Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/o Narratives

Since the early 1970s, a number of Chicana/o writers and artists have interrogated the nation as a regulative idea for cultural identity and social cohesion, and have favored postnational and transnational imaginaries. 'Writing Transit' illustrates how Chicana/o narratives refuse to function as disseminators for a uniform national project. Instead, by representing contact zones between Northern Mexico and Southern California, they create fictional universes in which cultural "heres" and "theres" become increasingly blurred. With its focus on unsettled and unsettling cultural positions "beyond the nation" in Chicana/o literature, film, music and performance art, 'Writing Transit' responds to a need to revise border and resistance paradigms in Literary and Cultural Studies.