Global Kaleidoscopes

This book introduces the concept of the East-West city to explore new urban identities that challenge binary constructions between Eastern and Western cultures through the literary study of global cities. It does so by reimagining our relational connections to time and space across diverse cultural, geographic, and literary contexts.

In the twentieth century, notions such as hybridity, third space, and border theory helped challenge rigid, essentialized views of identity and power. However, the twenty-first century invites us to elaborate on these foundational theories through an understanding of how interactions are becoming even more complex, with multiple, accelerated, and coalescing systems and identities occurring simultaneously. The East-West city is a site upon which travelers, immigrants, exiles, pilgrims, and refugees transcribe their identities and form new ways to map and articulate “home.” Through a critical analysis of literary urban studies, Global Kaleidoscopes explores how twenty-first-century world literature offers distinctive examinations of cities and their inhabitants at unique intersections where inimitable identities are transformed continuously through moments of contact and encounter across time and space.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate researchers seeking compelling, city-focused approaches through geocritical studies, transnational urban culture, and world literatures. The ways in which this book reframes social spaces and urban imaginaries through diverse, contemporary writers will also appeal to a broad international audience, especially those intrigued by examining the city in literature and literary urban comparatists interested in Eastern and Western cultural confluences.

Michael P. Moreno is Professor of English at Green River College in Washington state. His expertise is grounded in comparative literature, contemporary American and Latinx literature/culture, spatial theory, literary urban studies, human geography, and architectural theory. He has an extensive body of publications in academic journals and edited volumes examining literary spatial configurations of cities and their identities, with particular emphasis on the Latinx community as well as East–West confluences.