Across Cultures Across Borders

Across Cultures/Across Borders is a collection of new critical essays, interviews, and other writings by twenty-five established and emerging Canadian Aboriginal and Native American scholars and creative writers across Turtle Island. Together, these original works illustrate diverse but interconnecting knowledges and offer powerfully relevant observations on Native literature and culture.

Across Cultures/Across Borders is a collection of new critical essays, interviews, and other writings by twenty-five established and emerging Canadian Aboriginal and Native American scholars and creative writers across Turtle Island. Together, these original works illustrate diverse but interconnecting knowledges and offer powerfully relevant observations on Native literature and culture.

For as long as Mexicans have emigrated to the United States they have responded creatively to the challenges of making a new home. But although historical, sociological, and other aspects of Mexican immigration have been widely studied, its cultural and artistic manifestations have been largely overlooked by scholars—even though Mexico has produced the greatest number of cultural works inspired by the immigration process. And recently Chicana/o artists have addressed immigration as a central theme in their cultural productions and motifs. Culture across Borders is the first and only book-length study to analyze a wide range of cultural manifestations of the immigration experience, including art, literature, cinema, corridos, and humor. It shows how Mexican immigrants have been depicted in popular culture both in Mexico and the United States—and how Mexican and Chicano/Chicana artists, intellectuals, and others have used artistic means to protest the unjust treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities. Established and upcoming scholars from both sides of the border contribute their expertise in art history, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and other fields, capturing the many facets of the immigrant experience in popular culture. Topics include the difference between Chicano/a and Mexican representation of immigration; how films dealing with immigrants are treated differently by Mexican, Chicano, and Hollywood producers; the rich literary and artistic production on immigration themes; and the significance of immigration in Chicano jokes. As a first step in addressing the cultural dimensions of Mexican immigration to the United States, this book captures how the immigration process has inspired powerful creative responses on both sides of the border.

Communities across Borders examines the many ways in which national, ethnic or religious groups, professions, businesses and cultures are becoming increasingly tangled together. It show how this entanglement is the result of the vast flows of people, meanings, goods and money that now migrate between countries and world regions. Now the effectiveness and significance of electronic technologies for interpersonal communication (including cyber-communities and the interconnectedness of the global world economy) simultaneously empowers even the poorest people to forge effective cultures stretching national borders, and compels many to do so to escape injustice and deprivation.

How do students' online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture? In this book scholars from a range of countries illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students.

Uncovering aspects of university culture which are often hidden or misunderstood, this book brings together international perspectives, showing the matches and mismatches between experience and expectation, as both staff and student face new academic cultures. Drawing on the stories of students and members of staff in the higher education sector as starting points for analysis, this book considers aspects such as the dynamics and pragmatics of university settings, from tutorial to lecture; the assignment and multiple text types from reflective logs to essays; different interpretations of grades, grading and feedback. Topics are explored with examples from critical incidents and narratives in international contexts – both where staff or students cross cultures and borders, and where they are functioning within the university culture with which they are most familiar. Ideal both for those new to learning and teaching in higher education, and those seeking to refresh their practice, this must-read book uses case studies and narratives to illustrate key challenges academics and students face. With consideration given to learning across cultures, the narratives and topics lead to enquiries which the reader can ask and research for themselves to find helpful answers to explain their own university experiences.

This innovative work offers the first comprehensive transcultural history of historiography. The contributors transcend a Eurocentric approach not only in terms of the individual historiographies they assess, but also in the methodologies they use for comparative analysis. Moving beyond the traditional national focus of historiography, the book offers a genuinely comparative consideration of the commonalities and differences in writing history. Distinguishing among distinct cultural identities, the contributors consider the ways and means of intellectual transfers and assess the strength of local historiographical traditions as they are challenged from outside. The essays explore the question of the utility and the limits of conceptions of modernism that apply Western theories of development to non-Western cultures. Warning against the dominant tendency in recent historiographies of non-Western societies to define these predominantly in relation to Western thought, the authors show the extent to which indigenous traditions have been overlooked. The key question is how the triad of industrialization, modernization, and the historicization process, which was decisive in the development of modern academic historiography, also is valid beyond Europe. Illustrating just how deeply suffused history writing is with European models, the book offers a broad theoretical platform for exploring the value and necessity of a world historiography beyond Eurocentrism.

As performative and political acts, translation, intervention, and participation are movements that take place across, along, and between borders. Such movements traverse geographic boundaries, affect social distinctions, and challenge conceptual categorizations - while shifting and transforming lines of separation themselves. This book brings together choreographers, movement practitioners, and theorists from various fields and disciplines to reflect upon such dynamics of difference. From their individual cultural backgrounds, they ask how these movements affect related fields such as corporeality, perception, (self-)representation, and expression.