From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies Susanne Rohr In his essay “Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature,” Winfried Fluck asks the question, “What is made possible by literature? ” (in this volume 95) and his essay “Why We Need Fiction” adds another dimension to this inquiry. This focus cuts to the core of what is also my main interest in fiction: its power. While, as Fluck himself states, this perspective has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the last decades, it remains well worth pursuing, as his numerous illuminating publications on the topic show. There have, of course, been endless attempts to find answers to the question of what literature can or cannot do and what may or may not be the source of its power and allure. Fluck, when trying to explain the power of fiction, places the imaginary center stage. This concept, which goes back to Wolfgang Iser’s work, Fluck has developed into a theory of American literature where fiction is seen as a fertile ground of imaginary self-extension. His approach hinges on the articulation of the imaginary, which is the interpretive expression of the meaning the text has for a reader. Here, different dimensions interweave, such as the subjective and the commonplace, the creative and the conventional, in dialogue with the historical and national situatedness of the act. It is the latter, the role of the national context, that I will investigate in particular in this essay. The key questions are the following: If the national context plays a decisive role in the interplay of fictional dimensions, what are the implications when this context is reconceptualized as a transnational one? Is there such a thing as a transnational imaginary? The intense debates on transnationalism and the “transnational turn” currently being held in almost all areas of literary and cultural studies indicate that there is an urge to reflect on the implications of this transnational shift. What I intend to do in the following is, first, to retrace Fluck’s argument on the status of the imaginary, and then to show, by examining Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel Intimacies, how the dynamic of a transnational imaginary is staged in this text. 1 Fluck has developed and refined his approach in a number of seminal publications, among them Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900. This eminent work is a history of the changing functions of the American novel in the 19 th century. Fluck here uses the term function as a heuristic category that rests on the assumption that the analysis of aesthetic experience can be linked with historical contexts of use. 2 In the field of political science and philosophy, the imaginary is conceptualized as “social imaginary,” as an imaginary system, defined along the lines of the social function of imagined ideas, practices, orientations and values that bind a society together. Or, in the words of Charles Taylor, one of the key thinkers in the field, the social imaginary is “what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (2). Cf. also the work of Benedict Anderson, especially his Imagined Communities, where he examines the origins of nationalism. So What Can Literature Do? In the last decades, discussions of the enabling capacities of literature have receded into the background, while an exploration of literature as an accomplice in practices of cooptation and containment has moved to the fore. In Fluck’s words regarding revisionist criticism, the “interpretive emphasis lies on what is cleverly and cunningly contained by the text” (272). Implying a shift in priorities, Fluck presents a theory in which literature is seen as a field of emanation, not containment. 1 His approach builds on the work of Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics and literary anthropology, where, for both Fluck and Iser, the concept of the imaginary plays a major role. If we ask the question what literature can do, what may constitute its power and attraction, and why we as readers keep returning to it, the underlying assumption of Fluck’s and Iser’s approach points towards an answer: It is that fiction enables the imaginary to emerge in a certain gestalt. Iser defines the imaginary in a phenomenological sense as that which underlies our ordinary experience as a flow of something diffuse: a current of feelings, desires and fleeting, often arbitrary impressions, to which he ascribes a protean potential. 2 In the act of fictionalizing, the reader taps into this realm and establishes a triadic relationship among the imaginary, the fictive, and the real. The latter element of the triangle is important, as for the imaginary to gain a certain gestalt and to be shared, it needs to relate to discourses of the real. And these in turn are historically specific, otherwise they would not be tangible. Iser describes this process as follows: [T]he fictionalizing act is a guided act. It aims at something that in turn endows the imaginary with an articulate gestalt (…) we pass from the diffuse to the precise. (…) [I]t enables the imaginary to take on an essential quality of the real, for determinacy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 114 Susanne Rohr is a minimal definition of reality. This is not, of course, to say that the imaginary is real, although it certainly assumes an appearance of reality in the way it intrudes into and acts upon the given world. (3; emphasis in original) The interplay between inside and outside in the fictionalizing act puts the person involved in an in-between position. It is an act of transgressing boundaries. The process of triangulation, of creating relations between the imaginary, the fictive, and the real is at the same time subjective and intersubjective, private and socially influenced, and it is immensely pleasurable as it allows the reader to experience the diffuse imaginary to be “lured into form” (3), as Iser puts it. What is more, Fluck argues that the act of articulating the imaginary, which he calls the “articulation effect” (“Containment,” 96), is not only enjoyable and thus one of the attractions that an immersion in fiction holds for the reader, but that the act also serves an important social function. For articulating the imaginary by means of fiction is, according to Fluck, an instrument of self-extension and self-fashioning for those performing the act as it facilitates the expression of what would otherwise be inexpressible or transgressive in a particular culture at a given time. As we can infer from Iser’s quotation above, the imaginary cannot be identical with the fictive; it is always both more and less at the same time. More, because it is the subjective product of a fictionalizing act, and less, because expressing the imaginary can never fully represent it. Hence our unceasing motivation to try again and do it justice. Expressing the imaginary simultaneously draws on discourses of the real and alters them because the articulated interpretations feed back into codes of the real and become part of these. Fluck ascribes a “paradoxical nature” to this process and explains it as follows: In the history of literature (and other fictions), we encounter this interplay of the imaginary and the real in ever new combinations. In this process, no side remains unaffected: While the imaginary aims to redefine reality, the codes of the real transform the imaginary into something that can be understood and experienced by others, thereby socializing subjective experience. (96-97) Literature, in this view, is a medium of self-empowerment and self-definition for the reader. In expressing the imaginary, fiction allows us to experience a version of oneself that, while related to discourses of the real, surpasses them and can venture into as yet uncharted territory. At the same time, however, as much of the research of the past decades has shown, literature is characterized by structures of ideological containment that exert control through disciplinary powers, so that, combining both perspectives, fiction must be a field of contra‐ dictory or antagonistic forces. The expression of the imaginary is thus on the one 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 115 hand an act of self-extension as it allows for the emergence of not-yet realized potentials, on the other hand the gestalt into which it was “lured” inevitably feeds back into the discursive regimes. Fiction thus serves a double function as it provides both disciplinary and enabling options that are negotiated in the act of expressing the imaginary, while the particular constellation of the conflicting forces as it manifests in the “articulation effect” is historically specific. In tracing the historical development of these constellations, the trajectory being one of a growing liberalization, Fluck’s cultural history of American literature is consequently one of a “continuous unfolding and increasing radicalization of expressive individualism” (103). This process is fueled by an interesting inter‐ dependence, as a growing realization of fiction’s affordance of self-extension leads at the same time to a heightened awareness of the antagonistic forces in society. The See-saw Effect Fluck highlights one particular example of this development in his discussion of the particular interplay of the conflicting currents in the historical romance of the nineteenth century. He describes a “precarious balance” (100) in these novels, which unleash fiction’s forces of self-extension as spectacularly as they control them in their narrative construction with the ultimate goal of reaffirming the legitimacy of social hierarchy. Fluck describes this underlying back-and-forth movement as follows: “the narrative produces something like an emotional see-saw effect, in which the imagination and the emotions of the reader are constantly refueled, but also never quite released from the need for self-restraint” (101). Following the logic of Fluck’s theory, this see-saw effect characterizes the reader’s interaction with fiction generally, not just that of a more sensationalist kind. The force of the movement may vary, but it is present nonetheless. What I want to explore in the following is the surprising impression that, as it appears to me, some examples of recent American fiction seem to want to bring the agitating forces to a standstill, and, moreover, that the standstill is a systemic implication in what might be called the transnational imaginary. Ramón Saldívar, among others, has also considered the history and format of the transnational imaginary. While I share with Saldívar the assessment that a new generation of ethnic writers has contributed to bringing American fiction in the global context of the twenty-first century to a new stage, I hesitate to fully follow his diagnosis of the “post-postmodern, post-borderlands, and neohistorical transnational turn in what one could call postethnic fiction in the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 116 Susanne Rohr postrace era of American literature” (“Imagining Cultures” 4). The underlying paradigm here, as Saldívar maintains, is what he calls “historical fantasy” (3). Considering the novel that Saldívar uses to illustrate his argument, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), this generic attribution seems convincing. Yet regarding the novel that I want to consider in the following, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, the air of exuberance in Saldívar’s descriptions seems somehow unfitting. To be sure, what Intimacies shares with Díaz’s novel and others of its kind is its interest in the relationship between race and identity in the twenty-first century and the ensuing need “to invent a new ‘imaginary’ for thinking about the nature of a just society” (3). Unlike Díaz’s text, though, Intimacies is not about “attempting to ‘stitch together’ the lost histories and isolated communities (…) in both the homelands and the diasporic communities in the United States” (5) but, on the contrary, about consciously choosing a transnational life in a globalized meta-community - and about witnessing stitches and seams come apart internally in the process. Intimacies unfolds this kind of transnational existence. We accompany the narrator-protagonist, a woman of indistinct race, age, and nationality, as she moves from the U.S. to the Netherlands to work on a one-year contract as a staff interpreter for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. She settles into the cosmopolitan community of the Court, and the reader follows her wanderings through the city, her ways of taking in the new language and of establishing her personal life in the new surroundings. She begins a relationship with a Dutch man, Adriaan, who is married with children and ostensibly in the process of divorcing his wife. He leaves the protagonist for what turns out to be an extended period of time to settle things with his wife, who lives in Portugal, during which time the communication between him and the protagonist dwindles. Adriaan’s absence and increasing silence begin to unsettle the narrator, as do acts of street violence that enter the narrator’s radius as well as a difficult task at the Court, where the narrator is called upon as an interpreter in the genocide trial of a former African president. Lending her voice to both the horrifying testimonies of victims and to the cool statements of the perpetrator undermines the ethical stance of the narrator to such a degree that she decides not to accept the offer of a permanent position at the Court. The narrator decides to leave The Hague and her ambiguous personal and professional situation only to find this decision challenged when Adriaan returns, his marital situation resolved, and ready to continue the relationship with her. The ending is left somewhat open but suggests that the narrator will decide to stay in The Hague. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 117 3 I would like to thank Lili von Stengel for drawing my attention to this interview and for inspiration. Hide and See This story of a transnational existence is presented to us in a narrative style that, in a peculiar double move, is extremely subjective, forcing the reader into uncomfortable intimacy with the first-person narrator, while at the same time keeping her or him at arm’s length. The narrator is a woman whose name the reader never learns, and in an interview with Steph Cha, Kitamura comments on her play with anonymity as follows: “I’m always interested in characters who are a little bit on the margins of the dominant culture, whatever that culture might be, or observers who occupy this liminal space (…) Once you’re named, you are part of the system in some way, and you’re recognized. You have been named and seen” (np). 3 The undercover position of the narrator, this hiding from being recognized while simultaneously closely observing from outside the system, creates a fictional universe that oscillates between being inviting and uninviting in equal measure. The narrative voice is, on the one hand, quite forthcoming and thus somehow trustworthy in her precise observations, yet on the other hand these reality constructions are hermetically closed due to their extreme subjectivity. The perplexing reader position that ensues is one of being denied entrance while already having been admitted. This narrative technique is functional in another way as well, as Cha and Kitamura establish in the interview: by leaving the narrator’s features indistinct and by establishing her Japanese American background only indirectly, the protagonist (and the author, for that matter) can circumvent expectations to construct the story around race and to “perform that identity for the presumed white readership” (np). The reader’s experience of being held at arm’s length is thus not established along the known lines of cultural and racial difference, but is an effect of ethical problems and failures that evolve in and through the quicksand of the transnational setting of the novel. The latter, it seems to me, is instrumental in bringing the see-saw effect to a momentary standstill. For what might be the gestalt into which the imaginary is lured, as Iser put it, if the articulation effect cannot readily feed back into the discursive regimes of the real when these are blurred in a radically transnational setting that offers a multitude of possibilities? Intimacies in my reading stages this transnational standstill through a number of strategies, one being the blurring of identities. For the narrator’s identity is not only obscured with regard to race, but the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 118 Susanne Rohr 4 On 22 November, 2022, the municipality of The Hague officially apologized for its role in the Dutch history of colonialism and slavery (NL Times). national and cultural indeterminacy is also established from the outset. The opening paragraph reads as follows: It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorienting to me, after my father’s death and my mother’s sudden retreat to Singapore. For the first time, I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from. (…) I realized that I had no intention of returning to New York, I no longer knew how to be at home there. (1) As a matter of fact, the narrator seems not to know how to be at home anywhere in the world as her childhood experience was one of continuously moving around. Her identity is linked to her linguistic capabilities, she has “native fluency in English and Japanese from [her] parents, and in French from a childhood in Paris” and speaks “Spanish and German to the point of professional proficiency” (13). In the new surroundings, in encountering a new language in a place that is “not yet worn down by acquaintance or distorted by memory,” the narrator feels that “a new space [has] opened up” for her (2). However, the image of a blank page is subtly undermined right away as the concealed side of the promising new territory, its history of colonialism and slavery, is revealed to the narrator in the course of her urban flânerie. She perceives the dark side as expressed in the “heritage aesthetic” (11) of the Old Town, the historic city center, which dismantles the idea of an innocent place not yet distorted by memory as an illusion. The Hague’s legacy of profiting from the transatlantic slave trade as a hub of colonialism functions like a dark undercurrent of the story. 4 It contributes to the ethical dilemma surrounding the genocide trial of the former African president that fundamentally unsettles the narrator in the end as the trial is held in a court that “had primarily investigated and made arrests in African countries, even as crimes against humanity proliferated around the world” (57). One of the first new acquaintances the narrator admits to the “new” space that appears to have “opened up” (2) is another person with a transnational identity, Jana, a Black woman of Serbian-Ethiopian descent who went to school in France and then lived in London before she moved to The Hague. Jana does not live in the historic city center and the text subtly indicates that this is still a matter of residential segregation, of historical continuity, as is the exploitation of immigrant workers that the narrator observes during her flâneries. The city’s “veneer of civility was constantly giving way” (12), she concludes, true to the role 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 119 of “archaeologist of the culture” that the author ascribes to her protagonist (Cha np). In taking the reader along on these urban wanderings that make the narrator feel more and more uneasy, the novel refers to the genre of detective fiction without ever fully adopting it. Still, the motif of looking for clues structures the narrative, although the search is frustrated on both the level of story and in the reception process as the object to be found remains a mystery. In this narrative setup, the novel bears resemblance to a whole generation of texts beginning with Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987), yet there is no postmodern playfulness involved in Intimacies. Here, there is only a cool yet not uninvolved registration of disintegrating facades behind which past and present constellations of guilt, injustice and crime are revealed. The reader is made to share the protagonist’s growing uneasiness that accompanies the process, a narrator who in all her perceptive precision remains curiously elusive. Strangely enough, this leads to the experience of simultaneous intimacy and perplexity on the part of the reader. As Leland Cheuk, one of the reviewers of Intimacies, puts it: “She’s so circumspect that I started to wonder: What exactly did Adriaan and others find alluring about her? ” (np). This statement is a telling example of an “articulation effect” as Fluck would call it and which I would describe as the expression of a transnational imaginary in a particular gestalt. It is the statement of a certain helplessness vis-à-vis an almost featureless yet powerful protagonist bereft of an identity constructed through the specificities of name, age, ethnicity, nationality and the cultural universe of a mother tongue. The emotional see-saw movement that Fluck describes in the reception process comes to a standstill as the text offers no interplay between self-assertion and self-restraint or wish-fulfillment and control with which the reader could engage; nor is there the authority of a national context that would initiate the move and countermove of the antagonistic forces. Before dealing with the question of what this implies for Fluck’s attempt to trace “the transformations which the imaginary undergoes in the development of American literature” (“Containment,” 104), I would first like to consider how Intimacies sets the scene for the transnational imaginary to gain its gestalt in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The Ambiguous Universe The Court is described as a genuinely transnational universe where the people working for the Court, and those who are brought to trial there, form a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and multilingual group. The narrator goes to great lengths to explain the nature of her work as an interpreter in this cosmos. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 120 Susanne Rohr There are no traces of snooty postmodern nonchalance when she ponders the relationship between words and meaning, no whimsical sense of play between difference and différance: “there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning. As interpreters it was our job to throw down planks across these gaps” (13). Thus, although the narrator is fully aware that verbatim translation is ultimately an impossible act, she still struggles for it as a whole life can depend on facilitating communication in legal proceedings. Yet it seems to me that it is the power of these chasms that structure plot and story in this novel and in the end affect the narrator’s life, corrode the trial against the former African president and in all of this provide the context for the transnational imaginary yet to be formed. The whole act of translation in this context is a deeply ambiguous endeavor: translating testimony from one language into another in real time requires extreme accuracy, yet the translator of whom this exactitude is demanded and who is thus cast in the role of mere instrument has to transmit the nuances of the testimony as well in order to establish authenticity. Different translators may emphasize these nuances differently, making witnesses seem more or less reliable. The status of the translators is thus always in danger of being compromised, and while they facilitate the legal proceedings, the whole process turns the Court into a theater where dramas of real-life suffering are performed. As the narrator concludes: “The Court was run according the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity” (14). The scenario is like a Roman arena where the dimensions of individual pain and public entertainment intermingle in the performances that decide matters of life and death, guilt and genocide while it is unclear who is directing the show. What is more, in these hearings it is the duty of the interpreters to breach taboos, to say the unsayable, to express “matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision” (16). This, then, is the hybrid universe emerging from the chasm between languages: at the same time real and unreal, there and not there, authentic in its inauthenticity. It is a universe where the unspeakable is spoken, but one that none of the persons involved can fully apprehend as all players are from a different linguistic, cultural, and national background. And that, it seems to me, is exactly the gestalt of the emerging transnational imaginary as it is tentatively staged in the novel: ungraspable, multi-voiced, im‐ personal, only provisionally existent. By definition, the transnational imaginary develops beyond the confines of national demands and sensitivities and beyond the interplay of self-extension and control described by Fluck. It is not generated 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 121 by an emotional see-saw movement but develops in a universe without clear-cut ethical norms or, rather, a space where these norms are constantly blurred in the act of translation. Which “discursive regimes,” in Fluck’s words (“Containment,” 107), would the reader have to internalize to see his or her individual liberation stimulated by going against them? For it seems to me, with Intimacies we have reached a stage in American literature where “the force which stands in the way of the self ” and that, in opposing it, would make articulating “the claim for self-expression and self-extension” (110) in the imaginary all the more potent for the individual, is unceremoniously dethroned. This happens neither because the novel undermines or coopts these antagonistic forces, nor are the powers dismantled as chimera, as revisionist accounts would have it. Rather, they are dissolved in the need for constant translation in a transnational context that grants the individual power and takes it away at the same time and where the positions of the controlling forces change continuously. So there is no self-empowerment on the part of the readers as they have to follow a narrator who, as already established, is left almost featureless: It is almost as if she dissolves when faced with this ambiguous universe. Greg Chase opens an interesting frame of interpretation when, placing the novel in the historical context of the looming Brexit and American elections, he reads the indistinctness of the narrator as a new take on the relationship between the personal and the political. He comes to the conclusion that “In Kitamura’s hands, the narrator’s cosmopolitanism shades into moral relativism, a constitutional inability to make strong judgments or take decisive action” (np). This moral relativism, if we go along with this description, develops over the weeks when the narrator has to translate in the trial against a former African president who is accused of ethnic cleansing after a contested election. Over the duration of the proceedings, she has the unpleasant sensation of a growing intimacy and familiarity with the defendant whose perspective she is made to share. The narrator states: “It was disquieting in the extreme, like being placed inside a body I had no desire to occupy” (177). The climax of the trial - and the novel - is the testimony of a victim, a young woman, who had to witness the murder of her entire family by the former president’s henchmen. The testimony has to pass through a number of languages until it is finally translated by the narrator for the court. And it is here, in these passages, that the narrator decomposes and that the position of the “I” gets blurred to a point where it is difficult for the reader to discern who is speaking. Performing the move from the accused to the victim and now having to lend her voice to the witness becomes unsettling to the narrator as it makes her former uncomfortable nearness to the defendant all the more palpable: “As I 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 122 Susanne Rohr 5 The editors of the volume Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World, Hans Alma and Guido Vanheeswijck also consider this problem. In their discussion of the concept of Taylor’s “immanent frame,” meaning that traditional sources of the social imaginary have vanished from a community’s view, they write that “this immanent frame is not related to one single social imaginary, but can only be understood by reference to social imaginaries in the plural, since contemporary Western culture showcases a superdiversity which does not allow for one single picture or social imaginary” (3). looked down at the witness, it prickled through me, the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious” (185; emphasis in original). It is as if in this transnational, multilingual and multicultural universe, the ethical demarcation between right and wrong becomes blurred, and the moral and legal perspectives become uncertain, but not only for the narrator with her indistinct characteristics and her fleeting identity. The whole trial collapses causing public outcry, and the hope of the victim who had given her testimony for the promise of justice is betrayed. It seems to me that at this point the question of the “social imaginary” enters the aesthetic realm of Fluck’s “articulation effect.” The philosopher Charles Taylor defines the social imaginary as “the ways people imagine their social existence (…) the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23). The ideal of justice is part of this set of imagined ideas that bind a society together, and Taylor defines its place as follows: “the image of order carries a definition not only of what is right, but of the context in which it makes sense to strive for and hope to realize the right (at least partially)” (9). But what happens to the ideal of justice, Intimacies asks, when the context is such that the points of reference are blurred? The breakdown of the trial, in my reading, illustrates the problem of a “social imaginary” seen in a transnational dimension, and it translates into an empty “articulation effect” on the part of protagonist and reader alike as there might not (yet) be a transnational “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s term. 5 As such, it may well provide a rather bleak answer to the questions that the editors of the volume The Imaginary and Its Worlds raise: “How do the centrifugal forces of globalization affect the cultural and social productivity of the imaginary? (…) How does the transnational framework alter the imaginary’s work of interlacing interiority and exterior conditions? ” (Bieger, Saldívar, Voelz xi-xii). In a private discussion at their final meeting, the former president, now acquitted of the charges against him, turns the tables and accuses the narrator of complicity in the power play of the institution she serves and, pointing out her Japanese American background, of ignoring the historical burden of this 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 123 twofold heritage. He ends with the accusation “You are no better than me” (212), which the narrator feels is true and to which she thus has no answer. In a state of complete agitation and feeling of utterly powerless, the narrator leaves the scene and calls her mother who tells her that, as a small child, she had already been to The Hague, and that she then had always enjoyed the flavor of a particular food. Upon hearing this, the narrator records a strong bodily feeling of recognition. So it is that which remains in the end: a return to the body as a last refuge which can be anchored to a place through corporeal sensations. The narrator’s experience of powerlessness, it seems to me, can also be read along the lines of Sianne Ngai’s investigation of obstructed agency in “ugly feelings,” which she understands as “allegories for an autonomous or bourgeois art’s increasingly resigned and pessimistic understanding of its own relationship to political action” (3). And that, in my view, is the situation that Intimacies explores in great detail, where the see-saw movement comes to a standstill - for the protagonist, but also for the reader. Work Cited Alma, Hans, and Guido Vanheeswijck, ed. Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World. Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bieger, Laura, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz, Ed. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013. Cha, Steph. “Katie Kitamura complicates the narrative.” Los Angeles Times 20 July 2021. Web. 9 May 2023. <https: / / www.latimes.com/ entertainment-arts/ books/ story/ 2021-0 7-20/ katie-kitamura-interprets-the-world>. Chase, Greg. “Intimacies.” Harvard Review Online 16 October 2021. Web. 9 May 2023. <h ttps: / / www.harvardreview.org/ book-review/ intimacies/ >. Cheuk, Leland. “Fascinating, Mysterious ‘Intimacies’ Doesn’t Let Readers Get Close Enough.” NPR 22 July 2021. Web. 9 May 2023. <https: / / www.npr.org/ 2021/ 07/ 22/ 1018 978359/ fascinating-mysterious-intimacies-doesnt-let-readers-get-close-enough>. Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. ---. “Fiction and Justice.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2009. 385-408. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 124 Susanne Rohr ---. “Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsge‐ schichte.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 365-384. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Kitamura, Katie. Intimacies. New York: Riverhead Books, 2021. “Mayor of The Hague Apologizes for the City’s Past History with Slavery.” NL Times 20 Nov. 2022. Web. 9 May 2023. <https: / / nltimes.nl/ 2022/ 11/ 20/ mayor-hague-apologizes -citys-past-history-slavery>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Saldívar, Ramón. “Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America.” The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn. Ed. 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