Abstract
Since its publication in 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza has become one of the most widely read multicultural queer texts in European classrooms. It has also become foundational in Border Studies. This chapter shows ways Anzaldúa’s text opens up the canon of American literature within a larger transnational and hemispheric framework, contributing to a decolonial critique. Through its mixing of theory and fiction, history and autobiography, prose and poetry, the book locates itself typographically and topographically at the border, the interface between opposing forces, calling in question easy definitions of American fiction. As Fellner demonstrates, the text straddles many borders, moving across linguistic boundaries and various symbolic borders, subverting binary structures and constituting a powerful queer translanguaging practice. Gauging the impact of Anzaldúa’s texts at European universities, Fellner carves out the cultural work of this text in the field of American Studies, showing why Borderlands/La Frontera is a rich and valuable text in European classrooms, which can help define the borders of American fiction.
This almost finished product seems an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several different leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance. The whole thing has a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will. It is a rebellious, willful entity, a precocious girl-child forced to grow up too quickly, rough, unyielding, with pieces of feather sticking out here and there, fur, twigs, clay. My child, but not for much longer.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera 88–89
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Notes
- 1.
In feminist practice, a politics of location grounds research in accountability for the situatedness of knowledge production. The concept of the politics of location goes back to Adrienne Rich (1986), who famously linked her existence as a subject to her location, arguing that the anchoring of her positionality in her body allowed for her very existence. Building on this understanding, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) then used the politics of location to “refer to the historical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative boundaries that provide the ground for political definition and self-definition” (106). A pedagogy of location affirms the importance of location, which also “opens up the possibility to critically reflect upon what is being conveyed, how it is conveyed, by whom, and from where” (Hoechtl et al. 2018).
- 2.
The MA program Border Studies is a trilingual and trinational study program between Saarland University, TU Kaiserslautern, the University of Luxembourg, and the Université de Lorraine. Within this program I teach a class called ‘Introduction to Border Studies from a Cultural Studies’ at the University of Luxembourg and two North American Studies classes at Saarland University. For further details on this program, see: http://www.uni-gr.eu/en/Master_Border_Studies
- 3.
- 4.
Michael Denning (1996) has identified this question as the founding question of American Studies (360). The question of the Americanness of the United States has, of course, deep roots within American history. Famously asked in 1782 by J.H. St. John de Crèvecoeur when he inquired “What then, is the American, this new man?” (Lauter 2006, 930), the definition of the ‘American character’ has preoccupied critics of American culture since.
- 5.
The concept of ‘redrawing the boundaries’ is the subject of Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (1992). In their introduction, the editors argue that “[t]he boundaries to be reckoned with in literary studies range from national, linguistic, historical, generation, and geographical to racial, ethnic, social, sexual, political, ethical, and religious” (4).
- 6.
Amy Kaplan (2002), for instance, has famously argued for a transterritorial conception of space of American culture expressed through the notion of borderlands, which “not only lie at the geographic and political margins of national identity but as often traverse the center of the metropolis.” The metaphor of borderlands, according to her, transforms “the traditional notion of the frontier from the primitive margins of civilization to a decentered cosmopolitanism” (16–17).
- 7.
In an interview, Anzaldúa explained her conception of ‘Borderlands,’ both as a physical and as a metaphysical reality. She explained: “Borderlands with a small b is the actual southwest borderlands or any borderlands between two cultures, but when I use the capital B it’s a metaphor for processes of many things: psychological, physical, mental” (Keating 2000, 176).
- 8.
As Anzaldúa explains, “Nepantla is a kind of an elaboration of Borderlands. I use nepantla to talk about the creative act, I use it to talk about the construction of identity, I use it to describe a function of the mind” (Keating 2000, 176).
- 9.
For detailed explanations as to the decolonial pedagogical potential of Borderlands/La Frontera and suggestions for a series of classroom activities which help decolonize the classroom, see the volume Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classroom and Communities (Cantú-Sánchez et al. 2020b) in particular the essays by Cantú and Alonso.
- 10.
Herméneutique croisée is the core research concept of the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transculural Spaces,” of which I am a member. See: https://www.irtg-diversity.com/index.php?page=research_research-concepts
- 11.
Werner Sollors, for instance, has vehemently argued for the study of U.S. literature as a polylingual as well as multicultural body of texts. See The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations, edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors (2000).
- 12.
Information about the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) may be found at https://www.coe/int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/home
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Fellner, A.M. (2022). Gloria Anzaldúa at European Universities: Straddling Borders of Fiction and Identity. In: Mazzeno, L.W., Norton, S. (eds) Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94166-6_10
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