Post-National Enquiries Essays on Ethnic and Racial Border Crossings

The studies collected in this volume address a variety of cultural narratives of diverse border crossings. Through their focus on various historical and contemporary border phenomena in Europe and the United States, the essays show that the border-crossing migrant challenges the view that people belong to one particular nation-state and culture. The essays in the first part of the volume explore of the problematics of “race” in theoretical and practical border crossings including the theories of sociologist Paul Gilroy, multicultural casting in American theatre, and the fiction of James Baldwin. In the second part the focus is on encounters with whiteness and problems of constructing ethnic identity in the cinema of Elia Kazan, Jewish American fiction, and Toni Morrison’s most recent novel A Mercy (2008). The third part of the volume explores the sites and practices of border by providing case analyses of the Muslim veil in Europe and the Finnish-Russian border. The final part of the volume is devoted to the problematization of borders in the fiction of the South Asian American writer Bharati Mukherjee.