Border Literary Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism

Abstract

We are all, of course, only too familiar with “globalization” understood as a multinational corporate/economic world phenomenon, or more specifically, as Robert Eric Livingston reminds us, as “economic discourses commonly termed neoliberal embodied and administered by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.” But, Livingston continues, “ethical and political discourses . . . likewise aspire to global significance” (145). Today, such is also the case for critical discourses in American literary studies, which, in another time, were almost fully grounded and bounded within the US. Such a critical globalization in American literary studies is in the same universe as “the transnational,” “the post-national,” and “border theory”—interpretive tendencies that while discrete, nevertheless share the same basic impulse and mission of decentering American literary studies away from a nation–state focus and identity. The purpose of this essay is to critique this tendency with some cautionary observations and with a focus on literary histories that speak to the US-Mexico border area, principally the respective works of Jose David Saldivar and Ramon Saldivar.