Abstract
This article examines the complexities and ambivalence associated with the flows of immigration, which has created radical effects of dislocation upon identity articulation. Since immigrants develop multiple relationships that cross and span cultural and national borders, the trajectories of their identities would occupy no singular national space but travel in a web of social, economic and cultural links that sprawls over the globe. In the process of immigration, as mutual penetration between the local and the global discourses is intensified, the elements of different nations may mingle in a network of transnational passages, which challenges the authority of singular national domination by repositioning the site of identity articulation at the intersections of various cultural crossings. As Marilyn Chin, one of the leading authors of Asian immigrant communities, has expressed in her poetry, immigrants are perpetually required to situate themselves at an unstable point of mediation between the national and the post-national forces, which mean both border-crossing and border-redefining in spatial and temporal terms.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.25.10
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Benzi
(2016)
"The Poetics of Transnational Life: Writing Identity across Borders,"
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory: Vol. 25, Article 11.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.25.10
Available at:
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol25/iss1/11
