On the Very Edge: Bidentities in Michelle Cliff’s Fiction - Softcover

Kinane, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496855159 ISBN 13: 9781496855152

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2025

Synopsis

On the Very Edge: Bidentities in Michelle Cliff’s Fiction uses the life and work of bisexual, biracial, and bicultural author Michelle Cliff (1946–2016) to develop an entirely new approach to intersectional cultural, race, and gender/sexuality studies that prioritizes “bi-ness” as a methodological tool. The book focuses not “simply” on bisexuality, biracialism, or biculturalism as isolated identity concepts; rather, it explores the very nature of these intersectional identity categories as configured by Cliff. The text, therefore, represents a reclamation of bi identity in Cliff’s work as a much broader cultural, and not just sexual or racial, category, arguing that Cliff’s spaces and/or stages of “bi-ness” are in themselves significant in understanding contemporary global identity politics, as well as in navigating complex and often damaging identity constructs.

Michelle Cliff, partnered with poet Adrienne Rich and “passing” as white, had an often-invisible sexuality and cultural identity. Yet her acclaimed work—Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Bodies of Water, If I Could Write This in Fire, Free Enterprise, and others—demonstrates the intersections between bisexuality, biracialism, and biculturalism in often profound ways. Drawing on original research, interviews, diaries, editorials, and other correspondences, On the Very Edge will have far-reaching implications in the understanding of complex Caribbean identity politics and intersectional race, gender, and sexuality studies at large.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Kinane is reader in Popular Literature and Culture at the University of Roehampton, London. His books include Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence, Isn't it Ironic? Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture, Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade, Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives, and Landscapes of Liminality: Between Place and Space.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496855159
• ISBN 13: 9781496855152
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164