Broadening the idea of "borderlands" beyond its traditional geographic meaning, this volume features new ways of characterizing the political, cultural, religious, and racial fluidity of early America. It extends the concept to regions not typically seen as borderlands and demonstrates how the term has been used in recent years to describe unstable spaces where people, cultures, and viewpoints collide. The essays include an exploration of the diplomacy and motives that led colonial and Native leaders in the Ohio Valley—including those from the Shawnee and Cherokee—to cooperate and form coalitions; a contextualized look at the relationship between African Americans and Seminole Indians on the Florida borderlands; and an assessment of the role that animal husbandry played in the economies of southeastern Indians. An essay on the experiences of those who disappeared in the early colonial southwest highlights the magnitude of destruction on these emergent borderlands and features a fresh perspective on Cabeza de Vaca. Yet another essay examines the experiences of French missionary priests in the trans-Appalachian West, adding a new layer of understanding to places ordinarily associated with the evangelical Protestant revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Collectively these essays focus on marginalized peoples and reveal how their experiences and decisions lie at the center of the history of borderlands. They also look at the process of cultural mixing and the crossing of religious and racial boundaries. A timely assessment of the dynamic field of borderland studies, Borderland Narratives argues that the interpretive model of borders is essential to understanding the history of colonial North America. A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith Contributors: Andrew Frank | A. Glenn Crothers | Rob Harper | Tyler Boulware | Carla Gerona | Rebekah M. K. Mergenthal | Michael Pasquier | Philip Mulder | Julie Winch

For over 150 years, borderland authors from both Mexico and the United States have developed novels which owe their narrative power to compelling relationships between literary constructions of space and artistic expressions of conflicts, characters, and cultural encounter. This study explores those relationships by analyzing representations of the spaces in which characters function-whether barrio, ballroom, or border city as well as the places characters inhabit relative to the border-occupying native or foreign territory, traveling temporarily, or settling permanently. Concomitant with close attention to the conceptualization of space in border literature is a foregrounding of the genres that border writers employ, such as historical romance and the Hispanic bildungsroman, as well as the literary traditions from which they draw, such as travel narratives or utopian literature. Assessing geopoetics in border writing from the Mexican American War to the present, including writers such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Jovita Gonzalez, Ernesto Galarza, Americo Paredes, Harriet Doerr, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Miguel Mendez provides a paradigm for tracing the development and changes in individual responses to this space as well as a broad range of responses based on class and gender. This corpus of literature demonstrates that the various ways in which characters respond to cultural encounter-adapting, resisting, challenging, sympathizing-depends on artistic rendering of spaces and places around them. Thus, the central argument of this project is that character responses to cultural encounters arise out of geopoetics-the artistic expression of space and place-from the earliest to the most recent border narratives.

In this book, Janet Alsup reports and theorizes a multi-layered study of teacher identity development. The study, which followed six pre-service English education students, was designed to investigate her hypothesis that forming (or failing to form) a professional identity is central in the process of becoming an effective teacher. This work addresses the intersection of various types of discourse within the process of professional identity development, emphasizes that the intersection of the personal and professional in teacher identity formation is more complex than is acknowledged in typical methods classes, and accents the need for teacher educators to take steps to facilitate such integration. Specific suggestions for methods courses are presented that teacher educators can use as is or adapt to their own contexts. Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces speaks eloquently to faculty, researchers, and graduate students across the field of teacher education.

In the 1980s, a Chinese state-sponsored oral history project led to the publication of local, regional, and national histories. These histories are the basis of this innovative study of ideology formation and political mobilization, post-Cultural Revolution reconciliation, and the recovery of borderland identities in early post-Mao China.

Composed by international researchers, the Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the developing methodology of narrative inquiry. The Handbook outlines the historical development and philosophical underpinnings of narrative inquiry as well as describes different forms of narrative inquiry. This one-of-a-kind volume offers an emerging map of the field and encourages further dialogue, discussion, and experimentation as the field continues to develop. Key Features: Offers coverage of various disciplines and viewpoints from around the world: Leading international contributors draw upon narrative inquiry as conceptualized in Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and Philosophy. Illustrates the range of forms of narrative inquiry: Both conceptual and practical in-depth descriptions of narrative inquiry are presented. Portrays how narrative inquiry is used in research in different professional fields: Particular attention is paid to representational issues, ethical issues, and some of the complexities of narrative inquiry with indigenous and cross-cultural participants as well as child participants. Intended Audience: The Handbook of Narrative Inquiry is a must have resource for narrative methodologists and students of narrative inquiry across the social sciences. Individuals in the fields of Nursing, Psychology, Anthropology, Education, Social Work, Sociology, Organizational Studies, and Health research will be particularly well served by this masterful work.

Reflexiones is an annual review of the work in progress of scholars affiliated with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. It may also include outside works derived from center-sponsored presentations. Reflexiones 1998, the second volume in the series, invites us to view Mexican American identity in a new light. In the rich interdisciplinary tradition of Mexican American studies, the contributors to Reflexiones 1998 come from a variety of fields. Martha Menchaca (anthropology) and Mauricio Tenorio and David Montejano (both in history) open with a three-part piece on the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Angela Valenzuela (sociology, Rice University) discusses the practice of cultural assimilation in our educational system. Américo Paredes (anthropology and English) offers a telling vignette of borderland life. Sheila Marie Contreras (English) considers the question of Mexican American ancestry in a study of a poem by Teresa Palomo Acosta. Lalo Alcaraz, the Los Angeles-based satirist, delivers a trenchant autobiographical cartoon story. James Nicolopulos (Spanish and Portuguese) delves into the corrido tradition and the effects of the advent of sound recording. Richard Flores (anthropology) explores the myth of the Alamo and the film Martyrs of the Alamo. And finally, Charles Ramírez Berg (radio, television, and film) examines Mexican American border documentaries.

Geir Hønneland discusses some of the big questions in social science: What is identity? What is the role of identity and narrative in the study of international relations? The location is the Kola Peninsula, the most heavily militarized area of the world during the Cold War, now set to become Europe's next big oil playground.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands maps the relationship between gender and borderlands at a global scale and sets the agenda for developing a global composite field of gender and borderlands studies. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to understand the complex nexus at which gender and the borderlands intersect, modelling radical relationality at epistemological, ontological, and activist levels. Going beyond border studies’ frequent site at the U.S.–Mexico Border, this book examines the power relations of borderlands as they play out in, influence, and reflect gender dynamics. Contributors draw on case studies from around the world, and their chapters span diverse fields from anthropology, literature, and history, to political science, religious studies, sociology, and the arts. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands is an indispensable resource for scholars and students engaged in border studies, gender studies, and the wide range of interlocking disciplines that inform and enrich these fields. Chapters 1, 15 and 20.of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

A unique comparative study of immigrant and diaspora literatures in America

At the Heart of the Borderlands is the first book-length study of Africans and Afro-descendants in the frontiers of Spanish America. While people of African descent have formed part of most borderlands histories, this study recognizes and explains their critical contribution to the formation of frontier spaces. Lack of imperial control coupled with Spain's desperation for settlers and soldiers in frontier areas facilitated the social mobility of Afro-descendants. This need allowed African descendants to become not just members of borderland societies but leaders of it as well. They were essential actors in helping to shape the limits of the Spanish empire. Africans and Afro-descendants built, opposed, and shaped Spanish hegemony in the borderlands, taking on roles that would have been impossible or difficult in colonial centers due to the socio-racial hierarchy of imperial policies and practices.