The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary
Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Américo 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 Ramón Saldívar establishes Paredes’s preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldívar 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.
About the Author
Ramón Saldívar, professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012. He is Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Studies, and has served as Chair of the Department of English and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Currently the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program at Stanford, he has also served as the Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. His teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, the history of the novel, 19th and early 20th century literary studies, cultural studies, globalization and issues concerning transnationalism, and Chicano and Chicana studies. In March 2013 President Obama appointed him to a six -year term on the National Council on the Humanities.
Professor Saldívar has served on the editorial boards of Stanford University Press and the scholarly journals, American Literary History, American Literature, Aztlán, andModern Fiction Studies. His articles have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History,Narrative, Modern Language Notes (MLN), English Literary History (ELH), Comparative Literature, Diacritics, Studies in the Novel, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and other major journals. He is author of Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984), a study of the authority of meaning in the novel, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), a history of the development of Chicano narrative forms, and The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006), which was awarded the MLA prize for best book in the area of Chicano/Chicana and Latino/Latina Cultural and Literary Studies. His new book, The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, co-edited with Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz, will appear in Spring 2013 from the University Press of New England. He is currently at work on two new book projects, Race, Narrative Theory and Contemporary American Fiction and Américo Paredes and the Post-war Writings from Asia.
Professor Saldívar is a recipient of the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education and the Lillian and Thomas B. Rhodes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University from 1994-99.