The Transnational and the Translocal in Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue

chapter 11 Globalizing European Peripheries: The Transnational and the Translocal in Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue

While Mahjoub’s works discussed above reveal hidden historical contexts between Europe and its Others, the work of Monica Ali emphasizes chang- es generated by globalization and the expansion of the European Union. As the increased mobility of transnational migration ranging from labourers to ERASMUS exchange students and from tourists to settlers shows, globalization affects the construction of European identities in ways that exceed and problematize the traditional colonizer/colonized opposition and other similar dualisms. What this means is that the identities of European nation-states are changing because of both global and intra-European flows of migration gener- ating new cultural expressions. While postcolonial literary studies have tended to prioritize the entry and experiences of the formerly colonial migrants in the metropolis over other forms of mobility, the new challenges of cultural contact call for new ways of reading postcolonial narratives to account for the peculiarities of increased cultural contacts. It is the aim of this chapter to explore the impact of such everyday contacts and “vernacular cosmopolitanisms” through an analysis of their representa- tion in Monica Ali’s novel Alentejo Blue published in 2006.1 While Ali is known primarily for her debute novel Brick Lane, a novel narrating Bangladeshi im- migrant lives in East London, Alentejo Blue addresses different conditions of contemporary migration. In my analysis, I argue that this underrated novel set in rural Portugal deserves critical attention as it is an attempt to examine, through narratives of travel and stay, the problematics of migration and the transformed meanings of centre and periphery. Through a series of snapshots of European tourists, travellers, and their hosts in the small and remote Por- tuguese village of Mamarrosa, Alentejo Blue shows the presence of globalizing forces and the transnational in the locality, emphasizing that the global and the local are not oppositions but work in a parallel manner. Rather than sim- ply representing globalization as threatening the alleged purity or tradition of a rural village with its premodern lifestyle, Ali’s novel, read in a transnational framework, uncovers its silenced histories and links it with the wider world in

1 Monica Ali, Alentejo Blue, London: Doubleday, 2006.

194 chapter 11 order to counter dominant views of cultural contact. In so doing it shows how all identities, including those in European peripheries, are mobile and multi- ply constructed in relation to the global. In other words, Alentejo Blue, by show- ing how global flows affect the local in various ways, provides an alternative to views of globalization that emphasize its metropolitan nature and reveals how it is extends to everywhere.

Contextualizing Globalization

Contemporary cultural narratives of migration are embedded in the transnational processes of globalization which transform the ways in which national and other identities are lived through and imagined. As such, the processes of globalization are not entirely new as world system theorists and critics of colonial discourse have shown, but the nature of contemporary globalization is somewhat different from its earlier historical predecessors.2 While the links and nodes between different civilizations predate the conquests of European civilizations, transforming histories and creating cultural hybridities, the processes of today’s globalization, owing to digitization and the development of rapid communications technology, are experienced simultaneously in the different parts of the globe. Unsurprisingly, the social theorist Anthony Giddens describes globalization as an expression of an era characterized by “the inten- sification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa”.3 In her book A Sociology of Globalization (2007), the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that globalization involves two distinct modes. On the one hand the term denotes the emergence of global actors and institutions such as the World Trade Organization as well as that of new global processes including financial markets and the transformation of cosmopolitanism, while on the other hand it describes processes that at the current point in time are less evi- dent at the global level but that are transforming the naturalized meanings of the national and the local.4 In Sassen’s view, processes such as the emergence of transnational activist networks and the replacement of national institutions and standards with international ones are examples of this:

2 Suman Gupta, Literature and Globalization, Cambridge: Polity, 2009, 10–11. 3 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1990, 64. 4 Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization, New York: w.w. Norton, 2007, 5.