The Price of 'Free' Trade: NAFTA and the Economics of Border Crossing in George Rabasa's Floating Kingdom and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Tillett, Rebecca ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2219-6713 (2008) The Price of 'Free' Trade: NAFTA and the Economics of Border Crossing in George Rabasa's Floating Kingdom and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Comparative American Studies, 6 (4). pp. 147-170. ISSN 1741-2676

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Under contemporary US immigration policy, the US-Mexico border has become a new 'American Frontier', a 'Tortilla Curtain' that marks the edges of nation and of national knowledge. As a result of such US policies and the increased cultural and political tensions in the area that result from them, the border region has more clearly emerged imaginatively and culturally as, in Gloria Anzaldúa's terms, a 'third country'. This paper analyses that 'third country' and its relationship to an arbitrarily imposed and emphatically enforced political and cultural border in the work of the Chicano writer George Rabasa and the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Both Rabasa and Silko actively map a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures into the physical border region itself, engaging with the complex relationships between culture and nature, community and place. Both also emphasise an increasingly transgressive and transnational perspective. In this context, both writers highlight and expose the indeterminacy, fragility and permeability of borders of all kinds.

Item Type: Article
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of American Studies (former - to 2014)
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > American Studies
Depositing User: EPrints Services
Date Deposited: 01 Oct 2010 13:57
Last Modified: 10 Aug 2023 13:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/9649
DOI:

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item