Transgressions

In our time capitalist globalization and an increasing sense of social and cultural interconnectedness have worked together to undermine territorially defined national and individual identities. Increasingly, people and persons are finding themselves multiply positioned, experiencing and maintaining meaningful relations to more than one location, tradition, cultural or social praxis. The essays collected in this book take their starting point from this situation. They focus on a transgressive perspectives and practices, on the dualistic experiences of postcolonial difference and conflict at the interstices between roots and routes, between essentialist and flexible identity constructions. Hence, these essays throw a fresh light on questions of ethnicity, identity, and narration no longer located in the circumscribed space of the nation, but increasingly on the move, like the people themselves, displaced by migrancy or exile. This collection of cutting-edge new scholarship covers a broad selection of cultural practices and literary works on a comparative basis: ranging from Black British art, early British orientalists, to postcolonial Indian novels, Indian diasporic constructions in the US, Australian and Chicano performances. It contains essays by experienced critics plus work by up-and-coming new voices.