Transcultural Writers, World Literature and Multicultural Australia in the Global Age Arianna Dagnino (University of South Australia)
A mutation is under way within the global ecumene of Letters, where new notions of belonging as well as definitions of selfhood and identity are being externalized through new creative artistic and literary processes. In the present age of transnational flows and complex globalizing phenomena, a new generation of authors is writing beyond the limits, or on the border, of their primary cultures and national landscapes. For this reason, a growing number of literary critics prefer to refer to these authors and their imaginative works as “transcultural”.1 These writers may have in their background a migrant, exile or transnational experience of some sort but in their cultural orientation and writing style they seem to detach themselves from the conventional tropes of migrant, diasporic or postcolonial writing that have dominated the last twenty-thirty years of the global literary landscape. The present article analyses the growing significance, in the wider terrain of world literature and in the symbolic space of multicultural Australia, of a transcultural way of writing more attuned to the cultural complexities of our globalized contemporaneity. Historic literary examples of transcultural writers who underwent a “creative transpatriation” – that is, the identity and cultural metamorphosis that may be triggered by moving physically, virtually, and imaginatively outside one’s cultural and homeland/national borders – can be easily found. Just keeping to the 20th century, the American writer Paul Bowles, with “his imaginative assimilation and interpretation of Moroccan culture” (Patteson 1992, p. 182), the Belgian-born French novelist living in the United States Marguerite Yourcenar, or, in his own way and with his multifarious cultural experiences, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges may be considered among the forerunners of a phenomenon that only now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is acquiring greater impetus and resonance. Transcultural theories (Rama 1982; Spitta 1993; Canclini 1995) have been deployed and engaged, especially in the Latin American region, since the late 1940s, after the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1947) coined the term “transculturation” 1
For an analysis of early 21st century transcultural writers see Arianna Dagnino (2012), “Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Fiction in the Age of Global Modernity”.