American Borders: Inclusion and Exclusion in US Culture provides an overview of American culture produced in a range of contexts, from the founding of the nation to the age of globalization and neoliberalism, in order to understand the diverse literary landscapes of the United States from a twenty-first century perspective. The authors confront American exceptionalism, discourses on freedom and democracy, and US foundational narratives by reassessing the literary canon and exploring ethnic literature, culture, and film with a focus on identity and exclusion. Their contributions envision different manifestations of conviviality and estrangement and deconstruct neoliberal slogans, analyzing hospitable inclusion in relation to national history and ideologies. By looking at representations of foreignness and conditional belonging in literature and film from different ethnic traditions, the volume fleshes out a new border dialectic that conveys the heterogeneity of American boundaries beyond the opposition inside/outside.
Table of Content
Introduction: Beyond Borders. Inclusion and Exclusion in American Culture.- Isamu: Becoming Nisei.-
Part I. Perpetuating Otherness. Relocation to the Outside Within .- “Don’t Fence Me In”: Interiorized Outsides and Japanese American Concentration Camps.- The Resonance of the Hostage Crisis in
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2004) and the Limits of Hospitality.- Cartographies of Inclusion/Exclusion and Contested Belongings in Raquel Cepeda’s
Bird of Paradise: How I Became a Latina.-
Part II. Beyond Sovereign Frames: Contesting Imaginaries and National Myths .- Foreigners in their Own Land: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Creation of Tolerated Strangers.- E Pluribus Unum?: Disintegrating the Melting Pot Myth in American Science Fiction Narratives of National Fragmentation.- Inhospitable Homelands: Practices of Inclusion and Exclusion in African American War Narratives.- Monsters or Men?: Guillermo del Toro’s Allegories of American Othering in
The Shape of Water.-
Part III. Welcoming the Stranger Inside?: Exclusive Inclusion in the Age of Neoliberalism .- Strangers in the Homeland: Dystopic (in)Hospitality in Mc Carthy’s
The Road.- Riding the Beast: Of Borders, Aliens, and Hospitality in Valeria Luiselli’s
Lost Children Archive (2019) and
Tell Me How It Ends (2017).- Grief, Hospitality, and the Frontier in Chloé Zhao’s
Nomadland (2020).- Nonsecular Thirdspaces in Ayad Akhtar’s
American Dervish and
Homeland Elegies.- The Ugly Guy (Novel Excerpt).
About the author
Paula Barba Guerrero is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include African American literature, space studies, memory, nostalgia, and speculative fiction.Mónica Fernández Jiménez holds a Ph D in English from the University of Valladolid, Spain, and currently works as a translator in England. Her research interests include Caribbean literature, Postcolonial Studies, American imperialism, and ecocriticism.
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