Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse

Mobility, Space, and Resistance: Transformative Spatiality in Literary and Political Discourse draws from various disciplines—such as geography, sociology, political science, gender studies, and poststructuralist thought—to posit the productive capabilities of literature in political action and at the same time show how literary art can resist the imposition and domination of oppressive systems of our spatial lives. The various approaches, topics, and types of literature discussed in this volume display a concern for social issues that can be addressed in and through literature. The essays address social injustice, oppression, discrimination, and their spatial representations. While offering interpretations of literature, this collection seeks to show how literary spaces contribute to understanding, changing, or challenging physical spaces of our lived world.

1: Introduction: Resistance, the Outside, and the Creative Act, Christian Beck.- Part I: Mobility and Travel.- 1: The Chivalrous Nation: Travel and Ideological Exchange in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.- 2: Conjuring Roots in Dystopia: Reconciling Transgenerational Conflict in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying.- 3: Matriarchal Mobility: Generational Displacement and (En)Gendered Place in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.- 4: Colonial Advertising and Tourism in the Crosscurrents of Empire.- 5: Mobility and Remapping borders in Palestinian Women’s Literature: Narratives of Resistance and Survival.- Part II: Backgrounds and Interiors.- 6: Interiorized Imperialism in Native American and Japanese American World War II Narratives.- 7: Turning the Earth, Changing the Narrative: Spatial Transformation in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892).- 9: Woolf in the Background: Distance as Visual Philosophy, Then and Now.- 10: Representing the Slum in African Literatures: The Contingency of Political Possibility.- Part III: Radical Positions.- 11: A New Cartographer: Rabih Alameddine and An Unnecessary Woman.- 12: Spaces of Resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels.- 13: Trans(it) Spaces and Intimacy: A Literary Analysis of Chicu’s Soliloquy.- 14: “A Spring of Pure Possibility”: Harlem, Palestine, and Chester Himes’s “Literature of Combat”.- 15: Counter-narratives of Inevitability: Anti-capitalism and the Near Future in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God.