LITERATURE, NATURE, CITIZENSHIP, AND GLOBAL FLOWS: OF TRANSNATIONAL AND TRANSCULTURAL CROSSROADS

Abstract

This essay problematizes the relationship between literature, nature and citizenship in our digital culture. By focusing on the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization in connection with the tension between belonging to a national place and being mobile in transnational space, it deals with the following questions and issues: What is the meaning of identity and citizenship in the digital age of cybernations and netizens? How does literary representation render the cultural construction of the human-machine/ human-nature interface? How does literature translate and negotiate the disruptive in-between zone of inter- and intracultural disjunctures and conjunctures—the place where diverse histories, customs, values, beliefs and cognitive systems are contested and interwoven—as inhabited place, that is, as affective geography (Soja)? What are the theoretical tools to map and measure this inhabited contact zone? In the process of giving tentative and partial answers, this essay elaborates a link between the political unconscious (Jameson), the cultural unconscious (Bourdieu) and the ecological unconscious (Walter) of the human-machine/ human-nature interface that surfaces in contemporary multi-ethnic writing; a transwriting (Walter) that, in the face of natural catastrophes, instantiates a decolonizing attitude towards nature by delineating new forms of cohabitation involving the entire biota.