We would like here to acknowledge the support of the research project Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers (FEM2017, 83084P, AEI, FEDER), the research group Discourse and Identity (ED431C, 2019/001) and the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR). Special thanks are due to Pr. Gérald Preher, editor of The Journal of the Short Story in English, for his encouragement and support throughout.
1Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English was the title of a conference organised by the research project Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers in affiliation with the ENSFR (European Network for Short Fiction Research), held at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) on 23 and 24 May, 2019. As its title suggests, the aim of the conference was to foster fruitful critical debate on the theoretical and practical implications of borders as the site of identitary intersections in the contemporary short story in English. Pr. Gérald Preher, the general editor of the Journal of the Short Story in English, suggested to us the possibility of publishing a special section of the journal with a selection of papers delivered at the conference addressing the various manners in which borders prefigure, problematise and fictionalise identitary positions in the contemporary short story in English.
2In fact, the contemporary short story is itself an example of how permeable and fluid borders may represent an open ground for ideological challenges, critical reflection and contestation, both thematically and formally speaking. The interstitial nature of the contemporary short story, which resists clear-cut discursive classifications in terms of its formal nature, has been recently described as a hybrid form and as “the liminal genre par excellence” (Achilles and Bergman 4), a borderline narrative which combines rhetorical strategies from different genres and whose brevity remains its sole identifiable defining feature. However, the short story’s brevity conditions the genre’s inclination for particular themes (Korte; Drewery; Cox) and a tendency to depict transitional situations and moments of crisis (Achilles and Bergman 22). Most significantly, the short story’s condensed nature allows the articulation of urgent responses to social concerns with immediacy in a wide variety of formats and publication outlets. Indeed, the material conditions in which the short story is, in this day and age, written, disseminated and published accords with the specificities of a globalised market whose cultural products travel fast across borders, be these material or ideological ones.
3The contradictory nature of borders, built to “separate and divide on the one hand, and to welcome and allow passage on the other” (Manzanas 9), invites us to consider their porous and fluid nature, which is where their dynamic and productive elements reside (Rosello and Wolfe 2). As Walter Mignolo suggests, globalisation has implied a readjustment of borders which may question and even blur distinctions “between Western and Eastern civilizations, Christianity and Islam, Latin and Anglo America, and Africa and Europe” (x). Thus, “borders,” “thresholds” and “interstices” may entail, precisely because of their indeterminacy and their position at a physical, cultural and ideological crossroads, a useful tool of mediation particularly appealing in an age of “global mobility, digital networking, and interethnic transnationality, ecological considerations of species boundaries as well as technological redefinitions of the human” (Achilles and Bergmann 3).
4Because borders and interstices may question and eventually do away with received assumptions which inform excruciating definitions, binary oppositions and categorical divides through their articulation of fluid alternatives, the contemporary short story emerges as a powerful site to problematise the “representation of liminal identities” and conflictive subject positions derived from the impossibility of or resistance to fit in traditional categories relating to class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, age or religion, therefore speaking “directly to and about those whose sense of self, region, state or nation is insecure” (Hunter 138). This special section of the Journal of the Short Story in English gathers a selection of thought-provoking essays which elucidate the various ways in which the short narrative form functions as a medium for the articulation of these identitary elements; it explores how the tensions deriving from their disparity and friction are problematised or negotiated.
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5The term “intersections” immediately calls to mind the idea of space, an element that links the articles included in Part I of this section, “Intersecting Landscapes.” Under the lens of “Anthropocene feminism,” Paul March-Russell reads Daisy Johnson’s Fen (2016), a collection of stories set in the liminal space of the Fens in which the author maps out a number of cross-border encounters between the human, the animal and the non-organic. These encounters articulate a myriad of possible sexual identities and demand a re-gendering of the landscape. The focus on landscape continues in Richard Jorge’s essay, which looks into the way in which the Irish Gothic short story has partaken in the long-standing debate on Irish identity and the meaning of “Irishness.” Reading Claire Keegan’s collection Walk the Blue Fields (2007) against J. S. Le Fanu’s and Bram Stoker’s Gothic stories, Jorge shows how Irish short story writers have brought “the Gothic home” (Arata 621) as a mechanism through which to convey a critique of Ireland’s colonial past and its irretrievable loss of identity in the postcolonial present. A different, yet related, dialectics between past, present and future is also central to Pedro M. Carmona Rodríguez’s exploration of multicultural “Canadianness” in Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes” and “A Map of the City” (2001). Unravelling the multiplicity of diasporic “roots/routes” (Gilroy 19) inscribed in these stories, Carmona Rodríguez examines how the contradictory dynamics of border-crossing and border-building intersect in the configuration of Canadian multicultural identities. The representation of porous boundaries and passageways between different geographies and temporalities is also tackled by Mª Luisa Pascual Garrido in her analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hema and Kaushik,” included in the collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008). Examining the trope of secrecy both from a formal and thematic perspective, Pascual Garrido approaches Lahiri’s sequence-narrative as a liminal text that plays with and upends those familiar dichotomies of absent/present, home/abroad, here/there.
6Building on borders and intersectionality, the articles included in Part II, “Intersections at Play,” engage meaningfully with the mutually reinforcing categories of race, ethnicity, class and gender. Thus, in her essay on Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” (1982), Begoña Simal-González discusses Morrison’s strategic “game of (identity) cards” which, purposefully confusing, forces readers to reconsider how their preconceptions about the twinning of race and class impact on their interpretation of discourse and reality. Gaming, as a metaphor for spelling out different identity positions, resonates strongly in Sylvia Mieszkowski’s discussion of Zadie Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia” (2013). Mieszkowski reads the badminton games in Smith’s text as an allegory that evokes “the structural positions available to ‘the immigrant’” and pushes the reader into an exercise of compassionate imagination, whilst simultaneously engaging with the complex intersections of race and gender as well as race and class in Smith’s narrative. The intertwining of racial, class and gender identities also surfaces in the next article: Sara González Bernárdez examines the tension between the natural and the supernatural in N. K. Jemisin’s “Red Dirt Witch” (2018), unveiling the subversive potential conferred on the magical elements present in the story.
7Echoing the on-going diversification of intersectional studies, the articles in Part III, “Age and Sexuality as Intersecting Sites,” move beyond the singularities of race, class and gender to tackle other intersectional identity categories such as sexuality, (dis)ability or age. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas and Johan Galtung, Sergio López-Sande explores the dialogic relationship between self and other in David Foster Wallace’s short story writing, showing how psychological violence—particularly at a tender age—may haunt and alter an individual’s sense of self. In the next article, Marta Gort Paniello discusses Alice Munro’s short story “In Sight of the Lake,” included in Dear Life (2012), with a focus on identity in old age. The essay shines a torch on Munro’s approach to age as a vector integral to one’s identity awareness across time and space, simultaneously showing how the Canadian author challenges dichotomising views about ageing. Moving from Canada to Britain, Ana García Soriano’s article examines the theme of “outsiderness” in Jackie Kay’s Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002), where the barriers faced by the characters respond to multiple and intersecting identity variables. Kay’s collection thus reveals a post-ethnic aesthetics in its multi-layered depiction of marginality, which in turn further illuminates the potential of the short story genre to interrogate hegemonic discourses.
8The suitability of the short story to accommodate voices from the margins is, indeed, a nexus of criticism shared by all the articles collected here. What is more, a number of them are also concerned with exploring the short story’s position betwixt and between other literary forms (Achilles and Bergman 4). Part IV, “Intersecting Genres,” opens with Monica Fernández Jiménez’s exploration of the relations between (auto)biographical writing and the short story form in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River (1983). Kincaid’s formal experimentation in this collection is read as a deliberate attempt at voicing the difficulties and contradictions inherent to the representation of the postcolonial female subaltern. This focus on form continues in the remaining articles, which discuss the relationship of whole to fragment in two short story cycles by South African writer Zoë Wicomb. Marta Fossati’s essay on You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) interprets Wicomb’s use of the short story cycle as an instrument for ideological resistance: just as different stories create gaps in the macro-structure of the collection, the incursion of voices that speak from the margins destabilises the linearity and coherence of grand narratives. On a related note, Sevetlana Stefanova’s essay analyses the internal and external boundaries of Wicomb’s The One That Got Away (2008), showing how the reading experiences staged in the stories themselves parallel and call attention to “the cross-border character of reading a short story cycle.” The final pieces in this issue thus resonate with Paul March-Russell’s view in the opening article that “the short story collection can be read as an aggregation of fragments that always teeters in disaggregation.”