Community Boundaries and Border Crossings: Critical Essays on Ethnic Women Writers(Transforming Literary Studies)

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.

Table 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.