Generating Translocality: Mobility, Place and Constellation.

Since the 1960’s, globalization processes, decolonization, and technological changes are rendering national borders and cultural boundaries more permeable and have shaped frames of awareness well beyond traditional limitations. It has been stated that with the growth of global consciousness, the priority of national and cultural belonging will be fading, i.e. not becoming extinct, but less solidified due to a weakening of the identification and attachment to one singular national or cultural group or even group of nations, Europe say. These transformations have led to the emergence of transnational and transcultural discourses in the social sciences and humanities in the last five decades and have reframed the inquiry of cultural practice. In my paper, I shall explore today’s complex models of “(re)crossing borders” and introduce a new parameter. If the “transnational” and “transcultural” are considered fluid spaces, are they not becoming shallow or superficial spaces, even promoting violent fluidity? I will focus on translocality as a perspective that emphasize trajectories of movement, exchanges, but also varieties of inhabiting places. The spatial concept of “translocality,” I suggest, situates cultural practice continuously within and across ‘locales’ without confining them to the boundedness of one single nation, one single culture and moreover without limiting them within the antipodes of East and West, North and South. “Translocal” perspectives on cultural practice reflect critically on diverse experiences of movement and exchanges as well as on practices of emplacement, which brings into view the specifically local, as well as the spatially global.