The Borderlands of Culture

Americo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary

Auteur: Saldívar, Ramón; Pease, Donald E.
Éditeur: Duke University Press
Collection: New Americanists
ISBN: 9780822337768
eISBN Pdf: 9780822387954
Lieu de publication: Durham , United States
Année de publication électronique: 2006
Mois : Avril
Pages: 536
DDC: 813/.54
Langue: Anglais

Légende

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Américo Paredes (1915–1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ramón Saldívar establishes Paredes’s preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldívar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the “new” American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization.

Saldívar demonstrates how Paredes’s poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the “border studies” or “anthropology of the borderlands.” Saldívar describes how Paredes’s experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Saldívar was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes’s own words. By explaining how Paredes’s work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldívar extends Paredes’s intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: In Memoriam
Part I History and Remembrance as Social Aesthetics
- 1 ‘‘The Memory Is All That Matters’’
- 2 A Life in the Borderlands
Part II Fictions of the Transnational Imaginary
- 3 The Checkerboard of Consciousness in George Washington Gómez
- 4 Transnational Modernisms: Paredes, Roosevelt, Rockwell, Bulosan, and the Four Freedoms
- 5 Paredes and the Modernist Vernacular Intellectuals: George I. Sánchez and Emma Tenayuca
- 6 The Borders of Modernity
- 7 Bilingual Aesthetics and the Law of the Heart
- 8 Border Subjects and Transnational Sites: The Hammon andthe Beans and Other Stories
- 9 Narrative and the Idioms of Race, Nation, and Identity
- 10 The Postwar Borderlands and the Origins of the Transnational Imaginary: The Occupation-Era Writings in Pacific Stars and Stripes and El Universal
- 11 The Shadow and the Imaginary Functioning of Institutions
Conculsion : A Transsentimental Journey
Notes
Works Cited
Index