| Toni Cade Bambara, Edwidge Danticat, and Mayra Santos-Febres write short stories that negotiate literary, cultural, ideological and geopolitical boundaries. Their insurrectionary writing style mirrors their status as border writers---they are aware of their position in society and in literary tradition as women and as Afro-descendents from the United States, Haiti, and Puerto Rico respectively. Their writing reflects their refusal to accept "marginality" by challenging, resisting, and interrogating the existence of imposed repressive boundaries between cultures, languages, identities, genders, spaces, ethnicities, or nations. These writers dismiss discourses that impose or suggest closedness by embracing disobedience and creating alternative languages, literary spaces, and temporalities that embrace subjects traditionally ignored or avoided. Their short stories celebrate a rebellious act of transgression that empowers "marginal" subjects.;Although these writers are also known for their novels, it is interesting to study how their textual rebelliousness is expressed in their short stories since it is usually one of the most marginal genres in academic curricula and/or literary canons, and it has clearly marked spatial and temporal boundaries. Similar to what these "border writers" execute in their novels, essays or poems, their short stories propose alternative paradigms and spaces from which marginal voices speak and marginal subjects are represented. This new reconfiguration of space is significant in these authors' use of the short story mode, where narrative form mirrors a mutinous approach towards homogeneous monolingual and monocultural frameworks imposed largely by Western canonical works and homophobic, xenophobic, and colonialist literary perspectives.;Consequently, these women's short stories become battlegrounds in which authority is contested, reversing and contesting the limits imposed by repressive discourses and literary forms, such as the short story genre. Their short stories and their insubordinate narrators propose alternative viewpoints located in the aesthetic, sociopolitical, and cultural borderlands that these narratives recognize, resist, transgress, reinforce or create. These authors and narratives' rejection of binaries, stereotypes, essentialisms, and generalizations unsettle and deconstruct the borders that divide and separate them from each other, from themselves, and the rest of the world. |
