An Alternative Border Metaphor: On Rhizomes and Disciplinary Boundaries

Abstract

The border is an inherently transnational nexus of cultures and identities yet, when approached and articulated from within the discipline of American Studies, often results in a re-entrenchment of singular national histories, cultures, and identities. This essay seeks to address the propensity of the discipline to remain sited within and focused upon the nation-state of the United States of America and its hegemonic ideology at the expense of more wide-ranging hemispheric analyses that account for the fluid, transnational, and borderless identities that America—in its continental configuration—has always been home to. Invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s critical metaphor—the rhizome—the paper develops and deploys analytical techniques which seek out and highlight connections and alternative configurations of existing material, often obfuscated by the supposed territorial integrity of nation and its inhabitant’s identities. Two key texts (Laurie Ricou’s The Arbutus/Madrone Files (2002) and Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas (1993)) are offered as examples of the ways in which positioning the border itself as a possible rhizomatic line of flight can ensure that borderlands cultural productions retain the multiplicity of the identities that they enact as both spatially and temporally (in)distinct and as challenges to the perpetuation of the border as a static and dichotomous entity.

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