How did "Postcolonial" do it? On "Third Culture" as an identifying category.

The college at which I teach is not unusual in imagining courses in American Literature, which cover literary texts by "Americans" of various kinds from various eras (contemporary, Black, Queer, Historical), and in British Literature, which likewise teaches texts by "British" authors of various kinds from various eras.  This requires faith in "American" and "British" as legitimate identities.

My college, like many, also offers courses in Postcolonial Literature.

If logic follows, one should be able to argue that "Postcolonial" is a legitimate identity.  Certainly it is a legitimate category for academic analysis.  The term is vexed with critique and the notion of "postcolonial" spans multiple continents. Yet, postcolonial literature, right or wrong, flawed or no, is a viable, and identity-based subject area.  Postcolonial texts are designated according to the biography of their author.

I point this out because I wonder how theoretical writings by authors like Spivak, Bhabha and Said-- reflecting on resistance to colonialism--facilitated a Eurocentric, homogenising discipline in which all formerly colonised nations are lumped together as objects of study in Western Scholarship (I believe Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes about this in her 1986 "Under Western Eyes").

On the one hand: OMG epic problem in which academia perpetuates a "There's the West and the Rest" binary (See Niall Ferguson, 2011).
On the other: Hmn.  Strategic Essentialism, anyone?

In "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" Spivak argues for “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (pg?).  According to Oxford Reference strategic essentialism is "A political tactic employed by a minority group acting on the basis of a shared identity in the public arena in the interests of unity during a struggle for equal rights. The term was coined by Spivak and has been influential in feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial theory." 

An interpretation of "postcolonial" is that its essentialism is strategic: at least it exists in the Western Academy. Flawed, and homogenizing as the term is, students at least get to take the courses (and in them, or in my versions of them at any rate, historical, national and cultural distinctions are carefully drawn and contexts painstakingly taught).  

Enter Third Culture Kids, and Third Culture Authors:

Does everyone critique the terms over and over again?  Yes (as in postcolonial studies).

But do we still use TCK?  Yes, because it is gaining some traction/recognition (as was the case for postcolonialism which gained traction in the 1980s)

Is there a single nation of origin for "Third Culture"?  No (as in postcolonial)

Is a literary-analytical model predicated on author biography a problem?  Goodness yes!  Did Foucault not argue that the author is dead?  (And yet, all our literary disciplines are predicated on a myth of origins: American, British, Postcolonial . . . why shouldn't third culture be added to that list?)

Here's my thought: strategic essentialism is "scrupulously visible", in other words, it has an objective in mind and declares, openly, the short-term elision of nuance in order to achieve that goal.

TCK is "gaining traction": but only a little. 
Any one of you who has recently had a piece of academic work rejected by a journal that has no idea what you are talking about, and/or has had to rehearse ad infinitum a definition of third culture in order to educate your audiences or potential readers, knows there's a long way to go before this term is understood in academe.

Strategically: let's use the term even though it essentializes.  While we do so we can point out its flaws and nuances (as was done in the postcolonial studies of the 1980s and 1990s).

Goal: to be acknowledged as a "thing" in academia?

What is our "goal"?

Jane Alison, Co-Ordinates, Return

In The Sisters Antipodes, TCA (Third Culture Author) Jane Alison writes "Sometimes I think we all have embedded in the brain a personal space like a home we've lost that lingers in our skulls"(5). I wonder.  Do we?

It's been a long three years for me in which I have not worked much on matters third culture.  I have been engaged instead in the unraveling of my parents's lives 3,000 miles away, the sale of their house, the death of my father, and my mother's transition to a nursing home.  To distract myself from all that, I wrote a novel and have thus joined the ranks of professors with unpublished novels in their desk drawers.  That manuscript has a plot absolutely rooted in the place in which I currently live.  Everything happens within a mile of here, where I sit typing this morning.  I was also department chair, and then program chair, during a time of radical restructuring at the college at which I work.  As my program's faculty dwindled, I was called upon to teach more historical literature than ever before.  Last year, I taught no international fiction courses, but did teach, among other things, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales and The Inferno.  I like all that other literature too, but: Who am I?  Where am I?

This spring, in order to have the same citizenships as my children, I became an American citizen. At the citizenship ceremony, I cried when I sang the American anthem because what came out was my British schoolgirl voice, the accent of Welsh-Catholic hymn singing back when I was 14: Who am I?  Where am I?

Last week I bought a house, also within a mile of where I sit now, typing.  The mortgage broker gave me a present, a framed canvas with a map of Maryland and the words "Rauwerda  Home  est'd 2019" at the top, with the house's specific co-ordinates forming a banner across the bottom.

There is no more TCK issue than "Where are you from" and no more fraught topic for TCKs or really any adult trying to anchor their identity in the ever-shifting world than "where is home?"

Here I am, then.  I have specific co-ordinates and a return to The Questions.

Over the summer I have funding to write an article about whether third culture identity can be viewed as a kind of nationalism.

In the fall I get to teach a course on contemporary international fiction and one on transnationalism.

I will dig back into this blog too.  What to do with the bloated and unusable but impressively capacious list of authors, for instance?

Reading The Sisters Antipodes  this morning, I notice that in 1965 Jane Alison "traveled by train to San Francisco, where [she] boarded the Oronsay" (17).  What a fantastic co-incidence, for this is the same ship Michael Ondaatje writes of in The Cat's Table and indeed the same ship Ondaatje himself travelled upon in his 1954 journey from Ceylon to London!  (Additional discovery thanks to Wikipedia, is that the Oronsay featured in a 1958 British Comedy called The Captain's Table: clearly Ondaatje's The Cat's Table is riffing on that).

Inhale, exhale, welcome home.