At the Border of Subjectivity: On Literature, Space, and Subalternity

Abstract

At the Border of Subjectivity: On Literature, Space, and Subalternity critically reexamines the making of the border subject within Mexican and Mexican American literature. I comparatively read texts alongside cultural studies to materially ground my analysis of border environmentalisms, border feminisms, and border citizenships. I argue that while Mexican Americans have utilized space-based identity claims to signal belonging, legitimacy, and resistance, such claims foreclose on our ability to build community with other border subjects. In my first chapter, “Uprooting and Disentangling: Endangered Border Subjects in Elena Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite and South Texas,” I consider how border women’s writing fragments a Mexican Indigenous presence and sustains settler colonial history. I pair the 1935 text with the 900-year-old Montezuma Bald Cypress in South Texas and environmental activism efforts at the Texas/Mexico border to contend with questions of lineage, genealogy, and belonging. My second chapter, “An Unsettled Border Geopoetics: Locating Community Cartographies in Sandra Cisneros’ cuentos and the Rio Grande Valley” is an expansion of my article, “Invented Geographies.” I define “border geopoetics” as a lens to read literary spatial relations within Latinx imaginaries. I use theory of “decolonization” and a South Texas GIS community mapping project to materially grapple with questions of subjectivity to further consider the fragility of citizenship. My third chapter, “The Death of Border Subjectivity: On Violence, Body, and Nation in Sara Uribe’s Antígona González and the U.S./Mexico Border” examines Mexican author Sara Uribe’s 2012 re-envisioning of the 400 BCE Sophocles tragedy, Antigone. I read Uribe’s use of el otro to access the un/knowable and in/visible violence on border bodies through the unlocatable. I center the murdered and disappeared by utilizing data, reports, and obituaries to make tangible those outside a humanistic grasp of “subject” and further address violence in the Américas. My postscript leaves readers with a “politic of tension,” which does not suggest a resolution to these contested and ongoing claims to space. At the Border of Subjectivity reframes questions of subalternity through a spatial and material framework that deconstructs the myth of nationalism and sovereignty to redefine “border futurity” beyond Chicanidad.