A Communitarian Politics of Pastiche: Transnational Feminism, Writing, and Citation in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki's sweeping transpacific novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) traverses countries, continents, oceans, and generations and speaks to scholars writing in the fields of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism who have remarked on the ambitious scope of the novel across time, space, cultures, and more. I move beyond the focus on globalization to argue that the most expansive and, ultimately, redemptive connections the novel makes articulate a profoundly feminist, communitarian, and transnational Asian politics grounded in both intergenerational familial relations and, more importantly, in the embodiment of non biological relations within community. The imaginative power of the novel lies not in its ability to connect across space but in the generative potential of the bonds of community and women through feminist interrelationality and, ultimately, its call to action in the face of uncertainty, modeling what I term a communitarian politics of pastiche. The novel's use of intertextuality and metatextuality models a radical feminist interrelationality through a practice that Sara Ahmed calls "feminist citation." Investigating the versions of ventriloquism staged at the novel's multiple different levels—the metatextual and the diegetic—I argue that Ozeki's novel advocates an expansive and generous way of "giving voice"—one that does not attempt to speak over or speak for but instead, through a structure of mutual constitution and feminist citation, speaks to and speaks with—and in so doing, models a form of feminist action in the face of uncertainty. © 2025 MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.