Contents: Preface. Introduction. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. 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. Index.
Crossing Borders is a volume of interdisciplinary essays on the paradigm of borders in African American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. studies, and South Asian studies. Written by established and mid-career scholars from across the world, the essays 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 honours and celebrates the life and work of Amritjit Singh as a teacher, mentor, author, scholar, and editor.
