Responding to Danau Tanu

Danau Tanu has an essay called "Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity of 'Third Culture Kids'" in Migration, Diversity and Education: Beyond Third Culture Kids (eds. Saija Benjamin and Fred Dervin, Palgrave 2015).


I love this collection as a whole for moving the rhetoric of third culture into academic discourse.  In the spirit of academic discourse, Tanu's comments on the applicability of "third culture" as an analytical rubric are quite critical: I love this too.  We must be able to scrutinize all angles of our approaches.

Someday, I might do something more elegant (and academic) with my responses, but for today I would like to "converse" somewhat chattily with Tanu's article:

DT (13): the concept is difficult to apply across disciplines for two reasons.  First, it is premised on essentialist categories that reify the boundaries, which define "Third Culture Kids." Second the (Anglophone) literature has hitherto overlooked the significance of the specific socio-cultural context within which the term [. . .] was coined and subsequently popularized.

AMR (ie, Me): 1) So is everything, at least when it comes to disciplinary definitions within academic departments: American Literature?  Reified boundaries.  British?  Black British?  Immigrant British? etc etc.
and
2) That is changing!  See especially Jessica Sanfilippo Schulz's important work treating third culture literary texts that are not Anglophone.



DT (14):  TCK is "better understood as an emotionally powerful insider (emic) construct that narrates identity and belonging for people with a transnational upbringing in the same way that "Italy" or "Indonesia" represent geographical and emotional homelands, but are insufficient as analytical constructs."

AMR: Yes!  For those without a specific nation or geography to emplace them TCKness does become a paradoxical "nationality", it becomes a "homeland."

Here's a thing that fascinates me: if "TCK" is analogous to "Italy" or "Indonesia", then, in spite of its insufficiencies as an analytical construct, it can be used the same way.  We study "Italian Literature"; we study "Indonesian Literature"; therefore we can also study "Third Culture Literature" and assume that this title implies some level of cultural coherence.  Tanu's discussion reveals how wrong headed all frames of analysis based on nation really are ("Italy" and "Indonesia" are much more diverse than those essentialist labels imply).  If we persist in using "Italy" and "Indonesia" as analytical constructs, I would argue, "TCK" can analogously join their ranks.



DT (18): "Instead of the processes involved in negotiating boundaries [TCK scholars] emphasize the content."
AMR: Tanu is saying, I think: there is too much work defining who is TCK and figuring out how to delineate the term, and it comes at the expense of thinking what the term is comprised of.  There is too much emphasis on describing the box at the expense of observing what is IN the box.
YES.  Dr. Tanu!  You are quite right.

What is IN THE BOX of third culture literature? Obviously (go ahead, scroll through the blog, or browse my first book Overseas), I have gone at this problem before.  In these early efforts I started with explaining TCK, and defining who is a TCA and agonizing over biographies (all problems in the field, as Tanu argues).

CAN one go the other way?  Can one start with "what is in the literature (that makes it TCK)?"  I hope so.  I'd like to try that next.

My commitment, as always, is to the "un-national".

Can one look in the box first, and leave commenting on author identity out altogether?  Or at least make it secondary?  It is, I would emphasize, NOT the norm in literary critical studies, a discipline which pretends a la Foucault that the author has died, and yet continues to orient all of its courses around national identities and many of its professional publications around them too. (Anyone got a copy of Canadian Literature kicking around?)

(Maybe TCK (or the un-nation of its authors) must strategically essentialize to prove their nationhood first?
Maybe we have already done that?)

Maybe we can be the first , us in the world of literary critique, to look inside the box and see what is there waiting for us, the Schroedinger's cat of what happens in un-nationalist fictional narrative?

Postcolonial Studies Association, London, 2017

This is a bit of a conference digest.  First: reflections on third culture and its literature; second reflections on Dulwich college and ships (related, I swear) and third (unrelated, except to my life in a Humanities Center here at Goucher College) Rosi Braidotti's keynote.

First:
Oh, I was as happy as a clam in the session on Third Culture.  Photo credits Anastasia Goana Go Ying Ying.

Anastasia Goana  Go Ying Ying (middle) presented Sociological material on TCKs and superdiversity (Vertovec), on identity denial (in which one can curtain/screen off parts of one's identity selectively and to situational advantage) and "enoughness" (when is one of a place "enough" to claim that place's identity?).  She noted the problem of being "called out" for inconsistent self-identification.  Her accounts of interviews and surveys were succinct and vivid.

Jessica Sanfilippo Schulz (right) contrasted and compared TC and Transcultural, referencing the work of Arianna Dagnino, and analysing Allende, Messud and Baraouie (TCAs who write in languages other than English).  Her work is essential in advancing TC analysis into comparative literature.

Both of these papers were great.

My paper was about the cloud theory thing (spoken of previously on this blog).  Here I am !

The questions after the papers raised familiar issues: why this term, do we need it? asked Cathy Waegner.
I think we do . . . but it's only useful if it adds something specific not covered elsewhere: I still believe it does, though maybe the transcultural is coming awfully close.

Isn't this a (heinous!) biographically driven reading, asked a woman whose name I didn't record.  Yes.  It is.  Thinking about this afterwards, I think the only way round this is to indicate forcefully that third culture literature has characteristics discernible in the literature.  ie you can know TCL even if you don't know anything about the author's life. (please see my next book??)

Second:
I recently published an article on Michael Ondaatje in which I argue that Dulwich College in London, where he went to school ages 11-18, is a privileged enclave of white Britishness.  En route to dinner at an old friend's house, said friend drove us past Dulwich College and talked about how it started as a school for the underprivileged, and persists as a place that heavily recruits international students.
Hmn.  So,  It is not what I thought, at all.  Perhaps it is even more apropos though: as international school (like UWC or its ilk), Ondaatje would have been amongst other TCKs like himself.

Also Jessica had told me about Amitav Ghosh as a TCK, and she is doing great work on ships as a metaphor: I heard a wonderful paper (by Florian Stadtler) on Ghosh's trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire): all very liquid and fluid and all that.  Stadtler argues that the national is presented as negative,  and the very specifically local as salvific.  Stadtler lifts a term from cinema: "network narrative" (David Brodwell, Poetics of Cinema, 2008 p 243) to explain fluid synchronicities.  I want to read the trilogy and return to his argument.


Third:
Braidotti on the Humanities.
OMG do we not care about analysing the human anymore?  I was recently scolded for insufficient engagement (my whole center, the Humanities Center, was, not just me).  How can we engage when the pasts of our disciplines are coming to an end and their futures aren't yet clear?  Braidotti argues that we are on the cusp of a sixth extinction environmentally and an end-point disciplinarily. Speaking for literature alone: whither the future if everyone writes and no one reads ? (pun intended).
Is literature's saving grace that it teaches empathy in a tech-heavy individualistic world?  Do we need war to bring back the importance of the human and of human stories?

Aufwiedersehen British Army Brats in Germany (Guest Post: Jessica Sanfilipo Schulz )

Whilst carrying out research for a scholarly article I recently wrote about TCK songwriters, I stumbled upon many musicians who grew up as military brats in Germany. A couple of weeks ago I submitted the article but since then my list of artists who, as the offspring of British Armed Forces personnel, were raised in Germany still seems to be growing. Some of the musicians, for example, are James Blunt, Pete Doherty and Colin Greenwood (Radiohead). Incidentally, Tanita Tikaram was born in Muenster, where I am currently living. When my family and I first moved to Muenster in 2003, the presence of the families of the British Armed Forces conferred this otherwise very provincial town, an aura of internationality.

Originally, the units of the British 21^st Army Group arrived in Muenster in April 1945. Soon after this, when Germany was divided into zones of occupation, the British Army was assigned the north-western part of the country and more specifically the key cities of Cologne, Dortmund, Duesseldorf, Hamburg, Bremen, Kiel, Hannover, the Ruhr valley and the North Sea coast. Furthermore, the 21^st Army Group was renamed “British Army of the Rhine”. The group then consisted of 80,000 soldiers. In 1955 the allied military occupation of West Germany formally ended and at the end of the sixties, 55,000 British Army soldiers were stationed in Germany. With the official unification of former East and West Germany and the signing of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, the British Government announced a framework for “Options for Change”, involving substantial cuts in the British Army of the Rhine. It was also announced that the group of units would be renamed to British Forces Germany (BFG). Finally, in 2011 the MoD make public the pull-out of the 20,000 remaining troops in Germany, which is to be accomplished by 2020.

At the end of 2012, Muenster witnessed the closing of the BFG barracks and the withdrawal from the town of 600 troops and their families. Looking back, it appears that they not only handed down barracks, housing accommodation and bi-cultural liaisons to the town of Muenster, but thinking of TCK artists such as Tanita Tikaram, it seems that some of the individuals who were linked to the BFG left their artistry behind to a wider audience.

Shelley Jones cunningly looks into the connection between creativity and nomadic childhoods. She interviews TCKs who chose creative careers in adulthood. These TCKS confirm that they began engaging in creativity in order to express their displacement.

Lance Bangs, a TCK filmmaker (an American military brat), reveals that in childhood, amidst the frequent travelling, he felt like he was going to disappear so he turned to filming as a form of keeping an anchored journal. Donna Musil, also an American military brat filmmaker, reports to Shelley Jones that creativity gives military kids a voice: “Many of these kids don’t have a voice when they’re growing up,” she says. “It’s always what the military needs, what the foreign service needs, what the missionaries need. So I guess that makes a lot of artists, because you want to express yourself.”

Thus, as Donna Musil points out, whilst growing up, many TCKs did not have a voice because they had to follow the etiquette of their parents’ employers and represent their parents’ nations in an honorable way abroad. Creativity gave a voice to many military brats, such as Ian McEwan, Tanita Tikaram and the designer Nicholas Kirkwood, who all spent part of their childhood in Germany. Now, after 70 years, the British Army troops are preparing to leave Germany permanently. Not only are the troops involved in this withdrawal but their families too. The military cuts and withdrawals evidently mean that less British Army troops and their families will be sent abroad and fewer children will be raised as British military brats. So does this step also represent the end of a generation of British military brat artists and the fascinating artistic outcome of their transient childhoods? Luckily there are many other subcategories of TCKs. Brian Molko of the rock band Placebo, for example, is a business brat, whereas the designer Tom Dixon is an EdKid (see Zilber for this term). It is therefore reassuring that there are currently still many other groups of TCKs on the move and I am looking forward to their future expressions of creativity.

by Jessica Sanfilippo Schulz

Works Cited

Jones, Shelley. “Does a Nomadic Childhood Lead to a More Creative Life? Uprooted Kids.” Huck Magazine. 22 July 2015. http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/uprooted-kids/

Zilber, Ettie. Third Culture Kids: The Children of Educators in International Schools. Melton, Woodbridge: John Catt, 2009. 

Yann Martel: The High Mountains of Portugal (2016)

Martel's father was a French Canadian academic and then diplomat: Martel, like so many TCAs, lived all over the place as a child (Spain, Portugal, Alaska, Costa Rica etc.) and then continued to  travel as an adult (Mexico, Iran, Turkey, India etc.).  Though I try not to geek out too much about this and try not to pry, he now lives nearish to one of my very dear friends in Saskatoon, SK.  At one point she (my friend, that is) and the Martel family were on a cross country ski vacation in the same remote  Saskatchewan park.

I read this novel while I myself was travelling, which was kind of perfect.  I recommend the novel as an "on the road" read.  Indeed, the first of the three sections describes a Portuguese man in the 1930s driving one of the first automobiles, and hating it (which is gratifying to mull over when one is oneself on the umpteenth leg of a journey and driving, when one's legs ache with the desire to move, and eyes burn with the tedium of paying attention to highway highway highway).

The three sections are linked by references to an ape: in Darwinian fashion , the ape connects the branches of the family tree.  The novel is not about science though, really.  Like Life of Pi, it is about what we believe in and why.  How does faith fit in, and, for Martel, where does the magic of empathy, understanding and connection actually lie?  In High Mountains, as in Life of Pi, there is magic in kinship between animals who are seemingly separated by species and geography, but are actually not so different at all.

If third culture authors frequently consider the problems of leaving, moving on, and displacement, this novel considers the questions: who is left behind and how will they cope and what does the displacement of their loved ones mean for them?

In all three sections, a man is widowed (he is left, his loved ones move on without him).  In all three sections, the solution to isolation and desolation is recognising connection with an ape, an ape that is itself far away from home.

Put your faith in the foreigner, Martel seems to say, for within their terrifying, puzzling heart you will find the souls of your dearest departed loves.

In an era of increasing xenophobia, and escalating racial tension, this solution--look to the foreigner you want to consider atavistic and recognise that everything you value is in their breast--is shocking. To some, it may even read as blasphemous, but really it is a magical salvific delivered almost humourously: we are just apes; we wind up in unlikely places far from our birthplaces; we can figure out how to trust and even love each other.

Expatriate Versus Third Culture (Chris Pavone Vs. Belinda Bauer)

(I am edging back into writing the blog after my novel-writing forced me to take a break from it: Hello!)

A persistent problem in explaining third culture to people new to the term is transmitting to them the importance of international mobility and detachment from "home" during the developmental years.  I find myself at conferences reiterating the definitive importance of not really belonging anywhere during the years when an individual would ordinarily shape their identity:

if you grow up aware you are an outsider, that feeling persists into adulthood (which adds up to TCKness).

if you grow up feeling like you belong, and then travel as an adult, you may feel like an outsider when you travel but you retain the conviction that you do, if only in your heart, have a home somewhere (not TCKness).

One can see a clear distinction between Expat authors (who travelled as grown ups and write internationally inflected fiction) and Third Culture Authors (TCAs).

Consider

Chris Pavone's spy-thriller The Expats:
Pavone was born and raised in the USA.  He lives in NYC.  He has travelled, as an adult.
The Expats revels in the pleasures of travel and affluent expatriatism.  It is a fun novel, full of European geographical and cultural details, with a gutsy protagonist (Kate) who lives her cosmopolitanism with flair and intelligence.

Versus
Belinda Bauer's murder mystery Black-Lands
Bauer grew up in England and Africa and now lives in Wales.  She's a TCA.  Black-Lands considers a boy murdered by a pedophile and his younger brother's efforts to find out what happened to the corpse.  This is a deeply engaging, somewhat alarming novel.

Is there international travel in this novel?  No.

But, if not international, is it still TCliterature?? YES.

It considers, like so much third culture literature, the extremes of what a child may lose and how it wracks them to try and reclaim what has been lost to them.  This emphasis on how a child may feel disconnected, or devastated by loss, is a persistent trope in third culture literature,  precisely because the experience of dislocation and unbelonging during the developmental years is so central to TCKness.