Transculturality and the contingency of belonging

Abstract

ABSTRACT The increasing mobility of world populations has disturbed the perception of national cultures as immovable, sedentary and ancestral. A constant tension has arisen between the bordering practices of nation states and the actual diversity of the cultures round which their fences are built. The most destructive force of modern times, the force that keeps borders in place is nationalism. As nationalism proliferates, violence increases because the nation cannot stand ambiguity. Literature occupies a particular place in this situation by crossing borders, disrupting the myth of the naturalness of the fixed and sedentary nature of nation states. Postcolonial literatures, in particular, establish a transcultural dialogue, a zone of contact that produces a new, ‘third' cultural space as language, writer and reader are changed. Works such as Saadat Manto's Toba Tek Singh, expose the actual contingency of that which is considered self-evident and necessary by the state. Consequently, contingency is shown to characterise the experience of home and belonging. Literary writing immediately problematizes the issue of belonging because it is in the very nature of such writing, the very nature of the imagination, to cross boundaries, to not belong. Thus the contingency of belonging initiated by transculturality becomes literature’s horizon of hope.