Writing from the Borderlands
Gloria Anzaldúa–a well-known Texas scholar and author–theorized what it means to exist in the borderlands, the area that spans borders and brings cultures into contact. Such spaces invite a blurring of identities and ideas that can produce exciting new literature and media. Like Anzaldúa, many of our faculty members research how stories–from classic literature to K-Pop and Disney movies–exist between and across borders. This research explores how people negotiate their own national and personal identities by exchanging and reshaping stories in these amorphous areas where cultures collide.
Featured Publications
This book originated as a collaborative project of educators of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) who are part of SHLDNet and TechHS. Its goal is to offer an open, accessible, and adaptable resource for teaching and learning U.S. Spanish in the United States. The book is primarily designed for intermediate-level classes, but its flexible structure allows it to be used with diverse student populations. Its central focus is U.S. Spanish, and it explores the histories, cultures, language practices, and identity complexities of Latino/Hispanic communities across the country. This book offers an innovative and transformative approach to teaching SHL by combining open pedagogies, multiliteracies, critical language awareness, rational language, and service-learning. It is intended for SHL instructors and students who want to implement a participatory, culturally relevant, and multidimensional approach. The activities encourage students to actively engage, connect with their community, and apply what they have learned in real-world contexts.
Read More: “Estamos Aquí: Comunidades Bilingües e Identidades Regionales de los Estados Unidos”
This is Spanish for Heritage Learners textbook designed to be implemented in courses SPA 2313 Spanish for Native/Heritage Speakers I and SPA 2315 Spanish for Native/Heritage Speakers II (Texas Academic Course Guide Manual, ACGM). Organized in ten thematic units, the textbook integrates Multiliteracy and Project-based approaches, which have been proven to support student engagement, advance language proficiency, and promote deep connection with Hispanic cultures and communities.
In this book chapter, I will explore how resilience, a positive mindset, and motivation helped my journey as a graduate student and then a professor in US academia as an immigrant. In this context, I will analyze three stages and decades of my personal and professional development and growth; as well as how my family roots/values and hometown socio-political environment influenced my personal and professional context and decisions. First, I will describe how I navigated these new challenging spaces. Second, I will examine how these understandings and personal reflections helped me to overcome obstacles. I had a strong sense of identity and my values prevailed. I was the advocate now for the global asset of the Spanish program as the only foreign language that survived administrative cuts and politics at my institution. Third, I will show how I developed learning strategies and skills for decision-making, perception of the other, critical thinking, and theory of mind. I will draw upon some cognition, evolutionary and social psychology theories to explain these aspects of my professional and personal journey.
Literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century is often concerned with migration, immigration, and exile. Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Michel Houellebecq's Submission, and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, narrate the lives of immigrants and refugees and the negotiations between migrants and host nations. They trace the transformations on the idea of Europe and how it is challenged in the face of socio-historical crises. Kapka Kassabova's Border belongs to a long tradition of Eastern European writing that engages in a dialogue with the idea of Europe. Viewed from its edges and through narratives of migration, Europe emerges as a geographical, linguistic, and cultural space whose oneness is an impossibility considering the stories of dislocation housed in its cities.
Read More: “Migration and Immigration in Europe and Its Edges”
Southeastern Europe has been a subject of study from travel accounts to political and historical analyses to anthropological studies. Within these studies, one senses the persistent unease that the region's resistance to a homogeneous identity poses for scholars and political bodies alike. Scholars (Wolff, Todorova, and others) have shed light on the ways in which southeastern Europe is constructed within the European imagination as part of a peripheral Europe that does not neatly fit into notions of Europeanness. Testament to this unease is the slow pace at which southeastern European countries are included within a united Europe, the conditions for inclusion, and the cultural differences that resist insertion into the homogenized concept of Europe. The literatures of southeastern Europe are haunted by this dissonance at the center of the various identities and notions of belonging. Kapka Kassabova's Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe is a travel narrative that centers on identity and belonging as caught between centers and peripheries, modernity and tradition, and globalization and nationalism, and fiction and creative nonfiction. In it, the border zone between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey emerges as fluid, palimpsestic, and as a space where crucial social and geopolitical conversations are animated. Here, Kassabova's work is examined through the lenses of border writing, travel writing, and oral history, demonstrating how she constructs modes of representation that accurately capture the intricacy of border zones. Border is notable for its formal and thematic innovations in representing border zones by blending elements of memoir, reportage, and historical analysis that mirror complex and intersecting realities of the borderlands themselves.
Read More: “The Polyphony of the Border: Genre, Narrative, Collective History”
The International Journal of Disney Studies is the first journal of the emerging field of Disney Studies. It is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of Disney, an international media conglomerate that permeates our global culture and understanding of wider societal issues and processes. The journal publishes empirical and theoretical research that critically examines and analyses the Walt Disney Company, its intellectual properties and products thereof and their relationship with culture and society. Whilst the study of Disney has been trivialized, the rise of the Walt Disney Company and its permeation within society has continued to have a place within public discourse and contributes to our understanding and shaping of cultures all over the world. This journal provides much needed dialogue on the study of Disney in all its forms. A key aim of this journal is to continue to advance Disney Studies as an interdisciplinary field and be a cornerstone for Disney scholarship as the field continues to progress.
This chapter examines the rise of this Koreatown in Singapore in relation to the global popularity of K-culture (Korean popular culture). The emerging Koreatown in Singapore is distinguished from other traditional ethnic enclaves because of its target consumer groups, namely K-culture fans. By investigating the culture of Koreatown in Singapore, this chapter demonstrates how the changing role of ethnic enclaves requires a new way of understanding ethnic identities and minority politics in relation to global capitalism and its effects on Singapore. To this end, this chapter analyzes two different aspects of a Koreatown in Singapore: Koreatown as a physical space and Koreatown as a figurative idea. While the former focuses on the outlooks of Koreatown and customers in Tanjong Pagar, the latter investigates articles in the Korean immigrant magazine Hannah Press to show how the Korean community in Singapore internally incorporates K-culture in the representation of their Koreatown. Ultimately, this chapter contends that the global circulation of Korean culture formulates the identity of the Koreatown in Singapore.
Read More: “The Emergence of Koreatown in Singapore and a Global Community of K-culture Fans”
This essay examines the conceptualization of Hallyu in two Korean television audition programs, Super Star K and Star Audition: The Great Birth (hereafter The Great Birth), in early 2010s South Korea. These early 2010s audition programs strongly promoted nationalist pride in the Hallyu business, especially in their selection of potential Kpop stars as exemplary figures of Korean culture for a global market. However, these globalizing projects tended to include a variety of non-Korean subjects and social minorities, such as foreign nationals, members of the Korean diaspora, and multiethnic Koreans within its most nationalist narrative. Ironically, these non-Korean subjects play a critical role in revealing the discriminatory nature of Hallyu discourse and the Korean dream opposing the original intention of the audition programs. In this sense, while Hallyu has been criticized as “cultural imperialism” or an “invasion of Korean culture,” an inverse penetration into the everyday practices of Koreans occurs as non-Korean stakeholders (rather than “consumers”) across the world disrupt the notion of Koreanness as an ethnic marker of Hallyu.
