FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORETICAL SCHOLARSHIP from a broad range of humanities and social science disciplines (including emotional geography, sociology, political science, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and psychology, to name a few) have increasingly addressed the affective experience of transnationalism on both individuals and communities. Taking as their starting point an intersectional understanding of difference developed in feminist work since the 1980s, these studies examine how race, class, sexuality, and gender together become useful categories in the “making and theorizing of transnational domains.” Literature is one such transnational domain. Since German unification, German-language writing by minority and nonminority authors alike has become increasingly “globalized and transnational,” which includes the subject matter, setting, languages, translations, distribution, and reception, ranging from the media promotion of texts and their authors to the awarding of prizes. These literary texts are populated with circulating bodies, both literally and figuratively, and therefore also contain the emotional and physical resonances of the border-crossing experience, such as destabilized feelings of belonging, reconfiguration of identity in travel, the impact of space and place on familial or sexual intimacy, the trauma of exile, or the corporeal results of economic precarity and racially motivated violence. More recent trends in affect studies move away from concerns of identity or subjecthood, and instead ask after the political frameworks, undercurrents, and aftershocks of these contents.

Building on the engagement with and definitions of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, world literature, and contemporary literature offered by Elisabeth Herrmann and Stuart Taberner in the preceding chapters, the following will trace the affective features in and of the transnational in order to mine for the politically engaged moments in contemporary literature. I suggest that a reconsideration of the affective turn that has taken hold in feminist and queer research since the new millennium is essential for understanding transnationalism in its function as a category, feature, or “pillar” (Herrmann) of literature, for it acts as a conduit through which literature is connected to the broader reach of politicized feminist studies; affect illuminates not only the connective charges between bodies as they move across or straddle borders, but it also captures the impact of transnational flows on individuals and social collectives working within power structures.