Building on twenty-first-century critical interest in the spatial humanities, this collection of essays examines the relations between place and linguistic form and challenges the economic demarcations that instill divisions between perceived literary centers and their peripheries. The rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban, alienated geographies, enclosed within the determinism of history and dislocated from themselves by the impersonality of language, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one’s locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and re-building identity. Given the slow-moving but long-in-the-making civilizational disasters that have led various governments to bar access to places of refuge and to construct detention facilities at porous borders, this edited collection looks toward experimentations in literary form as dramatizing the impermanence of significations attributed to places. Literary writing presupposes complex systems of intersecting networks as well as interactive dynamics, even within the seeming binaries of “center” and “margin” and “nation” and “individual.” The eleven chapters in this collection explore the function of literary forms that represent diverse ways of being in place and re-envision identities in order to alert readers to the slow violence of being refused entry into history through a negation of the places of belonging.
