Disordering the Border: Harryette Mullen’s Transaborder Poetics in Muse & Drudge
This essay reads Harryette Mullen’s epic poem Muse & Drudge as an innovative text of the US-Mexico borderlands by focusing on Mullen’s literal and figurative transactions between multiple discourses, including Spanish, and the corresponding sets of material conditions these discourses conjure to understand how Muse & Drudge reveals the ongoing racialization and exploitation of African American women and Latinas. I identify a transaborder politics in Muse & Drudge in which shared colonial histories unite Afro-Caribbean diasporic and borderlands subjects. In Mullen’s poetics, themes of separation, definition, and regulation are racialized concepts, deeply embedded in the violent histories of racial mixing and mestizaje that are both named outright and alluded to metaphorically by her hybridized language.
The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary
Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Americo Paredes (1915–1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ramon Saldivar establishes Paredes’s preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldivar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the “new” American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization.

Saldivar demonstrates how Paredes’s poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the “border studies” or “anthropology of the borderlands.” Saldivar describes how Paredes’s experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Saldivar was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes’s own words. By explaining how Paredes’s work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldivar extends Paredes’s intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.
Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes
What is the significance of that loose collective enterprise, sprung up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a somewhat oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several important social and political matters: first, that the United States, following the Second World War, assumed definitive leadership of a capitalist empire; second, that its position of leadership generated a network of internal social contradictions which persist to this day (the collision of imperialist demands with the isolationist and revolutionary nationalism of American ideology); third, that this postwar period has been characterized, at the international level, by an extended cold war shadowed by the threat of a global catastrophe, whether deliberate or accidental. Whatever one's political allegiances, these truths, surely, we hold as self-evident. Postwar American poetry is deployed within that general arena, and to the degree that it is "political" at all, it reflects and responds to that set of overriding circumstances.' In my view the period ought to be seen 1. Black and feminist writing in the United States often confines the focus of the political engagement to a more restricted national theater. Nevertheless, even in these cases engagement is necessarily carried out within the global framework I have sketched above.