Female agency and identity negotiations in contemporary narratives of border crossings

The panel focuses on contemporary stories of migration and the ensuing survival strategies that displaced subjects resort to in order to “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth”. In particular, all three papers explore the challenge of negotiating hyphenated identities and of reinventing oneself against liminal spaces in the case of female characters. Although the texts under analysis deal with different cross-cultural contexts – the Dominican diaspora, American post-western borderlands, and the Bengali-American experience respectively – they share a pressing desire to give life to resilient and empowered female protagonists. At the same time, they are also keen to probe into the specific difficulties – or, conversely, the conventionally feminine strengths – which women face and/or can draw on in the process of exercising their agency.