Borderlands and Liminal Subjects

Borders are essentially imaginary structures, but their effects are very real. This volume explores both geopolitical and conceptual borders through an interdisciplinary lens, bridging the disciplines of philosophy and literature. With contributions from scholars around the world, this collection closely examines the concepts of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality in order to reveal the paradoxical ambiguities inherent in these seemingly solid binary oppositions, while critiquing structures of power that produce and police these borders. As a political paradigm, liminality may be embraced by marginal subjects and communities, further blurring the boundaries between oppressive distinctions and categories.

Auteur

Jessica Elbert Decker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University San Marcos, USA. Her current research investigates the symbolic structures of western patriarchy, especially as they appear in ancient philosophy, mythology, and psychoanalysis.

Dylan Winchock is a lecturer for the Literature & Writing and Liberal Studies programs at California State University San Marcos, USA. His scholarship focuses on contemporary literature and the emergence of borderlands as sites of hegemonic struggle in city space. His most recent project is a critique of utopian fantasies in literature.

Contenu

Introduction: Borderlands and Liminality Across Philosophy and Literature.- Ethics at the Border: Transmitting Migrant Experiences.- Land, Territory and Border: Liminality in Contemporary Israeli Literature.- Zones of Maximal Translatability: Borderspace and Women's Time.- A Search for Colonial Histories: The Conquest by Yxta Maya Murray.- Transforming Borders: Resistant Liminality in Beloved, Song of Solomon, and Paradise.- Gone Over on the Other Side: Passing in Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars.- Queering and Gendering Aztlán: Anzaldúa's Feminist Reshaping of the Chicana/o Nation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.- Achilles and the (Sexual) History of Being.- Borderland Spaces of the Third Kind: Erotic Agency in Plato and Octavia Butler.- Alice's Parallel Series: Carroll, Deleuze, and the 'Stuttering Sense' of the World.- Cultural Liminality: Gender, Identity, and Margin in the Uncanny Stories of Elizabeth Bowen.- Crossing the Utopian / Apocalyptic Border: The Anxiety of Forgetting in Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things.