Complementing Latin American Borders

The idea of complementing borders is appropriately ambiguous with respect to Latin America. People inhabiting cultural borders do not belong to either of the two sides, yet they are contained within the complementation that emerges when two or more cultures interdependently and incongruously interact.

In giving an account of complementing borders, this volume alludes to the Latin American context, most particularly Brazil and Mexico, through notions of rhythms and resonances, euphonies and discords, continuous flows and syncopes―all of which are found in everyday life, the arts, politics, economics, and social institutions and practices. The general theme of Complementing Latin American Borders, emerging from Charles S. Peirce’s process philosophy, is that of ebb and flow, fusion and diffusion, ordering and disordering, and the intermixing and dispersal of propensities and proclivities among Latin American cultures, past and present.

The story begins with a dialogue in the form of a satirical play on various characters of Jorge Luis Borges. Latin American is then presented in terms of invention and perpetual re-invention. As such, Latin America, as sympathetic vibrations creating cultural patterning, brings about notions of vagueness within generality by way of homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies within hegemonizing pressures. The reader comes away with a renewed sense of Latin American border complementing.

Floyd Merrell is the author of eight books, including Signs Grow: Semiosis and Life Processes; Sign, Textuality, World; and Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics, as well as numerous articles on semiotics, literary theory, and Hispanic literature.