Monolingual, monolithic English is an issue of the past. In this collection, by using cinema, poetry, art, and novels we demonstrate that English has become the heteroglossic language of immigration – Englishes of exile. By appropriating its plural form we pay respect to all those who have been improving standard English, thus proving that one may be born in a language as well as give birth to a language or add to it one’s own version. The story of the immigrant, refugee, exile, expatriate is everybody’s story, and without migration, we could not evolve our human race.

Written by leading international scholars, this book surveys transnational dimensions of graphic narratives, covering popular comics and graphic novels from the USA, Asia and Europe.

Recently, "trans" has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. As a prefix, "trans" can attach itself to other words to express or describe movement and change, as it does in the terms "transnational" or "transmedia." Trans is also an adjective when it is part of a word that signifies an identity or expression. Trans has worked as an adjective to destabilize established ideas about gender as it makes new senses of what gender can mean for trans people. Much of the study of life writing is about the study of identity and the possibilities for lives that stories of identity make possible. In that spirit, Trans Narratives: trans, transmedia, transnational represents an opportunity for critical work about life writing by trans people to be featured, as it seeks to interrogate the idea of trans in multiple registers, bringing a prefix to the center of the current field of life-writing studies. It aims to understand through life writing and its theory what trans means when we talk about identities and bodies, and to understand better what the critical terms transmedia and transnational can mean for the field of life writing. The Chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Transnational Latina Narratives is the first critical study of its kind to examine twenty-first-century Latina narratives by female authors of diverse Latin American heritages based in the U.S. Heredia s comparative perspective on gender, race and migrations between Latin America and the U.S. demonstrates the changing national landscape that needs to accommodate an ever-growing Latino/a presence. This book draws on the work of Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Marta Moreno Vega, Angie Cruz, and Marie Arana, as well as a diverse blend of popular culture. Heredia s thought-provoking insights seek to empower the representation of women who are transnational ambassadors in modern trans-American literature.

This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.

This book provides an innovative insight into the regulatory conundrum of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), deploying transnational legal analysis as a methodological framework to explore the most controversial area of risk governance. The book deconstructs hegemonic and counter-hegemonic transnational narratives on the governance of GMO risks, cutting across US law, EU law, the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, and hybrid standard-setting regimes. Should uncertain risks be run unless adverse effects have been conclusively established, and should regulators only act where this is cost-benefit effective? Should risk managers make a convincing case that a product or process is safe enough for the relevant uncertain risks to be socially acceptable? How can intractable transnational regulatory conflicts be solved? The book complements a close analysis of regulatory frameworks and case law with a more encompassing perspective on the political, socio-economic and distributional implications of different approaches to the regulation of health and environmental risks at times of globalisation. The GMO deadlock thus becomes a lens through which to investigate the underlying value systems, goals, and impacts of transnational discourses on risk governance. Against this backdrop, the normative strand of analysis points to the limited ability of science and procedural deliberation to generate authentic agreement and to identify normatively legitimate solutions, in the absence of pre-existing shared perspectives.

This volume examines the emergence of modern popular culture between the 1830s and the 1860s, when popular storytelling meant serial storytelling and when new printing techniques and an expanding infrastructure brought serial entertainment to the masses. Analyzing fiction and non-fiction narratives from the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Brazil, Popular Culture—Serial Culture offers a transnational perspective on border-crossing serial genres from the roman feuilleton and the city mystery novel to abolitionist gift books and world’s fairs.

This publication contributes to new understandings of how heritage operates as a global phenomenon and the transnational heritage discourses that emerge from this process. Taking such a view sees autochthonous and franchised heritage not as separate or opposing elements but as part of the same process of contemporary globalised identity-making, which contributes to the development of newly emergent cosmopolitan identities. The book critically examines the processes that are involved in the franchising of heritage and its cultural effects. It does so by examining the connections and tensions that emerge from combining autochthonous and franchised heritage in the United Arab Emirates, providing a unique window in to the process of creating hybrid heritage in non-Western contexts. It develops new ideas about how this global phenomenon works, how it might be characterised and how it influences and is itself affected by local forms of heritage. By exploring how autochthonous and franchised heritage is produced in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates it becomes clear that Western-dominated practices are often challenged and, perhaps more importantly, that new ways of understanding, producing and living with heritage are being articulated in these previously marginal locations. The book offers innovative insights into heritage as a transnational process, exploring how it operates within local, national and international identity concerns and debates. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in critical heritage studies, museums, tourism, cultural studies and Middle Eastern studies.

This book makes a major contribution to understanding European politics and identity. It examines how politicians, cultural elites, and other actors fight over Europe’s future with words and stories, telling narratives about European integration in different political, social, and cultural contexts. The chapters explore how actors formulate stories to make sense of Europe’s past and contemporary challenges and to legitimise their own positions and preferences. The contributors explore themes ranging from divisive stories about the European Union (EU), mobilised in institutional reform referendums, to the top-down deployment of legitimising narratives by EU institutions, religiously inspired apocalyptic narratives of European unity, and stories about nations and Europe told by museums and academics. Combined, the chapters of this book are essential reading for everyone interested in Europe’s common past and contemporary challenges, and the EU’s highly contested nature in times of apparently increasing disintegration.

Maps the complexities of imaginative worldmaking in contemporary culture through an aesthetics of narrative performance.