Numer 11 (1/2018)
Walls, Material and Rhetorical: Past, Present, and Future
Redaktor: Virginia R. Dominguez
Spis treści
Strony
Pobierz
Paweł Jędrzejko
Campo di Fiori, or Walls
5 – 10
PDF

INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach

Virginia R. Dominguez
Introduction
11 – 23
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

Trump’s proposed wall |Introduction |rhetoric |Polls |comparisons

Streszczenie

An introduction to this special issue of RIAS on walls, in light of President Trump’s proposal to build a tall and beautiful wall along the US-Mexico border and the multiple concerns it raises, this essay, like this issue of RIAS as a whole, provides comparative background on walls built at different times in the past and in different locations around the world, exploring their intended efficacy and questionable results, their transformation over time into sites of tourism, uncertain peace, and unstable truces. Raising questions about both rhetoric and materiality, it suggests that the matter does not just concern Trump’s views and policies but, rather, much more general views in the US toward Mexico and Mexicans. The essay raises the specters of both racism and imperialism in the rhetoric and proposals coming from the White House, and it seeks to use contributions from scholars in Italy, Israel, Mexico, the U.S., Hungary, South Korea, Denmark, and Canada to put it all in broader perspective.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Alejandro Lugo
Photo Essay: Re-Mapping the US-Mexico Border/lands
25 – 37
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

US-Mexico Border |photography |imperialism |the everyday |photoessay

Streszczenie

The United States-Mexico international border has been unilaterally remapped by the US government for almost three decades. A series of US congressional acts have intensified efforts to secure the border, inlcuding by building fences and walls. This photo essay presents images of the border barriers as well as borderland images. The fence or wall images are then intended, on my part, to be juxtaposed with borderland images that capture the social and political relations that manifest the complex ways the borderlands are being remapped through walls and their consequences—all in the context of the still so-called ‘American Dream.’ The goal of the photo essay is to help identify the different ways the remapping of the U.S.-Mexico border itself is being carried out, with or without the “great, beautiful wall” Donald Trump and his supporters are currently imagining and proposing.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Arizona State University, USA
Laura McAtackney
The Many Forms and Meanings of (Peace) Walls in Contemporary Northern Ireland
39 – 61
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

gender |Belfast |segregation |peace walls |memorials |victimhood

Streszczenie

Peace walls are a longstanding materialization of the conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles c.1968–c.1998. The walls have been one of the only security infrastructural forms associated with the violence to have continued and grown into the post-conflict context. They have often been a forgotten materialization of conflict due to their ‘temporary’ nature and their restriction to working-class, urban areas. While there are increasing moves to have these walls removed, or at least to put policies in place to allow them to be taken down in consultation with the communities beside them, there has been little consideration of the long-term impacts on public memory of material segregation. This article uses peace walls in Belfast as a case-study of the unforeseen repercussions of long-term segregation of divided communities. It offers a warning to the current generation of politicians regarding not only the role of what ideological walls are intended to do, but also the impacts they can have that were not intended.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Aarhus Universitet, Dania
Giorgio Mariani
Walls that Bridge; or, What We Can Learn from the Roman Walls
63 – 82
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

Roman walls |walls as rhetoric |US literature |walls as bridges |walls as dividers

Streszczenie

When, during the latest US electoral campaign, Pope Francis criticized Trump’s idea of building a wall between Mexico and the US, reiterating his favorite point that “we do not need to build walls, but bridges,” the Trump camp retorted that the Pope lives in a city state surrounded by walls, in a city itself surrounded by other walls dating back to ancient Roman times. Why wasn’t he concerned with those walls? As one can see, even though Roman walls have completely lost their original function and survive mainly as tourist sites, they also remain powerful political and cultural symbols. The scope of this essay is to offer, from the perspective of an Americanist who was born and raised in Rome, some comparative reflections on what we can learn today from the history of Roman walls, as well as from their symbolic afterlives.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Sapienza Università di Roma, Włochy

Éva Eszter Szabó
Fence Walls: From the Iron Curtain to the US and Hungarian Border Barriers and the Emergence of Global Walls
83 – 111
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

US–Mexican border barrier |Hungarian border fence |unauthorized migration |Eastern Europe |Cold War |Iron Curtain |border walls

Streszczenie

This paper considers the resurgence of the Iron Curtain metaphor and its appropriateness in relation to the current border barriers in the US and the EU. It addresses the impact of the Iron Curtain both on Eastern Europe and on Western Europe, and it explores the legacy of this nearly hermetically sealed off borderland in the different border security and migration control approaches within the EU in the current era of emerging global walls. In my view, while the Iron Curtain metaphor is mistakenly applied to the current border barriers in the US and the EU alike, its legacy does contribute to the marked difference between Eastern and Western European attitudes and policies to the massive influx of migrants. From the Iron Curtain to the Hungarian border fence, the fence walls of the spatially identical border sections reflect not only the changing concepts of walls, but also the distinct historical experiences with migration. The current border barriers in Hungary and the EU, however, draw on the US–Mexican border barrier that aims to stop unauthorized entry while keeping the gates open in both directions for legal cross-border movement in contrast with the prison walls of the Iron Curtain.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Węgry
Amalia Sa’ar,
Sarai B. Aharoni,
Alisa C. Lewin
Fencing In and Out: Israel's Separation Wall and the Whitewashing of State Violence
113 – 134
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

security |state violence |gated communities |misrecognition |the political |Israel-Palestine |separation wall

Streszczenie

This essay uses the case of Israel’s Separation Wall to address the role of walls in the articulation of security, violence, vulnerability, and danger. In Israel, “security” refers exclusively to the Jewish citizens, whether they are fenced in (residing within the Green Line) or outside it (such as West Bank settlers). For the Palestinians, by contrast, the wall is yet another instrument of structural and symbolic violence. While Israeli Jews are vaguely aware of “the occupation,” they largely remain blissfully unaware of the violent under-side of everyday civil security, which the wall represents. Tracing the ways in which Jewish citizens living inside the Green Line experience and accommodate the wall, this essay analyzes its role in whitewashing state violence and in the ongoing construction of subject positions with respect to the security-violence complex.


INFORMACJE O AUTORACH


Amalia Sa’ar
Uniwersytet w Hajfie, Izrael

Sarai B. Aharoni
Uniwersytet Ben Guriona, Izrael

Alisa C. Lewin
Uniwersytet w Hajfie, Izrael
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina,
Steffan Igor Ayora-Díaz
To Build a Wall: Imaginaries of Identity in Yucatan, Mexico
135 – 152
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

Yucatan-Mexico relations |history |space |Yucatan |the border

Streszczenie

Here we consider ideas related to walls, roads, bridges, doors and tunnels and the materialities they name as a general frame of reference, to reflect on the manifold relations between imagined insides and outsides generally implied when discussing the wall already splitting Mexico and the US, but also regarding Yucatecan identity. We explain the ways in which Yucatecans have often seen themselves as different from “Mexicans” and why. Yucatecans have sometimes expressed the wish to build a wall around the Yucatan peninsula. We propose that such a wish is based on an erroneous perception of Yucatecans as intrinsically better people than non-Yucatecans, upholding ideals of “peacefulness” and “goodness,” and on the rhetorical inclusion of all inhabitants of the Yucatan peninsula within an imagined single “Yucatan.” Yet the wished-for Yucatecan unity is impeded by the current political and identity divisions within the Yucatan peninsula, which comprises three different states, each with its own economy, specific regional identities, and its own internal problems. We believe that to make Yucatan more inclusive, Yucatecans ought to start imagining more and better roads and bridges.


INFORMACJE O AUTORACH


Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Meksyk


Steffan Igor Ayora-Díaz
Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Meksyk
Sangjun Jeong
Mending Wall? The War over History in South Korea
153 – 173
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

Korean Peninsula |Political Divisions |history |war |Demilitarized Zone

Streszczenie

Until Korea was divided into North and South in 1945, it had maintained its territorial unity on the Korean peninsula for well over 1,000 years. Then, two young US officers drew an arbitrary line along the 38th parallel. Developing into a heavily militarized zone only several years later, ironically called the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ), that division has lasted for decades and into the present. Recently, several symbolic acts were performed in the zone and innovative plans were suggested to make the land strip into a peace park as a symbol of ideological reconciliation and ecological paradise. Yet to many Koreans, the zone is still inscribed as a wall permanently bisecting the peninsula not only physically but also culturally. Through an analysis of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” this article contemplates the divisions within South Korean society over the North-South divide as a war over the telling of history. This history, however told, must be understood alongside the sentiment of han, a Korean word loosely defined as frustration, anger, and sadness, something that has been shaped by centuries of suffering from wars, invasions, colonization, injustice, and exploitation.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Narodowy Uniwersytet Seulski, Korea Południowa
Jasmin Habib
Wall Art and the Presence of Absence
175 – 189
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

photoessay |Palestinians |wall art |coexistence |de Certeau |Haifa

Streszczenie

This photoessay takes the reader on a walking tour through Wadi Nisnas, Haifa, Israel, where art appears on walls and where walls become art. Using de Certeau, Jasmin Habib reflects on the way that these pieces represent the political and cultural histories of Palestinian displacement, a politics of belonging as well as their return. The artists’ imaginary of coexistence is set in stark contrast to the nativism that marks the world outside of these walls.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Uniwersytet w Waterloo, Kanada
György Tóth
Epilogue—Turning to the Wall: Concepts across Space and Time
191 – 203
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

commentary |Trump |historical memory |metonymy |Art

Streszczenie

The epilogue to this journal issue interrogates a variety of aspects of walls as mental structures and tropes of historical memory. Engaging with the issue’s contributing authors, Tóth argues that the idea of the wall functions as metonymy, activating a siege mentality and mobilizing its target audience—hence its rhetorical power and attraction as policy. Discussing the wall’s symbology as a border of the nation state but also pointing out its increasing privatization, the piece concludes with an exploration of the potential that walls may have for the creative subversion of their original function to seal off, categorize and divide humans.


INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

University of Stirling, UK

Juliana Nalerio
America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea (A Book Review)
205 – 209
PDF

INFORMACJE O AUTORZE

Universidad de Valladolid, Hiszpania
Stanford University, USA
Pobierz cały numer
1 – 226
PDF
International American
https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS
ISSN 1991-2773
Studies Association
e-ISSN 1991-2773