Abstract
This chapter deals with varying degrees of traumatic failure to go across the threshold (limen) between spaces, moments or situations in three short stories by contemporary black British writers: Koye Oyedeji’s “Home” (2000), Pete Kalu’s “Getting Home” (2015) and Valda Jackson’s “An Age of Reason” (2015). The difficulties to negotiate this interspace in a genre apt to depict liminality are experienced by the migrant central characters as obstacles to finding a safe anchorage for the self, a point of existential balance, a sense of feeling at “home”. The chapter further analyses the role of art and writing as ways to respond to situations of mental distress and identitary dislocation in the stories.
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Sacido-Romero, J. (2019). Stranded in a Border Zone: Traumatic Liminality in Black British Short Stories. In: Korte, B., Lojo-Rodríguez, L. (eds) Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30359-4_7
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