"Nothing important in common": Migrant memory and transnational identity in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. Issue 3 (3rd July 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Liste Noya, José
• Is Part Of: Atlantic studies. Volume 15:Issue 3(2018)
• Page Start: 383
• Page End: 401
• Publication Date: 2018-07-03
• Subjects: Netherland -- Joseph O'Neill -- transatlantic -- transnational -- community -- cricket; Globalization -- Periodicals; Atlantic Ocean Region -- History -- Periodicals; Atlantic Ocean Region -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; Atlantic Ocean Region -- In literature -- Periodicals; Cross-cultural studies -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- Periodicals; 909.0963
• DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2017.1363556
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1478-8810

Abstract

ABSTRACT: 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).