Studies on foreignness have increased substantially over the last two decades in response to what has been dubbed the migration/refugee crisis. Yet, they have focused on specific areas such as regions, periods, ethnic groups, and authors. Predicated on the belief that this so-called “twenty-first century problem” is in fact as old as humanity itself, this book analyzes cases based on both long-term historical perspectives and current occurrences from around the world. Bringing together an international group of scholars from Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America, it examines a variety of examples and strategies, mostly from world literatures, ranging from Spain’s failed experience with consolidation as a nation-state-type entity during the Golden Age of Castile, to Shakespeare’s rhetorical subversion of the language of fear and hate, to Mario Rigoni Stern’s random status at the unpredictable Italian-Austrian borders, to Lawrence Durrell’s ambivalent approach to noticing the physically visible other, to the French government’s ongoing criminalization of hospitality, to Sandra Cisneros’s attempt at straddling two countries and cultures while belonging to neither one, to the illusive legal limbo of the DREAMers in the United States. We are not born foreigners; we are made. The purpose of the book is to assert, as denoted by the title, this fundamental premise, that is, the making of strangers is the result of a deliberate and purposeful act that has social, political, and linguistic implications. The ultimate expression of this phenomenon is the compulsive labeling of people along artificial categories such as race, gender, religion, birthplace, or nationality. A corollary purpose of the book is to help shed light worldwide on one of the most pressing issues facing the world today: the place of “the other” amid fear-mongering and unabashedly contemptuous acts and rhetoric toward immigrants, refugees and all those excluded within because of race, gender, national origin, religion and ethnicity. As illustrated by the examples examined in this book, humans have certainly evolved in many areas; dealing with the “other” might not have been one of those. It is hoped that the book encourages reflection on how the arts, and especially world literatures, can help us navigate and think through the ever-present crisis: the place of the “stranger” among us.

Claims that Shakespeare resists an emergent, exclusionary post-reformation ideology of 'true' Englishness in his early plays.

This book examines how the Calais Jungle posed and addressed the European Question. The issue of who and what counts as European was articulated through this makeshift camp. The book argues that the Jungle acquired meaning as a localised struggle to define territory, borders, rights and refugees in Europe. Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad is used as a framing device for analysis. Discourses of tropicality are shown to produce the Jungle in terms of a postcolonial space of exception. This representational space fused bodies and environment in racialised ways. Attention is then drawn to assemblages that gave rise to political subjectivity, which partially elided a Eurocentric prism of rights. Here, the book explores how a ‘right to the jungle’ was generated via relations between refugees, aid workers and material objects—constituting the Jungle as a space of representation. Finally, intimate life in, and beyond, the Jungle is examined as a spatial practice that contests the EU border regime.

Assessing his work in the context of film aesthetics, philosophy, history, adaptation studies and cultural studies, this is the first book-length English-language anthology about this important director's cinema, offering a wide range of perspectives by a diverse range of international scholars.

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

This book connects the history of immigration with histories of Native Americans, African Americans, women, the poor, Latino/a Americans and Asian Americans.

Whilst many undocumented migrants in the United States continue to exist in the shadows, since the turn of the millennium an increasing number have emerged within public debate, casting themselves against the dominant discursive trope of the "illegal alien," and entering the struggle over political self-representation. Drawing on a range of life narratives published from 2001 to 2016, this book explores how undocumented migrants have represented themselves in various narrative forms in the context of the DREAM Act and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) movement. By reading these self-representations as both a product of America's changing views on citizenship and membership, and an arena where such views can potentially be challenged, the book interrogates the role such self-representations have played not only in constructing undocumented migrant identities, but also in shaping social borders. At a time when the inclusion and exclusion of (potential) citizens is once again highly debated in the United States, the book concludes by giving a potential indication of where views on undocumented migration might be headed. This interdisciplinary exploration of migrant narratives will be of interest to scholars and researchers across American Literary and Cultural Studies, Citizenship Studies, and Ethnic and Migration Studies.