Broadening the idea of "borderlands" beyond its traditional geographic meaning, this volume features new ways of characterizing the political, cultural, religious, and racial fluidity of early America. It extends the concept to regions not typically seen as borderlands and demonstrates how the term has been used in recent years to describe unstable spaces where people, cultures, and viewpoints collide. The essays include an exploration of the diplomacy and motives that led colonial and Native leaders in the Ohio Valley—including those from the Shawnee and Cherokee—to cooperate and form coalitions; a contextualized look at the relationship between African Americans and Seminole Indians on the Florida borderlands; and an assessment of the role that animal husbandry played in the economies of southeastern Indians. An essay on the experiences of those who disappeared in the early colonial southwest highlights the magnitude of destruction on these emergent borderlands and features a fresh perspective on Cabeza de Vaca. Yet another essay examines the experiences of French missionary priests in the trans-Appalachian West, adding a new layer of understanding to places ordinarily associated with the evangelical Protestant revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Collectively these essays focus on marginalized peoples and reveal how their experiences and decisions lie at the center of the history of borderlands. They also look at the process of cultural mixing and the crossing of religious and racial boundaries. A timely assessment of the dynamic field of borderland studies, Borderland Narratives argues that the interpretive model of borders is essential to understanding the history of colonial North America. A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith Contributors: Andrew Frank | A. Glenn Crothers | Rob Harper | Tyler Boulware | Carla Gerona | Rebekah M. K. Mergenthal | Michael Pasquier | Philip Mulder | Julie Winch

For over 150 years, borderland authors from both Mexico and the United States have developed novels which owe their narrative power to compelling relationships between literary constructions of space and artistic expressions of conflicts, characters, and cultural encounter. This study explores those relationships by analyzing representations of the spaces in which characters function-whether barrio, ballroom, or border city as well as the places characters inhabit relative to the border-occupying native or foreign territory, traveling temporarily, or settling permanently. Concomitant with close attention to the conceptualization of space in border literature is a foregrounding of the genres that border writers employ, such as historical romance and the Hispanic bildungsroman, as well as the literary traditions from which they draw, such as travel narratives or utopian literature. Assessing geopoetics in border writing from the Mexican American War to the present, including writers such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Jovita Gonzalez, Ernesto Galarza, Americo Paredes, Harriet Doerr, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Miguel Mendez provides a paradigm for tracing the development and changes in individual responses to this space as well as a broad range of responses based on class and gender. This corpus of literature demonstrates that the various ways in which characters respond to cultural encounter-adapting, resisting, challenging, sympathizing-depends on artistic rendering of spaces and places around them. Thus, the central argument of this project is that character responses to cultural encounters arise out of geopoetics-the artistic expression of space and place-from the earliest to the most recent border narratives.

Border Confluences examines how the theme of cultural difference influences the ways that writers construct narrative space and the ways their characters negotiate those spaces, from domestic sphere to national territory, public school to utopia."--BOOK JACKET.

This collection of original essays extends the concept of boderlands - as both a process and place - to geographic places and topics not usually considered in this realm. This includes African slavery, missionaries, the Ohio Valley, and other non-Spanish regions.

Bessarabia?mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova?was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ?symbolic inclusion,? but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy. By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era. ÿ

This study examines the work of six American poets who visited Mexico in the 1950s, discussing the complex relationships between location, writing, society, history and dislocation. By interacting with Mexican culture and writing about the experience, these poets had to come to terms with the foreign as well as explore their own identities as Americans. Experiencing Mexico inspired these poets to use many different voices in their poetry, a style in opposition to the hegemony of 1950s American culture. This study compares and contrasts the poets, particularly in terms of class, race, sexual orientation, and gender, and which strategies of "going foreign" each uses. Each chapter examines a poem or series of poems based upon a trip to Mexico. Analyzed in detail are Williams' The Desert Music, Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, Corso's "Mexican Impressions" and "Puma in Chapultepec Zoo," Ginsberg's Siesta in Xbalba, Levertov's "Tomatlan" and others, and Hayden's An Inference of Mexico.

The implications for criminology of territorial borders are relatively unexplored. This book presents the first systematic attempt to develop a critical criminology of borders, offering a unique treatment of the impact of globalisation and mobility. Providing a wealth of case material from Australia, Europe and North America, it is useful for students, academics, and practitioners working in criminology, migration, human geography, international law and politics, globalisation, sociology and cultural anthropology.