Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders
In this essay, Susan Stanford Friedman attempts to explain the studies of migration, diasporas, and borders both as three distinctive disciplines, as well as their tendency toward becoming ”increasingly interwoven and mutually constitutive in literary studies”. While admitting her own awareness of the exceedingly complex nature of the discussion relevant to these three areas of study, and of the unlikelyhood that an entirely exhaustive discussion can be achieved, she does provide an extremely useful overview of the philosophical, practical, political, historical, global, and local ideology associated with each of these concepts, respectivley, as well as points where the three seem to meet. Friedman provides a useful summation of her goals for this particular text when she states, “I have attempted to name some of the many lines of inquiry; the pathways of exploration; the kinds of questions people have been pursuing; and the spectrum of concerns from material and political to metaphoric and psychological, cultural, and aesthetic.”
I find Friedman’s discussion of Borders and Borderlands particularly interesting, given that the notion of “border” is significantly ambiguous and contradictory; the ambiguity and contradiction surrounding “border”, then, also permeates Border Studies as a discipline. The ambiguity surrounding borders lies in the fact that they can be either physical geographic borders, or figurative and metaphorical. The contradiction lies, to name only a few of many points, in the fact that “Borders are fixed and fluid, impermeable and porous. They separate but also connect, demarcate but also blend differences. Absolute at any moment in time, they are always changing over time [...] Borders are used to excercise power over others but also to empower survival against others.” Essentially, borderlands refers to a kind of liminal space, a state of being inbetween. In order to contextualize her discussion of Borders and Borderlands, Friedman evokes Gloria Anzaldua’s “touchstone text for border studies”, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA.
Although Anzaldua’s text, as well as Friedman’s essay as a whole, seems to focus a good deal on borders as they relate to the construction of identity, it is made quite clear that borderlands can refer to the liminal space “across all kinds of differences: psychological, spiritual, sexual, linguistic, generic, disciplinary.” The idea that borderlands can exit across disciplines is one that is quite relevant to the concerns of a course designed to develop various perspectives toward research. It seems that research itself exists in a kind of borderland; it situates itself inbetween numerous academic disciplines, and, to be truly apt as a researcher, one must learn to navigate within this borderland. In this particular discussion, Friedman calls for collaboration across disciplines in truly sorting out the interwoven and individual concepts associated with Migration, Diasporas, and Borders. She says, “Perhaps a fitting end for this overview is a blending of the humanities and the social sciences evident in the geographers’ characterization of what they have learned from the rich literatures of migration, diaspora, and borders.” Essentially, Friedman has further complicated, or expanded, the possibilities for what “English Studies” can be.
