Times of Mobility is a co-edited collection of essays focused on the analysis of modern and contemporary works of literature that cross national borders by virtue of being authored by writers who live and write across national borders, in the hyphenated spaces between languages and cultures and seen through the lens of gender as it intersects with ethnicity and/or nationality.

The book emerged primarily from two conferences on the topics of transnational literatures and translation, one held in 2013 at the Central European University in Budapest and the other at Swarthmore College in the United States, in 2015. The conferences brought together writers and scholars from several European countries and the United States. While the former one explored mostly the creation of transnational theory and its application to literary works, the latter focused more on the processes of translation either in its literal transfer of one work from one language to another or in the form of “self-translation,” of authors writing in languages other than their native ones. Thus, the book is orchestrated precisely on these two intersecting theoretical and critical threads and establishes a cohesive panorama of literary and sociopolitical landscapes created largely by authors who have been working across national, cultural, and linguistic borders over the last several decades. Transnationalism is largely theorized, discussed, and applied in light of Azade Seyhan's working definition: “I understand transnational literature as a genre of writing that operates outside the national canon, addresses issues facing deterritorialized cultures, and speaks for those in what I call ‘paranational’ communities and alliances” (Seyhan 2001, 10; quoted on p. 1).

A majority of the essays simultaneously engage with the notion and theory of the “transnational” in relation to feminist theory and cultural studies. As the three co-editors state in their Introduction, “although the concept ‘transnational’ is neither simple nor unproblematic in itself, its rise would be impossible without rethinking other related concepts such as identity and border, the globalization and migration that occurred with postmodernism and the rise of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, as well as the development of feminist theory” (4).

The collection is divided into three sections that delineate the different degrees of transnationalism in relation to translational and writing across borders, with a heavy focus on immigrant women writers. In the first section, “From Transnational to Translational,” Susan Stanford Friedman, Eleonora Federici, Vita Fortunati, Azade Seyhan, Sonia Fernández Hoyos, Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, and Jasmina Lukić explore the development of a transnational theory as emerging from or applied to the works of diasporic writers, authors who have crossed borders and are writing from spaces of displacement and are motivated by the trauma of exile. In the second section, “Reading across Borders,” Grace Ledbetter, Ágnes Györke, Vera Eliasova, Madalina Nicolaescu, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, and Dejan Ilić adopt wider interdisciplinary strategies as they navigate aspects of transnationalism, self-translation, and hyphenated existences in various literary genres as well as other artistic forms of expression such as dance and choreography. The last section, titled “Transnational in Translation,” explores the practice and craft of translation per se in a variety of literary translations by known writers and translators. Scholars and translators Michale Kandel, Sibelan Forrester, Ellen Elias-Bursać, and Kathryn Hellerstein address the role of translators and their various choices in the negotiations between the languages of origin and the target languages from the perspective of aesthetic dimensions, but also in light of historical and political biases that might have the potential of influencing the reception of the respective works either on the international market or in their own countries.

The essays cover a large area of world literature with a particular focus on eastern and central Europe, but not only. From the fiction of the British Bengaldeshi writer Monica Ali, to the prose of the Algerian writer of French expression Assia Djebar; from the fiction of the British-Zimbabwean Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing to the prose of the Croatian writer based in the Netherlands Dubravka Ugresic; from works by transnational women writers in various diasporas such as Kapka Kassabova, to George Balanchine's choreography using Hellenic mythology; and from “transnational rivalries” in Serbian and Croatian writers and translations of oral literature to the negotiations between Yiddish and Chinese in the poems of the Polish Jewish writer Malech Ravitch, the collection takes the reader on an invigorating and fascinating mini world tour of both well-known and lesser known diasporic and transnational writers. In doing this, the authors of the book weave a cohesive and extensive theoretical framework of transnationalism as illustrated by diverse works of art and as often tied in with various processes of translation while simultaneously intersecting with feminist and gender theories.

While the notion and denomination of transnational literatures has circulated for some time in the study of diasporic and exile writers, this is the first time that a study develops theories of the transnational to such a comprehensive degree and explores a diverse range of artistic works of different mediums and genres from a multitude of national and cultural universes. The essays are beautifully crafted, meticulously researched, synergistically connected to one another and together form an important and much needed contribution not only to literary studies but to cultural and feminist studies and to the intellectual history of the last half a century.

Sonia Fernández Hoyos and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa's statement regarding the creation of literature from a location of exile and displacement could well apply to a large portion of the book as they make the very cogent claim that “lacking a state is not a loss; it means belonging to more than one homeland and thus being able to construct a place of one's own on cultural crossroads…. At the end of the day, the exile-journey, the mistrusted displacement, and the despair of the evanescent self within a liquid world can signal hope in the paradigms of transnational writing” (111). Indeed this is a study that ingeniously validates the living and creating a “cultural crossroads,” and in hyphenated spaces produced by the realities of exile, migration, immigration and overall the traumas of displacement. In so doing it brings out equally the poignancy of what Edward Said called the “insurmountable” sadness of exile and the richness that emerges from such sadness while turning it into artistic beauty.