Frontiers, boundaries, margins, and borders occupy center stage in much recent scholarship. Influenced first by postcolonial theory and now by transnational studies, this paradigm shift has brought about heightened awareness of global interconnectedness and transnational circuits of production, meaning, and migration. For some scholars and public intellectuals, this increasingly globalized world has become marked by a rootless migratory sensibility (Arjun Appadurai) and a flattening of power relations (Thomas Freedman). But as performance artist and cultural critic Guillermo Gómez-Peña has suggested, the experience of crossing borders is not the same for all. Rather than a utopic dissolution of all boundaries, twentieth-century border crossers often traverse one boundary in order to firm up another. This panel seeks papers that explore twentieth-century works in which crossing one border--national, generic, thematic, formal--necessitates reinforcing a different borderline.

We are seeking participants for this panel, which is proposed for the next American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco (May 24-27, 2012). Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical statement (including rank and institutional affiliation) to Jolene Hubbs () and Lee Bebout () by December 1, 2011. Notification by December 15, 2011. Proposals should be both pasted into the body of the email and included as Word attachments.