Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood

In October 2022, Leuven University Press published the edited volume Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood. Perspectives on Community-Building, Identity and Belonging. The book is the materialised outcome of a project that had been at the heart of years of fruitful collaboration between the ILCS and the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin (UCD) that sought to shift the discourse away from othering multicultural and multi-ethnic environments by exploring transcultural encounters in the urban neighbourhood from a grassroots perspective. Researchers from both institutions jointly organised a workshop on Transnational and Translingual Urban Writing at the ILCS in June 2018, followed by a larger, interdisciplinary conference on the Transnational Neighbourhood in Dublin in September 2019. In the concluding discussions, all participants agreed that we needed to define new terms to overcome the pejorative connotation that is usually attached to discussions around multi-cultural urban neighbourhoods. Urban neighbourhoods, in particular, have come to occupy the public imagination as a litmus test of migration, with some areas hailed as multicultural success stories while others are framed as ghettos. In an attempt to break down this dichotomy, the volume Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood explores these debates through the lenses of geography, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. Furthermore, by establishing the interdisciplinary concept of the 'transnational neighbourhood', it defines these localities – whether Clichy-sous-Bois, Belfast, El Segundo Barrio or Williamsburg – as densely packed contact zones where disparate cultures meet in often highly asymmetrical relations, producing a constantly shifting local and cultural knowledge about identity, belonging, and familiarity. 

This new approach has the potential to shift the discussion by offering a pivotal response to one of the key questions of our time: How do people create a sense of community within an exceedingly globalised context? By focusing on the neighbourhood as a central space of transcultural everyday experience within three different levels of discourse (i.e., the virtual, the physical local, and the transnational-global), the volume’s multidisciplinary contributions explore bottom-up practices of community-building alongside cultural, social, economic, and historical barriers.

Given the fact that we are living in an age of unprecedented human mobility, global mass migration constantly shifts the way communities live, interact, and make sense of new urban environments. The associated loss of home and the making of a new one, the challenge of making migrants and transmigrants welcome, and the conflicting notions of identity and belonging are perhaps some of the most acutely felt transcultural predicaments of the 20th and 21st century. As a result, terms such as identity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, plurilingualism and  globalisation, as well as colonialism and postcolonialism, play a central role in our media and in political discourse. 

In order to grasp the complexity and multi-faceted nature of multicultural urban neighbourhoods, the volume’s overall concept is interdisciplinary and comparative in nature, bringing together chapters featuring different methodological approaches (literary studies, geography, ethnography, sociology, linguistics, theatre studies) whose affinities and mutually enriching interrelations best unfold when studied in combination. The volume, as a whole, is structured around the question of how the contemporary transnational neighbourhood is constituted and interconnected (virtually and on the ground). Topics at the centre of our enquiry include the analysis of transnational neighbourhoods' overlapping geographies and mnemonic layers, and of the strategies of their mobile residents for negotiating strangeness. An awareness of the necessity to consider simultaneous and intersecting spatial, temporal and agency-related factors underlies all contributions and their theoretical and methodological approaches.

The volume is divided into three sections – virtual neighbourhoods, overlapping neighbourhoods, and negotiating strangeness and mobile neighbourhoods. The volume’s first section, ‘Virtual Neighbourhoods’, examines how the World Wide Web (WWW) as a global information medium has transposed the notion of neighbourhood  into  a  simulated  or  the  virtual  world. The second section, ‘Overlapping Neighbourhoods’, explores the cultural, historical and mnemonic semantics of bordering neighbourhoods. These are characterised by a simultaneity of visible and invisible borders that demarcate historical layers of segregation, social ethnic codes, cultural identity markers and different overlapping  space claiming  practices. The third section, ‘Negotiating  Strangeness  and  Mobile  Neighbourhoods’,  gathers polyphonic perspectives and strategies of negotiating the correlating binaries of distance and belonging as well as familiarity and constant mobility while attempting to appropriate a place of one’s own, build a new community, and create visibility within hegemonial and hierarchical social settings.

Examples of case studies include a sociological study of the virtual connectedness of multiterritorial Mexican migrants between Brooklyn and rural Mexico, a cultural studies approach to the street art and visual representation of a transnational community at the US–Mexican border, and a linguistic study illustrating how Latin American com¬munities in London’s Seven Sisters construct and sustain a highly localised identity through a wider trans-national network of online communications and spatial representations. An ethnographic chapter traces the shifting formations and understandings of the transnational neighbourhoods that surround Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York City, while a practice-based study takes both a theoretical as well as a creative approach and introduces community theatre as a performative space that can transform strangeness into familiarity.

Bringing all these perspectives together helps to crystallise the shared interest across academic disciplines and makes evident the mutual benefit we can reap when sharing objects of enquiry, methods and results. The editors hope that the volume will provide inspiration, useful ideas and tools for a refreshed and continued discussion as well as reassessment of what we can learn from and about transnational neighbourhoods. This volume is only the beginning.

Britta C. Jung, Gad Schaffer, Stephan Ehrig

Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood is a free open access book available online at: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/59049

The Transnational Neighbourhoods project has been part of the AHRC-funded OWRI initiative 'Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community' and we acknowledge the AHRC's support with gratitude.