In Japan there is a legend that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their wishes realized. But folding cranes, and the meditative, solemn care that it involves, has come to mean more than just an exercise in wish making. Origami cranes have become a symbol of renewal, atonement, and warning. Their symbolism may have emerged out of Japan’s particular mythology and history, but they do not belong to any one nation. The crane is a migratory bird that crosses borders and makes its home with scant regard to the blood-soaked lines that humans have drawn on maps.

This anthology uses origami cranes as a way for some of India’s best-known writers, poets, and artists to form a shared civic space for a conversation about the fault lines in India at a time of darkness. The twenty-three pieces collected here encompass reportage, stories, poems, memoir, and polemic—the kind of complex and enriching diversity that India demands and deserves. The paper crane becomes a motif of connection, beauty, and reclamation in an otherwise degraded country, enabling those who fight with words to become the best army they can be.

In this original and collaborative creation, John Brown-Childs offers unique insights into some of the central problems facing communities, social movements, and people who desire social change: how does one build a movement that can account for race, class and gender, and yet still operate across all of these lines? How can communities sustain themselves in truly social ways? And perhaps most important, how can we take the importance of community into account without forgoing the important distinctions that we all ascribe to ourselves as individuals?Borrowing from the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois federation, Brown-Childs offers a way of thinking about communities as coalitions, ones that account for differences in the very act of coming together. Using the Iroquois as an example of transcommunality in action, he also offers specific outcomes that many people desire—racial justice and peace are two examples—as points of focus around which many disparate groups may organize, without ever subsuming questions of identity as an expense of organizing.In addition to Brown-Childs' own exegesis, twelve scholars and thinkers from all walks of life offer their own responses to his thinking, enriching the book as an illustration and example of transcommunality.In an age of fractured identities and a world that is moving toward a global community, Transcommunality offers a persuasive way of imagining the world where community and individual identity may not only coexist, but also depend upon the other to the benefit of both.