Experiments in SciFi and Fantasy (and Hello again, Third Culture Literature: It has been a long time)

I am reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor as a favor for a friend, and I still have Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven on the go ( for those following along, that means War and Peace is neglected for the moment, though I made it as far as the wolf-hunting part, which is roughly half way).

Anyway, Bujold writes "Radial symmetry was popular among the tiny creatures occupying the ecological niches held by insects on Earth" (17) and "Do you think they could be like those birds from Earth, that pick parasites off cattle?" (21).  

LeGuin writes about Dr. William Haber's office in Portland:  "It did not have a view of Mount Hood [. . .] But on one of the walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood" (6).  It is the absence of this mural that first signals the world-changing effect of Orr's dreams (24-5).

These two incidents of the unfamiliar fantastic and scientific compared to Earth (radials, Mount Hood) together made me think "Huh.  Interesting.  I bet a TCK wouldn't compare the current world with a past one.  I bet they'd just occupy the new world, without comparison."  

So, I set up a little experiment re: world-building to see if I was right.

SciFi (We are on spaceships, new planets and all that):

Bujold's Shards of Honor  vs. CCK Nnedi Okorafor's Binti

Fantasy (We are on Earth, but its crazy different.  )

LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven vs TCK Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

I need to do more work on this.  I got blindsided by my second migraine of the week (after swimming which is so virtuous I ought to be radiating health, but I am not) so this is very preliminary.

Guys.  The results of my experiment are surprising.  I expected an absence of comparison in Hamid and Okorafor.  I expected their characters to just get on with being in the new places.  What I may have found instead is the introduction of that ever-mind boggling extra dimension: TIME.

Okorafor roots Binti in a fantasy of the past (ancestral land) as well as a science fiction of the future (launch port)  when she has Binti muse "We Himba don't travel.  We stay put.  Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish.  We even cover our bodies with it. Otjize is red land.  Here in the launch port, most were Khoush.  [. . . ] Here I was an outsider" (3).

Hamid describes portals through which migrants travel from one part of earth to another.  Migrants cross immense geographic and cultural distance in an instant.  However, the past get left behind, and all the people in it.  "When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind" writes Hamid (98), and adds "We are all migrants through time " (209).

It brings us back to Salman Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands": "The past is a country from which we have all emigrated.  It's loss is a part of our common humanity" (12).  

It's true.  We all do leave the past behind.  

However, an early response to my hasty experiment is that SciFi and Fantasy contrasts "home" places (ancestral lands, Earth, which is home for Bujold's readers if not for protagonist Cordelia Naismith) with imagined ones, without much considering how the home places are necessarily also past places.

CCK and TCK SciFi and Fantasy cannot seem to help themselves in thinking about the importance of the past as it informs the future, and in so doing, reminds us of how irrevocably it is lost to us. Time  as a metaphor for distance from place is of the essence.

Addendum (the good bit, actually.  Best thoughts below):

Perhaps you are infuriated by the Ford Escalade sized hole in this argument?  I received this text at about 6.20 AM, from a good friend who is also a good scientist, and a good reader: 

"George Orr’s dreams [Lathe of Heaven] change the past. That’s the entire premise. Not just for him, but for everyone. "

Doh!

On the one hand: throw this laptop out the window melodramatically for that is correct

BUT!

On the other hand: why did LeGuin's writing about the past automatically feel different to me?

Giving myself benefit of the doubt for a second led to this insight: I am  indeed wrong  in my conclusion "CCK and TCK SciFi and Fantasy cannot seem to help themselves in thinking about the importance of the past as it informs the future."  No.  Not correct.  TCK and CCK SciFi show a separation between past and present.  The past is a vision with no direct connection to the present.  The past does not cause the present.  That's the problem really: the rupture between past and present leads to nostalgia for something to which there is no chain of connection from the present.

In LeGuin, you do see how the past informs the present.  Over and over again different pasts inform the present in different ways.  For LeGuin, the focus is on the present, on the ramifications of a tweak to something in the past.  Causality is everything.  The past causes the present.  The present, as outcome of altered past, is relentlessly the focus.

To belabor the point, in CCK and TCK work, the past does NOT cause the present.  Rushdie opens his essay with: "An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall in the room where I work. It's a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born" (9).  The past is a relic, static, fetishized even.  It bears no resemblance to the present, and how it connects with the present at all is the mystery because it does not seem to have any bearing on it whatsoever.

I've started a new blog

 Come find me over here:

https://whatsantjereading.blogspot.com/

Reading

For Better Posture, World Peace, and Improved Dentition.

I wrote a novel. Today is its publication day!

"But Antje," you ask, "Where the heck have you been?"

Among other things, I have been writing fiction.  

Slow Time is published by spuyten duyvil press.  

It is TCL in a way similar to Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth in that it presents a kind of fantasy of belonging, of being claimed by a place.  It does have a military brat character.  Also, were I to analyze it as though I had not written it myself, it does bear many of the hallmarks of third culture literature, even when third culture literature doesn't seem to be about traveling.

Buy it here: https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/slow-time.html

Memoirs

 I was very fortunate to present with Dr. Jessica Sanfilippo-Schulz in a talk for the World Food Programme's Family Liaison Outreach Community (FLOCK).  Our work was on TCK and CCK memoirs.

Here are some of the books I spoke about and some I would have spoken about if I had had more time:

I started with Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands (1981), which is essays not memoir per se.  The titular essay, "Imaginary Homelands" has some lovely lines about geographic and temporal distance meaning that what is remembered as "home" is actually fictional.  Rushdie is not strictly TCK, though definitely multiply displaced (India, Pakistan, The UK, years in hiding from the fatwa, the United States).

I paired him with Michael Ondaatje's family history Running in the Family (1982)--for Ondaatje, trying to piece memories together requires collaboration.  Ondaatje is TCK (former Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, UK, Canada).

Akwaeke Emezi's memoir Dear Senthuran (2021) considers the result of multiple moves (nothing and no one seems real after a while).  Here (as in their autobiographical novel Freshwater), Emezi is interested in the psychology of ogbanje.  Their work makes me feel as though my brain is melting . . . a good thing in small doses.  Emezi is Malaysian/ Sri Lankan/Nigerian/ American.

Jane Alison's 2009 memoir is . . . astonishing.  It concerns an American and an Australian diplomatic family in which there is a partner (for Alison, a parent) swap.  Alison is Australian/American and her bio sometimes refers to her as "raised in the foreign service" which is interesting shorthand for a TCK upbringing.

Heidi Sand-Hart's Home Keeps Moving (2010) is a memoir of being raised a missionary kid in England, India and Norway.  She explicitly engages with TCK vocabulary, unlike the other authors I mention.  She is also the only one of the authors I have mentioned so far who is not also a successful novelist.  It shows in the prose style, which is more rawly confessional.

I threw in some novels too, because of how they catch autobiographical detail.  Yann Martel's The High Mountains of Portugal (2016) which I found peripatetically charming, and which features a mis- matched relationship between a chimpanzee and an Iberian rhinoceros.  I have written about this before.

I have written about Ondaatje's The Cat's Table academically.  I used it in the FLOCK talk because details about the Oronsay, and the protagonist's age when sailing alone on it from Ceylon to England are so exactly depictions of Ondaatje's own past.

I have never written on Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.    Her work would pair very well with Yann Martel's, actually.  Call Me Zebra (2018) is rife with TCK and CCK themes.  Oloomi has other novels too.

I ended with some words from Pico Iyer (card-carrying TCK).  His Global Soul (2000) is iconic in writing about travel and dislocation.  

And finally, Aminatta Forna's The Devil that Danced on Water (2002).  I suspect her very recent The Window Seat would have excellent material too.

Ideally, especially for the World Food Programme audience, I would have liked to consider a couple of TCK travel narratives, perhaps jumping off from the award winning blogs listed on this site and my own work from years ago on that topic.  Something I have yet to investigate is TCKs in international aid writing memoirs.  I know those must exist, but haven't put the work into hunting them down yet.  I can recommend non-TCK Jessica Alexander's Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (2013) as an interesting starting point in that genre.

And what about Ottessa Moshfegh's amazing Homesick for Another World (2012).  Short stories.  Love them.  Why have I not written about them yet?

In the FLOCK talk, I plugged my own book.  Here it is:

It deals with seventeen TCK fiction writers, and has a good bibliography (c. 2013).

Gerald Durrell My Family and Other Animals was one of my favorite books when I was ten. 

Glossary (& Resources) to accompany Antje M. Rauwerda’s FIGT Research Network Talk, June 4, 2021.

 

 Looking for TCK novels? Try Heidi Tunberg’s TCK Resources: http://tckresources.com/ 

 Or a booklist I compiled for this blog (Needs updates!): https://thirdcultureliterature.blogspot.com/2014/07/an-ever-growing-list-of-third-culture.html

 Terminology:

A cluster of terms about people who have relocated (used in Literary Analysis, but also widely in other disciplines):

 • Migrant (moves temporarily, e.g. “migrant worker”)

 • Immigrant (moves permanently to a new place, often adopts citizenship in new locale) 

• Emigrant (moves from a place) 

• Diaspora (originally from the Jewish diaspora—a scattered population whose origin is elsewhere. E.g. Indian diasporic population in England, Hong Kong diasporic population in Vancouver) 

• Global (Catch-all for anything people want to imply is international in some way! 

A footnote on problems: these terms often imply racial difference and power imbalances. 

 Two heavily theorized literary terms:

 • Postcolonial. After C19 European colonialism in Africa, India, Caribbean, Australia, Canada, NZ. Texts from formerly colonized countries, often engaged with the aftermath of the colonial encounter (racism, empire, recuperating indigenous and national identities). 

• Borderland. Spanning a border (e.g. First Nations peoples whose territories span the Canada/US border or, most commonly, migrant workers whose lives straddle the Mexico/US border) 

 Terms to compare with TCK: 

 1) Hybrid 

Hybrid is something mixed. It combines elements. A CCK might be hybrid . . . But a TCK (neither/nor, not an amalgamation) might not be. 

 2) Transnational 

 

Steven Vertovec “Transnationalism and Identity” 

“social worlds that span more than one place” 

“Circular flows of persons, goods, information and symbols”

 “tendency towards claiming membership in more than one place.”

 Nancy L. Greene The Limits of Transnationalism 

 “Transnationalism emphasizes the back-and forth-ness of interconnected ties” 

 “Circular flows” (Vertovec) and “back- and forth-ness” (Greene) (ie repeated crossings of the same borders) are not necessarily typical of the TCK. 

 “membership in more than one place”: TCKs feel neither/nor rather than the both/and.

 Transnationalism can happen at any age . . . And you don’t even need to be a person (“goods, information and symbols”) 

 3) Interstitial, Liminal, In-Between 

 Key Theorist: Homi K. Bhabha (Location of Culture, Nation and Narration) 

Interstice: usually, a small gap 

Liminal: a transitional area (e.g. a hallway), a threshold, a border 

In-Between: being in between things 

For Bhabha: diasporic populations are positioned on the line itself between one thing and another. 

 TCK is neither/ nor. 

 Liminal etc. are the actual dividing line. 

 Sounds like TCK, but isn’t: 

 Third World (a.k.a. “developing countries.” Used a lot in C20. Redolent with racism and neocolonial attitudes) 

 Third World Cosmopolitanism 

A term generated by Timothy Brennan in the 1980s: Essentially involves a “third world” postcolonial author who has relocated to a major “first world” city. E.g. Salman Rushdie. 

 Third Culture 

The Emerging Third Culture by John Brockman “In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists.” In 1963, Snow expanded his idea when he “optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists.”

June 4 Presentation for FIGT research network

 

“Third Culture Kid” and the Literary World 

Date: Friday, June 4, 2021

Time: 60 minutes. 9:00am EDT (New York) / 1:00pm GMT (Accra) / 3:00pm CEST (Vienna) / 9:00pm SGT, AWST (Singapore & Perth)

Location: Online (via Zoom)

Cost: FREE. Open to all. 

Join the FIGT Research Network for a discussion on the ‘Third Culture Kid (TCK)’ concept and research with Dr. Antje Rauwerda. 

I need “TCK” in my work.  Do you need it in yours?

“TCK” catches an experience of displacement that is usually invisible in Literary Studies.

As a college professor in a Literary Studies major, I spend a lot of time thinking about authors like Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan and Barbara Kingsolver: each of these is a TCK, but they are marketed as Canadian, British and American.  If their novels get taught in university courses, they are grouped with the novels of other Canadian, British and American writers. Focusing on the passport nationalities of these authors in marketing and teaching leaves out a great deal about the internationalism, dislocation and other TCK experiences they share.

The TCK experiences of the authors result in some surprising thematic similarities in their fictions, but without “TCK” as a term, there isn’t really any way for me to analyze how their novels are similar.

My discipline has highly theorized analytical terms like (im)migrant, diaspora, transnational, global, postcolonial, borderland, and liminal, but these do not capture the experience of spending one’s developmental years outside one’s passport nation.   

My presentation will first offer a brief and utilitarian description of some of the words used for internationalism in my field, with an emphasis on how they overlap with and differ from our construction of “Third Culture Kid.”  (I will provide a take-away glossary.)

Shame: The Next Frontier in Third Culture Studies

 I was recently at Transnational Literature's "Follow the Sun" Conference.  I was on a Third Culture panel (organized by Jessica Sanfilippo Schulz) with Jessica, and with Anastasia Goana (the dream team: we have paneled together before.  I hope we get to again).  "At" of course means "on zoom".  Look!  Here we are (Anastasia for the photo credit):

Zoom notwithstanding, the conference did what conferences are--at their best--supposed to do.  It stimulated thought/ exposed me to new ideas/ made me want to weep gratefully that other people out there in the world think that some of these issues are interesting too.

 I gave a paper on Third Culture and how it could function as a kind of nationality (nods to Benedict Anderson and Joanna Yoshi Grote, as well as Danau Tanu's work, which got me thinking along these lines in the first place).  I went on a bit of a tear about academia and methodological nationalism within our disciplines (which tend to be defined in terms of nation and so, even if our institutions like the hipness of "transnational" and boundary-crossing terms, these same organizations that fund our research and employment are stubbornly resistant to them). And . . . I wrapped up with some consideration of privilege, the problem of relegating host countries to mere backdrops, and shame.

Bambo Soyinka, who is sharp and articulate, and a pleasure to spend time thinking with, said of our panel as a whole that the issues of shame, denial and privilege kept surfacing.  Did they always have negative connotations, Bambo asked.

My answer was no.  In fact, I think turning to look those issues in the face is precisely where positive insights will emerge.  I want to write more about this.  I am, vaguely, beginning to cook a piece that deals with Jane Alison's The Sisters Antipodes and Sisonke Msimang's Always Another Country and the question of adult perspectives on a childhoods of comparative privilege.

In what I have so far on the question of shame, in a longer-playing article on TC Nationalism that I can't seem to get published, I quote Tanu's interview of an adult TCK dubbed "Afra"who grew up in Algeria.  That adult says of their childhood during times of political unrest, "I miss the riots."  Tanu notes that "some TCKs speak of developing countries as though their poor economic conditions or sociopolitical unrest were like adventure rides."  Oof, right?  At first, that TCK interviewee sounds like a bit of a jerk, except that what they really said had a specific intonation: "'I miss the riots,' said Afra, 'with knowing humor.'"  

Stop the train: that "knowing humor" changes everything.  'Afra" misses the riots (they miss their childhood home and its conditions), but Afra knows it is ridiculous, crazy, wrong, privileged, shameful, to say such a thing.

My contention is that the adult perspective on privileged childhood experience is something TCK scholars absolutely HAVE to deal with.  Here (from the article I haven't yet published), is why I think so:

What do you think?  Jessica Sanfilippo Schulz (who is quite the power-house in third culture literary work these days) wrote this to me in an email:

 By the way, regarding the comment about shame/guilt of last week, it is a recurrent theme in the four texts I have analysed (PhD thesis). As you illustrated, it is something that seems to occur retrospectively in adulthood. My first four chapters examine life writing written in adulthood and shame and guilt is always there, TCKs and refugees. BUT: in chapter 5 I explore life writing written by youth, and so far, I haven't come across shame and guilt much. Just at the beginning of one Vlog entry I am looking at and I am currently wondering how to tackle it / label it / explain it. I am writing the final chapter right now and will keep an eye on this theme. Another thing that I have noticed is that shame and guilt (so far the texts I have read) are only noticeable in texts by women. I haven't come across it in any of the other texts I have read by men. I therefore think that when it comes to looking at Jane Alison, you might want to compare the text with a memoir written by a man. 

My response, over email:

I have just had time to read this.   Goodness.  My jaw is on the floor.  There is my hunch . . . And then you go and back it up with a bevy of actual facts!  Hmn.  Well.  Seems like there is work to do.  I really like your idea of comparing a M and F memoirist. 

I like your blog idea too.  If I do one, would it be OK with you if I cut and pasted a few of your words from below?

So, Jessica: here is the blog post you requested :)

PS to everyone.  Do you think we will ever get past defining "third culture"?  I think literary terminology should provide us with useful tools, and TC has been useful to me . . . I confess, however, that I am tired of defining it, patrolling its borders, trying to make it cohere.  Jessica's conference paper branches out more into cross-culture, and Aminatta Forna spoke eloquently in her keynote at the conference about the transnational. . .

Comments welcome.