Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film

This book examines the spatial morphologies represented in a wide range of contemporary ethnic American literary and cinematic works. Drawing from Henri Lefebvres theorization of space as a living organism, Edward Sojas writings on the postmetropolis, Marc Augs notion of the non-place, Manuel Castells space of flows, and Michel de Certeaus theories of walking as a practice, the volume extends previous theorizations by examining how spatial uses, appropriations, strictures, ruptures, and reconfigurations function in literary texts and films that represent inhabitants of racial-ethnic borderlands and migrational U.S. cities. The authors argue for the necessity of an alternative poetics of place that makes room for those who move beyond the spaces of traditional visibilitydisplaced and homeless people, undocumented workers, hybrid and/or marginalized populations rendered invisible by the cultural elite, yet often disciplined by agents of surveillance. Building upon Doreen Masseys conceptualization of liminal space as a sphere in which narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate, this study recasts spatial paradigms to insert an array of emergent geographies of invisibility that the volume traverses via the analysis of works by Chuck Palahniuk, Helena Viramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gloria Anzalda, Alejandro Morales, and Li-Young Lee, among others, and films such as Thomas McCarthys The Visitor, Steven Spielbergs The Terminal, and Alejandro Gonzalez Irritus Babel.