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Paradoxical Mobilities: Transmigration, Transliteration and the Mexican-American Border

Veranstaltungstyp: Seminar

Ort: 11/215

Zeiten: Di. 10:00 - 12:00 (wöchentlich)

Beschreibung: The Mexican-American border, Allison E. Fagan has stated,
"is one that soldiers, surveyors, cartographers, politicians, and historians alike have sought to fix in place while the land and our experience of it resists such fixing. This is, in part, no metaphor: the border literally moves. It crosses and zigzags each landscape differently, in some places marked, in others unmarked. The Río Grande moves, and we move our fences—or sometimes, the river itself—to accommodate its movements, to preserve the boundaries of nations. But we can’t neglect the ways the border and its conflicts also move with people […]. Even the famous Chicano civil rights chant “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” suggests that this kind of paradoxical mobility is an essential characteristic of the national boundary."
This master seminar wants to trace, analyse and interpret the paradoxical movements and mobilities which characterize the Mexican-American border as a contentious, conflictual, but also productive, space of crossings, transgressions, struggles and (re-)appropriations. We will look at different, yet also connected, and interacting issues and aspects from the perspective of a variety of texts and representations concerned with the transgressive and paradoxical border space between languages, cultures, political and legal orders and mentalities.
Our material will include:
Novels by Yuri Herrera, Ana Castillo and Don Winslow
Documentary material and film
Film and TV Series
Statistical and demographic facts
Historical literature.
Students interested in participating are asked to do some basic historical and cultural research of their own in preparation for the course, as well as reading some preparatory secondary literature (access will be posted on this site). Finally, all literary texts will have to be read in advance (sources and references will be provided within the next weeks).

List of Primary Works (please obtain and read, copies indicated via Amazon link):

Yuri Herrera. Signs Preceding the End of the World. 2015. (https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Yuri-Herrera/dp/1908276428/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)
Yuri Herrera. The Transmigration of Bodies. 2016. (https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B01H65WGE4/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2)
Ana Castillo. The Guardians. 2007. (https://www.amazon.de/Guardians-Novel-Ana-Castillo/dp/1400065003)
Valeria Luiselli: Tell Me How it Will End. 2017. (https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Luiselli/dp/0008271925/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)