The essays in this volume take up the challenge of working out -- or reworking -- the problematics of the borders, the boundaries and the frameworks that structure our various and multiple notions of identity -- textual, personal, collective, generic, and disciplinary. The contributors to this volume write about subjects (and are often themselves subjects) who "refuse to occupy a single territory" -- who cross geographical, cultural, national, linguistic, generic, specular and disciplinary borders.
Essays by Kathryn Hellerstein, Anita Goldman, Jane Marcus and Scott Malcomson exlpore the...

The oral tradition has always played an important role in African American literature, ranging from works such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to Toni Morrison's Beloved. These and countless other novels affirm the power of sonance and sound in the African American literary canon. Considering the wide swath of work in this powerful lineage -- in addition to its shared heritage with performance -- Mae G. Henderson deploys her trope of "speaking in tongues" to theorize the preeminence of voice and narration in black women's literary performance through her...