If we wanted to carry out an archaeology of border theory, how would we identify its sources and its targets? Where would we locate its multiple sites of production and consumption, formation and transformation? What are the multiple discourses producing images of borders almost everywhere, at least in the minds of academics? In trying to answer these questions, more with an exploratory spirit than with a definitive one, let us say that the sites, the sources, the targets, and the discourses can be variably characterized by the following: previously marginalized intellectuals within the academy (i.e., women and other minorities), the...

My wife and I go to an opening reception at the newly opened Barnes & Noble bookstore. We are disappointed because it looks like a mall. What did we expect? The store is full of people who gather around food tables and gawk through the aisles. People visit and chat with one another. My wife and I look at each other and finally whisper:“There’s no one here but white people.”El Paso is 70 percent “Hispanic” (I hate that word). The West Side, where the bookstore was built, is the whitest part of El Paso. The clientele assembled here...

In the annals of silent film comedy, there is neither a more beloved nor a more invested signature than Charlie Chaplin’s. It is literally legendary in that the signature carries its legend along with it. The mythos of Charlie Chaplin has established a fixed context of description and association over the past decades in the mere mention of the proper name or its illumination upon the silver screen. It connotes an entire cast of outcast roles — the little tramp, the pantomimic clown, the nomadic vagabond—with each and every inscription.

In reviewingThe Pilgrim(1923), the critic Robert E. Sherwood...

In the Latin Americas, wherever they are, there are, perhaps still to come, two steps to the border. These twopasoswill have been thought under the auspices of two proper names whose propriety goes unquestioned: Paz and Borges. They will have taken sides where perhaps there are none.

In any case, the juxtaposition of Paz and Borges, of two relationships to modernity, has been most recently suggested by Néstor Garcia Canclini inCulturas híbridas,in which he poses the problem of their relation as one of the direction of their work, writing of Paz, “Queremos entender por qué a...

As Anglo-American theorists of women’s autobiography have shown, female subjectivity is characterized both by women’s experiences in social contexts not of their own making and by their lack of access to means through which to represent the specificity of these experiences (Jelinek, 1980; Personal Narratives Group, 1989; Bell and Yalom, 1990; Smith and Watson, 1992). Women’s “life writing,” by these accounts, entails and encodes a double marginalization: an alienated relationship to the material conditions of existence on the one hand, and an estrangement from the cultural practices through which these conditions are mediated and understood on the other. Postmodern strategies...

Although literary critics, writers, and intellectuals have emphasized the diversity and newness emerging along the “border” zones of literal geopolitical boundaries as well the more figurative limits of subjectivity, accounts of the people and texts who inhabit these liminal spaces tend to coalesce into a single, undifferentiated narrative line. Commentators who treat the distinct experiences of nationality, alternative permutations of sexuality, racial marginalization, and varying degrees of political oppression that appear in such works as Gloria Anzaldúa’sBorderlands/La Fronteraor Américo Paredes’sWith His Pistol in His Handnonetheless tell similar stories when they describe how such texts perform within...