The Border Crossing Narrative and the Disruption of Southern Borders

2018 ◽  
pp. 55-81
Author(s):  
Mary Weaks-Baxter
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Hybrid Identities ◽  
Collective Narratives ◽  
Dorothea Lange ◽  
Aaron Douglas ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
A Site

With the view that crossing a border is a transformative experience, this chapter provides groundwork for the rest of the study and focuses on collective narratives of movement, specifically at ways they create new communities, break down borders, and upset Southern identities. This chapter is the most expansive in examining various types of texts. Looking at personal narratives, visual arts including work by Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and Dorothea Lange, literary texts by writers including Frances E.W. Harper, Wilma Mankiller, William Attaway, and Harriette Arnow, and articles and advertising from newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the chapter focuses on the hybrid identities created in and by Southern Border Crossing Narratives and examines the Border Crossing Narrative as a site of confrontation and struggle, as not only a narrative that can be created and maintained, but also one that others can attempt to control.

Wordly Corrasions: Philology and Narrative inWorstward Ho

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Mark Byron
Keyword(s):  
First Principles ◽  
Alexander Pope ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Water Ice ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
Land Farming ◽  
King James Bible ◽  
A Site ◽  
Thomas Browne ◽  
Geological Formations

Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett's sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts. Such landmark studies as James Knowlson's biography, Damned to Fame (1996), and John Pilling's edition of the Dream Notebook (1999), and the availability of primary documents such as Beckett's reading notes at Reading and Trinity libraries, opened the way for a generation of work rethinking Beckett's textual habitus. Given this profound reappraisal of Beckett's material processes of composition, this paper seeks to show that Beckett's late prose work, Worstward Ho, represents a profound mediation on writing, self-citation, and habits of allusion to the literary canon. In its epic gestures, it reorients the heavenly aspiration of Dante's Commedia earthwards, invoking instead the language of agriculture, geology and masonry in the process of creating and decreating its imaginative space. Beckett's earthy epic invokes and erodes the first principles of narrative by way of philology as well as by means of deft reference to literary texts and images preoccupied with land, farming, and geological formations. This process is described in the word corrasion, a geological term referring to the erosion of rock by various forms of water, ice, snow and moraine. Textual excursions into philology in Worstward Ho also unearth the strata comprising Beckett's corpus (in particular Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, and Ill Seen Ill Said), as well as the rock or canon upon which his own literary production is built. A close reading of Worstward Ho turns up a number of shrewd allusions to the King James Bible and Thomas Browne, as one might expect, but also perhaps surprisingly sustained affinities with the literary sensibilities of Alexander Pope and the poetry of S. T. Coleridge. The more one digs, the more Beckett's ‘little epic’ seems to become one of earthworks, bits of pipe, and masonry, a site and record of literary sedimentation.

scholarly journals “Buoyant Cartographies”: Strata-Mapping the Detroit River Border

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Taien Ng-Chan
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Zone ◽  
City Image ◽  
Detroit River ◽  
Border Zones ◽  
Nature Park ◽  
A Site ◽  
International Border

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In the early days of September 2018, a group of artists and researchers converged on the Detroit River (an international border between Detroit, Michigan, USA and Windsor, Ontario, Canada) to investigate the “Buoyant Cartographies” that this particular site demanded. As one of the parties involved in this participatory event (along with Lead Investigators <i>In/Terminus Creative Research Group</i> and <i>Float School</i>), my artist-research collective Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU) undertook an experimental mapping project that investigated the different “strata” of the place and the development of a “city-image.” The HPU Strata-Walk is an experimental and performative mapping methodology that focuses on how spatial meaning is created through a “stratigraphic” sensing of a site. The Detroit-Windsor border makes an especially compelling site for a Strata-Walk, in light of the conflicts over borders and walls in the current political environment, which presents an urgent need towards understanding and envisioning alternate possibilities for border zones. As a material site and geo-political space, the Detroit River border particularly benefits from intermedial investigations into spatial meanings and their construction. Notably, the role of folklore and local narratives on the internet and social media (and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge) figures large in developing one's knowledge of place. Experimental cartographies can thus help to develop alternate ways of seeing such sites.</p><p>This presentation is an attempt to trace this particular event of “discovery,” an account of how a place becomes known and how intermedial practices influence the manifestation of space and experience. Inherent in this research is the overarching question of how one begins to decolonize public narratives of place, how gaps and erasures in knowledge can be located in order to demarcate a way forward for further study and action. With these concerns in mind, I conduct a preliminary analysis of the border site through the activities of the HPU and our specific “strata-walking” framework, which focuses on different approaches of mapping-as-process, from phenomenological, ethnographic and cultural landscape reading methodologies to networked, social and digital media research. This performative mapping can shape individual experiences of the border through the revealing of complex networks, flows, and narratives, and point to fissures where alternative imaginings might be possible. I will first begin with a brief introduction to the HPU’s methodologies, before situating them in a survey of relevant literatures around experimental and critical processes of mapping. Then, using photographic and textual documentation, I delve into some very preliminary results of the investigation, focusing on touristic experiences of border crossing as well as a look at the specific “imageability” of Peche Island in the Detroit River, a place of rumour and mystery, now a nature park maintained by the city of Windsor. The overall goal will be to demonstrate the necessity of experimental cartographies in the creation of alternate experiences and more reflexive narratives about the border zone, with the Detroit-Windsor border as a case study.</p>

Guarding the “Southern Border” in Communist Bulgaria: Policies, Practices, Experiences

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-250
Author(s):  
Nikolai Vukov
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
Current Article ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Military

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová. Soon after the establishment of communist rule in Bulgaria, the state’s “Southern border” (with Turkey and Greece) became its most staunchly guarded borderline, stimulated by the ideological interpretation of the two countries as imperialist states that posed a direct threat to the entire socialist bloc. Since the early 1960s—copying the strategies applied to the Berlin Wall—various new measures were introduced by the communist state to make this borderline even more impermeable, involving the actions of military institutions, propaganda units, and the local population. The current article analyzes the guarding of the “Southern border” in communist Bulgaria and interprets it as an element of the overall strategy of these years to put borderline areas under strict supervision and control. The article presents the main steps in the organization of Border Troops in Bulgaria after 1944 and the various political, educational, and cultural policies developed by the communist state to create loyalty among the soldiers, the military staff, and the population in general. On the basis of archival materials, published memoirs, and literary texts, the article reconstructs the maintenance of constant alert about illegal trespassing, the organization of “voluntary troops” for border-guarding, the training of the young generations, and the romanticizing of the border guard service in those years. In the last part, emphasis is paid to the discrepancies between the propaganda messages and the reactions of the local population, which outline the multi-faceted encounters with ideological policies at the edges of this staunchly guarded world.

Lucilla You Min and Her Embodiment of a Cosmopolitan Fantasy

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-140
Author(s):  
Erica Ka-yan Poon
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
The Body ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Star Studies ◽  
Cultural Competition ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Cold War

Lucilla You Min, who acted in Japanese and Hong Kong coproduced films in the early 1960s, is a valuable case study for postwar East Asian border-crossing star studies. This article conceptualizes the body of the star as a site of constructed meaning, and argues that You Min's embodiment of cosmopolitan fantasy as constructed by the studios she worked for was fraught with corporate and cultural competition in the Cold War era. The first part examines how Japanese cinema's discourses of publicity constructed You Min's embodiment of the imaginary of tōyō—an expression of Japan's desire for a leadership role in mediating between Asia and the West. The second part analyzes how Hong Kong cinema constructed the imaginary of the cosmopolitan, embodied by You Min's seemingly natural adaptability in world travel.

Teaching and Practice: Composing Texts, Composing Lives

1994 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sondra Perl
Keyword(s):  
Adult Learners ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Adult Students ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Composition Studies ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Learning And Development ◽  
Reader Response Theory ◽  
A Site

In this article, Sondra Perl draws on the work of theorists in composition studies, reader response theory, critical pedagogy, and feminist studies to explicate a pedagogy that incorporates her own learning and development with that of her adult students. She emphasizes not only the importance of her students' responding critically to various literary texts, but also the importance of teachers' critically analyzing the texts of their teaching practice. Perl asserts that a classroom of adult learners has the potential to be a supportive milieu in which both students and teachers use writing as a way of brining their own experience to their interpretation of texts. In this way, Perl believes, students and teachers alike author their coming together, and the classroom becomes a site in which they compose not only texts, but also themselves.

Feeling

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah McNamer
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Sir Gawain ◽  
History Of Emotion ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
A Site ◽  
Opening Up

The past few decades have witnessed a surge of interest in emotion as a subject of study across the disciplines. This has generated important interdisciplinary conversations, opening up new methodologies and new fields, including a field with special relevance to medievalists -- the history of emotion. How can specialists in Middle English literature contribute in more visible and fruitful ways to the history of emotion? This article gestures towards some ways of bridging the disciplinary divide between literature and the history of emotion. It advocates an approach that does not dismiss, but embraces, the "literariness" of literature as a site for the making of emotion in history. It invites Middle English scholars to consider literary texts as scripts for the production of feeling, and it explains how the concepts of performance and performativity can generate new ways of thinking about emotion historically. Finally, it illustrates a method for reading Middle English texts as scripts for the making of emotion in history by analyzing two texts, The Wooing of Our Lord and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in their historical contexts.

scholarly journals Is Border Enforcement Effective? What We Know and What it Means

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 481-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Alden
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Border Enforcement ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Legal Obligations ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
Border Crossers

For too long, the policy debate over border enforcement has been split between those who believe the border can be sealed against illegal entry by force alone, and those who believe that any effort to do so is futile and without expanded legal work opportunities. And for too long, both sides have been able to muster evidence to make their cases — the enforcers pointing to targeted successes at sealing the border, and the critics pointing to continued illegal entry despite the billions spent on enforcement. Until recently it has been hard to referee the disputes with any confidence because the data was simply inadequate — both sides could muster their preferred measures to make their case. But improvements in both data and analysis are increasingly making it possible to offer answers to the critical question of the effectiveness of border enforcement in stopping and deterring illegal entry. The new evidence suggests that unauthorized migration across the southern border has plummeted, with successful illegal entries falling from roughly 1.8 million in 2000 to just 200,000 by 2015. Border enforcement has been a significant reason for the decline — in particular, the growing use of “consequences” such as jail time for illegal border crossers has had a powerful effect in deterring repeated border crossing efforts. The success of deterrence through enforcement has meant that attempted crossings have fallen dramatically even as the likelihood of a border crosser being apprehended by the Border Patrol has only risen slightly, to just over a 50–50 chance. These research advances should help to inform a more rational public debate over the incremental benefits of additional border enforcement expenditures. With Congress gearing up to consider budget proposals from the Trump administration that seek an additional $2.6 billion for border security, including construction of new physical barriers, the debate is long overdue. In particular, Congress should be taking a careful look at the incremental gains that might come from additional spending on border enforcement. The evidence suggests that deterrence through enforcement, despite its successes to date in reducing illegal entry across the border, is producing diminishing returns. There are three primary reasons. First, arrivals at the border are increasingly made up of asylum seekers from Central America rather than traditional economic migrants from Mexico; this is a population that is both harder to deter because of the dangers they face at home, and in many cases not appropriate to deter because the United States has legal obligations to consider serious requests for asylum. Second, the majority of additions to the US unauthorized population is now arriving on legal visas and then overstaying; enforcement at the southern border does nothing to respond to this challenge. And finally, among Mexican migrants, a growing percentage of the repeat border crossers are parents with children left behind in the United States, a population that is far harder to deter than young economic migrants. The administration could better inform this debate by releasing to scholars and the public the research it has sponsored in order to give Americans a fuller picture on border enforcement.

“Anywhere South of the Canadian Border”

2018 ◽  
pp. 174-184
Author(s):  
Mary Weaks-Baxter
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
American Society

This chapter reflects on Southern Border Formation Narratives and Border Crossing Narratives within a broader context of 21st Century wall building. Markers of Southernness are fading, yet at the same time, many of those strategies of Southern nation building are rearing their heads in American society. Bringing this chapter back around to the discussion of border building that opened the study, the book closes with a discussion of Southern Border Formation Narratives—especially those that divide races--that have been claimed by groups of people outside the South and how those narratives have blurred the line between South and not-South. Wrestling with questions about 21st Century wall building in the Age of Trump, the book closes by asserting that perhaps Malcolm X’s statement “As far as I am concerned, [the South] is anywhere south of the Canadian border” is even clearer now.

Cyborg Labor and the Global Logistics Matrix

Inland Shift ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan D. De Lara
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The Body ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Logistics ◽  
Worker Identity ◽  
Warehouse Workers ◽  
A Site ◽  
Insight Into

Individual and collective stories provide insight into how people make sense of the world. Such narratives are laden with cultural meaning and can provide the seeds for opposition to dominant systems. In the case of logistics, personal narratives were critical to the construction of a warehouse-worker identity that challenged the dominant pro-growth discourse or the pro-logistics “regime of truth” by referencing devalued immigrant bodies as a foil against boosterish claims. The chapter uses warehouse workers’ stories as an epistemic bridge that connects Latinx Studies and the theoretical tools of the testimonio to Clyde Woods’s blues epistemology and Robin Kelley’s freedom dreams by turning the body as a site of deprivation into bodies as sites of counter-narratives and collective identities. These stories became the backbone of a campaign by the Change To Win labor federation to improve warehouse workers’ conditions in inland Southern California.

Sinophone Mobilities

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
John Wei
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Geographical Mobility ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
A Site ◽  
Cultural Mobility

This chapter considers the intermingled cultural mobility and geographical mobility in the imagination and enactment of movements. It engages (and critiques) mobility scholarship and Sinophone scholarship to analyze border-crossing queer migrations and cultural flows between mainland China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese community in Malaysia. By developing and problematizing the idea of Sinophone mobilities, this chapter endeavors to shift our focus from post-migration settlement to a broader range of mobilized migrating experiences. The analysis extends to the flows and counterflows of queer cultures and migrants between China and the Sinophone sphere, in which China itself has become a site for Sinophone cultural productions.

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