ABSTRACT
For Keneth Kinnamon
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe. … A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los Atravesados live there … those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.”
—Gloria Anzaldúa 1Working right at the limits of several categories and approaches means that one is neither entirely inside or outside. One has to push one’s work as far as one can go: to the borderlines, where one never stops walking on the edges, incurring constantly the risk of falling off one side or the other side of the limit while undoing, redoing, modifying this limit.
—Trinh T. Minh-ha 2A book’s “borders”—its packaging, format, and the contexts in which it is read and published—are inseparable from its more apparent content. Not only [is] an author … part of the text … but so [are] its editors and readers. … every book, every reading, is laced and surrounded with circumstances worth considering, border crossings within the text as well as at its edges.
—Diane P. Freedman 3