ABSTRACT

Through specific and rigorous analysis of contemporary literary texts, this book shows how writers from inside affected communities portray indigeneity, displacement, and trauma. In a world of increasing global inequality, this study aims to demonstrate how literature, and the study of it, can effect positive social change, notably in the face of global environmental, economic, and social injustice. This collection brings together a diverse and compelling array of voices from academics leading their fields around the world, to pioneer a new approach to literary analysis anchored in engagement with our changing world.

chapter |4 pages

Socioliterature

Stories as Medicine

part 1|103 pages

Migration

chapter 1|15 pages

Dystopic Dissonance

Migration and Alienation in Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers

chapter 2|17 pages

“Tear Down This Wall”

Borders, Limits, and National Belonging in South Asian Postcolonial Literature

chapter 3|17 pages

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics

Disability, Dispossession, and Diaspora

chapter 4|16 pages

Linda Lê

A Literature of Displacement

chapter 6|19 pages

They Won’t Take Me Alive

Feminist Histories and Literary Journalism in El Salvador

part 2|74 pages

Indigeneity

chapter 7|10 pages

Dreams in a Time of Dystopic Colonialism

Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

chapter 8|16 pages

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory

Forms of Translation in The Sun Dance and El Circo Anahuac

chapter 9|14 pages

Not Lost

“We Are People of the Land. We Are Clay People, People of the Mounds”

chapter 10|16 pages

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance

History and Memory in Easterine Kire’s Novels

chapter 11|16 pages

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures

A Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Novels from Three Continents

part 3|76 pages

Trauma

chapter 12|9 pages

Magical Combat in Central Africa

Kim Nguyen’s War Witch

chapter 13|20 pages

From Bearing to Burying

Enacting Embodied Memories of Darfur Genocide in the Poetry of Emtithal Mahmoud

chapter 14|15 pages

Masculine Failure

Rape Culture and Intergenerational Trauma in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

chapter 15|16 pages

The Technology of Anguish

(Re)Imagining Post-9/11 Trauma in Tamora Pierce’s Fantasy Universes

chapter 16|14 pages

Women with Swords

Reinvention of Female Warriors in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Writings