This volume stems from the assumption that broadly-understood borderlands, as well as peripheries, provinces or uttermost ends of different kinds, are abodes of significant culture-generating forces. From the academic point of view, their undeniable appeal lies in the fact that they constitute spaces of mutual interactions and enable new cultural phenomena to surface, grow or decline, and, as such, are worth thorough and constant scrutiny. However, they also provide the setting for radical clashes between ideologies, languages, religions, customs, and, as the media report every single day, armies or guerrilla units. Living within such areas of creative dynamics and destructive friction (or visiting them, even vicariously as the contributors to the volume do) is tantamount to exposing oneself to a difference. One’s response to this difference – either in the form of rejection or, more preferably, acceptance (or a mixture of both) – is not merely an index of one’s tolerance (a platitudinised term itself that all too often hides an attitude of comfortable indifference), but an affirmation of humaneness. Borderlands are paradoxical, if not aporetic, loci. They simultaneously connote territories on either side of a border, in a literal sense, and a vague, intermediate state or region, in a metaphorical sense. Encapsulating the idea of border, the term indicates both inescapable nearness and unavoidable (or perhaps unbridgeable) separateness. The studies included in the volume focus on various aspects of borderland art and literature, on analyses of selected works, and on the peculiarities of cultural and literary representations. Thus, the borderland landscape, both literal and metaphorical, comes to be seen as a factor contributing to the emergence of new, distinct and identifiable themes and motifs, as well as theoretical frameworks.
DIVThe definitive life and work of Americo Paredes, the native South Texan poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist, ethnographer and first U.S. theorist of the border./div
This Summer 2006 (IV, Special) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge includes the proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Social Theory Forum (STF), held on April 5-6, 2006, at UMass Boston on: “Human Rights, Borderlands, and the Poetics of Applied Social Theory: Engaging with Gloria Anzaldúa in Self and Global Transformations.” Walking along and crossing the borderlands of academic disciplines, contributors engaged with Anzaldúa’s gripping and creative talent in bridging the boundaries of academia and everyday life, self and global/world-historical reflexivity, sociology and psychology, social science and the arts and the humanities, spirituality and secularism, private and public, consciousness and the subconscious, theory and practice, knowledge, feeling, and the sensual in favor of humanizing self and global outcomes. Central in this dialogue was the exploration of human rights in personal and institutional terrains and their intersections with human borderlands, seeking creative and applied theoretical and curricular innovations to advance human rights pedagogy and practice.
The image of the shadow in midtwentiethcentury America appeared across a variety of genres and media including poetry, pulp fiction, photography, and film. Drawing on an extensive framework that ranges from Cold War cultural histories to theorizations of psychoanalysis and the Gothic, Erik Mortenson argues that shadow imagery in 1950s and 1960s American culture not only reflected the anxiety and ambiguity of the times but also offered an imaginative space for artists to challenge the binary rhetoric associated with the Cold War. From comics to movies, Beats to bombs, Ambiguous Borderlands provides a novel understanding of the Cold War cultural context through its analysis of the image of the shadow in midcentury media. Its interdisciplinary approach, ambitious subject matter, and diverse theoretical framing make it essential reading for anyone interested in American literary and popular culture during the midtwentieth century.
In the twenty-first century, fatherhood is shifting from simply being a sidekick in the parental team to taking center stage with new expectations of involvement and caretaking. The social expectations of fathers start even before the children are born. Mr. Mom is now displaced with fathers who don’t think of themselves as babysitting their own children, but as central decision makers, along with mothers, as parents. Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture is an interdisciplinary edited collection of essays authored by prominent scholars in the fields of media, sociology, and cultural studies who address how media represent the image of the father in popular culture. This collection explores the history of representation of fathers like the “bumbling dad” to question and challenge how far popular culture has come in its representation of paternal figures. Each chapter of this book focuses on a different aspect of media, including how advertising creates expectations of play and father, crime shows and the new hero father, and men as paternal figures in horror films. The book also explores changing definitions of fatherhood by looking at such subjects as how the media represents sperm donation as complicating the definition of father and how specific groups have been represented as fathers, including gay men as dads and Latino fathers in film. This collection examines the media’s depiction of the “good” father to study how it both challenges and reshapes the ways in which we think of family, masculinity, and gender roles.
For over 150 years, borderland authors from both Mexico and the United States have developed novels which owe their narrative power to compelling relationships between literary constructions of space and artistic expressions of conflicts, characters, and cultural encounter. This study explores those relationships by analyzing representations of the spaces in which characters function-whether barrio, ballroom, or border city as well as the places characters inhabit relative to the border-occupying native or foreign territory, traveling temporarily, or settling permanently. Concomitant with close attention to the conceptualization of space in border literature is a foregrounding of the genres that border writers employ, such as historical romance and the Hispanic bildungsroman, as well as the literary traditions from which they draw, such as travel narratives or utopian literature. Assessing geopoetics in border writing from the Mexican American War to the present, including writers such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Jovita Gonzalez, Ernesto Galarza, Americo Paredes, Harriet Doerr, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Miguel Mendez provides a paradigm for tracing the development and changes in individual responses to this space as well as a broad range of responses based on class and gender. This corpus of literature demonstrates that the various ways in which characters respond to cultural encounter-adapting, resisting, challenging, sympathizing-depends on artistic rendering of spaces and places around them. Thus, the central argument of this project is that character responses to cultural encounters arise out of geopoetics-the artistic expression of space and place-from the earliest to the most recent border narratives.
The presentation and representation of the environment occurs throughout academia and across all news media. The strict protocols of science often clash with environmental information available from sources that dwell on subjective aesthetic, emotional and personal sensitivities. This book challenge the reader, as student, teacher, researcher or policy maker, to reflect critically on the ways that environments are studied, interpreted, presented and represented, in education and public policy.
This pathbreaking anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a remarkable range of texts—both old and new—draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist. The editors have organized essays around four board themes: the situation of Chicano literary studies within American literary history and debates about the “canon”; representations of the Chicana/o subject; genre, ideology, and history; and the aesthetics of Chicano literature. The volume as a whole aims at generating new ways of understanding what counts as culture and “theory” and who counts as a theorist. A selected and annotated bibliography of contemporary Chicano literary criticism is also included. By recovering neglected authors and texts and introducing readers to an emergent Chicano canon, by introducing new perspectives on American literary history, ethnicity, gender, culture, and the literary process itself, Criticism in the Borderlands is an agenda-setting collection that moves beyond previous scholarship to open up the field of Chicano literary studies and to define anew what is American literature. Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Héctor Calderón, Angie Chabram, Barbara Harlow, Rolando Hinojosa, Luis Leal, José E. Limón, Terese McKenna, Elizabeth J. Ordóñez, Genero Padilla, Alvina E. Quintana, Renato Rosaldo, José David Saldívar, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Rosaura Sánchez, Roberto Trujillo
This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed. Brown's study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named, and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups. Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth-century "progress." Table of Contents: Glossary Introduction 1. Inventory 2. Ghosts in the Bathhouse 3. Moving Pictures 4. The Power to Name 5. A Diary of Deportation 6. The Great Purges and the Rights of Man 7. Deportee into Colonizer 8. Racial Hierarchies Epilogue: Shifting Borders, Shifting Identities Notes Archival Sources Acknowledgments Index This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed. Brown's study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named, and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups. Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. Brown argues that repressive national policies grew not out of chauvinist or racist ideas, but the very instruments of modern governance - the census, map, and progressive social programs - first employed by Bolshevik reformers in the western borderlands. We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth century "progress." Kate Brown is Assistant Professor of History at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A Biography of No Place is one of the most original and imaginative works of history to emerge in the western literature on the former Soviet Union in the last ten years. Historiographically fearless, Kate Brown writes with elegance and force, turning this history of a lost, but culturally rich borderland into a compelling narrative that serves as a microcosm for understanding nation and state in the Twentieth Century. With compassion and respect for the diverse people who inhabited this margin of territory between Russia and Poland, Kate Brown restores the voices, memories, and humanity of a people lost. --Lynne Viola, Professor of History, University of Toronto Samuel Butler and Kate Brown have something in common. Both have written about Erewhon with imagination and flair. I was captivated by the courage and enterprise behind this book. Is there a way to write a history of events that do not make rational sense? Kate Brown asks. She proceeds to give us a stunning answer. --Modris Eksteins, author of Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age Kate Brown tells the story of how succeeding regimes transformed a onetime multiethnic borderland into a far more ethnically homogeneous region through their often murderous imperialist and nationalist projects. She writes evocatively of the inhabitants' frequently challenged identities and livelihoods and gives voice to their aspirations and laments, including Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Jews, and Russians. A Biography of No Place is a provocative meditation on the meanings of periphery and center in the writing of history. --Mark von Hagen, Professor of History, Columbia University
Border Confluences examines how the theme of cultural difference influences the ways that writers construct narrative space and the ways their characters negotiate those spaces, from domestic sphere to national territory, public school to utopia."--BOOK JACKET.
