose Grande’s semi-autobiographical work with Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender (2009b). The novel is about undocumented Mexican migrants working on a dairy farm in the United States. The migrant woman in this young adult book has an absent presence throughout the novel. The woman’s teenage daughter reveals that her mother has been kept by her smugglers. The reader can only partially discover the woman’s ordeal from the eldest daughter’s letters and diary entries. These two novels represent the corporeality of irregular migration and urge readers to pay attention to the female subject’s agency as she navigates the dangerous US-Mexico border. 10 As stated above, this study scrutinizes a body of transnational texts written by migrant women. I devised a set of criteria to both delimit the field and to reach a researchable number of samples. First, I adopted books written by women because I wanted to bring women authors’ voices to the foreground in my analysis. Chowaniec (2015) asked the question that I am grappling with in this dissertation: “why focus on women’s writing?” Some may interpret the omission of texts by male authors as a shortcoming. In their view, focusing one’s attention on narratives written by women can only point to a lack of scientific neutrality and diminished objectivity. After all, the researcher reveals her partiality at the onset by her choice of corpus. I have encountered quizzical looks since I announced that I would be looking at women’s writing on hybridity and in-betweenness resulting from transnational migration. Critics demand justification for why a serious academic study on hybridity and in-betweenness in transnational writing should explore fictions composed by women only. To the contrary, such criticism neglects to consider the simple reality that the focus on a body of texts by male authors often passes as normal. Frank (2008), for example, omitted women authors’ voices from his corpus in Migration and Literature whereas Moslund (2010) included only one narrative by a female author as opposed to two by male writers in Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change. Similarly, there was no concern for analyzing an equal number of literary products written by female and male authors in After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (2011). In addition, the contributors to Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror' (Tolan, Morton, Valassopoulos, & Spencer, 2013) disregarded “male/female equity” in their corpus of literary narratives that respond to the conflation of transnational migration with threats to American national security in post-9/11 novels (M. Eagleton, 2011, p. 110). My insistence on female authored fictions serves as a correction for this discursive elision. Clearly, there is a gap between women’s literary productions and the interpretive studies on their texts. The dearth of literary analyses that incorporate narratives by women authors may give the false impression that women do not write about major sociopolitical issues such as transborder migration and the militarization of international borders. This is far from the truth. Women address social issues in their fictions and yet fewer of their literary texts are adopted for scholarly analyses. As Rodríguez and Szurmuk (2015) rightly lamented, “The number of women-authored texts is phenomenal; women’s contributions, outstanding; their performance, excellent. It is hard to believe that they [are] washed off, postponed, demeaned, debased, ignored, bypassed. This erasure reveals deafness, blindness, and fear” (p. 3). There is clearly a mismatch between women’s literary production and the volume of analyses that focus on their 11 creative texts. Through my choice of texts by female writers, I amplify women authors’ voices about transnational migration. I am encouraged by Showalter when she declares, “[W]e must seek the repressed messages of women (...) before we can locate the feminine not-said, (…) by probing the fissures of the female text” (Showalter, 2012, p. 32). It is thus in such a light that this study adopts texts by women authors. Second, my choice of the four texts by female authors is also related to the relationship between writing and gender. While the question of whether there is a women’s tradition in writing remains vexing, some scholars refer to a “female tradition” in writing (e.g., M. Eagleton, 2011; Showalter, 2012). My adoption of women’s writing implies my belief that, however diverse, women constitute a group whose gendered life experiences affect their writing. One striking characteristic of fictions written by women is their frequent recourse to quasi-autobiographical structure, featuring their central character’s confessional female voice in letters, diary entries, memoirs, and testimonio (Seyhan, 2001). As opposed to stress on success and glory in men’s autobiographical writing, for instance, women’s texts reflects fragmentation (Berktay, 1993; Heilbrun, 1988; Jelinek, 2004). Among the primary texts, this confessional and fragmented narration is apparent in The Night Counter (Yunis, 2009), Saffron Dreams (Yunis, 2009), and Return to Sender (Alvarez, 2009b). The central character in Across a Hundred Mountains comments on her fragmented identity and sense of home. It may be argued that readers encounter the most autobiographical confessions in fictive texts written by women authors: fiction “does not establish a literal relationship between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist or have a truth claim” (Adak, 2011, pp. 162, my translation). Therefore, fiction may effortlessly incorporate sometimes thinly veiled autobiographical elements. Moreover, women authors have been ardent representers of the familial sphere, relationships, and home though they also contest the traditional notions of home and homeland (Chatterjee, 2021; Strehle, 2008). It is possible to deduce that women`s writing prioritizes certain forms and subject matters thanks to their gendered ways of seeing and articulating. The third criterion concerned the authors` relation to migration. An increasing number of female fiction writers are poised to tell the stories of their own or other women’s migrations. I have included works whose writers have personally experienced migration and the dis-ease it caused at a certain time in their own lives. I propose that women who have had such experience will respond to migration in a different manner from those who have never been displaced. For the authors in this dissertation, the experience of migration is personal. Like her female protagonist, Abdullah migrated to the United States through her marriage (Faraj, 2015). It is possible to trace 12 the link between the autobiographical elements and the protagonist’s journey to the United States as a married woman. Both Grande and Alvarez experienced migration as children: like her main character, Grande as a clandestine border crosser (Grande, 2012, 2018), and Alvarez a political refugee (Alvarez, 1998; Coonrod Martínez, 2007; Harrison & Hipchen, 2013; K. L. Johnson, 2005; Sirias, 2001). Having lived in the United States, Lebanon, Greece, and now in the United Arab Emirates, Yunis is a “nomad” academic and writer (Braidotti, 1994; Yunis, 2013). Just like Scheherazade, the female co-protagonist in her post-9/11 novel, Yunis is a transnational storyteller. Fourth, I included novels that center around im/migrant women's experiences and struggles because fictions about women`s mobility shed light into the transformative impacts of migration on these women as gendered subjects. Women experience migration differently from their male counterparts. For many women, migratory journeys take place within the institution of marriage. In many societies, marriage entails women’s move to their husband’s house. Cross-border migration is another layer of women`s gendered journeys. This is also true for the two women in my corpus. Upon entering married life, the women in Yunis’s and Abdullah`s novels leave their family homes and homelands behind. Though both are trailing spouses to their compatriots, their circumstances of migration differ greatly due to their social class, knowledge about the United States, and proficiency in English prior to migration. For this reason, whereas I place these two women in the same category based on their gender identity, I am cognizant of the unique consequences of their social class and language skills for their lives in the United States. The women in Grande`s and Alvarez` novels experience migration as gendered agents, too. As Boyd (2021) eloquently points out in a review article on global migration trends, gender is deeply embedded in determining who migrates, how transborder journeys take place, and what consequences stem from the migration of men and women independently or as family units. Gender relations and roles impact and are impacted by migration processes at three distinct stages of migrations: the pre-migration stage, the journey across state borders, and the experiences of migrants in the receiving country (Antman, 2018; Boyd & Grieco, 2003; Fleury, 2016). Alvarez`s (2009b) and Grande`s (2006) novels attests to the fact that women experience migration differently than men by thematizing gender-based sexual violence involved in irregular migration across the US-Mexico border. As such, they flesh out the social scientific research findings about gendered vulnerabilities involved in clandestine border crossing (see De León, 2015). These transnational fictions about irregular migration supplement social science research findings on women`s migration experience. 13 A distinction between the terms “immigrant” and “migrant” is due here. The term “immigrant” implies “the standpoint of the migrant-receiving nation-state” and refers to “outsiders coming in, presumably to stay” (Nicholas De Genova, 2002, p. 421). In the US context, the term “immigrant” may be a “euphemism for ‘not from this place’, or for ‘one who belongs somewhere else’” and deployed as a “political tool” for racializing certain groups. Bearing its negative connotations in mind, I adopt the term “immigrant” to refer to the characters throughout Chapter 3 as I explore the hybridity and in-betweenness of the Muslim women who immigrated to the United States. In Chapter 4, I introduce the concept of “migrant” to denote the characters’ circular pattern of movement between Mexico and the United States. In addition, I deploy the descriptors “irregular,” “clandestine,” and “undocumented” to define migrants whose transborder movement and entrance into the United States is not sanctioned by the state. I avoid deploying punitive and discriminatory descriptors such as “illegal,” “extra-legal,” and “unauthorized” except in places where I refer to legislation that uses these terms or quote specific occurrences in the primary texts (R. Brown, 2013; Chomsky, 2014). Accordingly, I define the adult members of the Cruz family and Mari in Return to Sender (Alvarez, 2009b) as undocumented migrants. Fifth, I adopted books composed in the writers’ second language. This way, I aim to trace the authors` recourse to self-translation and positioning in the liminal space with respect to the languages upon whose vocabularies they draw. A Turkish proverb reminds us that three migrations amount to a fire. Migrations result in the loss of homes, personal belongings, and memorabilia; long term transborder journeys also transform the migrant`s sense of belonging to certain places and communities and established relationships. As Seyhan (2001) observed, once “the smoke clears,” we are left with “charred pieces of identification, shards of language, burned tongues, and cultural fragments'' (p. 7). That is, once the destructive fire dies down, “the phoenix of a transnational, bi- and multilingual literature” arises (Seyhan, 2001, p. 7). When the smoke dissipates and calmness replaces the fire, the migrant turns to stories to recuperate losses incurred in the fire/migration. Some of the best literary works are written by writers functioning in a language that is not their mother tongue. The short story collection Mutterzunge by the Turkish-born Emine Sevgi Özdamar was written in German, which the author learned as an adult guestworker in Germany. Likewise, Abdullah, Alvarez, Grande, and Yunis write in a language that is not their mother tongue. Through their novels, they portray female protagonists’ stories of hybridity and in-betweenness. The experience of migration may be trenchant for actual migrants, but from the perspective of the four creative migrant writers whose works I analyze, migration is the condition for and expression of a hybrid plurality that originates from 14 the voluntary or mandatory encounter and interlacing of at least two distinct ‘national’ languages. Conceptualized as such, migration is in no way a negative notion; it connotes a richness that is born from a burning experience. The writers’ identification with the two cultures they bridge intersects with their other identity positions and manifests itself in their hybrid language. Their texts map spaces which disturb politico-spatial and linguistic boundaries. Sixth, I restricted my corpus to include texts published after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This way, I hope to investigate how the writers and the characters negotiate their hybrid identities and defy restrictive labeling and discourses in the post-9/11 context, thereby confounding the trajectories of nation, ‘national’ culture, and ‘national’ language. Most extant research on women’s post- 9/11 transnational migration narratives takes the authors` ethnic identity and/or religion as their basis of determining the primary texts. Heredia (2009), for instance, drew attention to the role female Latin American authors play as historical commentators. The female authors in her study, the author suggests, occupy the “specific liminal and mediating positions as cultural and historical ambassadors with a dual vision of Latin American and US American cultures in contact and in conflict with each other” (p. 4). In a similar vein, Socolovsky (2013) examined the work of six US-based Latina writers. Other researchers have based their text selection on the authors’ religion and ethnic identity. Sorgun (2011) took the authors’ religion as the basis of her choice of the primary texts in their doctoral dissertation and investigated how female authors responded to conversations about and by Muslim women. The researcher concluded that, by creating strong liberal Muslim women characters and highlighting variety in their interpretations of Islam and the veil, the four authors they chose as representative Muslim immigrant writers in the United States defied the image of the oppressed, invisible, and voiceless Muslim woman. Similarly, Maloul (2014) investigated fictions of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women writers who write in English in their doctoral dissertation. They were particularly interested in exploring how these writers constructed both political Islam and the religion as a private faith; how they portrayed Palestinian Muslim masculinities; and how they responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing ‘War on Terror.’ They argued that the works they adopted offered some of the most astute reactions to the events of 9/11 and their repercussions. Both Sorgun and Maloul underlined how the authors emphasized the diversity of Arab and Muslim communities. 15 My dissertation moves away from this ethnicity and/or religion-based selection of the primary texts. In this respect, it is closer to Gomaa’s (2016) The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature: Ethnic Women Writers and Problematic Belongings. But I take issue with the researcher’s choice of the label “ethnic women” to refer to non-white authors only. The researcher argues that the notion of Americanness is constructed nationally within the United States’ geographic space as well as transnationally outside that space. She asserts that the transnational perception of the US nation-space and Americanness makes ambivalent positioning possible, which she calls “non-national.” She argues that the non-national subject does not merely occupy a liminal space between home-country and host-country, but rather, reconfigures the implications of the foreign and the domestic, as well as home and abroad, within that interstitial space. In addition to interacting with these recent monographs on women’s transnational writing, my project calls for a wide range of references to the histories of transnational encounters depicted in the primary sources. Each analysis chapter draws on research in local histories and provides the context for the literary narratives under investigation. Nonetheless, because the four exemplary novels have arisen within the national borders of the United States, it is crucial to briefly consider the US context in relation to migration. This succinct overview gains importance when I analyze the selected books in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. It is possible to anchor the primary texts in my corpus in two pivotal moments in recent US border and immigration management practices: the post-Gatekeeper period and the post-9/11 era. These two historical moments need to be conceptualized as intermingled continua of increasingly intricate militarization strategies in US border policy (Andreas, 2009; Dunn, 2009; Nagengast, 1998). The United States erected the first border wall through Operation Gatekeeper, which launched an enhanced boundary enforcement strategy in October 1994 to decrease unauthorized migrant crossings across the US–Mexico boundary into southern California (Nevins, 2002, 2008, 2010). Immigration and terrorism has been conflated through the rhetoric of ‘the War on Terror’ in the wake of 9/11 (Chavez, 2013a; Rivera, 2014).The introduction of the Homeland Security Act in 2002 set into motion the emergence of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which governs both border control and immigration. According to De Genova (2007, 2019), the ascendancy of military strategies for border management has turned the United States into “the Homeland Security State” while making irregular migrants more vulnerable to abuse. The consequences of this border militarization have been devastating for those who cross the border irregularly (S. N. Chambers, 16 Boyce, Launius, & Dinsmore, 2019; Jones, 2016; Rubio-Goldsmith, McCormick, Martinez, & Duarte, 2006). Grande (2006) and Alvarez (2009b) address the repercussions of these shifts in border management. The epochal significance of September 11 needs to be underlined in thinking about America’s characterization of its national identity as well as its construction of its friends and enemies before commenting on how literature responds to it. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed the US Congress and the nation, declaring the creation of the Office of Homeland Security. Resembling the nation to a wounded body, Bush promised revenge. He opened his speech by defining “friends” and “enemies” of the nation. The polarizing logic, epitomized by Bush’s oft-quoted slogan: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” delivered at the launch of his anti-terrorism campaign denies the middle ground, the gray space, explored in this dissertation (Bush, 2001). Bush’s address to Americans predicted the random abuse Arab and/or Muslim communities would have to put up with in the aftermath of 9/11: I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith (Bush, 2001). His call for upholding American values and principles without specifying those American values and principles exuded confusion. It was also an early sign of the ensuing ambiguity against the nation’s racialized in-betweeners: citizens and alien residents of Arab and Muslim origins as well as anyone who looked Arab or Muslim. Addressing Muslims and Arabs, Bush said: “We respect your faith (.…) The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends.” Thus, Muslims and Arabs in the United States were interpellated as “friends” of the nation, not quite its members. That is, the post-9/11 American patriotism politely pushed away Muslims and Arabs from membership in the nation. Additionally, in Bush`s regard, ‘the War on Terrorism’ was “civilization's fight” and the advocates of “progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom” would fight against the terrorists. Efforts to locate terrorists “here at home” meant strengthening the intelligence capabilities in racialized communities (Bush, 2001). While the wounds from September 11 were still fresh, The USA Patriot Act of 2001 was enacted with the expressed goal of ensuring national security. The first Homeland Security office was established in Dearborn, Michigan: popularly dubbed the Arab American capital in North America (Baker & Shryock, 2009). Alongside this, Detroit 17 in the same state became the home for the largest counterterrorism investigations in US history (Abraham, Hovel, & Shryock, 2011; Howell & Shryock, 2011; Shryock, Abraham, & Hovel, 2011). This is to say that following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Arab and Muslim communities in the United States were put under siege (Cainkar, 2002, 2009; Cainkar & Maira, 2005). Further, the notion of “homeland” entered the official national discourse with the introduction of The Homeland Security Act of 2002, thus strengthening the link between immigration control and terrorism. Kaplan (2003) observed: “Homeland (…) conveys a sense of native origins, of birthplace and birthright. It appeals to common bloodlines, ancient history, notions of racial and ethnic homogeneity” (p. 86). The shift in the official discourse indicates a fundamental change in the self-representation of the American national identity from a nation of immigrants to a putatively homogeneous entity. The frequent repetition of “the Union” in the former President’s address to the nation characterized this renewed sense of the nation (Bush, 2001). President Bush’s speech set a precedent in imagining American society as an organic whole and rhetorically erased individuals who may have one foot in “the Union” and the other elsewhere. The assumed homogeneity of the empire would not tolerate hybrid and in-between residents. As a result, since the cataclysmic events of 9/11, racialized communities with transnational ties to other countries have found themselves to be ‘alien’ citizens vulnerable to constant surveillance. The term “alien citizen” refers to “an American citizen by virtue of her birth in the United States but her citizenship is suspect, if not denied, on account of her racialized identity and immigrant heritage” (Ngai, 2007, p. 2521). It should be noted that this category of alienage applies only to the people of non-European ancestry, including ‘unassimilable’ Chinese, ‘enemy-race’ Japanese, ‘illegal alien’ Mexican, and now ‘terrorist’ Middle Eastern, Arab, Muslim, and South Asian immigrants. In essence, the vengeful and repressive legislation introduced in the aftermath of 9/11 infringes on the human rights of Arab and other Muslim Americans. The discourse on national security has turned into a racist practice that criminalizes Arabs and Muslims and surveils their transnational ties and loyalties (Bayoumi, 2015; Howell & Jamal, 2009; Howell & Shryock, 2011; Jamal & Naber, 2008; Naber, 2006, 2008, 2012; Salaita, 2006; Shryock et al., 2011; Shryock & Lin, 2009). Stigmatization, surveillance, and in some cases actual incarceration of men ensued. It is in this sociopolitical context that Abdullah’s and Yunis’s novels emerged. And they are critical interventions in the post-September 11 era, one dominated by national security paranoia against Arab Americans and Muslims. Yunis mocks the anti-Arab surveillance and 18 second-generation Arab Americans’ futile attempts at assimilation. In comparison, Abdullah’s novel provides readers with a detailed picture of the ways in which a Muslim immigrant woman experienced ostracism and harassment in the aftermath of 9/11. The two novels show what ‘the War on Terror’ looks like from the vantage point of female Arab and Pakistani Americans. At first, it might appear counterintuitive to pay attention to migrant Mexicans in the same study that examines narratives about immigrant Muslim women. I admit that these are two very disparate groups. However, there is ample research on the conflation of migrant workers, most of whom come from Mexico and enter the country clandestinely, and Muslim communities (Chávez, 2012; Chavez, 2013a; Rivera, 2014). What unites these otherwise incongruous categories are the prejudices and stereotypes that have been used to malign their entire im/migrant communities. Through the dual processes of racialization and securitization, Latina/os and Muslims are constructed as the “Brown Threat” in the post-9/11 American imagination (Rivera, 2014). Mainstream representations of Latinos and Muslims in the United States shape not only how the US government and media constructs them as “Brown Threats,” it also affects the ways in which citizens interpret these minority groups as foreign. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 served as a rationale for the widespread surveillance of both Latino/a and Muslim communities. The terrorist attacks were not only “the raison d’etre for the massive fortification of the surveillance state,” but they also turned the objective of preventing terrorist activity into “a larger and more extensive application of surveillance and control systems of migrants” (Ono, 2012, p. 25). For this reason, this critical IC study looks at prose narratives about members of these two distinct groups albeit these members remain fictional characters. The following questions guide my investigation: 1. How may transnational fiction by im/migrant women, four examples of which this study analyzes, serve as a resource to descriptively trace the im/migrant experience? 2. What kind of topographic, sociopolitical, and linguistic maps do the data gathered from the analysis offer? 3. How can we re-read the notions of nation, culture, border, and agency critically? 4. Considering the findings, in what ways can this case study “critically” support IC inquiry and open itself a space in the field? 19 As detailed in Chapter 2, I draw on various methodology textbooks to determine my areas of analysis. Kellner (1998) advises that researchers assume a multi-perspectival approach to investigate cultural artifacts. In his model, the first step entails interrogating specific cultural texts’ production processes, the second step conducting textual analysis and critique of the artifacts, and the third step studying audience reception and the uses of cultural products. Similarly, Lehtonen (2000) sketches a tripartite model of analysis of cultural texts. Adopting a three-pronged model, as advocated by Kellner and Lehtonen, demands exploring the poetics of the texts, engaging in the hermeneutics of their contexts, and conducting an ethnography of their readers. However, such an aspiration raises feasibility concerns. For this reason, I focus on the texts and the context from which they emerged. I have developed a tool kit by drawing on various critical literary analysis methodologies (Guerin, Labor, Morgan, Reesman, & Willingham, 2005) and in conversation with key texts in both postcolonial literary studies (Spivak, 2012) and feminist literary criticisms (M. Eagleton, 2011; Jacobus, 1986; Showalter, 2012) to approach the texts. First, I identify the migrant character in each text. Next, I document the transnational geographic spaces the novels portray. After that, I determine the trans/national sociopolitical spaces the novels present. Then, I focus on the hybrid linguistic space in the novels. Finally, I assess the connection between the characters and the authors. Gender plays a key role in my study and permeates all levels of my analysis, even though I dedicate a different section in my analyses and discussion chapters to further elaborate on gender`s entanglements with nation, migration, and narration. Chapter 1: “Theoretical Framework: Deliberations on the Key Terms” establishes the conceptual framework for a reading of transnational fiction by migrant women authors from the perspective of IC. First, I dwell on the transgressive force in the modifier “transnational” by situating it in migration studies. I define transnational literature in relation to a host of cognate terms: world literature, diasporic writing, postcolonial literature, minor literature, ethnic literature and migration literature. Second, I elaborate on the notion of “hybridity” and “in- betweenness” by reviewing key theoretical sources. Third, I consider the role gender plays in narration and migration. I close this section with a brief discussion of how IC may benefit from sustained investigation into hybridity in literary texts. Chapter 2: “Methodology: Literizing Intercultural Communication Research Through a Focus on Transnational Fiction by Women” considers my methodological approach. Close readings of the four texts informed by the theoretical concepts I discuss in Chapter 1 comprise my primary analysis method. However, before moving on to a discussion of the areas to which I turn my 20 attention, I offer an overview of different paradigms and methods in IC research. My goals are to reveal where methodological gaps are and to discuss in what ways my intervention can contribute to the field. Interpretive textual analyses in IC studies emphasize building a connection between texts and their contexts rather than conducting a heavily text-centered examination. For this reason, while textual analysis remains the starting point in my research, I seek to link the four literary texts to their sociopolitical domains. Additionally, I enrich my discussion of the primary texts by drawing on secondary sources. Chapter 3: “Hybridity and In-betweenness in Saffron Dreams and The Night Counter” juxtaposes Saffron Dreams (Abdullah, 2009b) and The Night Counter (Yunis, 2009). These two books lend themselves to be read together since they both feature Muslim women whose migration to the United States was determined by their marriage. In addition, the two texts emerged as a response to the discrimination that Arab, Muslim, and South Asian immigrants have faced in the United States after 9/11. They both portray first generation immigrant women with ties to their home countries. Their recourse to their mother tongue helps disrupt the boundaries of the nation as a homogeneous group of people. Their stories underscore the fact that the American nation involves a hybrid mélange of individuals who have emotional as well as financial ties to other countries. The main characters in these two novels are in-between characters that use hybrid languages to reflect their bicultural identities. The protagonists assert their cultural in-betweenness through their allegiance to multiple geographies and languages. Their gender intersects with their transnational religious and ethnic identities. In both novels, the women outlive their husbands. In Abdullah’s fiction, the female protagonist transforms after her husband’s passing on 9/11 and interrogates in-betweenness from the perspective of a Muslim immigrant woman. In Yunis’s rendering of women’s transnational migration, the female protagonist’s taking root in the United States is symbolized by a fig tree, which eventually produces fruit in its new home. Chapter 4: “Hybridity and In-betweenness in Across a Hundred Mountains and Return to Sender” scrutinizes Across a Hundred Mountains (Grande, 2006) and Return to Sender (Alvarez, 2009b). The two narratives portray migration to the United States from its southern neighbor in ways that are not sanctioned by the state. I argue that migrants create hybrid identities for themselves through their movement across the physical US-Mexico border. Their double visions are observable in their bilingual language use. By focusing on the corporeality of migration, indexing migrant cartographies, bilingual language use and cultural hybridity, this chapter problematizes the myth that the United States is a homogeneous Union. It regards 21 migration as a ubiquitous human action. The linguistic hybridity that results from this contiguous cross-border interaction is a necessary outcome. Furthermore, it defends that the migrant character is an in-between person who straddles their home and host countries in their language use. Their memories transcend divisive state borders and trace transnational migrant maps. I conclude that the two works of fiction portray migration as a complex social process in which transborder geographical locations and migrants’ experiences gain new meanings in their relation to migrant and non-migrant others. Chapter 5: “Performances of Hybridity in the Third Space and Literary Intercultural Communication” has two objectives. First, it juxtaposes the four novels in terms of their representation of hybridity and in-betweenness as strategies of engaging with the nation/empire. I draw on my findings in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 to evaluate notions of nation, culture, border, and agency as they are represented in the four texts. Secondly, it considers the ways in which transnational novels may be used as rich sources of IC research. The Conclusion chapter highlights key findings from the two analysis chapters. It answers the question of whether exemplary transactional fictions written by female authors about im/migrant women may serve as viable sources for the IC discipline. 22 CHAPTER 1: DELIBERATIONS ON THE KEY TERMS 1.1. INTRODUCTION This chapter turns to the key concepts that inform my analyses in Chapters 3 and 4. The discussion opens with a genealogy of the term “transnational” in relation to “transnation” and “transnationalism” and surveys literature on the transnational turn in American literary studies. The first section ends with a discussion of the defining characteristics of transnational writing in relation to other competing labels. I argue that a transnational lens to read fiction by im/migrant authors may compensate for the limitations of other cognate metrics. References to geographical locations and sociopolitical incidents that engage, yet go beyond, the nation-state and linguistic hybridity remain two central aspects of transnational writing. Transnationality is most powerfully established and portrayed through explicit references to the extra-national places, sociopolitical incidents, and themes. But I am specifically interested in how im/migrant characters` and/or narrators` transnationality is established through hybrid language use. Therefore, in the second section, I address hybridity in transnational writing. Bakhtinian notion of linguistic hybridity and postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity inform my discussion. I also find Klinger`s discussion of linguistic hybridity, which I explain below, useful. I argue that im/migrant authors deploy various strategies of linguistic hybridity to represent cultural hybridity and in-betweenness. Thus, they seek to explode the exclusionary logic of a homogeneous nation. I turn to the link between gender and narration, as well as gender and mobility, to close this chapter. 1.2. IDENTIFYING THE TRANSNATIONAL IN LITERATURE The descriptor “transnational” is often invoked to refer to the “sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among non-state actors based across national borders” (Vertovec, 2009, p. 3). Long distance affiliations and networks established by individuals sharing the same interests and/or sense of belonging to the same religious communities across national borders precede the emergence of the nation-state, whose borders inform the very definition of transnationalism. The earliest use of the term “transnational” dates to Randolph Bourne’s 1916 essay “Trans- national America” where the author strived to quell public anxiety over hyphenated Americans` expression of loyalty to their country of origin during World War I. Bourne advocated for 23 accommodating the country`s “alien population” such as “the unpopular and dreaded German- American” citizens not by turning to the melting pot ideology, which aspires that immigrants severe ties with the old country (Maddern, 2013), but through native-born Americans` readjustment of their standards of what constitutes Americanness. For Bourne, the United States was destined to be a federation of cultures. He argued: America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the thread of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision. (Bourne, 1916, p. 96) In Bourne’s thinking, the modifier “trans-national” described foreign-born Americans and their descendants. In essence, Bourne problematized the use of the hyphen to refer to Americans whose ancestry lied in a country other than England only. Moreover, he endorsed cosmopolitanism, where diverse elements do not form a homogeneous entity, but “inextricably” mingle; different groups “do not fuse” but live in mutual toleration. Bourne proposed a “dual spiritual citizenship” closer to the contemporary understandings of transnational citizenship. For Bourne, foreign-born groups, including the migratory aliens that made up the unskilled labor force in the United States, were “no longer masses of aliens, waiting to be ‘assimilated,’ waiting to be melted down into the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism.” Rather, they constituted “threads of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves into a novel international nation.” Therefore, he advised that, as a “trans-nationality” comprising many nations, the United States stop the “crusade against its hyphenates.” Though Bourne`s editorial provides glimpses into its implications, parsing the adjective “transnational” is necessary to understand its affordances. According to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the prefix “trans” means “on” or “to the far side of something” and is often used synonymously with “across” as in the phrase “trans-Siberian railway.” It also denotes the relationship between two things and replaces “inter” as in “trans-racial child adoption.” Moreover, the prefix indicates a change that comes through experience as in “transformation.” The term “transnational” derives its meaning from the prefix, which also means “through, over, (...) beyond, outside of, from one place, person, thing or state to another” (Jay, 2021, p. 9). The adjective form implies extending or an aspiration to go beyond national boundaries (Gomaa, 2016; Jay, 2021, p. 9; Seyhan, 2001). As such, the term “transnational” inevitably engages with “nation” even if it aims to transgress its boundaries. Adopting a transnational perspective is transgressive in the sense that it underscores inter-connectivity between actors and phenomena 24 located on different sides of nation-state borders, while resisting the logic of purity and homogeneity associated with nation and nation-state. The discussion of the transnational raises questions about the notion of “transnation.” Appadurai (1996) observed that, because it houses crucial portions of ‘exported’ populations from elsewhere, the United States is home to delocalized ethnic and religious transnations, who retain ideological, affective, and so forth links to other places (pp. 172, 177). Indeed, for Appadurai, the United States is “a federation of diasporas” and Americanness emerges from the “cross- hatching of diasporic communities” amid anxieties of tribalism (p. 173). Similar to Bourne, Appadurai argued that the United States has always been a transnation when he declared that the country was not “a closed space for the melting pot to work its magic, but (...) another switching point” where divergent forms of affiliation play out and identities are negotiated (p. 171). Nevertheless, while discussing the notion of transnation in relation to America`s “uneasy” engagement with its racialized communities, Appadurai did not offer a definition. Rather, they contended that various forms of transnation would herald a postnational imaginary, which modulates through encounters with other transnational spaces. Ashcroft (2010) coined “transnation” as a comprehensive term to denote “the fluid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation” (p. 73, emphasis in original). In this formulation, this “fluid” disrupts the center versus periphery binary because it “extends beyond the geographical, political, administrative and even imaginative boundaries of the state, both within and beyond the boundaries of the nation.” It may be concluded, then, that transnation engages with nation even when it extends beyond the nation-state. The term “transnationalism” is both a social phenomenon and a multilocal research program. As a social phenomenon, transnationalism denotes “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Basch, Glick Schiller, & Szanton Blanc, 1994, p. 8). The im/migrant populations who build social fields that bridge their home and host countries are sometimes referred to as “transnationals” or “transmigrants.” Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992) maintained that while some migrants identify more with one society than the other(s), most forge transnational identities with links to more than one country: “Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and feel concerns, and develop identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously” (1992, pp. 1-2). To Glick-Schiller et al, the power of transnationalism lies in the ability of transmigrants to take advantage of their simultaneous positioning in several social locations. However, as Basch, Glick-Schiller, and 25 Szanton Blanc note, im/migrants do not typically call themselves transnationals or transmigrants (Basch et al., 1994, p. 8). It appears that prose fiction such as Salman Rushdie`s Satanic Verses, with its attention to fictive migrants` in-between identities, preceded scholarly discussions of transnationalism in migration research and other social sciences. The adoption of transnationalism in migration studies as a research framework in the early 1990s anticipated its steady rise and spread into other fields. By the mid-1990s, transnationalism had consolidated its status as an analytical framework in several fields across social sciences and humanities (Cano, 2005; Kearney, 1995). The 1994 Wenner-Gren Foundation Conference brought together pioneering investigators of transnational studies, planting the seeds of a multidisciplinary research area. According to the organizers, most of the participants agreed on the embeddedness of the transnational in the local and aimed to investigate transnational processes and their implications, rather than focus on transnationalism as a concept (Blanc, Basch, & Glick-Schiller, 1995, p. 683). The event also initiated the contentious debate whether transnational flows render nation-states obsolete (Appadurai, 1996) or work in the opposite direction and extend their influence into im/migrant pockets in other countries (Faist & Özveren, 2016). Moreover, it brought about concerns about its detrimental impacts (Miyoshi, 1996; Spivak, 2009). In 1999, Ethnic and Racial Studies dedicated a special issue to transnationalism, discussing it from theoretical and methodological aspects (Portes, 1999; Portes, Guarnizo, & Landolt, 1999; Vertovec, 1999). The time was ripe for a comprehensive overview of the variegated definitions and uses to which the term was put in the new millennium. Disentangling different manifestations of transnationalism, Vertovec (2009) identified six distinct conceptual premises, which merit closer scrutiny here by drawing on relevant other sources. First, transnationalism as “social morphology” encompasses social formations that span borders. According to Tölölyan (1991, p. 5), ethnic diasporas, or what he called “the exemplary communities of the transnational moment,” must be the central focus of any endeavor to investigate forms and dynamics of transnationalism. Second, according to Vertovec (2009), transnationalism as “a type of consciousness” pertains to individuals’ awareness of decentered attachments, of feeling here and there at the same time. Other critics note the prevalence of “diaspora consciousness” marked by dual identifications among immigrants (Schiller et al., 1992). Also, this notion of being here and there is connected to the condition Clifford (1994, p. 322) called “the empowering paradox of diaspora,” which indicates “solidarity and connection there” while “dwelling here.” The experience of multilocality intensifies the yearning to connect 26 with others who share similar roots and routes, but it may also enable the development of new “malleable” subjectivities (Dagnino, 2015; Faist & Özveren, 2016; Vertovec, 2009, p. 6) and a transnational imaginary (Appadurai, 1996). Third, transnationalism as “a mode of cultural reproduction” in Vertovec`s categorization stands for the processes of cultural interpenetration and blending. Memes shared across social media constitute the most conspicuous hybrid cultural form. Literary works I label transnational writing also showcase transborder cultural encounters and map novel cultural cartographies. Furthermore, these cultural products are tools for mediated transnationalism for their audience, as opposed to direct im/migrant transnationalism (Cohen, 2008), also called “minor transnationalism” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005). Vertovec`s fourth category, transnationalism as “an avenue of capital” comprises transnational corporations as the primary actors of transnational practices, but also embraces other minor members of the transnational capitalist class, who transfer remittances to their places of origin, and grassroots transnational entrepreneurs participating in circles of transborder trade (Vertovec, 2009). It needs to be noted that transnationalism as a channel of financing and investment cannot easily be separated from other ‘types’ of transnationalism because financial activities initiated by transnational entrepreneurs may be accompanied by political, social, and cultural pursuits (Portes, 1999). Fifth, transnationalism as “a site of political engagement” invokes international non-governmental organizations, including those concerned with human rights, environmental issues, and projects undertaken by ethnic diasporas. Appadurai (1996, p. 196) wrote that among transnational communities, new patriotisms do not necessarily constitute “the extensions of nationalist and counter-nationalist debates”, although “prosthetic nationalism and politics” informed by nostalgia may motivate interest in the politics of homelands. Participation in transnational political activities bears the potential to empower im/migrants because it equips them with a sense of purpose. The last component in Vertovec`s division, Transnationalism as “(re)construction of ‘place’ or locality” refers to the creation of “transnational social spaces” which link actors in more than one country and denotes rather dense, durable, and abstract sets of ties (Faist, 2015; Faist & Bilecen, 2019; Faist & Özveren, 2016). As this brief overview shows, transnationalism has multiple meanings. Sociologists, such as Levitt (2001), have emphasized the transnational impetus by focusing on immigrant pockets in the United States, offering explanations of how migrants participate in the social, political, economic, and cultural lives of their homelands and host societies via inexpensive transport and communication technology. According to Levitt, “the transnational village” functions as a spatial proximity enabled through a material infrastructure of cheap communications and transport technology. Such translocal existence has implications for the 27 nation-state on both ends of the border, because the nation-state stretches beyond its traditional geographical boundaries and is penetrated by other nation-states. Focusing attention on the national territory of the United States of America is no longer synonymous with the interests of US citizens. The migrant`s culture from the homeland is transposed onto US soil and imagery. 1.3. THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN IN AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES Since the 1990s, the transnational turn has swept American literary studies in sync with the tidal wave across social sciences, humanities, and interdisciplinary programs (Friedman, 2011, p. 2; Jay, 2010; Walkowitz, 2006). However, projects that investigate the transnational turn in American studies are far from uniform. Scholars stress cross-border fertilizations through comparative analyses of literatures originating from different Americas—i.e., Latin America, the Caribbean, North America—by highlighting the transhemispheric (Adams, 2009; Breinig, 2016; Levander & Levine, 2008; Nischik, 2014), transatlantic (Gilroy, 1993), and transpacific (P. Giles, 2019) zones of cultural encounters and cross-pollination (see e.g., Fluck, 2011; Pease, 2011, 2015). Others both emphasize cultural and literary interactions between the United States and other countries, and internationalize American studies (P. Giles, 2002; Tunc & Gürsel, 2012). Conducted outside the United States, this project investigates fiction that draws attention to connections between the United States and the countries the primary sources feature. The transnational turn in American literary studies nourished on multiple sources. Although there are different genealogies, critics note the rise of critical theory in the 1970s and its embrace of transnationalism as a transformative force (Fluck, Pease, & Rowe, 2011; Goyal, 2017a; Jay, 2010; Pease, 2011). In addition, they cite the resistance to the Vietnam War as the origin for transnational American studies (Pease, 2011, p. 4). Offering one of the most comprehensive accounts of the transnational turn in American cultural and literary studies, Jay (2010) highlights ethnic studies, feminist, Native American, and gay/queer scholars` contention that the imagery of ideal America masked the historical reality of genocide against indigenous peoples, slavery, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment and the ongoing economic and political marginalization of Chicano/as and Latino/as, women`s partial access to privileges, the persecution of lesbians and gays, and the oppression of religious minorities. In Jay`s view, the protests in the 1960s and 1970s brought together disparate social justice movements demanding political and civil rights. 28 Moreover, according to Giles (2019), the tension at the turn of the twenty-first century between American Studies departments whose intellectual curricula were based on the country’s self- defining mythologies—e.g., the open frontier, Tocquevillian notions of democracy,—“and a theoretical momentum that was seeking to place such formulations within a broader, more interrogatory framework” brought about transnational American studies. The latter has since “sought to introduce a quizzical, reflexive dimension into the definition of this area studies field, rather than simply taking the assumptions of national conditions for granted” (p. 31). Kaplan (1993) identified a pattern of denial across the disciplines in American universities, specifically pointing to the lack of consideration of American culture, empire, and imperialism in the United States (cf. Shu and Pease 2015, p. 20). Adopting a critical method of analysis, this new research program sought to reveal how the national literatures and cultures are in constant flux and renegotiation. Moreover, academic focus on transnationalism was not limited to the contemporary world. Researchers such as Giles (P. Giles, 2002) Dimock (2006) reconceptualized the past, illuminating transnational and cross-cultural borrowings and interactions previously occluded in the rubric of national paradigm. While Pease (2015) maintained that transnational American studies emerged out of “the transnational/diaspora complex” mediated between scholars’ transnational and diasporic modes of knowledge production, Jay (2010) saw its roots in the political movements of the early 1960s outsi