Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Unsettling genre -- 2. Growing up American -- I: Female travelling in the West/Indies: trauma and bound motion in Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River and Lucy -- 1. Trauma and the Bildungsroman -- 2. Mobilities in the traditional Bildungsroman -- 3. Locating the postcolonial travelling subject -- 4. Merging with and separating from the mother: bound motion in At the Bottom of the River -- 5. The politics of a silent voice -- 6. Declarations of in(ter)dependence in Lucy -- 7. Locomotive tongues: voice and body in Lucy -- II: "The mestiza way": a Bildung of the borderlands in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street -- 1. Individualism or communitarianism? -- 2. Mastering "the art of the present": unnatural boundaries and borderlands -- 3. Weaving and unweaving through the vignette -- 4. "Private open spaces": rebilding the private and the public -- 5. More room to play: deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation -- III: "It translated well": the promise and the perils of translation in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior -- 1. The promise and the perils of translation -- 2. "Minoritising" translations: the "Japanese Hamlet" and the Asian American Bildungsroman -- 3. Translation and marriage in the Asian American Bildungsroman -- 4. "La belle infidèle": the feminist translator and her dilemmas -- 5. "Impossible conversions": translating the letter or the sense? -- 6. "Dwelling in travel": translating the mother's tongue -- 7. Seduction and the "father's text" -- 8. "Something gives": revisiting relevance -- IV: "In the name of grand asymmetries": body Bildung in Audre Lorde's work -- 1. Imprinting the body: lessons of survival and emotional tattoos -- 2. Against uniformity: transgressive spellings of the body.

3. From the personal to the political: cancer and its meanings -- 4. A poetics of death: ars moriendi as an art of living -- 5. The art of love: uses of the erotic -- Postscript: temporary stopovers and new departures -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.