Interculturalism: Imtiaz Dharker, Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay and contemporary Irish poets

‘Interculturalism’, like ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’, is a multivalent term, and one which has been contested for reifying differences between cultures while eliding differences within cultures. In this chapter, ‘interculturalism’ denotes a discursive space which accommodates differences and commonalities, allowing us to expand the paradigms through which we read women's poetry. The imperatives of our contemporary travelling culture, manifested in the transnational flow of people, information and finance, have impacted in significant ways upon the priorities of first- and second-wave feminism: the struggle for civil and social justice, the exploration of identity politics and the task of recovery. At the beginning of the 1990s, the woman writer could persuasively be defined by feminist theorists such as Susan Stanford Friedman as a 'Penelope [who] exercises her agency as a weaver/writer within and against' a patriarchal tradition. Today's Penelope also works within the expanded contours of a world wide web and, whether by choice or through necessity, she demonstrates that migrancy and travel are not male prerogatives. In the lived experience, as in the poetics, of many women, 'home' is a condition of 'dwellingin- displacement'. Received notions of nation, place and female space are reconfigured in the global circuitry of diaspora, migration and the information superhighway.