“Trafficking in Words”: On the Politics of Writing, Cross-Border Mobility, and Nam Le’s <em>The Boat</em>

Abstract

The globe shrinks for those who own it; for displaced or dispossessed, migrant or refugee, no is more awesome than few feet across borders or frontiers.-Homi Bhabha, Double Visions (88)The 2008 publication of nam Le's collection of short stories, The Boat, marked his emergence in field of World Literature. Highly ambitious in scope, The Boat plays upon paradox that ensues when stories from vast reaches of globe are brought into close within a contained collection. stories set in teheran, rural Australia, Medellin, new York, Hiroshima, and liminal zones inhabited by refugees sit side by side in Le's collection without any immediately obvious connection or overarching design. However, i argue that this is by no means tangential, but integral to stories' meaning, throwing new light on invisible and overlapping threads that already exist within story-places: both linking them together and pushing them apart in unlikely patterns of affiliation and difference. Large-scale events in global history are refracted across Le's stories through specificity of local instances, where they emerge in surprising patterns of connection and repetition: global crisis in refugees, ongoing legacy of war and trauma, underhand and exploitative exchanges within global trade, reactionary rise of theocracy, extreme nationalism, and shifting dynamics of power and place wrought by globalization itself-all of these global narratives take on new dimensions in specifically local contexts in which they emerge.These tensions between global and local (the general and specific) also allude to shifting spatial coordinates at play in recent attempts to re-map World Literature's eurocentric dominance (Apter 2013; damrosch 2003; dimock 2006). As Ken Gelder notes in proximate Reading: Australian Literature in transnational Reading Frameworks, proximity and distance function as guiding principles of Le's collection, self-consciously gesturing to way contemporary forms of World Literature re-map spatial/temporal coordinates that have enabled dominant literatures and/or places to circulate as near (and dear) at expense of those other literatures that have been dismissed as far away (2010). How, then, are we to make sense of worldly encounters that structure form and content of The Boat? this question inevitably carries weight of contention surrounding World Literature in recent years. it's now become a truism that World Literature's communitarian possibilities are lost within a current neoliberal economy underpinned by a one-way trafficking from Us to rest. As Robert dixon and Brigid Rooney note in their introduction to Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, the rise of world literature paradigm [. . .] has much to do with 'the reevaluation of America's position in world after 9/11,' and it is strongly connected both ideologically and pedagogically to institution of United states academy (xi). no longer invested with Goethe's/Auerbach's idealistic belief in inclusivity of weltliteratur, World Literature is often seen to confirm Us literary hegemony in its very claim to oneworldliness. emily Apter's Against World Literature is one of latest manifestations of this critical shift, arguing against translatability of World Literature in a neoliberal context marked by an assimilative Us global hegemony. For Apter, World Literature's utopian ideal of one-worldliness is undermined by uneven economic and political conditions underpinning cross-border relations. in Apter's words, world literature either reinforces old national, regional, and ethnic literary alignments or projects a denationalized planetary screen that ignores deep structures of national belonging and economic interest contouring international culture industry (177). …