Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists

Many contemporary novelists experienced high levels of transnational mobility during their childhood and were thus raised ‘among’ different countries and cultures. Predominantly the offspring of diplomats, business executives, missionaries, military personnel and academics, these writers have compelling backgrounds of transnational and transient childhoods. Third Culture Kid (TCK), coined by the sociologist Ruth Useem, is the term given to this childhood experience. Until 2010, the term TCK was only used by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and cultural educators, but never before by scholars of literary studies. In 2011, Antje Rauwerda adapted this concept and coined the term ‘Third Culture Literature’ to describe the fictional writings by authors who share a ‘cultural background of expatriatism’. For Rauwerda, these novelists do not fit ‘a postcolonial, diasporic or cosmopolitan paradigm’ so that an up-to-date classification is needed for this new ‘subset of international writing’. The purpose of this article is to verify to what extent cultural identities are deployed in the marketing of Third Culture Literature. The article focuses on five contemporary well-known authors (such as Ian Martel and Ian McEwan) who have ‘grown up across worlds’ and analyses over 25 biographical details that are offered to readers by publishers in selected editions of their novels. The biographical details I examine are not only distributed in English but also, for example, in Arabic, Danish, German and Spanish. Not all publishers choose to portray their transnational authors in a ‘global’ light. However, due to the primarily international settings of Third Culture novels, many publishers either adopt the expatriate culture of their authors or adapt their biographies in order to kindle their target audiences

Dead Ends

Dead Ends by Jessica Sanfilippo-Schul

HAIKU OF MALADISMS

Creative writin

Big Small Steps: Childhoods on the Move

In May, shortly before boarding the Milano Malpensa airport Express train at the station of Cadorna, a stone set into the floor caught my eye. Passengers of the Malpensa Express who have the time to take a closer look at the stone can read an engraved inscription in Italian and English: “Every step I have taken in my life has led me here, now” (Garutti). After a 50-minute train ride, the inscription can be found inside the Milano Malpensa airport too, emphasizing both the significance of transport and the places of transit for travellers. These works of public art by the Italian artist Albert Garutti inspire travellers to think about the deeper meaning and consequences of each of their infinite steps, journeys, actions and decisions. Why we are physically in this certain place, right now, is often connected to moves we deliberately chose to make in adulthood, for example, family or job related. Yet, for many individuals, moves which can determine the course of one’s life are made in childhood due to their parents’ choices. Thus some of the “steps” which have led them to certain locations were not taken of one’s own free will but involuntarily. For work reasons, at the end of the 1960s, my British mother and Italian father moved to Liberia in West Africa, where I would eventually see the light of day. After eight years, due to the deteriorating political situation, my parents decided to move to Italy, where my siblings and I attended a British school. For love, years later, I moved to Germany. Due to my family’s background, relocating was not an unknown experience and my first German steps were taken in Stuttgart. Subsequently in 2004, two weeks before delivering our baby, my husband and I moved to Münster, where I began my Bachelor studies in 2008. By virtue of my cross-cultural upbringing, I then decided to enrol in the Master of Arts programme “National and Transnational Studies”. During the very first weeks of this programme, whilst discussing the term natio, we were asked by a lecturer to explain what home meant to us. Many peers replied that home was where they were born or where they grew up. Somewhat perplexed, that same evening I immediately searched the whole Internet for the definition of home when one has multiple passports (in my case three), attachments and languages. Seconds later, Google informed me that having grown up “among worlds”, I am a Third Culture Kid

PART 1

Complementary opposites, as seen Dating Gulliver Atrax Carnivore Train Ride Driftwood Just Kidding Newspaper Clippin

Escaping National Tags and Embracing Diversity: Third Culture Kid Songwriters

Nowadays, more and more writers cannot be classified according to one single nation. Whereas in Imagined Communities Anderson describes the development of nations and national belongings, in Third Culture Kid (TCK) discourse a central theme is the concept of not belonging to one specific nation or culture (“NatioNILism”). TCKs are individuals who were raised moving from one country to the next due to their parents’ career choices. Not having had a fixed home while growing up, rather than accepting classifications according to nations and cultures, many TCKs prefer to embrace diversity. Antje Rauwerda argues that the fiction of adult TCKs comprises typical features that reflect the consequences of a displaced international childhood and accordingly coins the new literary classification Third Culture Literature. Whereas Rauwerda exclusively analyses novels written by TCKs, this article examines whether the effects of hypermobile international childhoods can be detected in the works of TCK songwriters. By analysing not only the song lyrics of contemporary musicians such as Haikaa, Sinkane and Tanita Tikaram but also the artists’ views regarding issues such as belonging, identity and transience, it will be shown that in the scholarly realm the TCK lens can be expanded to song texts too

Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists

Many contemporary novelists experienced high levels of transnational mobility during their childhood and were thus raised ‘among’ different countries and cultures. Predominantly the offspring of diplomats, business executives, missionaries, military personnel and academics, these writers have compelling backgrounds of transnational and transient childhoods. Third Culture Kid (TCK), coined by the sociologist Ruth Useem, is the term given to this childhood experience. Until 2010, the term TCK was only used by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and cultural educators, but never before by scholars of literary studies. In 2011, Antje Rauwerda adapted this concept and coined the term ‘Third Culture Literature’ to describe the fictional writings by authors who share a ‘cultural background of expatriatism’. For Rauwerda, these novelists do not fit ‘a postcolonial, diasporic or cosmopolitan paradigm’ so that an up-to-date classification is needed for this new ‘subset of international writing’. The purpose of this article is to verify to what extent cultural identities are deployed in the marketing of Third Culture Literature. The article focuses on five contemporary well-known authors (such as Ian Martel and Ian McEwan) who have ‘grown up across worlds’ and analyses over 25 biographical details that are offered to readers by publishers in selected editions of their novels. The biographical details I examine are not only distributed in English but also, for example, in Arabic, Danish, German and Spanish. Not all publishers choose to portray their transnational authors in a ‘global’ light. However, due to the primarily international settings of Third Culture novels, many publishers either adopt the expatriate culture of their authors or adapt their biographies in order to kindle their target audiences

Moving Girlhoods in Twenty-First-Century Life Writing

This thesis explores twenty-first-century life writing by ‘Third Culture’ women and girls from diverse backgrounds that concerns the experience of growing up in at least three countries, cultures and languages – a phenomenon I term ‘moving girlhoods’. It reframes existing ‘Third Culture Literature’ theories, which have so far only been applied to fiction by authors raised as ‘expatriates’, while also integrating critical debates in postcolonial, transcultural, and girlhood scholarship into the field of life writing for the first time, to analyse how moving girlhoods shape autobiographical texts. Specifically, I explore the aesthetic and generic elements employed to portray the concerns of these particular migrant girls. Each chapter focuses on a distinct category of mobility and genre of life writing. Despite the different reasons for migration, in their various ways the texts portray ‘moving girlhoods’ as always an unsettling experience, however privileged the context of mobility. I argue that the writers magnify contradictions in their life writing to articulate the experience of growing up in conflictual conditions. In turn, genres of life writing are used to disrupt dichotomies, to challenge misjudgements and ill-fitting classifications, and to speak out against marginalisation. I analyse Elizabeth Liang’s play Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey (2013); Abeer Hoque’s Olive Witch: A Memoir (2016); Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (2017); and Susan Abulhawa’s essay ‘Memories in an Un-Palestinian Story, in a Can of Tuna’ (2013). I also examine modern-day forms of life writing by girls, such as TED talks. I conclude by contending that writers who grow up crossing borders and outside the mainstream create distinctive texts about bridging individual and collective differences. While describing multiple polarisations, life writing about moving girlhoods also empowers unique opportunities to explore and engage in the new perspectives and critical global conflicts of the twenty-first century