ABSTRACT
The recent reinforcement of nation-state borders due to the COVID-19 crisis has given new meaning to transnational and border studies. Following different strands of border thinking from decolonial perspectives, including discussions of border thinking as a tool in feminist knowledge production, this chapter rethinks the concept of literary transduction (as it was developed by Lubomír Doležel in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, 1998) within a new theoretical framework. In dialogue with the concepts of locational feminism (as coined by Susan Stanford Friedman, “Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy” in Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, 2001), and utopianism and singularity (as developed by Derek Attridge in The Singularity of Literature, 2004), this chapter examines transduction in the context of feminist transnational studies. In its travelling to feminist theory as it is proposed here, the concept of transduction reveals its potential to foreground processes rather than fixed states of affairs, and to allow for more complex approaches to the dynamics of interactions as constitutive of any transnational approach. The analytical potentials of the revised concept of transduction are tried out in an analysis of Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007).
