»DOwnLoAd. Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Society in Honor of Amritjit Singh Ebook. by Tapan Basu

Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Society in Honor of Amritjit Singh

This collection of original essays by eminent scholars in multi-ethnic U.S. and South Asian Studies, many of whom lean on postcolonial theory, centers on the idea of -crossing borders, - a paradigm that is critical to discourses of modernity, diaspora, exile, and trans-nation, as well as to the formation of nations, communities and identities. The essays are premised upon a recognition that although we live presumably in a -borderless world, - recurrent recent crises over migrants trapped and dying in international waters demonstrate yet again that borders are still real and that the material existence of individuals, living within and between borders, is fraught with difficulty. As such, nations are much more than -imagined communities- (Benedict Anderson) and the boundaries between nations have real impact on people's lives even though they may also be interrogated as fictional inventions, what Amitav Ghosh calls -shadow lines.- Borders, of course, exist within countries as well, and are in many cases the legacy of the very processes of globalization that have resulted in the movement of individuals and groups of people from one destination to another, within one national border and in different unfamiliar parts of the world. The flip side of the resultant cosmopolitanism is often the longing for what Salman Rushdie has memorably called -imaginary homelands, - translating, sooner or later, into the acknowledgement of spaces of diaspora and trans-nation that both extend and undercut the power of narratives based on nation and its borders. At the same time, the United States, the fabled melting pot of ethnicities, finds itself contending time and time again with the internal obduracy of the -unmeltable ethnics- as Michael Novak terms it. As contemporary events have shown, racial tensions are a persistent reality in the U.S. and India, intersecting with class schisms within the city and between the city and the suburbs. Our collection is thematically eclectic but it retains a disciplinary commonality and we expect it to become an important new contribution to the field.