La Frontera: Reflections on Borders in American Culture

The essays in this book have one common denominator, the discussion of the concept of the border in American culture. Partly motivated by a symposium held on this very topic in late 2014 at Eszterházy Károly University of Applied Sciences of Eger, Hungary, the subsequent call for papers resulted in a variety of submissions. The starting point of all essays was Gloria Anzaldua's statement: "[B]orderlands are not specific to the [American] Southwest. In fact the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy." As a whole the nine articles involved treat issues related to the actual U.S.-Mexico border and U.S.-Canadian border, investigate the consequences of the encounter of different cultures, and examine the borderlines discernible in popular culture including film and music, literature, i.e. slave narratives and history.