| The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary Contributor(s): Saldívar, Ramón (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822337762 ISBN-13: 9780822337768 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $118.70 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: April 2006 Annotation: "This is a magnificent book. Ramon Saldivar situates Americo Paredes as the founder of an aesthetic and an epistemology for the world at large by those who dwell in the borders--not just the borders between Mexico and the United States but the borders of Western imperialisms. His years of research, personal acquaintance with Paredes, and passionate scholarship have produced a work of lasting value and one that will no doubt become a canonical volume of Latino/a scholarship."--Walter D. Mignolo, author of "Local Histories/Global Designs" |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Biography & Autobiography |
| Dewey: B |
| LCCN: 2005031720 |
| Series: New Americanists |
| Physical Information: 536 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Am rico Paredes (1915-1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ram n Sald var establishes Paredes's preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Sald var reveals Paredes as a precursor to the "new" American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization. Sald var demonstrates how Paredes's poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the "border studies" or "anthropology of the borderlands." Sald var describes how Paredes's experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Sald var was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes's own words. By explaining how Paredes's work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Sald var extends Paredes's intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective. |