Abstract
Translocal novels—novels that are set in two or more distant places, which are layered or blended—are more often than not urban texts, since the city is, by nature, a site where a multitude of chronotopes interact. This article therefore examines structural analogies between translocal time(s) and urban spaces, and explores how the versatile nature of the city allows writers to project a variety of other spacetimes onto its surface. Both the spatialisation of time and the temporalisation of space in translocal narratives will be of interest. While a number of texts will be taken into account, Xiaolu Guo’s I Am China and Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician will serve as main examples for the narration of translocal urban time.
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Notes
- 1.
While many scholars opt for terms such as global, transnational, or transcultural to describe similar phenomena, I believe that the term translocal captures best the spatiotemporal ‘importance of local-local connections’ (Brickell and Datta 2011, 3).
- 2.
For a discussion of the translocal mappings and maps in Huchu’s novel, see Mattheis, (forthcoming).
- 3.
For a more detailed discussion of superpositions and urban layerings, see Mattheis and Gurr, (forthcoming).
- 4.
‘Tout se passe comme si l’espace était rattrapé par le temps, comme s’il n’y avait pas d’autre histoire que les nouvelles du jour.’
- 5.
‘L’espace du non-lieu ne crée ni identité singulière, ni relation, mais solitude et similitude.’
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Mattheis, L. (2021). Time in the Translocal City. In: Evans, AM., Kramer, K. (eds) Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination . Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55961-8_8
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