America today is witnessing the largest and most sustained wave of immigrants its borders have ever seen. Although factors like the Great Depression, World War II, and quota restrictions had slowed the massive influx of Europeans from the early part of the 20th century, policies like the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act have relaxed quotas and opened America's doors to hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year, from both Eastern and Western hemispheres, to reach a height of over 9 million immigrants in the 1990s. Today, immigrants and policy-makers alike grapple with issues regarding...

The contact of two different cultures in the colonization process produces a zone of cultural mingling; people who are betwixt and between. Armstrong examines the repercussions of colonization on the lives of women characters in novels about four different post-colonial cultural contexts--Native American, Jamaican, Irish, and Mexican American.

Armstrong begins by examining the particular historical contexts of each novel and the intersecting themes relating to the impact of colonialism such as liminality, mingling of cultures, loss and mourning, and reemergence of repressed history...