Short description:

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.

Long description:

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.

?The edited volume American Borders: Inclusion and Exclusion in US Culture offers a comprehensive redefinition of the concept of border in the context of the current era of globalization. ? The volume provides a valuable resource for academics and students interested in the representation and current understanding of borders in literature and cinema that impeccably completes the existing literature on the subject.? (Martina Permanyer Rodríguez, nexus, aedean.org, Issue 1, 2024)

Table of Contents:

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 McCarthy?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).