Katarzyna Marciniak. Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 272 pages. ISBN: 0816645779.

The title's key term, Alienhood , is stamped in ominous red ink across the cover of this new scholarly work by Katarzyna Marciniak. Like the marked foreign bodies she theorizes, the label pierces the shell of her slim and unassuming book and infuses its contents with an aura of abjection. The term “alien,” containing a double meaning as foreigner and extraterrestrial, is, according to Marciniak, irreconcilable with its milder and more oft-employed cousin, the “transnational.” She insists on the use of this difficult term to foreground the frequently painful reality of the exilic experience against popular, celebratory notions of international mobility and cultural hybridity touted in the United States . Although Marciniak occasionally grants the exilic subject some agency, her overarching message is unremittingly dark: the highly racialized rhetoric of alienhood succeeds in producing the idea of a nation by effectively rejecting and abjecting the marginalized foreign other. Marciniak supports her claim by interweaving postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory with close analyses of recent works of literature and cinema by and about “aliens.” Each chapter is devoted to the discussion of a new work, including an autobiography by Polish-American author Eva Hoffman, a semi-autobiographical novel by Latino Julia Alvarez, and fictional films by Chicano filmmaker Gregory Nava, Polish-American-French writer, actor, and director Roman Polanski, and Macedonian-American director Milcho Manchevski. In contrast to Marciniak's bleak thesis, we might also consider that these autobiographical and fictional works represent creative and critical achievements by immigrant authors, thus re-opening the possibility for a more empowering reading of the exilic subject.

The author's foregrounding of pain and disorientation are a pointed critical response to the popular contemporary discourse that dangerously and naively celebrates the supposed freedom found in the “double life” of the transnational. Marciniak's point—that for most immigrants, liminality is an unwanted state divorced from the stability and assuredness of the culturally grounded self—is an important counter-perspective to simplistic and normative assumptions that immigrants “choose” to leave their home countries in order to enjoy the benefits of living in the United States . She gives a detailed and psychoanalytically oriented analysis of the disorientation and fracturing of identity that occurs within the exiled subject as a result of purist nation-building strategies that seek to “devour” (assimilate) or “eject” (marginalize) difference. Focusing on cinematic and literary depictions of immigrants' struggles to remove accents, express themselves in a foreign language, navigate complex fields of gender and violence, and makeover the bodies that constantly betray them, Marciniak describes a “quivering self” that fits neither here nor there, but constantly wavers between the promise of future belonging and the remembrance of a past self-unity. She accomplishes the difficult and frequently ignored task of examining the immigrant psyche while generally respecting the messiness and unevenness of subjective emotional experience. Unfortunately, the image of the quivering self is evoked with such persistence that irreverent visions of Jell-O float before the reader's eyes long in advance of Marciniak's triumphant Afterword , in which she serves up the offending substance via an exposé of Guillermo Gómez-Peña's gelatin-based artwork, The Last Immigrant .

At the macro level, Marciniak's theorization of the nation and its definitive relationship with the “other” relies largely upon scholarly work by a host of postcolonial, race, and globalization theorists, including Trinh T. Minh-ha, Zygmunt Bauman, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and others. Her intervention here is to challenge the monolithic category of whiteness usually employed in such analyses by emphasizing that a “ certain kind of whiteness ” governs the unstable and historically shifting image of the proper, privileged American (15). Of particular interest to the author, herself of Eastern European descent, is to enter the “murky territory” of the post-communist “second world,” which despite rapid Westernization remains discursively tainted by the quality of “otherness” (xiv). Her strategy is limited in that it does not seek to challenge the problematic three-tiered ranking system, which secures the primacy of the “first world.” However, she does succeed in bringing Eastern European film into dialogue with Chicano and Latino cinema and writing, thus emphasizing the multivalent and insidious coding of difference that penetrates accents, behaviors, and histories just as thoroughly as skin color.

It is easy to become frustrated by the sheer weight of abjection in these accounts, which seem to leave the foreign self with little space for creative adaptation and resistance. Speaking of Homi Bhabha's influential notion of the “third space,” that liminal zone in between cultures where differences undergo translation and negotiation,¹ Marciniak states that “as an often overused cultural metaphor, the third space, particularly when it is not anchored by historical specificity, begins to function as a free-floating, volatile notion… inviting an understanding of transnational migrants as unanchored hybrids” (23). By focusing on the term's frequent “misuse” (which is undeniable), Marciniak forgoes a more thorough analysis of Bhabha's third space that would take seriously the possibilities it posits for redefining and destabilizing supposedly fixed cultural norms and subject positions. By presupposing a cohesive subject in a stable cultural field that becomes fractured and “quivering” only at the moment of cultural dislocation, Marciniak seems to preclude the possibility that all cultures and identities are subject to ongoing processes of formation and are engaged in multiple attachments, detachments, and re-attachments. In fact, her “quivering self” can in many ways be read as the abject sister of the “freefloating … unanchored hybrid,” forever caught in a position of liminality where it is impossible to establish new relationships or become agents in the interrelated processes of shaping self and environment.

The limitations of Marciniak's analysis emerge in her literary and cinematic discussions of abjectness, including in what is arguably her strongest and most nuanced chapter examining the link between linguistic translation and the body in Eva Hoffman's 1989 autobiography Lost in Translation . For Polish immigrant Ewa, learning English is not merely a struggle to match words, but rather a “corporeal struggle” (79); a striving to feel the language and meaning of words in her body; and a fight to “carrying oneself across” (99) into a new culture and language that inhabit the body as well as the mind. Detailing Ewa's difficulties with feeling at home in new make-up, clothing, and language that fail to mask her differences, Marciniak posits translation as a site of “resistance to a traditional notion of assimilation that works to accept, but also to absorb and flatten, the exile … and a defiance against the creation of a new, proper subject that erases her past so that she can successfully function in a new community” (78). But what sort of resistance is it that leaves the subject floundering in hopeless abjection? How can this essentially negative state of “otherness” be reconciled with a text that “ends on a note of immigrant success,” and that is hailed as “the first ‘postmodern' autobiography written in English² by an émigré from a European Communist Country” (78–9) who is now an internationally successful author living in New York City? While respecting the harsh and disorienting nature of the immigrant experience as described by both Marciniak and Hoffman, I would like to point to these questions as possible ways to open up the discussion about alienhood to include creative possibilities as well as pain.

All of the works discussed by Marciniak foreground the complexities of cultural mixing and contamination. Their authors have made use of the imaginative resources of their bi-cultural lives as well as the current popularity of such narratives among readers and critics to create forums for publicly resisting the essentializing discourse of alienhood. They provide opportunities to fully acknowledge both the struggles and creative possibilities for articulation within the marginalized immigrant experience. A more complete theoretical treatment of immigrant subjectivities in Alienhood might look beyond the pain to ask how exiled subjects eventually work to transcend the abject space of the liminal by forming new attachments and relationships. In the process, it may be possible to revalue the margins as potential loci for creative and critical authorship.

1. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture . (New York: Routledge, 1994).

2. Emphasis mine.