ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates the differences between related genres such as autoethnography, literacy narratives, and socialization narratives. It defines the LA as a liminal genre as it straddles dichotomies such as the following: narrative and argumentation, personal and scholarly, embodied and analytical. For writers who consider themselves transnational, the genre provides a space to represent their ongoing life trajectory across social boundaries. The chapter presents the transnational LA as located in liminal social fields that characterize mobility. Writers of such LAs attain a realization or footing that helps them consider their literacy trajectories as occurring between and beyond communities. For writers who position themselves as such, becoming emerges as a desirable trope. The genre’s liminality is congenial to such tropes and discourses.
