Arrivals without Plot: The Transnational Aesthetics of Network Form in Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man

Abstract

Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man consists of a web of interconnected stories that unfold over multiple geographies spanning the United States and Eastern Europe. The stories as a collective map how the novel’s multiple narrators came into contact with Jozef Pronek, a migrant displaced by the Bosnian war, in Sarajevo, Kiev, and Chicago. Building upon the insights of network theory, this essay examines how Hemon’s deployment of network aesthetics, which tells the migrant’s story in a plotless manner, introduces a transnational frame of thought for exploring precarious forms of life led by migrants and refugees displaced by the Bosnian war. I argue that the novel’s focus on weak social ties formed by the intimacies of transient encounter not only offer insights into the struggles of the migrant, but call forth critical engagement with nation-bound structures of feeling linked to Eastern European histories of war and migration in the late twentieth century.