The Riptide Currents of Transnationalism
The Riptide Currents of Transnationalism

Summary/Abstract: This paper suggests that it may be useful to think in terms of three interacting streams of transnationalism in modernity, especially as they shed light on modernist practices: imperialist transnationalism, regional transnationalism (including the hemispheric), and activist or diasporic transnationalism. My comments are provisional, a thought experiment prompted mainly by the reading of everyone’s papers. The intention is to give us a way to understand some of the relations among our very diverse materials.I am not aiming to offer a taxonomy of transnationalism or of our papers. Instead I conceive of something more dialectical. I propose that these three streams of transnationalism unfold together historically and they interact. Over time, into the present, they continuously constitute, strain, redirect or, in pockets, break up each other. In the end I ask two questions: 1) how might these transnational actors deliberately or simply by their presence break up, or redirect, or create aporias within the imperialist and regional forms of transnationalism—and vice versa? And 2) how might (geo)modernisms arise out of these interactions?

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