Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies / Edition 1

by José David Saldívar

Overview

Border Matters locates the study of Chicano culture in a broad social context. José Saldívar examines issues of representation and expression in a diverse, exciting assortment of texts—corridos, novels, poems, short stories, punk and hip-hop music, ethnography, paintings, performance, art, and essays. Saldívar provides a sophisticated model for a new kind of U.S. cultural studies, one that challenges the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture by foregrounding the contemporary experiences and historical circumstances facing Chicanos and Chicanas.

This intellectually adventurous, politically engaged study applies borderlands and diaspora theory to Chicano cultural practices in a way that permanently changes our understanding of both the Chicano experience and the meaning of cultural theory. Defying national (and nationalistic) paradigms of culture, Saldívar argues that the culture of the borderlands is trans-national, constituting a social space in which new relations, hybrid cultures, and multi-voiced aesthetics are negotiated.

Saldívar's critical readings treat culture as a social force and reveal the presence of social contexts within cultural texts. Border Matters maps out a new terrain for the study of culture, reshaping the way we understand migration, national identity, and intellectual inquiry itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520206823
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/01/1997
Series:	American Crossroads , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

José David Saldívar is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique and Literary History (1991).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Tracking Borders

PART ONE COMPARATIVE INTERCULTURAL STUDIES

1. Cultural Theory in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
2. Americo Paredes and Decolonization
3· Changing Borderland Subjectivities
4· The Production of Space by Arturo Islas
and Carmen Lomas Garza

PART TWO EL OTRO LADO I THE OTHER SIDE

5. On the Bad Edge of La Frontera
6. Tijuana Calling: Travel Writing, Autoethnography,
and Video Art
7· Remapping American Cultural Studies

Afterword: Frontejas to El Vez
Notes
References
Index