Transcultural Writers, World Literature and Multicultural Australia in the Global Age

By Arianna Dagnino

A mutation is under way within the global ecumene of Letters, where new notions of belonging as well as definitions of selfhood and identity are being externalized through new creative artistic and literary processes. In the present age of transnational flows and complex globalizing phenomena, a new generation of authors is writing beyond the limits, or on the border, of their primary cultures and national landscapes. For this reason, a growing number of literary critics prefer to refer to these authors and their imaginative works as “transcultural”.  These writers may have in their background a migrant, exile or transnational experience of some sort but in their cultural orientation and writing style they seem to detach themselves from the conventional tropes of migrant, diasporic or postcolonial writing that have dominated the last twenty-thirty years of the global literary landscape. The present article analyses the growing significance, in the wider terrain of world literature and in the symbolic space of multicultural Australia, of a transcultural way of writing more attuned to the cultural complexities of our globalized contemporaneity.

Scarica il pdf dell'articolo