Tutor: Vic Clarke

"Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy" (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 1987, p.19.)

Seminar questions:

• What does Anzaldúa mean by ‘Meztiza Consciousness’?
  How does Anzaldúa mobilise historical narrative in her writing?
  How do Anzaldúa’s ideas relate to Third World feminism, transnational feminism and intersectional feminism?
  How is Borderlands useful for the historian of gender and sexuality?

Core reading:

Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Chapter 7, ‘Towards a New Consciousness’.

Lugones, María, “On Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay” Hypatia (1992) pp. 31-37.

Perales, Monica, On Borderlands/La Frontera: Gloria Anzaldua and Twenty-Five Years of Research in the Borderlands’, Journal of Women’s History (2013), pp. 163-173.

Further reading:

Ahmed, Sara (Ed.), Uprootings/Regroundings (London: Routledge, 2003).

Anzaldúa, Gloria, Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Colour (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1990).

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherrie (eds.) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Colour (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press, 1981). Especially Anzaldúa, La Prieta, pp. 198-209.

Anzaldúa, Gloria, Keating, Ana Louise, Mignolo, Walter, Silverblatt, Irene, and Saldívar-Hull, Sonia (Eds.), The Gloria Anzaldua Reader (New York: Duke University Press, 2009).

Blunt, Alison, and Rose, Gillian, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (London: Guildford Press, 1994).

Blunt, Alison, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

Bost, Suzanne, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mestiza Pain; Mexican Sacrifice, Chicana Embodiment and Feminist Politics” Aztlán, (2005) 46-55.

Bost, Suzanne, Mulattas and Mestizas. Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000 (Athens: U of Georgia, 2003).

Robert Con Davis-Undiano, “Mestizos Critique the New World: Vasconcelos Anzaldúa and Anaya” LIT Literature, Interpretation, Theory. (2000), pp. 117-42.

González-López, Gloria, Family Secrets: Stories of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

Lavie, Smadar, “Staying Put: Crossing the Israel Palestine Border with Gloria Anzaldúa” Anthropology and Humanism, (2011) pp. 101-21.

Rosaldo, Renato, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, (London: Routledge, 1989).

Saldívar, José David, Border Matters. Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Torstrick, Rebecca, The Limits of Coexistence: Identity Politics in Israel, (University of Michigan Press, 2000).

 

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