ABSTRACT
As historically situated utterances, the political valence of the terms varies widely in function of historical context, disciplinary formation, and psycho-social investment. The word “transnational” offers two signal advantages denied both the “global” and the “world,” to wit, its two basic components—the “national” which acknowledges the cultural thickness and historical density of “nation” and the political agency of the nation-state—and the “trans” which moves beyond it. The word “transnational” suggests a wide variety of movements and interdependencies—the regional, the diasporic, the exilic—that can be figured as alongside, underneath, and beyond the national. While the World Art categories—“World Literature,” “World Cinema,” “World Music”—designate specific bodies of work, “Transnational” and “Global” are ad hoc analytic concepts applicable on some level to virtually any texts and processes. The term transnational is especially well-suited to an age where totalizing and universalizing discourses have come under suspicion, in comparison with a World which comes redolent of a complacently old-fashioned form of humanism.
