Representing and (De)Constructing Borderlands


Book Description

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.




Literary Multilingualism in the Borderlands


Book Description

This book focuses on literary multilingualism and specifically on the challenging condition of writing in Trieste, a key European borderland located at the intersection between the Latin, Germanic and Slav civilisations. By focusing on some of the most representative modern writers operating in the area, such as Italo Svevo, Boris Pahor, Claudio Magris and James Joyce, this work offers a wide-ranging discussion of multilingual practices deriving from the different language choices made by these writers. Along with the most common manifest strategies, such as code-switching and hybridisations, Deganutti highlights how Triestine writers found innovative latent practices to engage with multilingualism, such as writing in an analogical way or exploiting internal linguistic stratifications. Moreover, she shows how they provided answers to the several linguistic, cultural and even political challenges they were subjected to, with the result of redefining linguistic boundaries that clearly separate different tongues. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and academics interested in literary multilingualism in the fields of sociolinguistics, borderland studies and comparative literature.




Signs of Hope


Book Description

"Explores the thinking of the famous Trappist monk on topics of social concern-peace, race, ecology-through his correspondence with particular activists, scholars, and thinkers"--




Proceedings of IAC 2018 in Budapest


Book Description

International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and E-learning and International Academic Conference on Management, Economics and Marketing and International Academic Conference on Transport, Logistics, Tourism and Sport Science




Re-Membering Anzaldúa: Human Rights, Borderlands, and the Poetics of Applied Social Theory: Engaging with Gloria Anzaldúa in Self and Global Transformations (Proceedings of the Third Annual Social Theory Forum April 5-6, 2006, UMass Boston)


Book Description

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 Wounded Heart


Book Description

In her work as poet, essayist, editor, dramatist, and public intellectual, Chicana lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga has been extremely influential in current debates on culture and identity as an ongoing, open-ended process. Analyzing the "in-between" spaces in Moraga's writing where race, gender, class, and sexuality intermingle, this first book-length study of Moraga's work focuses on her writing of the body and related material practices of sex, desire, and pleasure. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano divides the book into three sections, which analyze Moraga's writing of the body, her dramaturgy in the context of both dominant and alternative Western theatrical traditions, and her writing of identities and racialized desire. Through close textual readings of Loving in the War Years, Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings, Yarbro-Bejarano contributes to the development of a language to talk about sexuality as potentially empowering, the place of desire within politics, and the intricate workings of racialized desire.




Deconstructing Dads


Book Description

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.




Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa


Book Description

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa—theorist, Chicana, feminist—famously called on scholars to do work that matters. This pronouncement was a rallying call, inspiring scholars across disciplines to become scholar-activists and to channel their intellectual energy and labor toward the betterment of society. Scholars and activists alike have encountered and expanded on these pathbreaking theories and concepts first introduced by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera and other texts. Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments. The collection is divided into three main parts, according to the ways the text has been used: “Curriculum Design,” “Pedagogy and Praxis,” and “Decolonizing Pedagogies.” As a pedagogical text, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa also offers practical advice in the form of lesson plans, activities, and other suggested resources for the classroom. This volume offers practical and inspiring ways to deploy Anzaldúa’s transformative theories with real and meaningful action. Contributors Carolina E. Alonso Cordelia Barrera Christina Bleyer Altheria Caldera Norma E. Cantú Margaret Cantú-Sánchez Freyca Calderon-Berumen Stephanie Cariaga Dylan Marie Colvin Candace de León-Zepeda Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto Alma Itzé Flores Christine Garcia Patricia M. García Patricia Pedroza González María del Socorro Gutiérrez-Magallanes Leandra H. Hernández Nina Hoechtl Rían Lozano Socorro Morales Anthony Nuño Karla O’Donald Christina Puntasecca Dagoberto Eli Ramirez José L. Saldívar Tanya J. Gaxiola Serrano Verónica Solís Alexander V. Stehn Carlos A. Tarin Sarah De Los Santos Upton Carla Wilson Kelli Zaytoun




The American Literary History Reader


Book Description

"American Literary History" has emerged as the leading journal devoted to U. S. literary and cultural studies. In this anthology, 17 major scholars address subjects as diverse as Hawthorne's utopias, Indian pictographs, Emily Dickinson and class, and the Black Arts Movement.




Construction of Maya Space


Book Description

Construction of Maya Spaces sheds new light on how Maya society may have shaped—and been shaped by—the constructed environment. Moving beyond the towering pyramids and temples often associated with Maya spaces, this volume focuses on how those in power used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power, and how the powerless pushed back. Through fifteen engaging chapters, contributors examine the construction of spatial features by ancient, historic, and contemporary Maya elite and nonelite peoples to understand how they used spaces differently. Through cutting-edge methodologies and case studies, chapters consider how and why Maya people connected and divided the spaces they used daily in their homes, in their public centers, in their sacred places such as caves, and across their regions to inform us about the mental constructs they used to create their lives and cultures of the past. Contributors Elias Alcocer Puerto Alejandra Alonso Olvera Traci Ardren Jaime J. Awe Alejandra Badillo Sánchez Nicolas C. Barth Grace Lloyd Bascopé Adolpho Iván Batún-Alpuche Elizabeth Beckner M. Kathryn Brown Bernadette Cap Miguel Covarrubias Reyna Juan Fernandez Diaz Alberto G. Flores Colin Thomas H. Guderjan C. Colleen Hanratty Héctor Hernández Álvarez Scott R. Hutson Joshua J. Kwoka Whitney Lytle Aline Magnoni Jennifer P. Mathews Stephanie J. Miller Shawn G. Morton Holley Moyes Shannon Plank Dominique Rissolo Patrick Rohrer Carmen Rojas Sandoval Justine M. Shaw J. Gregory Smith Travis W. Stanton Karl A. Taube Daniel Vallejo-Cáliz