One man's struggle to find a home between two cultures, exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. Cast of 1 man. Governor General's Drama Award Winner, 1993.

Border Fictions offers the first comparative analysis of multiethnic and transnational cultural representations about the United States' borders with Mexico and Canada. Blending textual analysis with theories of globalization and empire, Claudia Sadowski-Smith forges a new model of inter-American studies. Border Fictions places into dialogue a variety of hemispheric perspectives from Chicana/o, Asian American, American Indian, Latin American, and Canadian studies. Each chapter examines fiction that ranges widely, from celebrated authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alberto Ríos to writers whose contributions to border literature have not yet been fully appreciated, including Karen Tei Yamashita, Thomas King, Janette Turner Hospital, and emerging Chicana/o writers of the U.S.-Mexico border. Proposing a diverse and geographically expansive view of border and inter-American studies, Border Fictions links the work of these and numerous other authors to civil rights movements, environmental justice activism, struggles for land and border-crossing rights, as well as to anti-imperialist forms of nationalism in the United States' neighboring countries. The book forces us to take into account the ways in which shifts in the nature of global relations affect literary production, especially in its hemispheric manifestations.

The fast-growing body of postcolonial drama is progressively gaining its just recognition in the twentieth-century canon of English-language plays. From the vantage point of various samplings along the Trans-Pacific axis linking English Canada, Australia and New Zealand, this monograph seeks to document the significance of this emerging postcolonial theater. More specifically, it examines the myriad ways in which, over the last two decades, representative mainstream, ethnic and First Nations playwrights have dramatized Europe's «Other» in its multiple guises. In their efforts to match new content with innovative form, these artists have followed transgressive itineraries, redrawing the boundaries of conventional Western stage realism. Their new aesthetics often relies on techniques akin to Homi Bhabha's notions of hybridity and mimicry. The present study offers detailed analyses of the modes of hybridization through which Judith Thompson, Louis Nowra, Tomson Highway, Jack Davis, Hone Kouka, and other prominent writers have articulated subtle forms of psychic, grotesque, and mythic magic realism. Their legacy will undoubtedly affect the postcolonial dramaturgies of the twenty-first century.

This collection of contemporary postcolonial plays demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of a body of work that is currently influencing the shape of contemporary world theatre. This anthology encompasses both internationally admired 'classics' and previously unpublished texts, all dealing with imperialism and its aftermath. It includes work from Canada, the Carribean, South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, New Zealand and Australia. A general introduction outlines major themes in postcolonial plays. Introductions to individual plays include information on authors as well as overviews of cultural contexts, major ideas and performance history. Dramaturgical techniques in the plays draw on Western theatre as well as local performance traditions and include agit-prop dialogue, musical routines, storytelling, ritual incantation, epic narration, dance, multimedia presentation and puppetry. The plays dramatize diverse issues, such as: *globalization * political corruption * race and class relations *slavery *gender and sexuality *media representation *nationalism

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. Continental Divides is the first book to study the patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Rachel Adams considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. She investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity? In this engaging analysis, Adams charts the lengthy and often unrecognized traditions of neighborly exchange, both hostile and amicable, that have left an imprint on North America’s varied cultures.

Latin American Identities After 1980 takes an interdisciplinary approach to Latin American social and cultural identities. With broad regional coverage, and an emphasis on Canadian perspectives, it focuses on Latin American contact with other cultures and nations. Its sound scholarship combines evidence-based case studies with the Latin American tradition of the essay, particularly in areas where the discourse of the establishment does not match political, social, and cultural realities and where it is difficult to uncover the purposely covert. This study of the cultural and social Latin America begins with an interpretation of the new Pax Americana, designed in the 1980s by the North in agreement with the Southern elites. As the agreement ties the hands of national governments and establishes new regional and global strategies, a pan–Latin American identity is emphasized over individual national identities. The multi-faceted impacts and effects of globalization in Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the Caribbean are examined, with an emphasis on social change, the transnationalization and commodification of Latin American and Caribbean arts and the adaptation of cultural identities in a globalized context as understood by Latin American authors writing from transnational perspectives.

This book argues that the transnationalism that is central to Chicano identity originated in the global, postcolonial moment at the turn of the nineteenth century rather than as an effect of contemporary economic conditions, which began in the mid nineteenth century and primarily affected the laboring classes. The Spanish empire then began to implode, and colonists in the ?new world? debated the national contours of the viceroyalties. This is where the author locates the origins of Chicano literature, which is now and always has been ?postnational,? encompassing the wealthy, the poor, the white, and the mestizo.

In this era of increasing global mobility, identities are too complex to be captured by concepts that rely on national borders for reference. Such identities are not unified or stable, but are fluid entities which constantly push at the boundaries of the nation-state, thereby re-defining themselves and the nation-state simultaneously. Contemporary literature pays specific attention to internal and external notions of belonging ("Politics of Motion") and definitions of self resulting from interpersonal relationships ("Politics of Longing"). This collection looks at texts by authors who are British, American, or Canadian, but for whom a self-definition according national parameters is insufficient.

This collection investigates dramatic and performative renderings of 'America' as an exilic place particularly focusing on issues of language, space and identity. It looks at ways in which immigrants and outsiders are embodied in American theatre practice and explores ways in which 'America' is staged and dramatized by immigrants and foreigners.