Being highly concerned with the hyper meanings associated with the defining term in the book borderland, Gloria Anzladùa initiates her argument by stressing the difference between two key terms namely border and borderland. For her, “A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.”(Anzaldùa 3). Living in the border or “in the shadows” (Preface) like Anzaldùa puts it stands for a peculiar process of identity construction whereby”one’s shifting and multiple identity” (Preface) is re-invented. Moving beyond the monolithic view of identity articulates the essence of a new conceptualization of culture, a term the definition …show more content…
To further embark on the notions of culture and cultural studies, it should be noted that the very nature of the term has paved the way for a more comprehensive approach to identity in the way it emphasizes the politics of representations. Moreover, “the sites of contemporary cultural production and reception are no longer confined within the borders of nation-states(... . )Culture is becoming less a matter of locations than of hybrid and creolized meanings and practices that span global space. Cultures are syncretic and hybridized products of interactions across space” (Barker, The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Terms,68).Then, from this perspective, culture is foremost concerned with the processes of signification which deconstruct the pre-established set of meanings and hierarchies, notably the binaries of Self And Other (Said,Orientalism). Transcending the essentialist view that assumes rigid separating boundaries between cultures, the constructivist view which foregrounds the mechanisms of defining and redefining cultural identities in a multicultural society is to be
In Borderlands, the realities of what happens by the border instill the true terror that people face every day. They are unable to escape and trapped in a tragic situation. After reading my three classmates’ papers, I was able to learn a lot more about this piece than I originally encountered just on my own. I was able to read this piece in a completely new light and expand on ideas that I did not even think of.
Every writer has the ability to make their writing remarkable, beautiful, and complex by using elements like genre, discourse, and code. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a semi-autobiographical work by Gloria Anzaldúa. She examines the relations of her lands, languages, and herself overall. She defines the borders she has around herself in the preface of the book: “The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands…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” (Anzaldúa: Preface). The book is broken into two main sections. The semi-autobiographical section composed of seven smaller sections and the poetry section that is both in Spanish and English.
Seeing through a multicultural perspective. Identities, 19(4), 398. doi:10.1080/1070289X.2012.718714. Steven, D. K. (2014). The 'Secondary'.
Identity is 'how you view yourself and your life.'; (p. 12 Knots in a String.) Your identity helps you determine where you think you fit in, in your life. It is 'a rich complexity of images, ideas and associations.';(p. 12 Knots in a String.) It is given that as we go through our lives and encounter different experiences our identity of yourselves and where we belong may change. As this happens we may gain or relinquish new values and from this identity and image our influenced. 'A bad self-image and low self-esteem may form part of identity?but often the cause is not a loss of identity itself so much as a loss of belonging.'; Social psychologists suggest that identity is closely related to our culture. Native people today have been faced with this challenge against their identity as they are increasingly faced with a non-native society. I will prove that the play The Rez Sisters showed this loss of identity and loss of belonging. When a native person leaves the reservation to go and start a new life in a city they are forced to adapt to a lifestyle they are not accustomed to. They do not feel as though they fit in or belong to any particular culture. They are faced with extreme racism and stereotypes from other people in the nonreservational society.
To begin with, culture is something that may change evolve within time but culture is something that come with your heritage or your ethnicity the traditions and things that happen that make up your culture like how your parents raised you are culture. In the informational text “ What is cultural identity” by Elise Trumbull and Maria Pacheco, and in the personal essay “Ethnic Hash” by Patricia Williams, there are similarities and differences in how each writer conveys their message about cultural identity. Based upon their research, Trumbull and Pacheco present the idea that culture changes and that it will never stay the same, while Williams uses her personal experience to develop the idea that many things influence cultural inheritage but
Borderlands is defined by the author as belonging to two different countries which also exposes them to different cultures and trying to bridge both worlds without offending the other.
Culture and identity are two very strange ideas. They are received at a very young age, yet they are very hard to give to someone else. They will affect you for the rest or your life, yet for the most part you are born into them. However, they soon become very important to us and we cannot, no matter what we do, live without them. They are a part of us, and a vital aspect of society. However, it took me a very long time to recognize that I had an identity and a little while after that before I knew what it was.
At the opening of the book Borderlands, La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua conceptualizes the borderlands as being a burden and a cause of her pain and hopelessness. Anzaldua expresses her feelings towards the boarder using physical traits, but also using non-material descriptions. Anzaldua then goes on to talk about the experiences of oppression and, violence and discrimination of those queer folks of color and how her metaphors used in this book help understand better the meaning of such experiences. She also examines how the queer bodies are marked as locations for all kinds of violence through the power of gender binaries. In the first chapter of her book, Anzaldua explores many aspects of the borderline, and she portrays strong feelings about this matter.
Overtime, we have seen the influence and power that authors held through their writing(s). Authors such as William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and J.K Rowling have had lasting impacts on society whether it be through the entertainment business (ex. J.K Rowling and the Harry Potter franchise) or through studies inside and outside of the classrooms. Gloria Anzaldúa adds to the list of influential authors as her novel Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza has “the power to change minds” (Cantú and Hurtado 1), and has been taught in classrooms particularly geared towards women studies and feminist theory. Borderlands is a metaphor that conveys the limitations- socially, culturally, geographically, and sexually- within the border of two counties, particularly the U.S Mexican border. Gloria furthers her discussion in chapter six and seven by expressing her frustration of being stuck between these borders, the battle of feminism, and the loss of herself due to her oppressors.
In her work, “Identity,” Carla Kaplan frames the difficulty of defining the term “identity.” She argues that identity is a tension because personal identity conventionally arbitrates taste and lifestyle, while social identity is regarded as a constellation of different and often competing identifications or “cultural negotiations” (Kaplan, 2007). In addition, she argues that identity politics has caused “suspicion and criticism” by limiting new democratic possibilities by encouraging narrow solidarities rather than broader identification resulting in the struggle for recognition becoming a questioning of recognition (Kaplan, 2007). Lastly, she argues that “A realistic identity politics” is needed to recognize that identities are multiple/dynamic
Gloria Anzaldúa writes of a Utopic frame of mind, the borderlands created in and lived in by the new mestiza. She describes the preexisting natures of the Anglos, Mexicanos, and Chicanos as seen around the southwest U.S. / Mexican border, indicative of the nations at large. She also probes the borders of language, sexuality, psychology and spirituality. Anzaldúa presents this information in various identifiable ways including the autobiography, historical/informative essay, and poetry. What is unique to Anzaldúa is her ability to weave a ‘perfect’ kind of compromised state of mind that melds together the preexisting cultures while simultaneously formulating a fusion of genres that stretches previously constructed borders, proving both problematic and a step in the right extremely ideal direction.
In her book “Borderland/La Frontera, The New Mestiza” by Gloria Anzaldua, Gloria talks about what it means to be able to identify, culturally, one’s self. So what does it mean to be able to identify one’s self with a specific culture? What about when the culture you identify yourself with, unlike other cultures, isn’t legitimate? In her writing, Gloria expresses the struggles of Chicanos trying to find their own identity with language. By showing how she had to use several different styles of English and Spanish growing up, the rejections of both American and Mexican cultures, and by showing how the Chicano language finally came about, Gloria is able to effectively convey this point.
The first way describes cultural identity as a shared culture by many people; a culture is like a collective self. As he further argues that cultural identities always highlight the same practices of past which give people stability, unshifting and constant frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and shifting in their actual history (6). Hall shares his personal experience of immigration in Minimal Selves (1987) that when he thinks about identity, he got to know that he has always felt that he is a migrant amongst the foreigners. Similarly Lahiri’s fiction is autobiographical she explains her sorrows as a migrant and suffering in a foreign
What is identity? Identity is an unbound formation which is created by racial construction and gender construction within an individual’s society even though it is often seen as a controlled piece of oneself. In Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’, Tatum asserts that identity is formed by “individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political contexts” (Tatum 105). Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’” creates a better understanding of how major obstacles such as racism and sexism shape our self identity.
The eternal endeavor of obtaining a realistic sense of selfhood is depicted for all struggling women of color in Gloria Anzaldua’s “Borderlands/La Frontera” (1987). Anzaldua illustrates the oppressing realities of her world – one that sets limitations for the minority. Albeit the obvious restraints against the white majority (the physical borderland between the U.S. and Mexico), there is a constant and overwhelming emotional battle against the psychological “borderlands” instilled in Anzaldua as she desperately seeks recognition as an openly queer Mestiza woman. With being a Mestiza comes a lot of cultural stereotypes that more than often try to define ones’ role in the world – especially if you are those whom have privilege above the “others”.