THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN IN LITERARY STUDIES has drawn attention to literature's increasing engagement with economic and cultural globalization, as well as to the breakdown of national paradigms for understanding literature. Transnationalism has become a pervasive term in recent scholarship, but its analytical valence is often hard to pin down, especially when compared to similar or related concepts, including globalization and neoliberalism. Scholars have often relied on a distinction between transnationalism as a signifier of spatial mobility and cultural interconnectedness, and globalization as an economic process concerned with the operations of capital (and thereby connected to the ideologies of neoliberalism). Whether invoked in the context of cultural or economic relations, transnationalism predates the rise of neoliberalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as David Harvey notes, “there has undoubtedly been a deepening as well as a widening of these transnational connections during the phase of neoliberal globalization, and it is vital that these connectivities be acknowledged.” Harvey emphasizes the connections of the transnational ruling class and the global elites who have deliberately enacted neoliberal policies; transnational connectivities have also developed in response to the increasingly predominant structures of insecurity arising from neoliberalization, seen for example in the emergence of the precariat.

Critics of neoliberalism have pointed to the fact that it is increasingly hegemonic and yet rarely named, so that its concepts have come to seem like common sense or second nature. This imperceptibility of neoliberalism, together with the impossibility of imagining the scale of transnational networks or grasping the abstraction of the global financial system, creates a context in which the contemporary world often appears incomprehensible or unrepresentable. Such indecipherability is crucial to the ideology of neoliberalism, which operates via an illusion of political neutrality.

The notion of precarity has emerged as one way of making intelligible a central paradox of neoliberalism: it creates a situation of permanent insecurity that disproportionately affects minority groups, but at the same time its emphasis on individualism, flexibilization, and mobility offers unprecedented opportunities for destabilizing normative roles and eroding traditional social formations in ways that appear empowering, not least to women and gender and sexual minorities. Theorists of precarity therefore emphasize both the endemic insecurity of the contemporary world and the way this instability gives rise to potential for change.