This dissertation revisits the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to examine its neoliberal transformation intensified by globalization in order to address new aesthetic subjectivities that challenge this violent process from the peripheral experience and imagination. Despite increasing interest in the academic field, Border Studies have been trapped by hybridity theory -whose celebrative interpretations of the border phenomena frequently ignore social inequality and neutralize cultural conflicts- developed by Homi Bhabha and García Canclini, among others. Breaking with this postmodern frame, I explore the heterogeneous realities and marginal subjects particularly in relation to the crisis and the reformulation of two major and conflictive concepts: "cosmopolitanism" and "nation." I argue that for Border Studies to be effective, they have to respond to new scenarios of "peripheral" voices and experiences as they have been emerging along the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond. My dissertation thus focuses on narrative analysis of the topics that configure marginal languages and cultures: undocumented migratory labor and border crossing, the cholo community, popular border saints, narco-world and "bare life," feminicide in Ciudad Juárez and maquiladora workers. From Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gloria Anzaldúa, the texts of embodied border identities I analyze attempt to dismantle binary models -the "borderless" and the "bordered"- of the idea of 'great community,' to demonstrate the representational crisis of a national or bi-national perspective that intensifies monolithic claims, and to offer different and even alternative ideas of community in a globalized context.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-12082008-105038 |
| Date | 28 January 2009 |
| Creators | Park, Jungwon |
| Contributors | Hermann Herlinghaus, Shalini Puri, Joshua Lund, John Beverley |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-12082008-105038/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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