RIAS Editors

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Masthead and table of contents of the issue.

Paweł Jędrzejko

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Paweł Jędrzejko
Department of American and Canadian Studies
University of Silesia in Katowice
Poland

Borders and Vacuums

Abstract: Whoever said that the more thresholds we draw, the more marginal spaces we create, was certainly right. The indefinite character of liminality seems to infallibly invite radical solutions: the margin is the locus of the aporia: a non-encounter with a non-language in a non-space. It is there that the Spanish conquistadors located the native peoples of the Americas, construing them as “out of place” in the place in which they had dwelled since the times immemorial; it is there that the thinkers of the Age of Reason would relegate phenomena defying rationalist argumentation or empirical proof, yet undeniably felt as present; it is finally there that individuals driven by empathy end  up today amidst the ruthless political tug-of-war between 21st century nationalisms and progressive advocacy of freedom and equality. The mirage of greatness, poisoning the minds of many, calls into existence discourses of degradation and deprivation; the self-proclaimed “righteous” need a scapegoat to purge their own sins; the necessary condition of “being great” is the legitimization of the fallacy of someone else’s insignificance. with alt-facts ousting hard facts from the public space, with Orwellian media shamelessly creating realities based on the binarity of familiarity and enmity, with all visible attempts to silence the academic humanities, arts and letters by means of massive cuts in funding, the marginalization of those who find the “he who is not with us is against us” philosophy abhorrent gains significant momentum. But it is not in the margins that the monsters awaken: it is in the very heart of the well-defined center that fear rules unchecked while coercion, wearing white gloves, and walking hand in hand with blatant lies that boost fearful egos, facilitates turning a blind eye to cynical oppression, rendering the alleged winners actual victims of their own would-be “greatness.” More thresholds, more limits, all designed to keep the Others out, but all trapping those drawing the demarcation lines within, are being called into existence with increasing speed and intensity; yet the tighter the grip of the stultifying discourse is, the larger the space of the margin, the more obvious the aporias. 

Manuel Broncano Rodríguez

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

manuel broncano rodríguez
Texas A&M International University
USA
Presidential Address for IASA 8th World Congress
Laredo TX, 12-21 July 2017
Laredo is located in the vicinity of the Rio Grande/Bravo, in many senses the epitome of the border, of the frontier, of the “limen” in its etymological sense of “threshold,” “doorway,” or “limit.” The general theme of our reunion was “Marginalia: The Borders of the Border,” and the contributions the IASA members made addressed this theme from multiple perspectives, thus leading to most enriching discussions about one of the most written about topics in the scholarship of the last few decades. Such a topic has rekindled new interest, especially in the light of the recent political transformations in many regions of the globe, which are leading to revived feelings of essentialist nationalism and its atavistic fears of the other, call it the immigrant, the dissenter or, if you want, the barbarian. It is happening in Turkey, it is happening in Poland, it is happening in Britain, it is happening in the US. In this context, borders and walls, both physical and ideological, are being erected once again. Marginalia, in turn, is a Latin term that in its origins referred to the inscriptions that monks and other amanuensis made on the empty space surrounding the body of text inscribed on a parchment. Romance languages are largely the product of marginal inscriptions on Latin manuscripts. Thus, the first manifestations of the Spanish language are found in the glosses that monks scribbled on the margins of those manuscripts to clarify and comment on words whose meaning was already obscure for the medieval reader, and those annotations were made in the new romance language, which was nothing but macaronic Latin. By extension, marginalia refers to those writings that do not belong in the canonical body of works of a culture or civilization, and is close in meaning to apocryphal. Furthermore, it can be understood as referring to the interstices that exist between two or more cultures, nations, or religions. In our usage of the term, marginalia refers to those areas of the world that are populated by displaced or uprooted individuals, limbic spaces in which mere survival may become an illegal activity. The present address seeks to explicate the essence of the basic concepts underlying—and driving—the theme of the Congress.

Alberto Moreiras

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

We live, increasingly, in a state of extraction. My thesis is that we have not yet figured out the implications of a primary or fundamental logic of state extraction. We have not figured out its implications for our own predicament—for the predicament, that is, not of state functionaries as such, not of extractors and surveyors, which is a predicament of domination, but the predicament of those who would rather not be dominated, and who understand that giving up on domination is the logical price to be paid. These latter figures, those who refuse domination, those who prefer not to be dominated, hence not to dominate, they might in fact constitute the “borders of the border,” that fantastic fringe territory of the human this conference has decided to thematize and, in some sense, to honor. Let me then reserve that theoretical position, the position of border or hyperborder dwellers, to develop what follows. I will claim that the border of the border is today the site where information will not be shared—an opaque site of silence and secrecy, a place of radical reticence concerning unconcealment.

Marietta Messmer

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Marietta Messmer
University of Groningen
the Netherlands

Children and Youth: Disadvantaged and Disenfranchised by the Current U.S. Immigration Regime 

Abstract: Focusing on undocumented immigrant children who were brought to the US by their parents at a young age (the so-called 1.5 generation) and US citizen children living in irregular or mixed-status immigrant families, this essay argues that the current US immigration regime is too strongly adult-centered and in this way not only systematically disenfranchises immigrant children but also structurally disadvantages US citizen children living with at least one undocumented parent because the parent’s irregular status in practice tends to extinguish the child’s citizen status. Analyzing the US’s current immigration regime through the lens of under-age youth can thus function as an enabling prism to highlight the extent to which current US immigration laws and policies collide with both national and international legal practices and produce inherently contradictory or paradoxical situations; it can throw into relief the extent to which children (even US citizen children) lack sufficient agency and voice in current US immigration law; and it can foreground the deleterious consequences of the current immigration regime’s prioritization of deterrence and deportation for one of the most vulnerable segments of the US population for whom not even DACA can provide sufficient protection.

Alice Balestrino

Language: EN | Published: 04-10-2018 | Abstract

Alice Balestrino
Sapienza University of Rome

Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line
of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative Here. 

This article interrogates the Cartesian understanding of time and space in narratives grounded in memorial endeavors. It focuses on the lines that define the interconnectedness between these two dimensions in relation to the introduction of the phenomenological category of memory as a third element providing a perspective on reality and blurring the borders between present and past; here and there. This composite, operative category is tested in the analysis of Richard McGuire’s graphic narrative Here (2014) that, both on the level of the format and on that of the story, outlines the porosity and the ultimate disappearance of the spatiotemporal borders by means of memories. This work conceives of a historical simultaneity that soaks a particular space in its past and of the margins of contingency that separate what pertains to History, what to individual stories and what gets forgotten instead – a representation which is studied against the background of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s speculations on memory in A Thousand Plateaus. 

Keywords: Spacetime as a narrative category, Richard McGuire, Here, The American border

Chiara Grilli

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Chiara Grilli
Independent scholar
Italy

The Canvas and the Maze: Deconstructing Wall and Frontier in Contemporary American Science Fiction

Abstract: Science Fiction has always been used to analyze society through the construction of parallel worlds. Likewise, Denis Villeneuve’s movie Arrival (2016) and the TV series Westworld (2016) challenge respectively the evocative symbol of the wall and the old myth of the American frontier, thanks to the fruitful possibilities of representation offered by the Sci-Fi  genre. While in Arrival the wall is turned into the first tool of communication between two cultures, in Westworld the myth depicting America as the land of opportunity connects with that of the frontier and the search for new lands, intended here not as outdoor places, but more importantly as inner spaces. Beside their mystifying power, what connects these two works is a more complex concept of time and of identity: thanks to the screen and the maze, and, as a consequence, thanks to interrelation and introspection, the self is allowed to wander through time, through visionary predictions of the future and hallucinatory mirages of the past, which give the individual the chance to re-build his/her own life story.

Keywords: Science Fiction, Wall, American frontier

Antonio Daniel Juan Rubio , Isabel María García Conesa

Language: EN | Published: 23-09-2018 | Abstract

The New School for Social Research was founded as an institution where intellectuals and artists could openly exchange ideas and theories, free from censure or political pressure. The school's founders believed that in a world engulfed by political turmoil and modern warfare, the free exchange of different ideas regarding politics, aesthetics and other intellectual pursuits was key to ensuring a just and sane world.

The founders based the structure of The New School on the German Volkshochschulen, a school model that stressed the importance of adult education and a diversity of intellectual and interdisciplinary pursuits. Since its inception, The New School has maintained close ties with European ideas and philosophies of Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among many others.

Sensing a dire need to provide safe haven for many of Europe's scholars and intellectuals, Alvin Johnson established a new graduate department in 1933 (coinciding with Hitler's appointment to German Chancellor), called the University in Exile. With the financial assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropy groups, the University in Exile was founded as a new graduate division within The New School and, more importantly, as a rescue program. Nearly two hundred European scholars and professors received visas and teaching jobs in the U.S. from the University in Exile. While many of them taught at The New School, there was never any stipulation from the University in Exile that they were required to do so. Alvin Johnson's main goal was simply to get people out of harm's way. 

Fabrizio Tonello

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

For million of citizens, the experience of voting is now similar to the one of advancing through uncharted territory. The article looks at the origins of this feeling, tracing the history of political disorientation in the US and comparing it to the one of other industrial democracies.

Carlo Martinez

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Carlo Martinez
Università “G. d’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara,
Italy

“The thin delights of moonshine and romance”: Romance, Tourism, and Realism in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun

Abstract: Hawthorne’s involvement with the logic of the tourism of his day is a key aspect of his development as a fiction writer. Starting from a discussion of the early sketch “My Visit to Niagara” the article argues that the discourse of tourism, with its protocols and practices, is for Hawthorne a fertile breeding ground and conceptual framework for the elaboration of a new rationale and a new aesthetic for the fiction writing he calls “romance.” It then explores how tourism resonates in the romance which takes it as its central thematic concern: The Marble Faun. Hawthorne’s last completed long work of fiction represents a moment of artistic and personal crisis for the author, who finds his notion of romance writing caught in a sort of double bind created by the touristic nature of his stay in Italy. As the plot of the novel suggests, in his efforts to extricate himself from the situation, Hawthorne, envisioned and experimented with a new kind of writing that led him to revise and alter radically the romance form he had previously elaborated in favor of a much more realistic style of fiction.

Keywords: Nathaniel Hawthorne; Tourism; Italy; The Marble Faun; Romance; Realism

RIAS Editors

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Abstracts and biographical notes on the Contributors to the feature texts, varia articles and E.Elliott Prize sections of the present issue.

RIAS Editors

Language: EN | Published: 30-12-2018 | Abstract

Information for future Contributors to the Review of International American Studies