Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies: 1 (American Crossroads) - Tapa dura

"Border Matters" locates the study of Chicano culture in a broad social context. The author examines issues of representation and expression in a diverse assortment of texts - "corridas", novels, poems, short stories, punk and hip-hop music, ethnography, paintings, performance, art and essays. Saldivar provides a sophisticated model for a new kind of US cultural studies, one that seeks to challenge the homogeneity of US nationalism and popular culture by foregrounding the contemporary experiences and historical circumstances facing Chicanos and Chicanas. This study applies borderlands and diaspora theory to Chicano cultural practices in a way that seeks to change understanding of both the Chicano experience and the meaning of cultural theory. The author argues that the culture of the borderlands is transitional, constituting a social space in which new relations, hybrid cultures, and multi-voiced aesthetics are negotioted. The author's critical readings treat culture a social force and reveal the presence of social contexts within cultural texts.

"A brilliant new vision of the multiple migrations, metaphoric and material, that occur within and between intricate, evolving cultures of the U.S. and Mexico. By joining British and U.S. cultural studies to the study of the U.S. borderlands, Saldívar establishes the trans-Latin as a complex and contradictory space of ethnic identity, cultural imagination and political struggle.Border Matters is a groundbreaking book that not only casts light on regions that have been shadowed by neglect and disdain, but it also forces us to redraw, even unmap, the shifting intellectual borders of American cultural studies."Michael Eric Dyson,Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line

"Border Matters is exemplary in its detailed and sophisticated investigation of cultural texts. . . . A valuable work of intellectual history as well as a tour de force of contemporary cultural criticism."George Lipsitz, author ofTime Passages

"Saldívar presents and reworks very complex issues in a manner that will make this book accessible, even inviting, to non-expert readers, yet he loses none of the edge of his argument. . . . This is a groundbreaking work that does much more than define a new fieldit revolutionizes the predominant ways we tend to organize intellectual inquiry."Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, author ofRethinking the Borderlands