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From National Bildung to Postcolonial Transnationalism

This chapter links colonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism/cosmopolitanism to the genre of the Bildungsroman. The chapter’s theoretical reference points are Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc. and Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality: two influential critical works that offer incommensurate analyses of the Bildungsroman in relation to postcolonial nationalism (and the transnational). I show how Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows offer more fruitful accounts of these matters than both theorists. The novels complicate Cheah’s emphasis on the emancipatory potential of national Bildung by revealing the transnational assemblages that precede and exceed the nation’s formation. But they also resist the account of transnationalism identified by Slaughter, in which apparently cosmopolitan commitments disguise the continued coercions of Bildung as a disciplinary technique for subject-formation. Finally, each novel attends to the corporeal dimension of cosmopolitan solidarities and, in Shamsie’s case, links that corporeality to linguistic translation and the concept of the untranslatable.