• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.46
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• pp.63-84
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• 2017

This paper analyzes Gloria Anzaldua's borderland proposal through her work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). One of the strong trends of US geographical imagination started from the concept of 'city upon a hill'. It left an important footprint in the American history. In the area of international political history, it was the starting point of the isolationism policy. But, this imagination is contradictory because it has exercised the bordering power that demarcates the border and overpasses it as needed. Anzaldua's geographic proposal consists of transformation of the border into the borderlands. This is a challenge to the bordering power and a challenge to the geographical imagination that has led to isolationism, and ultimately a history war. This is not only a nationalist war aimed at the Chicano's restoration but also a war that can measure the American society's possibility of change in the future.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.231-266
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• 2010

This paper explores hybridity and hybridized relations that see mixings and crossings as the first moment of multicultural society. References to hybridity often assume that the definition and orientation of the term are located within biology; that is, hybridity constitutes a mixing of two formally discrete objects. In this regard, there seems to be a dialectical preoccupation with purity that goes hand in hand with discussions of hybridity. This dialectical reference to hybridity privileges whole, complete entities as the original instance before mixing, and in this way purity becomes reified. My analysis of hybridity foregrounds mixings that occur at the level of the social, not exclusively at the level of the biological. Hybridity contexts the myth of monoculturalism in the United States and foregrounds multiculturalism as the initial context around which difference has begun to be conceived. In destabilizing the myth of racial origins, this paper attempts to establish a retroactive construction of purity, which is historically, ideologically, and ethnically examined in Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Through this work composed of disparate narratives discourses, Anzaldua employs physical differences to ward off the colonial desire that has defined others as objects which are to be controlled. In this regard, this paper pursues the way that physical differences could be repositioned in terms of 'hybridity' that has been related to the cultural, historical, economical significations of borderlands. The space of borderlands is also a place marked psychologically; it will turn differences mobilized in the borderland into an acute consciousness that makes us recognize 'otherness' within ourselves. In sum, this paper attempts to elaborate the productive and creative interactions among disparate languages, classes, genders, and ideas, which will draw attention to their own interlocking nature.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.46
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• pp.85-112
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• 2017

Donald Trump, the $45^{th}$ president of the United States, has revived the 'English Only' policy since the beginning of his presidential campaign. The monolingualism not only underscores his extremely conservative ideas, but it also reflects the nativist tendency that prevents the demographic and cultural transformation of the US, which is accelerated by globalization and transnational migration. In particular, Donald Trump tries to reconfirm the mainstream American culture that is now thought to have been threatened by Hispanization and the growing number of Spanish speakers. This paper examines the effects of "code-switching" and the possibility of a bilingual community by contrasting Donald Trump with Gloria $Anzald{\acute{u}}a$, one of the representative Latina writers who created a "border language." Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) includes Spanish glossaries and expressions to represent her bilingual realities, while attempting to translate from English to Spanish, and vice versa. However, the text occasionally demonstrates the impossibility of translation. In doing so, $Anzald{\acute{u}}a$ indirectly states that it is indispensable to present both languages at the stage; she also invites monolingual readers to make more efforts to learn and better understand the Other's language. A "border language" she attempts to embody throughout the text is created in the process of encounters, conflicts, and negotiations among languages of different ethnicities, classes and generations. It does not signify an established form: rather it appears as a constantly transforming language, which can provide us with new perspectives and an alternative way of communication beyond monolingualism.