Erín Moure’s recent work invites us to think about the ways that our reading practices affect how we move in the world. Do we stay put? Move across borders? Force others into (or out of) (our?) spaces? Facilitate free movements? Do we see the world as given and unchangeable or as something, in Clarice Lispector’s words, “torturously in the making”? As Moure says explicitly in several essays collected in My Beloved Wager (2009), and as she challenges us to think about in O Cidadán (2002) and Expeditions of a Chimaera (2009), how we act as readers affects how we act as citizens and both are intimately tied to what we make of borders. How are we citizens not only of cities or nations but also of books? By considering Moure’s recent work, we explore the ways that, in learning to be different kinds of readers, we can learn to be different kinds of citizens.
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