This article explores the space that emerges between language and citizenship when language can no longer be assumed to be the direct expression of a precise national, cultural, and geopolitical identity. In the modern uncoupling of identities from fixed homelands, the sense of belonging finds itself caught up in a continual process of translating and being translated. In an emerging configuration that interrogates the subject-centered perspective of occidental humanism, we are invited to consider the transit of language, whether in literary expression, television realism, or musical rhythm, as the site of an ongoing elaboration that is irreducible to a single point of view or to the transparency desired by a unilateral politics. Where no culture, history, or identity remains immune to the interruptions and interrogations of a multiple modernity that no longer merely mirrors the First World, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship need to be reconsidered radically.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through disembodied mobility. References to boundless space, unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound. In this heady environment, new technologies promise ever-increasing powers of transformation and transport—applied to information, business, and self—and the benefits of surveillance and tracking. More and more in this context, the concept of a person or of human beings appears to depend on the attenuated possibilities of cyberspace. If the heavy, even immovable, facts of embodied existence can be ameliorated or discharged through the creation of new identities on the Internet, for example, or through new collective personas or communities, then what or who counts as a person becomes transformed.

In the study of postmodern technocultures, including computer-mediated communication and popular narratives about cyberspace, the status of embodiment has emerged as a key question, especially in the context of popular rhetorics that imagine the Internet as a site of freedom from embodied particularity. But while analyses of gender bending and sexual performance on the Internet abound, the future of race in cyberspace has been relatively neglected. This essay traces recent developments in the work of the Mexican American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose earlier interests in immigration, transnationalism, and border-crossing art have increasingly led him to reflect on the promises and dangers cyberspace poses for racially minoritized groups, to the extent that people who use or study the Internet fantasize cyberspace as a site of subjective border crossing and identity play. The essay looks at the theme of virtual reality in specific performances and at Gómez-Peña's incorporation of new technologies into his work.

The work of the distinguished French political theorist and philosopher Etienne Balibar has emerged as profoundly significant in shaping post-1968 debates around class, race, national sovereignty, citizenship, and international human rights. The following essay is particularly relevant to this issue of PMLA insofar as the essay signals the importance of the border as a limit case for globalization and reflects on what the philosophical bases of citizenship would be in a postnational order of Europe.

Borders, Balibar suggests, are products of the state's attributing to itself a right to property, which becomes, in turn, a limit case of institutions (their means of self-stabilization) that allows them to control subjects rather than be subject to their control. The police power of border control is the state's most undemocratic condition, its discretionary exemption from democracy. To democratize the border, he maintains, one must democratize this nondemocratic aspect of democratic sovereignty, a task that would be juridically difficult but that would be an act of political realism none the less, since borders inevitably shift whether nations want them to or not, redefined by socially trans bordered, culturally transnational, and economically global spaces.

The idea for this panel grewout of discussions among Anton Kaes, David Rodowick, and me during our stint as members of the PMLA Editorial Board in 1998–99. We were interested in developing a theme that would build on some of the issues raised in a prior PMLA special topic devoted to globalizing literary studies but that would concentrate more pointedly on the politics of transnational cultural production and the effect of global media on literature, art, and cinema. Working with the assumption that categories of citizenship and local forms of identity have become increasingly mobile, nomadic, and hybrid and drawing on theories of transnational citizenship in philosophy and social theory, we identified a number of interrelated subjects as our focus: the internationalization of aesthetics in a global culture industry; the influence of globally exported mass culture on nation-states worldwide; the consequences of the emergence of “cybernations”— virtual communities defined by electronic and Internet culture; the question of whether the dynamic push for economic and cultural internationalism will produce a return to political nativism and a renewed insistence on cultural difference; the politics of translation, not only across borders but in aesthetic exchanges between literature and cinematic and televisual forms; the shifting tensions between monolingualism and nonstandard language as new, displaced minority cultures emerge as consumers of transnational media and makers of alternative literatures and media; and the relevance of analogies between the borderless cartographies of the new Europe and medieval Christendom to discussions of global cultural production.

There is a passage in David Lodge's 1988 Novel nice work in which the heroine, a marxist-feminist critic who teaches English literature, looks out the window of an airplane and sees the division of labor.

Critical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.

With these epigraphs I aim to abbreviate a frequently cited “lesson of bosnia”——That a country was destroyed and a genocide happened, in the heart of Europe, on television, and what is known as the world or the West simply looked on and did nothing. Bosnians, said one to the American journalist David Rieff, “felt as you would feel if you were mugged in full view of a policeman and he did nothing to rescue you” (140). Or, as Rieff says with slightly more precision,

Globalization is such a large concept that it forces us all into the position of the blind men examining an elephant—able to articulate the part we touch but not able to grasp the whole. So it is with the provocative papers in this issue by Mark Poster, Bruce Robbins, and Thomas Keenan, along with Emily Apter's introduction. Each makes excellent points but also mounts a different argument. As a group they present a more comprehensive view of globalization than they do when read separately, and I want to explore the shape that emerges from their interactions. I see my task less as weaving them into a seamless tapestry than as highlighting the ways in which they challenge and complement one another. By pointing out the incompleteness as well as the accomplishment of each, I want to show that together they suggest new interactions between the local and the global and, through these interactions, new possibilities for political awareness and action.