In recent decades, globalization has led to increased mobility and interconnectedness. For a growing number of people, contemporary life entails new local and transnational interdependencies which transform individual and collective allegiances. Contemporary literature often reflects these changes through its exploration of migrant experiences and transcultural identities. Calling into question traditional definitions of culture, many recent works of poetry and prose fiction go beyond the spatial boundaries of a given state, emphasizing instead the mixing and collision of languages, cultures, and identities. In doing so, they also challenge recent and contemporary discourses about cultural identities, fostering a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of identity-formation processes in diverse transcultural frameworks. This volume analyses how traditional understandings of culture, as well as literary representations of identity constructs, can be reconceptualized from a transcultural perspective. In four thematic sections focusing on migration, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and literary translingualism, the twelve essays included in this volume explore various facets of transculturality in contemporary poetry and fiction from around the world. Contributors: Malin Lidström Brock, Katherina Dodou, Pilar Cuder–Domínguez, Stefan Helgesson, Christoph Houswitschka, Carly McLaughlin, Kristin Rebien, J.B. Rollins, Karen L. Ryan, Eric Sellin, Mats Tegmark, Carmen Zamorano Llena. Irene Gilsenan Nordin is Professor of English Literature at Dalarna University, Sweden. She is founder and director of DUCIS (Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies) and leads Dalarna University’s Transcultural Identities research group. Julie Hansen is Research Fellow at the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies and teaches Russian literature in the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University, Sweden. Carmen Zamorano Llena is Associate Professor of English Literature at Dalarna University, Sweden, and member of Dalarna University’s Transcultural Identities research group.

Mobility has become one of the most exciting factors shaping our transnational and transcultural world today. However, the variety of approaches and stimulating debates it has engendered in geopolitics and sociology make it challenging for literary and cultural critics to establish solid approaches and own vocabularies. Through a variety of case studies written by international contributors, this volume addresses emerging topics by using the tools of border studies, postcolonial discourse, and globalization theory. The multiple perspectives provided here emphasize the interaction between migrants and hosts as material, discursive, and historical. The chapters in this volume view identities as mobile and in constant flux, constructed and reconstructed repeatedly in historical and cultural encounters with several others. As a result of this dynamic, established stereotypes and images are challenged and revised in the analyses here. The book concludes that cultural identities are increasingly visible as results of large-scale global mobility. In so doing, it challenges views that address ethnicity as an unambiguous category and reveals that the making of such identities is contradictory and even conflicting.

This book addresses a topic of increasing importance to artists, art historians and scholars of cultural studies, migration studies and international relations: migration as a profoundly transforming force that has remodelled artistic and art institutional practices across the world. It explores contemporary art’s critical engagement with migration and globalisation as a key source for improving our understanding of how these processes transform identities, cultures, institutions and geopolitics. The author explores three interwoven issues of enduring interest: identity and belonging, institutional visibility and recognition of migrant artists, and the interrelations between aesthetics and politics, including the balancing of aesthetics, politics and ethics in representations of forced migration.

In this era of increasing global mobility, identities are too complex to be captured by concepts that rely on national borders for reference. Such identities are not unified or stable, but are fluid entities which constantly push at the boundaries of the nation-state, thereby re-defining themselves and the nation-state simultaneously. Contemporary literature pays specific attention to internal and external notions of belonging ("Politics of Motion") and definitions of self resulting from interpersonal relationships ("Politics of Longing"). This collection looks at texts by authors who are British, American, or Canadian, but for whom a self-definition according national parameters is insufficient.

We are in the midst of the third tectonic social transformation in human history. Our current transition toward greater forms of transnational interconnection, consumption- and finance-driven rather than production-based capitalism, digital information and cultural flows, and the attendant large-scale social and ecological consequences of these are drastically remaking our world, cultural producers from across the globe are seeking to make sense of, and provide insights into, these complex changes. Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Fiction takes a broad cross-cultural approach to analyzing the literature of our increasingly transnationalized world system, considering how its key constituent features and local-level manifestations have been thematized and imaginatively seized upon by literary fiction produced from the perspective of the periphery of the capitalist world system. Textual renderings of globalization are not simply second-order approximations of it, but constitutive elements of globalization that condition how it will be understood and responded to, and so coming to terms with the narrativizations of globalization is vital scholarly work, as, among other things, it allows us to see to what extent it is currently possible to imagine alternatives to globalization’s more baleful aspects. This work will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of areas including contemporary literary/cultural studies, globalization studies, international relations, and international political economy.

This book offers captivating insights into the interaction between the Indian and the American cultural worlds. A fascinating work of research, it illustrates an extraordinary capacity to employ the details of literary texts as significant clues in understanding the configuration of transcultural identities. The book constructs an exciting dialogue between complex theoretical notions and the vibrant fictional worlds populated by Indian, American and European characters. Its original and multi-layered approach illustrates how complex theories of culture can help the reader understand contemporary processes of migration, cultural change and gender identity that interfere with daily life.