Situating Strangeness: Exploring the Intersections between Bodies and Borders

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Zygmunt Bauman, in his publication Liquid Modernity, described the meeting of strangers as a mismeeting – a brief encounter which had no past and the unlikely possibility of a future. This suggests a meeting which is free from expectation, but it also has the potential to fuel alienation and displacement. Being a stranger is not synonymous with distant geographies or borderlands, though it does include them: strangers and peculiar places can be found closer to home. Themes of alienation, strangeness and foreignness converge in the following accounts. The reader will migrate through unrecognisable narratives coming into contact with diasporic identities, stand-up comedians, English Language Educators, artists and photographers, to mention a few. These accounts are diverse but commonalities are tangled between webs of thought. Readers are invited to tug at the threads of this web, to find their own connections and chance upon unexpected revelations which come through picking the ends.