LACS 45.02 Comparative Borderlands in the Americas
This hemispheric course examines the history, politics, and cultures of select borderlands, processes of border-making and the sociocultural effects of geopolitical divisors in Latin America and the Caribbean using the interdisciplinary approaches of contemporary Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies. By attending to a diverse array of boundary-making practices across the Americas, this course will expose you to a range of methods and subjects that will help us tackle the multitude of “border problems” that today constitute some of the major social, political, and economic issues of the region. Taking a geographically expansive view, we will utilize interdisciplinary approaches to analyze how border formation, cross-border activities, and gendered, racialized, and national identities are important sites of analysis that, in turn, anchor the political debates and the significance of these complex contact zones. We ask: how do borders produce mobility and belonging? How do they attempt to sustain law and order, and articulate sovereignty? How have specific borders changed over time? How are borders a central technology to the making of the modern world?
This course is organized in two parts. The first few weeks of the course will lay out the terms of engagement and present different approaches to the study of historical and contemporary borders in a global frame. We will discuss historical border formation in the Americas and move around different key sites to arrive at analytical clarity, develop a theoretical base, and understand the various expressions, practices, and realities initiated by specific borders across the region. In the second half of the course, we will inhabit the perspective of border-crossers, border-dwellers, and transborder persons to gather on-the- ground perspectives on what borders do, how they are experienced, as well as how they are resisted, reconfigured, and actively adapting to a changing, increasingly mobile world. These latter issues, from Week 5 onward, will follow the typical route of a contemporary migrant, that starts in their country of origin, starts, or passes through South America, moves swiftly through Central America, onwards north to U.S.- Mexico. Following these routes, we will engage ethnographic, journalistic, and audiovisual materials that speak to the contemporary debates around borders, displacement, and migration. This course contends that these elements must be always examined in dynamic relation to one another.
Instructor
J. Cuellar