Celebrating Cultural Hybridity Through Storytelling: Othello as a Borderlands Character in Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood

This paper provides a new approach to Othello’s story in Caryl Phillips’ polyphonic novel The Nature of Blood (1997). The fictional Othello finds himself at the crossroads between different cultures and is struggling to define his identity. Making use of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory as exposed in her work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), this study explores Phillips’ Othello as a borderlands character. Accordingly, it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that, as a borderlands character-narrator, Othello succeeds in bringing together the two hitherto conflicting cultures that he knows (Africa and Venice) through storytelling. Indeed, his narrative proves a transborder testimony that contributes to creating a debate forum where cultural hybridity is celebrated.um where cultural hybridity is celebrated.

Traversing Doctoral Borderlands : Black doctoral students’ experiences of identity construction in South Africa

Doctoral studies are described as a process of formation and becoming. This is an in-between space between unknowing and knowing, within and without the ivory tower of academia. In this in-between space the doctoral candidate takes the role of a novice and apprentice unlearning the student/unknowing past and learning to become a professional in academia. This project utilises the borderlands theory to understand the experiences of doctoral students as they undergo the process of becoming and intellectual identity formation. Whilst ‘journey’ and other metaphors that have been used to understand doctoral student experiences capture the process of becoming as a progression through the liminal stages – proposal, literature review, context, writing, reading etc. These stages presuppose temporality of being leading to stasis/completion. I argue that such conceptualisation of doctoral studies, although useful, depict one side of the story and provide a limited, monolithic, and homogenising understanding of the spatial configurations of doctoral space and intellectual identity formation. The dominant discourses of doctoral conceived and perceived space, liminal stages and understanding of doctoral student experiences, mask the more latent and intimate liminal stages of intellectual identity formation. Drawing from borderlands theory, I firstly argue for a holistic approach to understanding the spatiality of doctorate studies. Secondly, I argue that liminality is an everyday process integral to human existence where one is always in a state of ideological transition. An important state of liminality is the awareness of ‘Self’ in perpetual motion, caught between two worlds dominated/dominator and two ideologies of oppression/resistance. If this side of liminality is not made visible, institutional spaces, such as the doctorate, privileged with the power to disseminate and position onto-epistemologies as universal can be used to reproduce and reinforce exclusionary onto-epistemologies that subsequently impact intellectual identity formation. Using Lefebvre’s (1991) rhythmanalysis method, I use student experiences not as mere data for analysis, but as an act of envisioning, reinventing and coknowledge production to propose borderlands as a new metaphor to study doctoral spatial realities and the experiences of the students that traverse through it.

A Psychotherapy Private Practice Social Work Practicum: Expanding Our Boundaries of Field Education Placement

Many social workers go into private practice, providing crucial mental health services; however, there is a dearth in the scholarship outlining the social work student training for these career options. It may be argued that social work students receive little or no clinical training on how to run a private practice providing psychotherapy services. To mend this pedagogical shortcoming, a private practice field education placement is a legitimate teaching opportunity to prepare social work students to meet the mental health needs of individuals, families, and the public. Authors drew on borderlands theory described by Gloria Anzaldua as a contested space that focuses on “both and” thinking, which resonated with a sense of navigating a border filled with cultural tension between private practice and social work. Five social workers explore their unique experiences of a private practice field education placement using borderlands theory as a lens. Qualitative analysis of autoethnography narratives resulted in six themes: (1) benefits to private practice site, (2) preparation for social work, (3) private practice is social work, (4) balanced picture, (5) practicum landscape, and (6) learning opportunities. The article concludes with recommendations for social work education and research.

INCORPORATING AMBIGUITY INTO GIRLHOOD EXPERIENCES: GENDER STEREOTYPES AND IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS IN MARY HELEN PONCE'S HOYT STREET AND NORMA E. CANTÚ'S CANÍCULA: SNAPSHOTS OF A GIRLHOOD EN LA FRONTERA.

This paper reconsiders the Chicana girlhood narratives of Mary Helen Ponce and Norma E. Cantú, Hoyt Street and Canícula respectively, as instances of the ambiguous gender identities that lie at the core of much post-Borderlands theory. Drawing on Jose Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, Jennifer Ayala’s concept of “mothering in the borderlands” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s latest insights on liminality and fluidity, I contend that the female characters of the novels under analysis enter into a contradictory dialogue with the patriarchal archetypes of the mother, the virgin and the whore. Thus, this paper departs from previous feminist approaches to these texts, which have disregarded the characters’ allegiance and non-allegiance to patriarchal discourses on Chicana femininity. My aim with this essay is to advance new readings of these girlhood narratives as well as to contribute to research into the fragmentary and largely evasive character of Chicana identities.

QUEERING AMERICAN SPACE IN PIRI THOMAS’ DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS: A GLISSANTIAN APPROACH TO KINSHIP.

This paper reconsiders the Chicana girlhood narratives of Mary Helen Ponce and Norma E. Cantú, Hoyt Street and Canícula respectively, as instances of the ambiguous gender identities that lie at the core of much post-Borderlands theory. Drawing on Jose Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, Jennifer Ayala’s concept of “mothering in the borderlands” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s latest insights on liminality and fluidity, I contend that the female characters of the novels under analysis enter into a contradictory dialogue with the patriarchal archetypes of the mother, the virgin and the whore. Thus, this paper departs from previous feminist approaches to these texts, which have disregarded the characters’ allegiance and non-allegiance to patriarchal discourses on Chicana femininity. My aim with this essay is to advance new readings of these girlhood narratives as well as to contribute to research into the fragmentary and largely evasive character of Chicana identities.

Borderland literature, female pleasure, and the slash fic phenomenon

In the discussion of media and borderlands theory, current scholarship primarily attends to investigating borderlands as metaphors for broader minority critique, where niche, representative publications resist hegemonic mass-market productions. However, scholarship has yet to formally extend the borderlands paradigm to slash fan fiction—that is, examining a subaltern where residents display a hybridity of opposing culture. Looking at slash and its predominantly female, often queer, writers through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of a borderlands offers insight into the values and motivations of writers and consumers in their production of fan fiction, not just within the microcosm of fandom but also pertaining to wider social and cultural transformations. This investigation considers the circumstances dictating female fan experience by examining the practical and contextual dimensions of fandom and illustrating how fan works differ ontologically, epistemologically, and functionally from mainstream productions, thus facilitating a critique on how fans construct and mobilize imaginary as means of negotiating the real social structures that otherwise limit their enjoyment of consumable media and the transformative works they create that nonetheless mirror the systems of marginalization found in the real world.

Border Securitisation and Politics of State Policy in Nigeria, 2014–2017

This article examines the politics of public policies characterised by increased securitisation of Nigeria’s national boundary from 2014 to 2017. While the regulation appears on paper to discourage transborder crime, capital outflow and sustain a favourable balance of payment, the existing armoury of West African border literature argues otherwise. What is new in the transborder dynamics of West Africa? What informs government’s border policies in Nigeria? In answering these questions, this study provides a template for a reassessment of the gap between borderlands theory and policy in West Africa. The approach is comparative based on the critical analysis of oral interviews, government trade records, newspaper reports and the extant literature. The article provides a platform for rethinking of the nexus between governance and development in West Africa from the securitisation and neo-patrimonial perspectives. It concludes that effective border management in Nigeria is set aback by misguided and dysfunctional elitist-centred regulations that are devoid of the realities on the ground.

Intersectional Understandings of Inequality

To address the increase in social and economic inequalities requires complex paradigms that take into account multiple sources of oppression. This chapter proposes the concept of intersectionality elaborated through social identity theory and borderlands theory as a potential avenue for research and policy to speak to and solve multiple sources of disadvantage. The multiple sources of inequality produce intersectional identities as embodied in the social identities constituted by the master statuses of sexuality, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and physical ableness. By applying intersectionality to inequality one can examine both intersections of disadvantage (e.g., being poor and of Color) or intersections of both of disadvantage and privilege (e.g., being male and of Color). Intersectionality also permits the study of privilege when advantaged social identities are problematized. I conclude with reviewing the possible ways of empirically studying intersectionality and the advantages in applying it to the understanding of social and economic inequalities.