Transnational Literature Research Articles

Chronotopes of Transnational Literacies: How Youth Live and Imagine Social Worlds in their Digital Media Practices

AbstractThis study explores the transnational literacies that contribute to creating online social connections among migrant youth that may support their development and navigation of life across countries. We examine how social connectedness is semiotically constructed through time–space framing among two youth of Chinese descent who were participants of a larger study of the digital media practices of young people in an urban high school. We build on the concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) and scholarship of transnational literacies to understand the space–time dimensions of digital literacy practices, specifically how youth create the spatiotemporal context or frame of reference for their actions and positionings with others across geographical distances. Using a case study approach with data from interviews and observations, we analyzed how the youth depicted their transnational social relations within particular time–space frames. Qualitative and discourse analyses of the youths' narrative accounts show that they positioned themselves in proximity with their transnational peers within particular time–space contexts that supported their actions and emotions, and how they made sense of events, issues, practices, and their own identities as transnational individuals. The youths' ideas of schooling and education, and attunement to nationalistic ideologies, were developed through multiple chronotopes in their social connections across countries. This study offers implications for how an attention to the transnational spatiotemporal frame of youths' discourse and narrative may give us a more nuanced understanding of the subjectivity, knowledge, and perspective they derive from their experiences of movement and connection across borders.

‘상실’과 ‘저항’: 두브라프카 우그레시치의 포스트유고슬라비아 에세이즘과 그 함의

This research is devoted to the exploration of the implications of the Post-Yugoslav essayistic writings(Post-jugoslavenska esejistička proza) by Dubravka Ugrešić, one of the major contemporary female writers in Croatia through the analysis of their main themes and narrative features. It is the genre of essay that came to the fore in her literary works after she chose to live as an exiled writer. On the whole, it is the feeling of ‘loss’(gubitak) and the attitude of ‘resistance’(otpor) that underlie her essayistic writings, which are subsequently classified into five groups from the thematic points of view as follows. The first one is related to the nostalgic feeling of loss from the disappearance of Yugoslavia and includes those essays that criticize the confiscation and manipulation of the historical memories of ex-Yugoslavia in the new nation states that came to being after the disintegration of SFRY and during the outbreak of the Yugoslav interethnic violences and civil wars. The second group comprises the essays that provide the microscopic observations on the current situations in the Western Balkans in the transitional post-communist period. The third group of essayistic writings addresses the mutual recognitions between the East and the West of Europe, and the changes in recent Europe, caused by refugees and labour migration. The fourth group of essays examines the current status of literature including those ones and their writers in the Western Balkans and emphasizes the necessity of the proper consideration of the transnational literature as an alternative to the conservative national literatures, which have relied on the exclusive nationalistic cultures and have contributed to the identity politics. The fifth group of essays in Ugrešić’s oeuvre is related with the feministic criticism of patriarchal culture and misogyny in the Western Balkans. Based on the frequently repeated narratological elements, the above-mentioned themes are expressed through the authorial colorful tones and writing styles from the writings in fragments and short manifestoes to the long sarcastic feminist critiques and serious political interpretations with the view of diagnosing the crises of humanness(humanitas) from the Western Balkan countries to the West European societies. Ugrešić’s essayism originated from her diverse existential experiences as an exiled writer, and therefore needs to be considered as the heterogeneous and multilayered discourses that lead the readers to the deep contemplation and seeking solutions to the frustrating circumstances after the collapse of the communist countries.

Digital skills of and for lives marked by vulnerability: Being young, refugee, and connected in Europe

This article examines how teenage refugees in Europe develop digital skills in and through conditions of vulnerability. We argue that recognising vulnerability as a productive force, rather than merely as context, is crucial if we are to fully understand the emergence, limits and lack of skills among young people experiencing perpetual marginality. Drawing on 96 interviews and five creative workshops with teenage refugees in the cities of Athens, Brussels and London, we discuss three ways in which vulnerability and digital skills become entangled: (i) (dis-)connection, especially in conditions of scarce, interrupted and unsafe digital connectivity; (ii) learning, especially in contexts where digital and transnational literacies co-exist, compete or compensate for educational inequalities; and (iii) digital bordering, especially as this relates to restrictive regimes of mobility control that prolong risks for young refugees’ wellbeing and even life itself.

Sanctioning a space for literacy practices to promote transnational students’ identity development in a HL classroom

ABSTRACT Employing transnationalism and transnational literacies as theoretical perspectives, this study explores how two focal students from Asian immigrant families construct their transnational and transcultural identities by reflecting on their dynamic border-crossing experiences. The students’ creation of artifacts (illustrating self-portraits and composing “I Am” poems) and collection of their oral narratives are analyzed to seek how they construct and negotiate their hybrid, sophisticated, and multifaceted identities by moving across both geographical and metaphorical borders. The findings show that Asian American students shape their collective identities when engaging in authentic and meaningful literacy practices that support them to reflect on and make connections to their transnational experiences and (hi)stories. Since the literature on transnationalism has focused on Latinx immigrants, this study narrows the gap in the literature by examining how students from Asian immigrant families build, negotiate, and embody their transnational identities when participating in literacy practices that reflect their unique transnational experiences. The findings provide implications for educators that including literacy practices in transnational contexts can be powerful pedagogy as it offers ample opportunities for transnational students to reflect on their richly diverse life experiences and to connect each facet of their collective identities to make meanings of their transnational lifeworld.

Fusion of the Local and the Global in Parijat: Reading Blue Mimosa

This paper assesses how Parijat in her masterpiece Blue Mimosa deals with the issues of Nepalis’ global encounters. Primarily through one of the protagonists of the novel Suyogbir, Parijat weaves a story of a Nepali lahure who, in course of fighting the World War, interacts with the people abroad and brings in global experiences to his native country as he narrates the saga of his experiences with the female protagonist Sakambari. Significantly departing from her predecessors and also from her contemporaries primarily because of her serious concern with the global issues that no more affected only the people of her origin but those throughout the globe, Parijat in the novel caters to the new subjects to her readers. Her fascination with novel and experimental forms that rigorously redrew the boundaries of the traditional categories and her serious effort in familiarizing her readers with the global issues led her to the path of transcending her local experiences and thus acquiring a transnational stature. Applying Paul Jay’s ideas on transnational literature, this paper analyzes how Parijat in the novel blends the local and the global experiences with craft and imbricates those diverse experiences to constitute a beautiful structure. Her unique mixture of characters representing various cultural milieus, selection of settings and philosophical depth in subject matter blur the boundaries of ‘national’ category of writing and thus create an ambience where the local and the global intersect.

Perpetual Exile: Legacies of a Disrupted Century

The transnational configuration of contemporary German literature cannot be detached from its historical continuum, since such a separation would render the archive of histories of exile in and out of Germany inconsistent and incomplete. Bringing literary histories of exile in a dialogue, in this instance, Exilliteratur, represented by prominent German authors, who, during the Second World War, immigrated to Southern California (Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel, among others), as well as Anna Seghers and Stefan Zweig, who went into exile in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, and the emerging literature of contemporary transnational or so-called hyphenated German (“Bindestrich-Deutsche”) writers would enable an inclusive paradigm that communicates across communities of research. To that end, I briefly review one novel each by Anna Seghers and Lion Feuchtwanger and essays by the Iranian-German poet SAID, which exemplify the two distinctive genres of exile literature: the long-established Exilliteratur and what I elsewhere described as transnational literature of writers mostly from the non-Western world, who in the latter part of the twentieth century began immigrating to the West. While I acknowledge the different circumstances and historical imperatives that have dictated the features of the two genres, I foreground the ethical implications and the cautionary tales the respective works of Exilliteratur authors and transnational writers share.

Reading Devkota’s Prometheus as a Transnational Text: Intersecting the East and the West

This paper reads Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s Prometheus in the backdrop of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, considering the allegiance of a Nepali writer to a Western canon. Devkota, who had access to the literary trends in the West, has attempted to appropriate the Western tradition of portraying Prometheus as a mythical hero in literary works like Shelly’s and has tried to localize the image of the hero to elevate the marginalized status of the oppressed in Nepali society. Prometheus was unbound like that of Shelly’s and thus unlike that of Aeschylus as bound, Devkota projects this mythical hero in the Western mythology as a savior of the voiceless of his society. Drawing on Peter Morgan’s idea of transnational literature which “would identify that point at which two or more geo-cultural imaginaries intersect, connect, engage with, disrupt or conflict with each other in literary form,” this paper examines Devkota’s Prometheus how it intersects the East and the West in terms of the popular myths of two different societies.

The self-reflexivity in transnational literature: Re-writing the migration in female migrant writers.

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the socio-political meaning of the transnational literary production made by female migrant writers. Thus, it analyses their role in the framework of the 'hybrid' literary production of the 21st century in Europe, such as Spain and Italy. Moving away from the idea of national literatures, this paper investigates literature as a geographical and emotional inquiry point and friction between languages, ideas, practices, literary institutions, female authors, and female voices in today's markets. Hybrid literature written by first and second-generation migrants and displaced people is part of a huger concept of transnational literature, which breaks down with the idea of national identity and transiting towards a new conceptualization of hybridity in the literary production, also based on the translation of writings to other languages. The research question is about the relation between the transnational literary works, written by migrant women, and the social change. Based on the conceptualization of the Bhabha's 'third space', I will analyse the relation between the positioning of female migrant writers of 21st century and the role of hybridity. The preliminary findings show, firstly, the idea of reconceptualising it appears in light of the complexity of migrant people's realities and sex-gender differences. By adopting an intersectional lens, focused on the dialectic between gender and race/ethnicity and class, this paper analyses the tensions embedded in the re-positioning of four female migrant writers and their transnational experience (self)reflected in their writings. The present research contributes to the scientific knowledge in the field of cross-cultural literary studies, crossed with the migration study, through questioning the changing gender role and relations in transnational migrant literature. In addition, the findings show that today's reflection on 'third space' theory in the diasporic literature seems an idea to be refined when migrant women are involved.

Toward Border‐Crossing Biliteracies: Pláticas of Midwest Transnational Latinx Families Reading and (Re)writing the World

AbstractThis article focuses on the experiences of transnational Latinx youth and families through historias shared by the mothers. Transnational communities such as those from Latinx immigrant backgrounds have acquired critical perspectives because of their experiences in and across borders that have become central to their understanding of how to navigate learning in the U.S. context. As such, learning about border‐crossing knowledge and literacies from transnational students, families, and communities has become increasingly relevant and a timely pressing topic in today's U.S. language and literacy education and beyond. This study employed a pláticas methodology to capture how transnational Latinx mothers storied their bilingual children's biliteracies. This study draws on transnational literacies and transcultural knowledge to conceptualize border‐crossing biliteracies, a lens for understanding how transnational children read and write the world. Drawing on this lens, the findings reveal how transnational Latinx families disrupt and expand the meaning of family, language, literacy, and cultural teaching and learning for transnational Latinx youth. Rooted in their experiences, this article discusses and unpacks the meaning of border‐crossing biliteracies pedagogy and offers implications for bilingual educators, curriculum developers, and researchers.

ТРАНСНАЦІОНАЛЬНІ АСПЕКТИ ПОЕТИКИ РОМАНУ МАР’ЯНИ ГАПОНЕНКО «ХТО ТАКА МАРТА?»

The article is devoted to researching the creativity of the modern German-speaking writer of Ukrainian origin Marjana Gaponenko. The object of the research is the novel “Who is Martha?” (2012), for which the author received a prestigious literary award in 2013 – the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. The aim of the research is to carry out a terminological distinction of concepts that since the 90s of the 20th century have been increasingly used to denote literature of migrant authors, as well as to identify and analyze those characteristic features of poetics by which Marjana Gaponenko’s novel can be determined as transnational. The task of the study is to determine the peculiarities of transnational literature and carry out a three-level (biographical-referential, thematic-content and text-structural) decoding of the novel “Who is Martha?” with a focus on narrative techniques of transnational writing. Biographical, historicalliterary, philological, intertextual, intermedial and hermeneutic methods of research were involved in order to achieve the stated aim and solve the tasks. Conclusion. In the postmodern era, traditional concepts of national literature, culture, and identity are being more and more questioned and become conditional. Transnational movements and processes of hybridization level national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, and migration itself becomes an integral part of existence and often an impetus for literary creativity. Despite the fact that literary texts against the background of the migration experience were written earlier as well, it was in the 1990s that this phenomenon acquired a new expression and sound. Transnational literature with its immanent explicit and implicit reflection on transculturality, separating from the homogenizing essentialist concepts of identity and culture, as well as national and cultural affiliations, overcomes the contradictions between national and minority literature, between “own” and “foreign” and offers a productive approach to texts that were previously assigned to classification categories focused primarily on authors. The cognitive value of this concept lies in its special validity when studying the literary works by transmigrant authors as representatives of a new generation that freely chooses its place of residence and the language of literary expression. The conducted three-level decoding of Marjana Gaponenko’s novel substantiates the thesis that it belongs to transnational literature, the characteristic features of which are manifested at all levels of the artistic organization of the work. At the biographical-referential level, Marjana Gaponenko, taking into account her life and creative path, can be called a transnational author who belongs to postmodern transmigrants. This definition makes it possible to analyze the peculiarities of poetics in the novel “Who is Martha?”, which artistically implements the autobiographical experience of migration at the thematic-content level, but goes beyond these limits. While other migrant authors mostly deal with their own migration, artistic experience of identity crisis, loss and alienation, Marjana Gaponenko explores global essential topics, considering them in a broad cultural, historical and philosophical context. At the text-structural level, characteristic manifestations of transnationality are the spatial structure of the text, the use of dynamic heroes with hybrid identities (Marjana Gaponenko’s characters are postmodern cosmopolitans with inherent linguistic and cultural hybridity, who are searching for and eventually find essential truths beyond various boundaries), the presence of elements of analepsis and prolepsis, involvement of double characters, the inclusion of multilingualism and dialects, the use of stereotypes, tendency to blur genres, etc. Marjana Gaponenko’s novel with its cultural, linguistic and literary hybridity, as well as peculiar manifestations of intertextuality and intermediality, ultimately not only expands the space of reader’s reception and literary knowledge, but also ensures the development of a productive transcultural and transnational dialogue.

Teaching as a way of creating Italian transnational literature: A mission of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar at the University of Calabria

In this essay, I will illustrate the mission and the most significant innovative teaching activities promoted by the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar, a research center founded in 2017 at the University of Calabria, where I work. The Seminar aims to promote scholarly research into the abovementioned fields while building educational programs inspired by them. In particular, we investigate the perspective of specific Italian transnationalism that identifies itself with the network of Italian diasporic literature disseminated worldwide. Our goal is not limited to research; we seek to pursue a proactive perspective. It is a fact that contemporary writers of Italian heritage are generally unaware of contemporary Italian writers and that many of them are not familiar even with the Italian canonical masterpieces from the past, and the same goes vice versa. For this reason, our mission is to create new bridges to fill these gaps. One of the purposes of the “Italian Diaspora Seminar” is the ambition to investigate the opportunity to create, both theoretically and pragmatically, an inclusive ground in which to detect and promote new connections among Italian, diasporic, and migrant Italian contemporary writers. Our goal is to reinforce a sense of community that will lay the foundations for the growth of inclusive, inter-dialoguing, and unified Italian transnational literature.

Review: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. By Y-Dang Troeung. (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2022. 262 pp.) Geoffrey Gunn Geoffrey Gunn Emeritus, Nagasaki University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 323–324. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.323 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Geoffrey Gunn; Review: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 323–324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.323 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search A short book divided into four chapters, each suggests a psychological condition stemming from war (the Cambodian war), refugee displacement, and memory (or amnesia). In a substantive standalone preface, author Y-Dang Troeung positions her work between transnational literatures, critical refugee studies, global south studies, and “critical disability studies.” Neither does she ignore trauma-based paradigms as with post-memory, haunting, and intergenerational trauma (p. 11). Matching the subtitle of the work, as stated, the text “aims to construct and animate a genealogy of the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia in the service of decolonist, antiwar, and abolitionist futures” (p. xi). In doing so, Troeung reframes questions of international complicity and responsibility in the Cambodia genocide in ways that implicate us all. Such is the power of this book including a final “coda,” that no one reading it could doubt her general sentiments for a moment. Born in a refugee camp... You do not currently have access to this content.

Companion Texts and Spaces of Encounter: Reading Experiences in Shazia Majid, Ivo de Figueiredo and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s Life Writing

ABSTRACT Analyzing reading experiences represented in transnational literature clarifies how the author’s story connects to a larger world literature. Building on the feminist and postcolonial work of Sarah Ahmed, and Elleke Boehmer, Rita Felski's study of the uses of literature, I investigate the signification of the representations of reading experiences in three contemporary Norwegian works. These center thematically on gendered and racialized identity processes, as well as politics and history, in the aftermaths of colonialism and migration: Shazia Majid, Ut av skyggene. Den lange veien mot likestilling for innvandrerkvinnene [Out of the shadows. The long road to equality for immigrant women]; Ivo de Figueiredo’s A Stranger At My Table [En fremmed ved mitt bord. En familiehistorie] and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s work Vi puster fortsatt [We are still breathing]. My analysis of the reading experiences and the intersectional aspects in these works, explores how their stories refer to and enter into various networks of book communities: Feminist, imperialist, antiracist, Norwegian, English, American, Asian, African, 19th-century, colonial, black, white and more. The authors use their family history to tell a larger transnational story, leading to further explorations of how gender, ethnicity, nationality, class and religion form identities in transnational Norway.

‘Helsinki sind wir’: Sozialistische Transnationalität im Literaturbetrieb der DDR

The forced integration of European socialist states following WWII is usually viewed as a history of political misunderstandings and genuine social failures. From the early modernism and avant-garde periods onwards, socialism was also a common experience for the whole of East and Central Europe. Since the late 1950s, the densifying network of relations among culture departments of socialist parties, culture ministries of individual countries, writer associations, publishers or literary journals has resulted in thus far unknown transnational literature circulation. This article analyzes the transnational links between the GDR literary system and the literatures and literary institutions of the European Eastern Bloc. The paper aims to discuss two specific research questions. First, the international literature published in the GDR is examined statistically and regarding the prevailing concepts and practices of transnationality. Second, the transnationally networked places of socialist literature planning are presented. Documents preserved in East German archives form the basis for the research.

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

<i>The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures</i> by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

The self-reflexivity in transnational literature: Re-writing the migration in female migrant writers

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the socio-political meaning of the transnational literary production made by female migrant writers. Thus, it analyses their role in the framework of the ‘hybrid’ literary production of the 21st century in Europe, such as Spain and Italy. Moving away from the idea of national literatures, this paper investigates literature as a geographical and emotional inquiry point and friction between languages, ideas, practices, literary institutions, female authors, and female voices in today’s markets. Hybrid literature written by first and second-generation migrants and displaced people is part of a huger concept of transnational literature, which breaks down with the idea of national identity and transiting towards a new conceptualization of hybridity in the literary production, also based on the translation of writings to other languages. Based on the concept of ‘the location of culture’ and the conceptualization of the Bhabha’s ‘third space’, I will analyse the relation between the positioning of female migrant writers of 21st century and the role of hybridity and the reconceptualization of the ‘third space’ in their literary production. The preliminary findings show, firstly, the idea of reconceptualising it appears in light of the complexity of migrant people's realities and sex-gender differences. By adopting an intersectional lens, focused on the dialectic between gender and race/ethnicity and class, this paper analyses the tensions embedded in the re-positioning of four female migrant writers and their transnational experience (self)reflected in their writings. The present research contributes to the scientific knowledge in the field of cross-cultural literary studies, crossed with the migration study, through questioning the changing gender role and relations in transnational migrant literature. In addition, the findings show that today's reflection on ‘third space’ theory in the diasporic literature seems like an idea to be refined when migrant women are involved.

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation

Representation of the Ethnical and Cultural Identity of Russian Germans of the Omsk Region

The article is devoted to the analysis of literary works of Russian Germans of the Omsk region. The relevance of the research is due to the need to preserve the history, culture and language of individual ethnic groups in the context of globalization. The purpose of the article is to define and describe the elements of ethnocultural identity in transnational literary texts of Russian Germans. The work was carried out within the framework of an interdisciplinary approach using the methods of discursive, contextual and semantic analysis, elements of linguistic and cultural description. The research material is the works of authors – Russian Germans, whose life is connected with the Omsk region. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the specificity of these texts allows them to be attributed to transnational literature, since in most cases these works are autobiographical and dedicated to the search for identity. At the same time, the ethnocultural identity of Russian Germans living on the same territory includes national and regional components. As a result of the analysis of literary works, the authors have identified the following enlarged thematic groups that characterize the life of Russian Germans in the Omsk region: spatial, social, linguistic, cultural. Elements of both regional and ethnic identity of the Russian Germans of the Omsk region were identified in each thematic group. It is established that regional identity prevails in the spatial and socio-household components, and ethnic identity prevails in the linguistic and cultural components. The authors of the article show that ethno-cultural identity is objectified to a greater extent at the level of the identified thematic groups, to a lesser extent at the level of the use of stylistic means. The study revealed that colloquial mixed bilingual vocabulary prevails in terms of language as a means of humor and satire, as well as expressive and evaluative epithets.

Transnational Perspectives in the History of Contemporary Romanian Literature

"Transnational Perspectives in The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature. Discussing literature from a global perspective requires a transnational view on the evolution and international integration of literature. Most recent World Literature studies imply such an analytic perspective when questioning the recognition of certain national literatures within the more developed ones. While using concepts such as “minor” or “major literature” or, more precisely, “central” or “peripheral literature,” attention needs to be paid, Prodan argues, when talking about the global acknowledgement of literature, especially of those literatures coming from “minor” and even isolated cultures. In The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020, Mihai Iovănel proposes a thematic rather than a historical analysis of contemporary national literature with its periodized and temporal evolutions. The author includes, especially in the last chapter of his literary history, a transnational view of contemporary Romanian literature. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to analyse the way Romanian writers and their literary works are perceived by the critic as having “a transnational character.” Prodan also investigates how Iovănel succeeds in renewing critical strategies in literary historiography. Thus, this contribution is mainly dedicated to the last part of Mihai Iovănel’s History, which seeks out new strategies of transnational expansion of the spectrum of national literature, as the author also analyses the possibilities of a global integration and marketing of contemporary Romanian literature. Keywords: transnational literature, national literature, migration, literary history, periodization"

Critical collaboration across three transnational literacy autobiographies

AbstractHistorically, language and literacy education has overemphasized the ability to listen, speak, read, and write in one standard language (Campbell, 2005; Clark, 2013) without taking personal, historical, and contextual literacy experiences into account. Undertaking autobiography writing as a critical reflexive practice, this study analyzes three transnational literacy autobiographies or TLAs (Canagarajah, 2020) by each author that center critical engagement with an artifact (Pahl &amp; Rowsell, 2010) to learn how experiences within transnational contact zones have shaped their trajectories as literacies scholars. Merging pluriversality and transnational literacies as conceptual frameworks for analyzing their autobiographies, the authors conduct an interactive elicitation strategy and identify colonialism, emotion, and identity as emergent themes. Finally, the authors suggest using TLAs through critical collaboration to center transnational literacies and pedagogies, develop a transnational ethic of care, and imagine changes in current systems of inequity in literacy education.