I begin with Benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie for reasons I have already articulated.  

Moving to Tropic of Orange will bring us back to the Americas and continue the magical-realist writing style. Yamashita’s Americas, however, include no white-male perspective, despite the use of seven character perspectives. If Saleem Sinai drives toward nationalism despite innumerable fissures, both in his own body and in the society he attempts to represent, then Tropic is a rejection of Saleem’s mission. That is, the book’s fragmented and marginal perspectives never allow one to settle on a single story of the nation. We are, instead, given multiple, semi-autonomous storylines; they are threads that sometimes knot together and sometimes just rub. This formal layering of narratives and narrative styles––the shift in prose structures in remarkable––performs a critique of the drive toward the national story generally, while also taking on NAFTA specifically. Indicting the Trade Agreement for maintaining systemic poverty, Tropic rejects one’s ability to think the nation without locating it in a transnational world system. I am not sure I would trust my ability to communicate all of this to my students, but I have our Detroit surroundings as a tragically ready example.

If I have succeeded in the past two sections, then transitioning into Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient should not be too disconcerting, despite shifting in time to WWII and the location to an Italian villa. There are, at least at present, two key thoughts I want to continue into this book. First, I want to continue to think through marginal spaces, those disavowed, even temporarily, by all nations. The title character was once a desert explorer whose friends were limited to those interested in the same work. These associates, however, belonged to many different countries, all allegiances to which were forgotten in that arid landscape. Such unacknowledged spaces, then, need not simply be tragic if we can see their ability to create bonds among different peoples. The hospital/ villa in which the story is told performs a similar role. Secondly, we can use Ondaatje to think through how a seminal event in American history, WWII, and the dropping of atomic bombs, can be written through a marginal perspective. I am thinking specifically of Kip’s reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We will, hopefully, be able to tie space and narrative perspective together to see the forgotten stories of WWII and write the spaces left in its wake.

Finally, and perhaps most adventurously, I want to bring my students to Murambi, The Book of Bones, a narrative about the Rwandan genocide. Saleem, and his drive to write a nation, will have become something of a punching bag by this point. The aim now, however, will be to recover that project in the guise of this statement: If we posit the Rwandan Genocide, through Diop’s text, as a misrecognition of fellow citizens, then perhaps more nationalism isn’t always a bad thing. We must be careful here not to slip into a sloppy relativism (“nationalism is sometimes good sometimes bad”) and consider how group identity is formed in the text. Is there a Hutu nation posited?  How does the “Hutu” identity come to be historically, and how do its militant advocates narrate it?

I offer this book as the final one despite, or probably because of, my own investment in it; I will be writing a paper on the text, which is to be delivered at NEMLA. For the class, however, I want to channel my student’s emotional investment into a greater intellectual sensitivity. If the class has been successful, then we will have to think Diop’s text through an attention to Anderson’s argument, layered and disjunctive narrations, marginal spaces and their colonial inheritance, and our transnational connection to butchered children.