Numer 11 (2/2018)
The Borders of the Border
Redaktor: Manuel Broncano Rodríguez
Spis treści
Strony
Pobierz
Paweł Jędrzejko
Borders and Vacuums
5 – 6
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Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez
Presidential Address for IASA 8th World Congress, Laredo TX, 12-21 July 2017
7 – 20
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Słowa kluczowe

IASA |International American Studies Association |the future of American Studies |borders |limits |society |Ethics |Laredo TX |marginalia |US-Mexico Border |Bordelands |Anzaldúa |Melville |Bartleby |Frost |Cavafis |Frontier(s) |migration

Streszczenie

Laredo is located in the vicinity of the Rio Grande/Bravo, in many senses the epitome of the border, of the frontier, of the “limen” in its etymological sense of “threshold,” “doorway,” or “limit.” The general theme of our reunion was “Marginalia: The Borders of the Border,” and the contributions the IASA members made addressed this theme from multiple perspectives, thus leading to most enriching discussions about one of the most written about topics in the scholarship of the last few decades. Such a topic has rekindled new interest, especially in the light of the recent political transformations in many regions of the globe, which are leading to revived feelings of essentialist nationalism and its atavistic fears of the other, call it the immigrant, the dissenter or, if you want, the barbarian. It is happening in Turkey, it is happening in Poland, it is happening in Britain, it is happening in the US. In this context, borders and walls, both physical and ideological, are being erected once again. Marginalia, in turn, is a Latin term that in its origins referred to the inscriptions that monks and other amanuensis made on the empty space surrounding the body of text inscribed on a parchment. Romance languages are largely the product of marginal inscriptions on Latin manuscripts. Thus, the first manifestations of the Spanish language are found in the glosses that monks scribbled on the margins of those manuscripts to clarify and comment on words whose meaning was already obscure for the medieval reader, and those annotations were made in the new romance language, which was nothing but macaronic Latin. By extension, marginalia refers to those writings that do not belong in the canonical body of works of a culture or civilization, and is close in meaning to apocryphal. Furthermore, it can be understood as referring to the interstices that exist between two or more cultures, nations, or religions. In our usage of the term, marginalia refers to those areas of the world that are populated by displaced or uprooted individuals, limbic spaces in which mere survival may become an illegal activity. The present address seeks to explicate the essence of the basic concepts underlying—and driving—the theme of the Congress.


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Texas A&M International University, USA
Alberto Moreiras
Notes on the Illegal Condition in the State of Extraction. How Not To Be an Informant
21 – 36
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Słowa kluczowe

the US surveillance state |state extraction |information |domination |border

Streszczenie

We live, increasingly, in a state of extraction. My thesis is that we have not yet figured out the implications of a primary or fundamental logic of state extraction. We have not figured out its implications for our own predicament—for the predicament, that is, not of state functionaries as such, not of extractors and surveyors, which is a predicament of domination, but the predicament of those who would rather not be dominated, and who understand that giving up on domination is the logical price to be paid. These latter figures, those who refuse domination, those who prefer not to be dominated, hence not to dominate, they might in fact constitute the “borders of the border,” that fantastic fringe territory of the human this conference has decided to thematize and, in some sense, to honor. Let me then reserve that theoretical position, the position of border or hyperborder dwellers, to develop what follows. I will claim that the border of the border is today the site where information will not be shared—an opaque site of silence and secrecy, a place of radical reticence concerning unconcealment.


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Texas A&M International University, USA
Marietta Messmer
Children and Youth: Disadvantaged and Disenfranchised by the Current U.S. Immigration Regime
37 – 66
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Słowa kluczowe

irregular immigrant children |1.5 generation |limitations of DACA |constructions of illegality |US citizen children’s rights |family unity |best interest principle

Streszczenie

Focusing on undocumented immigrant children who were brought to the US by their partents at a young age (the so-called 1.5 generation) and US citizen children living in irregular or mixed-status immigrant families, this essay argues that the current US immigration regime is too strongly adult-centered and in this way not only systematically disenfranchises immigrant children but also structurally disadvantages US citizen children living with at least one undocumented parent because the parent’s irregular status in practice tends to extinguish the child’s citizen status. Analyzing the US’s current immigration regime through the lens of under-age youth can thus function as an enabling prism to highlight the extent to which current US immigration laws and policies collide with both national and international legal practices and produce inherently contradictory or paradoxical situations; it can throw into relief the extent to which children (even US citizen children) lack sufficient agency and voice in current US immigration law; and it can foreground the deleterial consequences of the current immigration regime’s prioritization of deterrence and deportation for one of the most vulnerable segments of the US population for whom not even DACA can provide sufficient protection.


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Uniwersytet w Groningen, Holandia
Alice Balestrino
Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative Here
67 – 79
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Słowa kluczowe

Spacetime as a narrative category |Richard McGuire |Here |the American border

Streszczenie

This article interrogates the Cartesian understanding of time and space in narratives grounded in memorial endeavors. It focuses on the lines that define the interconnectedness between these two dimensions in relation to the introduction of the phenomenological category of memory as a third element providing a perspective on reality and blurring the borders between present and past; here and there. This composite, operative category is tested in the analysis of Richard McGuire’s graphic narrative Here (2014) that, both on the level of the format and on that of the story, outlines the porosity and the ultimate disappearance of the spatiotemporal borders by means of memories. This work conceives of a historical simultaneity that soaks a particular space in its past and of the margins of contingency that separate what pertains to History, what to individual stories and what gets forgotten instead—a representation which is studied against the background of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s speculations on memory in A Thousand Plateaus.


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Sapienza Università di Roma, Włochy
Chiara Grilli
The Canvas and the Maze: Deconstructing Wall and Frontier in Contemporary American Science Fiction
81 – 94
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Słowa kluczowe

science fiction |wall |American frontier

Streszczenie

This paper analyses how Denis Villeneuve’s movie Arrival (2016) and the TV series Westworld (2016) challenge the evocative symbol of the wall and the myth of the American frontier by turning them respectively into a canvas, conceived as the primal source of communication between two cultures, and a maze, metaphorically alluding to the search for new, inner spaces. Both works express the need for new forms of introspection and interaction with the Other, giving the individual the chance to wander through visionary predictions of the future and hallucinatory mirages of the past, and to re-build his/her own self-narrative.

Antonio Daniel Juan Rubio,
Isabel María García Conesa
The New School for Social Research as a patron of European scholars
95 – 111
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Słowa kluczowe

European scholars |patronage |rescue program |interdisciplinary pursuits

Streszczenie

The New School for Social Research was founded as an institution where intellectuals and artists could openly exchange ideas and theories, free from censure or political pressure. The school’s founders believed that in a world engulfed by political turmoil and modern warfare, the free exchange of different ideas regarding politics, aesthetics and other intellectual pursuits was key to ensuring a just and sane world. Since its inception, The New School has maintained close ties with European ideas and philosophies of Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among many others. Sensing a dire need to provide safe haven for many of Europe’s scholars and intellectuals, Alvin Johnson established a new graduate department in 1933 (coinciding with Hitler’s appointment to German Chancellor), called the University in Exile. with the financial assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropy groups, the University in Exile was founded as a new graduate division within The New School and, more importantly, as a rescue program. Nearly two hundred European scholars and professors received visas and teaching jobs in the US from the University in Exile. While many of them taught at The New School, there was never any stipulation from the University in Exile that they were required to do so. Alvin Johnson’s main goal was simply to get people out of harm’s way.


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Antonio Daniel Juan Rubio
Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Hiszpania

Isabel María García Conesa
Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Hiszpania
Fabrizio Tonello
"We are sliding into uncharted territory, and we are alone in this.” A New Look At Political Disorientation
113 – 127
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Słowa kluczowe

disorientation |political communication |political participation |political parties |Neoliberalism

Streszczenie

In the United States and in European democracies most citizens feel disoriented when required to vote, as shown by high electoral volatility, reduced turnout, and the successes of unconventional candidates, or brand-new parties. The purpose of this article is to look at political disorientation under a new angle, as a phenomenon that has striking similarities with the physical disorientation created by an alien landscape.


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Università degli Studi di Padova, Włochy
Carlo Martinez
“The thin delights of moonshine and romance”: Romance, Tourism, and Realism in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun
129 – 150
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Słowa kluczowe

Nathaniel Hawthorne |tourism |Italy |The Marble Faun |romance |Realism

Streszczenie

Hawthorne’s involvement with the logic of the tourism of his day is a key aspect of his development as a fiction writer. Starting from a discussion of the early sketch “My Visit to Niagara” the article argues that the discourse of tourism, with its protocols and practices, is for Hawthorne a fertile breeding ground and conceptual framework for the elaboration of a new rationale and a new aesthetic for the fiction writing he calls “romance.” It then explores how tourism resonates in the romance which takes it as its central thematic concern: The Marble Faun. Hawthorne’s last completed long work of fiction represents a moment of artistic and personal crisis for the author, who finds his notion of romance writing caught in a sort of double bind created by the touristic nature of his stay in Italy. As the plot of the novel suggests, in his efforts to extricate himself from the situation, Hawthorne, envisioned and experimented with a new kind of writing that led him to revise and alter radically the romance form he had previously elaborated in favor of a much more realistic style of fiction.


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Gabriele d’Annunzio University, Włochy
Pobierz cały numer
1 – 166
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International American
https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS
ISSN 1991-2773
Studies Association
e-ISSN 1991-2773