Globalization on the Line

The essays in Globalization on the Line criticize the almost exclusive emphasis on the ethnically constituted trans-nation, whose function as an instrument of de-nationalization has become signified in the metaphorical use of 'the border.' Contributors focus on the surge of a more diverse variety of cultural forms of citizenship in response to the dramatic change that the geographies of U.S. border areas have undergone and simultaneously held to shape at the end of the 20th century. In its attempt to move beyond examinations of de-nationalized diasporic formations at the border, several essays in the collection add an attention to the northern frontier a hemispheric perspective that was originally spawned by imagining new forms of citizenship within U.S.- Mexico transborder cultures. Instead of viewing globalization and nation-states as two separate and opposed domains of theorization and politics, Globalization on the Line contextualizes U.S. borders within global processes that are currently reconstituting the relationship between nation-states and private corporations at the site of U.S. borders. The volume thus adds to the almost exclusive focus on the counter-hegemonic diasporic trans-nation an emphasis on various forms of citizenship that have emerged in response to increasingly more globally organized entities and practices.

CLAUDIA SADOWSKI-SMITH is Assistant Professor of English Department at the State University of New York, Fredonia. She has published articles on border studies, literatures of the U.S.-Mexico border, and globalization theory.