Abstract: Multiple meanings of floating signifiers which have been blocked in the contact zone or border zone of transnational literature are waiting for us to transgress, transmigrate, transport, and translate. There are abundant cases of bridges which gather as a passage that crosses the transnational boundaries from which something begins in its presencing. The bridges which represent the interstices of “beyond” produce the complex figures such as ethnicity of difference and identity, temporality of past and present, spatiality of inside and outside, and linguisticity of inclusion and exclusion. My contention is that transnationalism is a structural bridge which refers to the “beyond” of the boundary of a single nation-state in terms of moving in international migration, beyond the space of the Other in which doubling transcultural experience begins to unfold. Transnational literature, represented by such ethnic and linguistic borderland works of Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Chang-Rae Lee, and British-Canadian-Caribbean Louise Bennet, execute the crossing of the boundary in culture, going beyond and returning to the present in cultural borderlands. Their minds in their transnational context reveal and disreveal the complex figures of the boundary, thereby demonstrating the estrange sense of the unhomeliness by way of cultural translation.

Key words: border crossing, cultural translation, transnationalism, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Louise Bennett