TRANSNATIONALISM IS “not new and has been around since ancient times,” Michael Howard reminds us. Yet in the contemporary era the “ties, interactions, exchange and mobility” that connect across and between nations, Steven Vertovec argues, “function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world.” Economic globalization, instantaneous electronic media, and the movement of millions around the globe today appear to be rendering national borders—and the cultures, polities, and frameworks of understanding that they are imagined to contain—more porous than ever before.

Transnationalism—understood in this volume as a plurality of intersecting, and crosscutting flows of products, ideas, and people back and forth over borders—presents a number of challenges to scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. How are they to conceptualize transnationalism beyond the conventional focus on the experience of those “minority” individuals or groups who span two or more cultures as migrants, refugees, or exiles? That is, how can they move beyond a focus on diasporic formations, hybridity, or notions of center and periphery in order to theorize how contemporary transnationalism's characteristic multidirectionality and saturation of all aspects of everyday life, from consumption to culture, impacts everyone, whether “settled” residents of a given national space or transient “guests”? How can they best conceptualize the nation's continued salience—the persistence of the nation in transnationalism—for its citizens, and for those it refuses to accept as such? And how are they to rethink the nation's continued centrality to persistent global imbalances in economic, geopolitical, and military power, even as transnationalism appears to weaken that nation's claim to be sovereign?

For literary scholars, specifically, the reality of contemporary transnationalism prompts us to think more closely about the ways fiction written in a particular time and in a particular place—in the context of this volume, in the German-speaking countries—connects to, circulates through, and is rechanneled by global patternings and global debates on identity, mobility, hospitality, universalism, self-forming, and cosmopolitanism.

FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORETICAL SCHOLARSHIP from a broad range of humanities and social science disciplines (including emotional geography, sociology, political science, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and psychology, to name a few) have increasingly addressed the affective experience of transnationalism on both individuals and communities. Taking as their starting point an intersectional understanding of difference developed in feminist work since the 1980s, these studies examine how race, class, sexuality, and gender together become useful categories in the “making and theorizing of transnational domains.” Literature is one such transnational domain. Since German unification, German-language writing by minority and nonminority authors alike has become increasingly “globalized and transnational,” which includes the subject matter, setting, languages, translations, distribution, and reception, ranging from the media promotion of texts and their authors to the awarding of prizes. These literary texts are populated with circulating bodies, both literally and figuratively, and therefore also contain the emotional and physical resonances of the border-crossing experience, such as destabilized feelings of belonging, reconfiguration of identity in travel, the impact of space and place on familial or sexual intimacy, the trauma of exile, or the corporeal results of economic precarity and racially motivated violence. More recent trends in affect studies move away from concerns of identity or subjecthood, and instead ask after the political frameworks, undercurrents, and aftershocks of these contents.

Building on the engagement with and definitions of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, world literature, and contemporary literature offered by Elisabeth Herrmann and Stuart Taberner in the preceding chapters, the following will trace the affective features in and of the transnational in order to mine for the politically engaged moments in contemporary literature. I suggest that a reconsideration of the affective turn that has taken hold in feminist and queer research since the new millennium is essential for understanding transnationalism in its function as a category, feature, or “pillar” (Herrmann) of literature, for it acts as a conduit through which literature is connected to the broader reach of politicized feminist studies; affect illuminates not only the connective charges between bodies as they move across or straddle borders, but it also captures the impact of transnational flows on individuals and social collectives working within power structures.

IN OCTOBER 2013, the editors of this volume invited writer Ilija Trojanow to participate in a seminar on “Transnationalism” for the Thirty-Seventh Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Denver, Colorado. Denied permission to enter the United States, however, Trojanow was prevented from boarding his plane in Brazil. He participated in the seminar via Skype, and the planned performance based on his novel EisTau (Melting Ice, 2012) for the GSA luncheon was transformed into a discussion on the subject of surveillance in a digital age. The following interview does not explicitly engage with this event, though it remains as backdrop to the conversation.

EDITORS: You are considered a transnational author and someone who is an expert and practitioner of transnationalism. From your perspective and experience, how would you describe or define “transnationalism,” as a life experience, a mode of living and with regard to literature? That is, what is “transnational literature” for you?

TROJANOW: Well, it's difficult for me to answer because until the day I received your invitation, I’ve never used that word myself, and I’ve never positioned myself within this semantic framework. So this was a bit new to me. The reason I didn't do it is that “nationality” doesn't seem to figure in my kind of biographical conditioning. Right from the beginning, when we fled Bulgaria, there was always a very diverse context, starting with the refugee camps, where you have a multitude of different refugees, growing up in Kenya where you have a multilingual setting (I grew up speaking four languages) and many people from international or multinational backgrounds. So it was more of an education in cosmopolitanism, looking back on it, than in transnationalism. The only time I actually thought of myself in regards to any kind of national identity was when my father insisted that we apply for German citizenship. It was one of the weirdest conversations I’ve ever had because in those days there was no test. You just had to fill out a form and one of the questions was “What is your hobby?” and I wrote down “literature.” The bureaucrat who was screening me looked up from his form and said, “Ah, literature! So, so.

SINCE THE MID-2000S there has been a marked uptick across the Western world of discussions surrounding the validity and effectiveness of feminism today. Terms such as “postfeminism” or “lifestyle feminism” are increasingly used to characterize a popular interest in making feminism palatable through depoliticization, even as political actions are publicly evaluated as successes or failures on the basis of criteria more appropriate for their second-wave forebears. These discussions either brand feminist cultural production as successful activism against a sexist, mainstream, and consumerist culture, or condemn it as mere media sensation that points to the failure or ineffectuality of feminism today. This production of unclear political meaning speaks to the current situation of contemporary feminisms in both popular and academic discourse.

The label of women's writing used in this volume is particularly illustrative of the pitfalls of such desire for clear evaluation, for it suggests that a neat categorization along easily delineated gender lines corresponds productively with literary work geared toward consumption by a specific, self-identified female audience. The term “Popfeminismus” (popfeminism), which emerged in Germany alongside these other terms to reference a feminism entangled in popular culture, offers one way of undoing the categorical delineation. Popfeminism uses feminism to draw from, disturb, and rewrite popular culture, but also uses popular culture to draw from, disturb, and rewrite feminism. The circular result contains an inherent awkwardness that we suggest is politically legible.

In this essay, we explore how that awkwardness is a useful concept for the production, consumption, and analysis of a branch of contemporary “women's writing” that understands itself or is received as both feminist and popular, because it offers a way out of the failure/success binary. In so doing, it problematizes the existence of the category of women's writing altogether, even while it confirms that in feminist literature, beginning a discussion with a notion of women's writing is potentially necessary. Awkwardness embraces the ambivalence of effectiveness in feminist creative work today that refuses clear meaning-making by nevertheless showing how its own position is intentionally (if ambivalently) political.

We use a popfeminist methodology to propose awkwardness as a theoretical tool for political interpretation.