Borderlands Theory Research Articles

Borderland teaching of Chinese American teachers with Mexican American students

Even as research on teachers of Color increases, there still are few studies that examine Asian American teachers working cross-culturally with Latinx American students in US K–12 schools. This qualitative case study uses elements from borderlands theory and culturally responsive teaching to examine three Chinese American teachers working with eleven Mexican American students in three ethnically diverse urban secondary schools in the Pacific Northwest. Findings suggest that the Chinese American teachers used borderland teaching (a hybrid of borderlands theory and culturally responsive teaching) to promote academic performance and build kinships with the Mexican American students. Implications of the study include further refining borderland teaching for educational research and practice.

Healing the Open Wound of Ecofascism: Notes on Care in/from the Borderlands

ABSTRACT This essay explores environmental care from a Borderlands perspective. Using the August 3, 2019 shooting in El Paso, TX as a focal point, I argue that recent eco-fascist violence is deeply connected to environmental nativism, coloniality, and white supremacy. In centering an ethic of care informed by Borderlands theory, I highlight how interconnectivity, ambiguity, and compassion are vital for confronting historic patterns of violence.

Nowhere to bi: Barriers to belonging in the broader LGBTQ+ community for Aboriginal bi+ people in Australia

Having a multiplicity of identities not only makes it difficult to find inclusive spaces for Aboriginal bisexual+ (bi) people but may often be a barrier to building connections and relationships with people who have other queer identities. Bi + identities alone are often rendered invisible, unintelligible or erased when it comes to inclusion and solidarity among their peers. An intersectional lens is used to reflexively investigate existing literature to explore how a lack of solidarity among lateral communities may impact Aboriginal bi + people in Australia who face an array of racism and queerphobia from both LGBTQ + and Aboriginal communities. These unique and multifaceted layers of discrimination greatly impact mental health and wellbeing. These experiences stem from the heterosexist and monosexist status quo from heteropatriarchal settler colonialism that is seen in both Aboriginal and LGBTQ + communities respectively. As a result, Aboriginal queer people are constantly surveying risks, policing their own identities and identity expression, often hiding parts of their identity as a survival strategy to avoid rejection and adhere to dominant cultural norms. When specifically considering Aboriginal bi + identities, there are added unique stressors of lateral violence with other LGBTQ + groups, antibisexual prejudice, and assumed monosexuality, adding additional layers of minority stress. The author explores these experiences by extending upon borderland theory and minority stress models. Whilst there is solace in the holistic celebration of intersecting identities in emerging intersectional Aboriginal queer spaces, there is still a great need for solidarity and celebration of Aboriginal bi + people within the broader LGBTQ + community.

Transnational students' experiences of EMI in Myanmar's borderlands

Based on a large-scale ethnography of Myanmar migrants, the present study examines the experiences of multilingual Myanmar students who received EMI education in secondary schools and universities in Myanmar's borderlands. Data were collected through the use of linguistic autobiography, semi-structured interviews and written materials. Adopting the borderlands theory, the study investigates how Myanmar ethnic minority students encounter and wrestle with the EMI learning challenges in the hybridized border regions. Our findings indicate that Myanmar ethnic minorities appropriate their agentive practices by leveraging their borderland subjectivities to form an assemblage of semioticized resources. Living in an under-resourced EMI context, our participants flexibly deploy their previous multiliteracies, mobilize the local and community resources and maximize the digital and transnational affordances. Our study argues that the successful validation of EMI prospect in the borderlands needs to overcome the essentialist practices and take into consideration sociopolitical power within and cross the border. By revealing the EMI affordances and constraints mediated in the transnational experiences, our study contributes to the knowledge base of EMI inquiry by including the peripheral voices and indigenous practices as legitimate construct and revealing the interplay of multiple forces shaping EMI students' trajectories.

Borderland's theory in indigenous ethnic community archiving

The main purpose of this article is to bring to the fore the nexus between what borderlands theory stands for and the mushrooming of community archives in these areas as a form of counter-archiving and documenting the ‘other’. Zimbabwe's borderlands are uniquely inhabited by the marginalised ethnic indigenous groups of people. This prevalent borderland phenomenon has seen the growth of community archives which border on archival activism. Therefore, this article, through literature review interrogates further this borderland phenomenon by giving an overview picture of the nexus between community archives and Zimbabwe's borderlands. One of the findings reveals that these community archives which come in different formats such as archives, museums, trusts, oral history groups and language associations seem to be a counter move by the marginalised to tell their stories which are side-lined by those in power. It is now almost axiomatic to conclude that the stories of those in borderlands are scarcely documented in the mainstream heritage institutions in Zimbabwe. Also, one of the leitmotifs which runs through the article is how the concepts of Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) are used by community archives in borderlands to further their objectives.

Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and the American Union by Holly A. Mayer

Reviewed by: Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and the American Union by Holly A. Mayer Gregory T. Knouff Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and the American Union. By Holly A. Mayer. Campaigns and Commanders. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. 408 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. As the Continental army invaded Quebec in 1775, Congress envisioned it as a possible fourteenth rebellious province. Thinking in such broad North American terms, Congress authorized the raising of two Canadian Regiments in January 1776. The second of these—which was variously referred to as Second Canadian, Old Canadian, and Hazen’s but came to be known as Congress’s Own—is the subject of Holly A. Mayer’s ambitious new study. Mayer links this unit, one of the few regiments attached to the army but not raised by a specific state, to the construction of the American nation, showing how it reflected the diversity and indeterminate status of the emerging nation. A far-reaching fusing of older and more recent approaches to early North American military history, Mayer’s work builds on Charles Royster’s foundational A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783, which argued for the role of the Continental army in making early nationalism. At the same time, her work speaks to recent scholarship on how the army shaped American national identities in terms of gender, family, age, race, and enslavement.1 Mayer argues that the Continental army and Congress’s Own Regiment in particular constituted a borderland. She draws on borderland theory to show how Congress’s Own created new imagined communities that shaped and reflected the emerging United States. For Mayer, this borderland was [End Page 182] both a process and place.2 The place was not geographic but rather was located within the army, which moved across space and along military borders that its very presence constructed. The process was community formation among diverse people who previously had little in common but were bound together by the Continental army’s hierarchy and relation to the civilian government. Service conveyed a sense of belonging to the new nation as the regiment itself embodied elements of the republic. The regiment mirrored the divisions of state, local, and national authority as well as the territorial ambitions of the revolutionaries. Its commanding officer, Colonel Moses Hazen, originally from Massachusetts, had multiple land and business ties to Quebec and northern New England and was a borderland figure himself. Meanwhile, its officer corps embodied George Washington’s hope for a nationalized professional military, as it was composed of residents of many states, Europe, and Canada. Although the unit was known as “infernals” (153), in part because of its heterogeneity and its officers’ reputations as contentious, Mayer also emphasizes its successes in battles and in expanding U.S. borders. She demonstrates that the unit proved competent against British forces at Brandywine, Germantown, and the siege of Yorktown. Less well-known, but vitally important to showing how the regiment constructed imagined national borders, is Mayer’s analysis of how its soldiers were also agents of early U.S. expansionism. The regiment’s 1779 expedition to the Coos Country—a borderland between New York, New Hampshire, and the claims of Vermont separatists, as well as homeland to Abenakis—exerted a U.S. military claim to the region. Initially part of a vanguard for another invasion of the Saint Lawrence valley in Canada, the unit ended up constructing networks of supply and fortification, essentially creating and constituting a border in the region. Mayer’s concluding chapter on how regimental veterans sought economic competence in the postwar period implies that their postwar migrations into borderland regions continued. In some cases, they took up claims to bounty land warrants and became settler colonists of American empire in the contested boundaries of the early republic. It is difficult to overstate how well-researched Mayer’s work is. Using wide-ranging sources including muster rolls, orderly books, Revolutionary [End Page 183] War pension applications, correspondence, and journals, she paints a comprehensive portrait of the regiment over time that focuses on both officers and enlisted men. The book carefully documents...

Beyond Machismo. Intersectional Latino Masculinities

Beyond Machismo. Intersectional Latino Masculinities

Securitizing the Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderland: impacts on the Ahmadzai Wazirs

Taking ‘Ahmadzai Wazirs’ of erstwhile FATA, Pakistan as a case study, this research attempts to explore the impacts of the securitization discourse and border fencing on the socio-cultural lives of the tribesmen who have lived for centuries in the Pakistan and Afghanistan borderland area. This is done by focusing on the perceptions which Ahmadzai Wazir tribes have on the state’s securitization and border fencing narrative, and the resultant impacts on them. In the wake of the policy maker’s decision to fence the border, this paper investigates the perception of the border community about the ongoing border fencing project and the ways in which the border landers defy the territorial notion of state sovereignty. We thus try to engage this comparatively newer theoretical framework, the borderland theory to investigate perceptions of the local people as a distinct cross-border community in order to investigate the notion of security from the perspective of the people on the borderland. The theory allows us to see borderland as a distinct entity as opposed to the hitherto dominant state-centred approach of looking at the border region as state peripheries. A mixed research method was employed to get primary and secondary data and draw analysis.

Servingness in the Borderlands: A Study of Faculty Hiring at a Hispanic-Serving Institution on the Border

This evaluation of faculty hiring examines how eight faculty search chairs at a border Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) discuss how they enact an HSI consciousness when making hiring decisions. Using a combined phenomenological case study approach, the author examines hiring through a conceptual framework that brings together organizational culture and Borderlands theory to understand how committee decisions on hiring are informed by their campus’s HSI designation and cultural identity. Through analysis of faculty search chair interviews, faculty search chairs at a borderland HSI are committed to hiring with their student population in mind by enacting a Latinx-serving consciousness. Overall, the findings of this study contribute to a broader conversation on servingness as well as scholarship on how educators and administrators can embrace the cultural values that their Latinx students possess to make decisions in hiring.

Celebrating Cultural Hybridity Through Storytelling: Othello as a Borderlands Character in Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood

This paper provides a new approach to Othello’s story in Caryl Phillips’ polyphonic novel The Nature of Blood (1997). The fictional Othello finds himself at the crossroads between different cultures and is struggling to define his identity. Making use of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory as exposed in her work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), this study explores Phillips’ Othello as a borderlands character. Accordingly, it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that, as a borderlands character-narrator, Othello succeeds in bringing together the two hitherto conflicting cultures that he knows (Africa and Venice) through storytelling. Indeed, his narrative proves a transborder testimony that contributes to creating a debate forum where cultural hybridity is celebrated.um where cultural hybridity is celebrated.

Open Doors and “Open Wounds”: Bearing Witness to Borders and Changing Discursive Formations on Refugees and Migrants in Turkey

ABSTRACT On February 28th, 2020, with President Erdogan’s claim to have “opened the doors,” refugees and migrants made their way to the Turkish borderlines with Greece and Bulgaria, only to experience militarized policing, hazardous crossings by sea, and deadly encounters. By employing a critical discourse analysis and using Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory and lens, the article argues how Turkish borderlines with Greece and Bulgaria have transformed into a borderland due to the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) shifting discursive formations against migrants and refugees. The article analyzes public speeches and statements of President Erdogan and politicians from the JDP between the years 2014–2020. The discursive shift from honorable guests and Muslim fellows to refugees and migrants being a burden on the Turkish state has led Greece and Bulgaria to heighten the militarization of the borderlines both on land and sea, forming a complex security landscape, a topography of cruelty, and a borderland. Furthermore, the article contextualizes how this infected environment becomes an “open wound,” breaking down families, futures, and bodies as well as constructing individual and collective spaces of (un)belonging, trauma, and displacement.

Bandits, Militants, and Martyrs: Sub‐state Violence as Claim to Authority in Late Antique North Africa

AbstractFourth Century North Africa was a site of intense religious and political conflict. Emerging from a period of persecution and newly legitimized by the Roman state, the Christian Church immediately fractured into two competing camps. Now known as the Donatist schism, this fracture was the result of competing claims to religious authority between two camps of bishops, but the doctrinal debate at its core precipitated a specific form of violence: attacks on clergy and property perpetrated by roving groups of militant bandits. Known as circumcellions, these bands acquired a perverse reputation for religious zeal, a desire for martyrdom, and what their opponents described as the ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ of their violence. Here I analyze sources produced by both Donatists and Catholics to trace patterns of circumcellion violence. I draw on borderland theory and research on non‐state violence to argue that such acts were not mad, but rather the result of strategic efforts to consolidate religious and political power. In this, Donatism and the sectarian violence that accompanied it provide important insights into how banditry and peasant rebellions can serve as alternate sources of social and political power, avenues through which heterodox movements challenge the power state and religious hierarchies alike.

Between two cultures: an autoethnographic reflection on multicultural competence as a science educator

Multicultural competence has gained attention in education as the diversity of students has increased. Thus, teachers ought to be expected to develop ways of understanding students’ cultural differences and to improve their ability to communicate with and be culturally empathic with students from different backgrounds. Using an autoethnographic approach, I reflect on my lived experiences based on the three aspects of multicultural competence -cultural knowledge, awareness, and skills: through the lens of multiracial feminist theory and Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideas in her Borderlands theory. I specifically discuss how my experiences as a female science educator were shaped in both South Korea and the USA to understand my cultural beliefs. This autoethnography points to the aspects of multicultural experiences that teachers can reflect on to understand both students’ realities and their own in science education.

Blak, Bi+ and Borderlands: An Autoethnography on Multiplicities of Indigenous Queer Identities Using Borderland Theory

Indigenous queer people often experience a conflict in identity, feeling torn between long-standing cultures and new LGBTIQA+ spaces; however, conflicts are being reframed by new generations of Indigenous queer academics who consider decolonising ideas about white heteronormativity. The following autoethnography of my own Indigenous queer journey (muru) uses narrative analysis to explore the challenges of living between worlds as well as the difficulties in gaining acceptance from multiple cultures. This story, like many others, highlights the power of narrative as it reflects the nuanced experiences of Indigenous queer people with identity multiplicity via the application of borderland theory. The narrative analysis forefronts the wide impact of internalised phobias (homophobia, biphobia, and racism) and its impact on performative self-expression of sexual identity, self-sabotage, institutionalized racism and shadeism, and community acceptance, particularly for bi+ sexual identities. This article will explore existing literature which illustrates how navigating the multiplicity of identities may result in poorer social and emotional wellbeing, particularly for Indigenous queer youth. The article concludes with final comments and suggests future directions in mixed method research with Indigenous queer Australians to better understand and improve their social and emotional wellbeing.

Classroom counterspaces: centering Brown and Black students in doctoral education

ABSTRACT Campus counterspaces exist as spaces where Brown and Black students can promote their own learning, and where their experiences are considered valid and critical knowledge. However, research on classrooms as counterspaces has often been limited to ethnic studies courses. Using data collected from a graduate-level research methods course situated in the U.S, this study explores what constitutes a classroom counterspace, and how instructors can create classroom counterspaces. Data were mainly collected through student conversations, reflections, classroom observations, and field notes. Drawing from Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory, the study revealed that classroom counterspaces recognize the complexity of Brown and Black identity, push back against whiteness, and support Brown and Black students’ vulnerable and honest perspectives on the academy. These findings highlight areas where instructors can rethink their pedagogical approaches to create classroom counterspaces, and suggest that classroom counterspaces also push against the hegemony found in current U.S. higher education.

Transcultural and First Nations doctoral education and epistemological border-crossing: histories and epistemic justice

ABSTRACT Existing literature on transcultural doctoral education remains largely silent about how history enters knowledge creation and the supervisory relationship. This paper draws upon Andzaldúa’s borderlands theory and de Sousa Santo’s theory on epistemologies of the South to examine the complex ways that history impacts upon First Nations, migrant, refugee and culturally diverse doctoral candidates’ epistemological border-crossing. We explore how our life history study of 40 research candidates and supervisors across seven Australian universities casts new light on knowledge creation in transnational and First Nations doctoral education. Findings show research supervision as a multimodal process of epistemological border-crossing that is deeply embedded in intersected histories. We argue that a history-informed supervision approach demonstrates the deconstructive possibilities of epistemological border-crossing and contributes towards global epistemic justice.

Doctoral students navigating the borderlands of academic teaching in an era of precarity

ABSTRACT Neoliberalisation of academia has led to an increasing recruitment of doctoral students in teaching roles. Whilst there is evidence of doctoral students being engaged in teaching roles and the reasons for doing so, there is a pressing need to understand their experiences and to develop effective support practices to help them in their roles as teachers. Using borderlands theory as a lens, the thematic analysis of case study data from doctoral students in two English universities indicates that although they were navigating similar borderlands, the structural inequalities posed by their institutions led to differential support for their teaching roles and teacher identity development. The paper highlights the need for aligning doctoral roles to academic roles. It concludes by challenging the precarious support available for doctoral students, and proposes recommendations for the holistic development of doctoral students as competent and successful teachers (and researchers) in an increasingly precarious academia.

Inhabiting borders: autoethnographic reflections of PhD students in Colombia

ABSTRACT This article examines our border experiences as PhD candidates developing transdisciplinary research in a Colombian public university. Its objective is to present our autoethnographic reflections by employing the borderlands theory as a framework to understand the emergence of physical and symbolic in-between spaces in which our experiences are situated. Our findings indicate that two elements affect our border experiences: the Colombian context, and practices and subjectivities. While the context is shaped by violence and neoliberalism, practices and subjectivities include our transdisciplinary formation and our research conducted with collaborators considered as ‘others.’ By discussing, examining, and interpreting our experiences, we underline the similarities and differences among them.

Community Narrative as a Borderlands Praxis: Anzaldúa's Mestiza Consciousness as Explored in Cortez's Sexile.

I apply Gloria Anzaldúa's "borderlands theory" to Jamie Cortez'sSexile, an HIV/AIDS prevention publication created as a first-person narrative of the journey of queer, trans activist Adela Vasquez who fled to the US from Cuba in 1980. I argue thatSexileis a borderlands text and operationalizes Anzaldúa'smestizaconsciousness at various levels- ranging from the essence of the text and what its existence represents to the literary techniques used in the telling of Adela's narrative. In the first half of this paper, I explore Anzaldúa's borderlands theory and the ethos ofSexileas a text, including Vázquez's story as inherently a borderland narrative; as a product of democratized knowledge; the praxis of the text's creation; and the technology of the graphic novel. Throughout the second half, I look more closely at the content of the text using close reading to explore notions of the "borderland" represented throughout Adela's narrative. Through both its content and the praxis of creation,Sexilerepresents the power of graphic medicine in illustrating the nuances of narratives at the interstices of marginalized identities and captures the multitudes and ambiguities of trauma, loss, rebirth, kinship, and joy at the margins.

Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a LiteratureMestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity

Book Review| March 01 2021 Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a LiteratureMestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature. By González, Christopher. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2017. xii, 194 pp. Cloth, $129.95; paper, $29.95; e-book, $29.95.Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity. By Davis-Undiano, Robert Con. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 2017. xxi, 312 pp. Cloth, $29.95; e-book available. Bernadine Hernández Bernadine Hernández Bernadine Hernández is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of New Mexico. Her forthcoming book is titled Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth Century Borderlands (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2022). Her publications appear in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Literature and Culture, among others. She specializes in transnational feminism and sexual economies of the US borderlands, along with American literary studies/empire from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, borderlands theory, and Chicana/Latina literature and sexualities. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (1): 154–156. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8878590 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Bernadine Hernández; Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a LiteratureMestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity. American Literature 1 March 2021; 93 (1): 154–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8878590 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search Now more than ever, Latino/a studies is on the brink of change. From invoking the X to in Latino/a studies programs nationwide to having the tough conversations that 1960s and 1970s Chicano nationalists ignored regarding Indigenous and Black Latinos/as/x, the field is shifting. Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature by Christopher González and Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity by Robert Con Davis-Undiano are two vastly different texts that continue the conversation on the future of Latino/a studies.Permissible Narratives is an astute study of how readership has contended with the development of Latino/a literature over the last fifty-plus years. The book is part of the Cognitive Approaches to Culture Series from Ohio University Press and is unique because it employs a cognitive narratology framework to examine what is permissible in Latino/a narrative and what is foreclosed as... Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press2021 You do not currently have access to this content.