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The Transcultural. The following question remains: how do we talk to one another and about cultures and identities in the global village of the late twentieth century, after the end of the cold war, and within an awareness of cultural diversity (not only within and across the former blocs, but globally)? Or, in other words: what is the nature of the contemporary cultural world?

While attempting to fully answer this is well beyond the scope of this essay, I would like to tentatively propose some ways of thinking about it.

First, it might be useful to ask this: when we say that we are communicating with one another as groups (or as members of different groups), in what space is that communication occurring? Is there a larger space in which all this is happening? In other words, is there a space which in some ways transcends (by being around them, in-between them, and within them) the individual categories such as Eastern Bloc, Western Bloc, Women in Yugoslavia, and other cultural (identity) labels? If so, what is the nature of this space?

Second, we might problematize the pronoun “we,” or, for that matter, the pronoun “I,” as loci of clear and separate group identities. While in some extreme situations, such as wars or national and ethnic tensions, a sense that the communicating parties belong to opposing groups may indeed cover over everything else (in other words, national or ethnic identity may be foregrounded), in most cases a splintering of the communication into a number of less focused (and possibly less divisive) fragments will occur. The people involved might be wearing similar clothes, have similar tastes in music and films, or similar family situations and problems. In other words, as an I in a communication process, I am a member of numerous groups (oldest children, nonsmokers, rock fans, scholars, dissidents, liberals, women, etc.) which might intersect with the groups of the person I am communicating with. This both opens potential common space we can use in our relationship and problematizes the clarity and simplicity of our respective affiliations to national or ethnic groups that we come from (as well as, for that matter, to any one of the mentioned groups). In other words, our affiliations are more complex, more numerous, and less stable than paradigms such as the cold-war one might suggest.

I believe that this points to a cultural space that we can, for lack of a better word, label “transcultural.” This does not mean a transcendence into some kind of a universal and eternal space, beyond history and experience, but, rather, as Mikhail Epstein puts it, “a space in, or among, cultures which is open to all of them …. [which] frees us from any one culture.”⁹

I will finish this section by proposing three ways to conceive of the transcultural. (1) it can be seen as a complex, and/or heterogeneous space in which all other cultural categories are immersed, and out of which they are sometimes molded; (2) it can be seen as an aspect of everybody’s culture, and, potentially, as a culture all its own: a culture of people with across-groups-similar values and beliefs, and/or of people with complex, transcultural experiences and affiliations; (3) and, finally, it can be seen as a mode of interaction which works well among groups and people aware and accepting of cultural difference but not prepared to let that difference permanently divide them.

Transcultural Space. One of the ways of looking at this is to suggest that the cultural mixing, which has characterized our world for centuries, has had the effect of producing an enlarged cultural space above, between, and within all individual categories which participated in its production, and that this space now also precedes all new cultural categories. On one level, this space corresponds to what Mike Featherstone and others call global culture and Marshall McLuhan calls the global village. It can be seen as outlined by, among other things, the Gulf War, the intervention in Somalia, the Salman Rushdie affair, the global expansion of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the Japanese car industry, as well as by global feminism, rock music, postcolonial criticism, cultural diversity, international contacts of scholars, and so forth. The transcultural in this sense also consists in transcultural occurrences on the local and micro levels, such as the combinations of cultural signs found in big cities, in individual literary, film, television and other texts, as well as in culturally complex individual subjectivities whose constitutive parts come from a variety of cultures without producing chaos or incoherence.

This results in a complex, multilayered world in which old notions of cultural identity, cultural origin, and cultural authenticity do not apply; in which an agreement on what is true, or good, or real, on what has happened and what needs to happen must inevitably be also a matter of negotiation rather than only the discovery of facts. All “new” cultural developments occur within this space, out of this space they are molded, and it is this space that they must count with.

As a frame for culture scholarship, political action, and (last but not least) everyday life experiences and personal choices, the transcultural opens up space not only for categories such as East European women, Western feminists, African Americans, Greek Americans, men, women, and so on, but for whatever is beyond, between, and around them. Furthermore, it is possible to see that not all (if any) individual cultures today have a separate existence which precedes their appearance on the global stage, but, rather, that they sometimes appear on the stage which is already set and hence must negotiate it in order to affirm their individuality. We should then not only look at how individual cultures differ from each other, but, rather, how they are actually negotiated in the contemporary globalized, multicultural, and diverse world.

In this context, it is interesting to ask: why a “pure” identity seems like a better choice at certain times? For instance: why is it easier today to be heard on the global stage as a person of a “pure” identity than as a person of a complex/mixed one? And why many people today get more pleasure out of constructing/choosing a “pure” identity than a complex one? Why, to some scholars, “pure” identities seem more authentic? I do not mean to suggest that choosing a “pure” identity is an invalid choice, but, rather, that it is as much a construction as any other (that it is neither the natural nor the only possible choice) and that, hence, it should be studied/perceived as such. (For instance, while reemergence of various nationalisms — seen as the return of the repressed national identities — at first seemed liberating, it soon became oppressive, since they allowed only, or at least favored, pure identities. Where does this leave us in terms of affirmation of difference?)

Transcultural People. In today’s world, the transcultural is a part of everybody’s experience. Transcultural occurrences and texts are so common that the normal fin-de-millénium cultural experience is not culturally and/or nationally pure, but, rather, transcultural. Most (perhaps all) cultural spaces are transcultural in this sense: they incorporate “foreign” elements (frequently) without perceiving them as foreign. Most of us have been forced to (more or less successfully) negotiate this space. And many of us have, in the process, become transcultural people. We know that our values and tastes do not universally apply; we seek cross-cultural experiences; we are aware of the global space around us. This is in part simply the case because we are humans who today live on Earth. Indeed, it is precisely this awareness (that we are all humans with at least some things in common) that war propagandas attempt to rewrite, or put on hold, during wars.

We can also see the transcultural as a culture of people who share a symbolic/value system even though they do not belong to the same national and/or ethnic group. For example: they make similar fashion choices, listen to similar music, belong to similar social classes, or occupy similar or analogous structural positions within their respective countries. These people share a culture even when they do not always interpret all its products the same way.

And finally, it might also be possible to argue that people with complex, multiple group affiliations who are unable to subsume these under one or two simple identity labels most properly belong in the transcultural space (and share a culture?) even when they have little in common beyond the complexity itself. In other words, what they might have in common is not a specific cultural content but rather a certain kind of awareness of the world because they were forced to (due to their complex affiliations) negotiate the reality in similar ways.

The Transcultural Mode of Interaction. A useful way to think about the transcultural (particularly in relation to what was said above) is to see it as a particular mode of interaction; in other words, not to see it as this or that (permanently fixed?) position or identity, but rather as a way we can best interact in a complex and diverse space such as the transcultural. Let me use this essay as an example.

I have been asked (as an East European woman) to write it. When I suggested to the editor of this volume that I was uncomfortable with that classification and that I would like to focus not on Yugoslavian women but rather on the context of the question, I was allowed, no, encouraged to do just that. In other words, even though the initial classification fit the cold-war paradigm, what followed was not cold-war normal science. Not only was the discursive space in which this contribution was made more complex than any one of its constitutive parts (Eastern Bloc, Western Bloc, Second World), but the interaction mode used to negotiate it was the transcultural interaction mode. It began as an attempt at cross-bloc communication; this was then identified as not quite satisfactory; we renegotiated, taking the other’s position into account; in the process, a space which accommodated both of us was not only identified but further opened up.

Perhaps this was partly possible because the transcultural space already existed around us and because we were transcultural people who could see it.