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Globalization and transnationalism have reshaped our communities and their borderlines. Communities exceed fixed boundaries, existing instead in the liminal spaces where narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate. These liminal spaces-physical and virtual, local and global-provide opportunities for diversifying discussions on diaspora, cultural hybridity, and ethnic identity. Ethnic women writers make significant contributions to this dialogue regarding the reconfiguration of people and their perimeters.
A multigenre and multicultural text, Community Boundaries and Border Crossings explores the novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies, testimonios, plays, poems, and hybrid poetics of established and emerging ethnic women writers. This collection of critical essays highlights the new zones of cultural contact and exchange that are defining the twenty-first century. Each chapter reflects an awareness of cultural changes and challenges, engaging readers in a richly productive conversation concerning the interconnectedness of border crossings and community boundaries.
List of contents
Preface
Kristen Lillvis
Introduction
Molly Fuller
Part One: Deconstructing Boundaries
Language, Matter, Movement: Dynamic Community in Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution
Tana Jean Welch
Solidarity and Simultaneity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose
Kristen Lillvis
Border Transgression, Adolescent Transition, and the Quest for Justice in Louise Erdrich's The Round House
Molly Fuller
Part Two: Intra-spaces and Liminality
The Modernist Aesthetic and the Immigrant: Anzia Yezierska's Communities of Countrymen
Jana Tigchelaar
"Life Between Cultures": Reconfiguring the Community in the Young Adult Novels of Mitali Perkins
Hannah Swamidoss
Zora Neale Hurston's Differential Consciousness
Kate Nygren
Oppositional Identities and the Mestiz@ Writer
Sarah A. Chavez
Part Three: Diaspora and Disruption
"Take Plight's Sure Paradoxes With You. Jump.": Dismantling Canons and Transcending Gender Constructs in the Poems of Colette Bryce and Sinéad Morrissey
Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh
What Recognition? Authenticity, Agency, and Responsibility in Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field
Lydia Efthymia Roupakia
Palestinian Women's Life Narrative: Identity, Resistance, and the Politics of Belonging
Leila Aouadi
Border Crossing in British Anglophone Arab Women's Narratives: Issues of Home, Diaspora, and In-betweenness
Dallel Sarnou
About the author
Kristen Lillvis is associate professor of English at Marshall University.
Robert Miltner is professor of English at Kent State University at Stark.
Molly Fuller is teaching fellow in literature at Kent State University.
Summary
Through the overarching interconnected themes of community boundaries and border crossings, this collection explores issues of diaspora, trans-nationality, cultural hybridity, home, and identity that are central to ethnic women writers.
