Borderland Narratives

This collection of original essays extends the concept of boderlands—as both a process and place—to geographic places and topics not usually considered in this realm. This includes African slavery, missionaries, the Ohio Valley, and other non-Spanish regions. Positioning these regions and topics as comparable to other early North American crossroads and meeting places highlights how the mingling of people and cultures shaped North America’s history before 1850. Equally important, it helps illuminate scholars’s growing focus on the process of borderland formation across a variety of North American regions. Collectively, the essays in this volume reveal how the field is currently unfolding and urge scholars to abandon the geographic determinism of the first definition. The southwestern United States-Mexico border remains an ideal locale to employ the concept as a metaphor and as an intellectual tool, but this volume reveals the merits of employing borderlands to create more nuanced narratives of the intersection of people and ideas in the Ohio Valley and elsewhere in early North America.

Narratives of Arab Anglophone Women and the Articulation of a Major Discourse in a Minor Literature

“It is important to stress that a variety of positions with respect to feminism, nation, religion and identity are to be found in Anglophone Arab women’s writings. This being the case, it is doubtful whether, in discussing this literary production, much mileage is to be extracted from over emphasis of the notion of its being a conduit of ‘Third World subaltern women.’” (Nash 35) Building on Geoffrey Nash’s statement and reflecting on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of minor literature and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderland(s), we will discuss in this paper how the writings of Arab Anglophone women are specific minor and borderland narratives within minor literature(s) through a tentative (re)localization of Arab women’s English literature into distinct and various categories. By referring to various bestselling English works produced by Arab British and Arab American women authors, our aim is to establish a New taxonomy that may fit the specificity of these works.

Boundaryless Work and the Role of Mobile ICT

The change of structures of work towards fewer boundaries in time, space and tasks are sometimes referred to as boundaryless work. ICT is pointed out as one cause of this tendency. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the role of mobile ICT in the forming of the borderland between work and non-work and the identities formed in relation to this borderland: how is mobile ICT used in work and non-work, how is this use related to the forming of a borderland between work and non-work, what are the characteristics of the identities formed in this borderland? Narratives of experience of mobile ICT practices are analysed by means of social theories. The results show that mobile ICT is used as a boundary object between work and non-work. In distinguishing between functions and artefacts, between time and space, different identities are formed: extended work identity, border identity and boundaryless identity.