About the Book
Crossing Borders is a gathering of twenty original, interdisciplinary essays on the paradigm of borders in African American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. studies, and South Asian studies. These essays by established and mid-career scholars from around the globe employ a variety of approaches to the idea of “border crossings” and represent important contributions to the discourses on modernity, diasporic mobility, populism, migration, exile, sub-nation, trans-nation, as well as the formation of nationalities, communities, and identities. Borders, in these contexts, signify social and national inequities and hierarchies and also the ways to challenge and transgress entrenched barriers sanctioned by habit, custom, and law. The volume also honors and celebrates the life and work of Amritjit Singh as a teacher, mentor, author, scholar, and editor over half a century.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Tapan Basu and Tasneem Shahnaaz
Part I: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents
1 Out of Line: Shifting Border Paradigms in Cooper, Morrison, and Yamashita
Silvia Schultermandl
2 Wave or Particle?: Crossing Borders in Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013)
Peter Schmidt
3 Translating across the Borders: Sui Sin Far and Other Interethnic/Interstitial Asian American Subjects
Martha J. Cutter
4 Dancing with Italians: Chicago’s Italians in Fact, and in the Fiction of Willard Motley
Fred Gardaphe
Part II: Nation and Sub-Nation
5 Creating Kashmir: Gender, Politics, and Violence in Meena Arora Nayak’s Endless Rain
Robin E. Field
6 Drawing the Durand Line: Pakistani Afghans, Borders, and Transnational Insecurity
Zubeda Jalalzai
7 Teaching Giovanni’s Room in the Shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Denaturalizing Privilege
Catherine Rottenberg
Part III: Diaspora and Trans-Nation
8 Diasporic Subjectivity: Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s Caste and Outcast and Sadhu Singh Dhami’s Maluka
Nalini Iyer
9 A Partition without Borders: Diasporic Readings of Clear Light of Day and Train to Pakistan
Rahul K. Gairola
10 Caste, Race, and Intellectual History: Notes on a Singular Modernity
Auritro Majumder
Part IV: Gendered Identities
11 Jessie Fauset and the Historiography of the Harlem Renaissance
Cheryl A. Wall
12 Space and the Shape of a Life: Placing Nella Larsen
Thadious M. Davis
13 The Sexual Commodities, Racial Economies, and Critical Oversights of Felice Swados’s House of Fury
Ayesha K. Hardison
Part V: Art: Between the Popular and the Populist
14 Langston Hughes and the Challenges of Populist Art
Arnold Rampersad
15 Orality, History, and Narration: The Aesthetics of Listening
Jasbir Jain
16 Romare Bearden’s Li’l Dan the Drummer Boy: Coloring a Story of the Civil War
Robert B. Stepto
Part VI: Journeys across Art and Life
17 “Heritage” in America: A Literary Stroll
Werner Sollors
18 What Is Ralph Ellison All About?: A Retrospective View
Charles Johnson
19 Writing across Borders: Race and Gender in Elleke Boehmer’s Fiction
Lynda Ng
20 A Native Son Abroad: A Conversation with Amritjit Singh
Nibir K. Ghosh
Epilogue: Amritjit Singh: Reflections and Stories
Rajiva Verma, Ved Prakash, Houston A. Baker, Roshni
Rustomji-Kerns, K. D. Verma, David Ray, Judy Ray, Meena
Alexander, J. N. Sharma, Sachidananda Mohanty, Pradyumna
S. Chauhan, Malashri Lal, Sudhi Rajiv, Tapan Basu, Daniel M.
Scott, Joseph A. Conforti, Richard Olmstead, Barbara A.
Silliman, Zubeda Jalalzai, Gert Buelens, Robert Elliot Fox,
Bruce Dick, C. Lok Chua, Wendy Barker, Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni, John C. Hawley, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Samina
Najmi, Rajini Srikanth, Nita N. Kumar, Altaf Ullah Khan,
Marsha L. Dutton, Vladimir Marchenkov, Richard A. Courage,
Heba Sharobeem and Ira Dworkin
Index
About the Editors and Contributors
About the Author :
Tapan Basu is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Delhi.
Tasneem Shahnaaz is associate professor in the Department of English, Sri Aurobindo College, University of Delhi.
Review :
Readers will easily conclude that Singh is not only beloved by the participants gathered in these pages, but deeply respected.. . . . A forty-six-page appendix to the volume includes reminiscences (all warm, some straight-laced, some funny) of Amritjit Singh by a healthy number of prominent scholars and writers, including K.D. Verma, Meena Alexander, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Houston A. Baker, John C. Hawley, and Marsha L. Dutton. These, along with a tight preface, thoughtful introduction, a thorough index, and ample biographies of all contributors, help make this carefully edited volume of essays a fitting and invaluable tribute to Singh.
From its title to its delightful stories, Crossing Borders speaks perfectly to the rich contributions Amrit has made to literary study. It crosses borders of identity, nation, and art in ways that open our eyes—and our minds—to the multiple cultures he has been so instrumental in enabling us to see and to engage. A brilliant festschrift to celebrate the importance of Amritjit Singh’s work—and also his life as a colleague and friend.
Crossing Borders promises to be one of the most exciting publishing events in the academy in a decade, inscribing a long overdue tribute to Amritjit Singh, one of my finest colleagues and a leading humanist scholar of his generation. That Amrit is the subject of honor here is itself remarkable testimony to the real and symbolic value of different cultural subjects gathering across borders to express their affectionate regard for an unrelenting worker in the ‘contact zone’ of a plethora of cultures.
A rigorous, coherent, and superbly timed collection of essays, Crossing Borders pays rich and eloquent tribute to Professor Amritjit Singh’s distinguished and ongoing contributions to perennial ‘border crossings’ and does justice not just to the uniqueness of Amritjit’s conjunctural presence and significance as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual, but also to the themes and issues that have constituted his cosmopolitan agenda over the years.
This excellent collection of essays does the nearly impossible task of representing both the depth and range of Amritjit Singh’s work, extending across national borders, historical periods, and literary boundaries to represent an incredibly broad range of topics that, in the end, all seem intricately interconnected. Singh’s work has been a challenge to those less willing to follow those global and historical dynamics, and Crossing Borders, including essays by many of the best scholars working in these fields today, is a gift and an example for all those who have taken up Singh’s call to action.
Amritjit Singh is a respected scholar, teacher, and friend. This fine collection of essays is a tribute to Amrit’s personal courage and intellectual willingness to transgress borders and establish a common humanity with people everywhere. These are important attributes in our times when people want to assert their differences than seek a conversation which is always inconclusive. Maybe the question King Vikramaditya asks in an ancient text of moral riddles best describes Amrit’s life-history: “What country is foreign to the learned?”
In this imagined salon of notable international scholars joined by their friendship and admiration for Amritjit Singh, transnational studies and border studies intersect with feminist recuperation of historical oversights, South-Asian remappings, and African American literary analyses to explore the permeability of race and other borders. Highly recommended.
In order to understand the scope and breadth of Amritjit Singh’s contributions to global letters, one need only look at the list of contributors, who are among the most important voices in the field. Indeed, Crossing Borders makes a strong and persuasive argument that African American literary and cultural studies is a global project taking place in multiple locations both inside and outside the U.S. Beyond a doubt, Amrit has been witness to myriad configurations of knowledge production—including multiculturalism, gender studies, transnationalism, and literary historiography.
