Transnational Modern Languages, "Stories", by Emma Bond

(a summary by @nietzscheswritings)

The chapter opens with Jacques Derrida’s 1966 lecture “Structure, Sign and Play,” which is presented as a means of understanding how stories can be read within a transnational frame. Bond summarizes Derrida’s argument: structures of knowledge have traditionally been organized around a pre-established centre that stabilizes meaning but restricts creativity. Derrida urges readers to follow the deconstructionist methods of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, turning away from the centre toward a “nonlocus” that creates space for substitution, transformation, and reassemblage, enabling “freeplay” among signs that constitute a structure (p. 279). This is the chapter’s single explicit reference to Nietzsche, presented as part of Derrida’s methodological triad. Bond then explains how Derrida applies this relational decentring to ethnology, which emerged at a moment when European culture was becoming “dislocated” and no longer able to consider itself the central culture of reference (p. 280). This vantage point establishes the methodological foundation for reading transnational stories not through national origin or biography but through stylistic and technical markers that reflect relational networks across times and spaces.

The chapter argues that “transnational” cultural production differs from categories like multicultural, global, or world literature, which depend on circulation and commerce. Instead, transnational work negotiates systems of space and time through “multiple ties and interactions” across borders and manifests stylistically through “fluidity of constructed styles and practices: syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation and hybridity” (p. 280). Bond then aligns this with Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss: the bricoleur uses the “means at hand,” repurposing heterogeneous materials through acts of cutting, selecting, and assembling (p. 281).

Bond emphasizes that this bodily, hands-on dynamic of bricolage parallels how transnational narratives function through interactions between bodies and materials, generating new meaning by placing disparate cultural elements into contact. The local and global intertwine: narratives span “distant proximities” and stage proximities and distances central to diasporic consciousness, which is marked by multi-locality and decentered attachments (p. 281). To illustrate these principles, Bond turns to Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s novel Il comandante del fiume, which follows Yabar, a Roman teenager of Somali heritage. The novel’s temporal fragmentation, multilingual insertions, and composite structure reflect transnational stylistic features. For Yabar, bricolage becomes central to the reconstruction of identity. Childhood scenes depict him creating images with whatever materials are at hand (p. 282). This practice extends to his mother helping him transform a generic doll into a Will Smith figure through physical modification and sewing new clothes (pp. 282–283). Bond reads these scenes as literal enactments of bricolage that help Yabar reassemble symbols tied to his racial identity.

Transnational bricolage also shapes Yabar’s attempt to reconstruct the absent figure of his father, whose disappearance during the Somali civil war leaves only partial traces. Yabar cuts apart fragmented photobooth pictures of himself and his father and tries to recombine them, producing a distorted composite that reflects both disruption and a limited form of mastery (p. 283). Rome itself functions as another site of bricolage, with layered migrant presences and myths, exemplified by stories about treasures and remnants lying in the Tiber (p. 284). Linguistic bricolage becomes equally important. Yabar mediates Somali names, adopts and corrects hybrid linguistic forms, and undergoes a painful but generative process of re-learning Somali words, described as pushing them through the body until they regain shape and presence (pp. 284–285). This process allows for a fusion of past and present and creates a dialogical connection between himself, his friend Libaan, and Libaan’s mother (p. 285). Bond ties this explicitly to Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion that discourse, syntax, and the supplement compensate for gaps in vocabulary and that freeplay arises from the absence of a centre.

The chapter then shifts to Maud Sulter’s multimedia work, emphasizing her use of language, collage, and photomontage as transnational strategies. Sulter’s assemblages juxtapose African artefacts with European landscapes, emphasizing dislocation, forced movement, and the need to “adjust our vision” (pp. 286–287). Her composite artworks highlight both presence and absence, challenging hegemonic narratives and recovering the obscured histories of Black Europeans. Bond concludes that both Ali Farah and Sulter demonstrate how transnational storytelling uses bricolage to create new relations between past and present, here and elsewhere. These practices do not hide historical violence but use the openness of transnational freeplay to generate new composite cultural forms (p. 288)