Nothing important in common”
Migrant memory and transnational identity in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12737907 |
|---|---|
| Authors | José Liste Noya (0000-0002-4514-0117, Universidade da Coruña, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 383-401 |
| Publication date | 2018-07-03 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Atlantic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1478-8810 • E-ISSN: 1740-4649 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14788810.2017.1363556 |
| OpenAlex | W2819120466 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
A novel of privileged vagrants and uprooted migrants, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland explores the increasingly visible hinterlands of a (post)modern world that “reveals itself newly” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Structured retrospectively around those events, the novel portrays the transnational, cosmopolitan world of that city-on-an-island, New York, as a harbinger of what Jean-Luc Nancy terms the “world,” the worldly community that the migrant unwittingly belongs to in opposition to the reductive vision cast by the corporate-controlled notion of globalization. Rather quaintly focusing on the postcolonial version of cricket played by the migrant remnants of the British Empire, the novel’s diasporic cricketing community displays the memory of the migrant – a memory in migration – that also brings into momentary existence what might be community tout court. The novel’s narrator, visible vagrant rather than invisible migrant, embodies the transient, open-ended trajectory of a post-national, post-American, even post-Atlantic self. Such a self, in its melancholic, self-distancing retrospections, comes to imagine the singularly plural world waveringly coming into view on the literally and etymologically Atlantic horizon. Such would be a truly Atlantic community, the community of the “atlas,” a world rather than merely global(ized) community. The novel employs the transatlantic impetus both of its diasporic communities and of the narrator’s own cosmopolitan exile to bring what Nancy has called this “singular plural” world-in-the- making and its inherited asymmetries out into the open, an openness that can only be maintained, as the novel’s open-ended conclusion suggests, by embracing the world in its fullest embodiment as the moving site of the trans-(Atlantic)
Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Atlantic World · Diaspora · Empire · Genealogy · Identity (music · Nothing · Opposition (politics · Plural · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
The black Atlantic
Migrancy, Culture, Identity
After Empire
Modernity at large
The State of Exception
"Terminal Crisis?" From the Worlding of American Literature to World-System Literature
Toward the World Novel
What's These Worlds Coming To
Unclaimed Experience
Homo Sacer
Cricket as a Cure
The American Dream of Chuck Ramkissoon
A New Beginning
| Highly cited | No |
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