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This volume stems from the idea that the notion of borders and borderlines as clear-cut frontiers separating not only political and geographical areas, but also cultural, linguistic and semiotic spaces, does not fully address the complexity of contemporary cultural encounters. Centering on a whole range of literary works from the United States and the Caribbean, the contributors suggest and discuss different theoretical and methodological grounds to address the literary production taking place across the lines in North American and Caribbean culture. The volume represents a pioneering attempt at proposing the concept of the border as a useful paradigm not only for the study of Chicano literature but also for the other American literatures. The works presented in the volume illustrate various aspects and manifestations of the textual border(lands), and explore the double-voiced discourse of border texts by writers like Harriet E. Wilson, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Helena Viramontes, Paule Marshall and Monica Sone, among others. This book is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of comparative American studies and ethnic studies.
Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English offers a constructive dialogue on the concept of the transmodern, focusing on the works by very different contemporary authors from all over the world, such as: Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Barry, A. S. Byatt, Tabish Khair, David Mitchell, Alice Munroe, Harry Parker, Caryl Phillips, Richard Rodriguez, Alan Spence, Tim Winton and Kenneth White. The volume offers a thorough questioning of the concept of the transmodern, as well as an informed insight into the future formal and thematic development of literatures in English.
All civilisations have both feared and been fascinated by what lies beyond their limits, and have to a greater or lesser extent construed their “others” as exotics. Given that, even in its most consumerist fashion, the adoption of the exotic goes back a long way, what, then —if anything— is new in contemporary versions of exoticism? This volume attempts to offer some answers to this question. The first of its three sections serves as an extended introduction to the concept and practice of exoticism, considering the phenomenon from a number of theoretical and critical positions, explicitly examining —sometimes via significant examples— the particular attributes of exoticism. The second and third sections are more strictly text-based, relying on the analysis of specific instances of film in the former and literature in the latter, in order to tease out some specific uses of the exotic –whether ethnic, gendered, sexual or other. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in the fields of representation, cultural theory, postcolonialism, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, cinema and literature.
This new number of the series is a compilation of ten articles by members or collaborators of the research team in International Migrations of the University of Deusto, belonging to the European network of excellence IMISCOE (International Migration, Social Integration and Cohesion in Europe).
This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge...
This book presents papers by eleven European scholars that explore the ambivalent representations of an American West that follows “no single trajectory, creating instead a series of lines and rhythms, always moving, crossing, and folding” (Neil Campbell). The papers explore the use of the American West as an ideal or a realistic setting in different cultural productions, ranging from music (“Sing-along Melodies of the West”) to film (“Western Images in Motion”) or comics (“Graphic Representations of the American West”), and including popular cultural fields like podcasts, fashion, and gastronomy (“Performing the West”).
Writing from a vantage point that respects tribal specificities and Indigenous sovereignty, the essays in this volume consider the relational place-worlds crafted by the Native American authors Louise Erdrich, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gordon Henry Jr., Louis Owens, James Welch, Heid E. Erdrich, Ofelia Zepeda, and Simon J. Ortiz. Each is set in conversation with kindred writers and larger sociopolitical debates in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The shared aim is to decolonize academic methodologies and disciplines across the Atlantic by tracing the creative, spiritual, and intellectual networks that Native writers have established with other communities at home and around the world. Key issues to arise include Native American/Indigenous theories and literary practices that center on relationality, the planetary turn, grounded normativity, trans-Indigeneity, transborder identities, movement, journeying, migration, multilingualism, genomic research, futurity, ecology, and justice.
JosT Bastos is an associate professor of anthropology at the New University of Lisbon. --
Studies of literary reflections on ethnicity are essential to the ever-renewed definition of Canadian literature. The essays in this collection explore the diverse ways of negotiating identity and the articulation of space in Canada, taking ethnicity as a driving force with ideological and cultural implications that lend public and literary discourse an urgent dynamism. While theorizing ethnicity is a valuable critical enterprise, these essays centre on the concrete realization of the problematics of ethnicity in creative writing, covering a wide range of Canada's mosaic. The creative inscription of ethnicity stimulates the evolution and expansion of Canada's literary heritage, the complexit...
The story of the American West is that of a journey. It is the story of a movement, of a geographical and human transition, of the delineation of a route that would soon become a rooted myth. The story of the American West has similarly journeyed across boundaries, in a two-way movement, sometimes feeding the idea of that myth, sometimes challenging it. This collection of essays relates to the notion of the traveling essence of the myth of the American West from different geographical and disciplinary standpoints. The volume originates in Europe, in Spain, where the myth traveled, was received, assimilated, and re-presented. It intends to travel back to the West, in a two-way cross-cultural journey, which will hopefully contribute to the delineation of the New—always self-renewing—American West. It includes the work of authors of both sides of the Atlantic ocean who propose a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary dialogue upon the idea, the geography and the representation of the American West.