Campbell’s addition of the rhizomatic to the critical regionalist frame succeeds in a number of unforeseen, if not unexpected, ways.Ĥ Kenneth Frampton’s influential essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” (1983) is the most oft-cited originating point for the theory named in its title. This is further denoted in the central (dis)organizing principle of Campbell’s book in its aggregation and deployment of the Deleuzian metaphor of the rhizome (an organism characteristic of grasses which often have haphazard distribution) as complementary to the critically regionalist goals of his project. Herein, the use of “deterritorialization” as a key tenet of her discipline signals the growing importance of Deleuzian theory in new conceptions of regions such as the West. region of the West in-as the subtitle of his book suggests-a “transnational age.” Critical regionalism-originating in the theory and practice of architecture-has gained a significant critical foothold in Postwestern Studies (the area in which Campbell predominantly works) it is a field which, Krista Comer has recently remarked, “often gestures.toward a mood, a condition, a sense of place and people as disembedded or deterritorialized” (10). ![]() Her provocative suggestion that “‘American studies’ has long uncritically appropriated the name of the entire hemisphere for one particular country” (19)-in much the same way as that same country dominates many existing border discourses-is one that my arguments herein will respond to.ģ Of equal importance to my approach is Neil Campbell’s The Rhizomatic West (2008) and its development of critical regionalism as an innovative and apt lens to reorient analyses of the U.S. Likewise, in developing a comparative hemispheric framework, her analysis transgresses both national and firmly entrenched disciplinary boundaries. In focusing on marginalized voices-indigenous, Chicano/a, Asian-Sadowski-Smith effectively complicates borders as demarcations of singular identities. And secondly, in doing so, that “an alternative inter-American framework that focuses on.aces into dialogue hemispheric approaches to these geographies” (17). Firstly, that studying fiction which emerges from border regions can enable us to “move beyond dominant conceptualizations of who inhabits and can speak for the border” (11). Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s Border Fictions (2008) suggests two ideas of particular pertinence to this essay. Two recent field-shaping studies point the way in this regard, informing the development of my own arguments here and offering new theoretical maps which suggest ways in which centrifugal readings might be developed to interrogate regions like those found at national borders: regions which appear simultaneously cartographically distinct yet also culturally indistinct. Even from these external perspectives, then, the border performs a significant role in notions of nationalism, as it does from the perspective radiating from the central nation of North America.Ģ Such centripetal appropriations of distinctly transnational regions by singular national concerns need to be reconfigured if regionalism is to be extricated from its relationship with nationalism. ![]() For many Canadians the 49 th parallel performs an important psychic role in defining an identity distinct from that south of the line the border is an important line of cultural defense. ![]() The view from Mexico differs from that north of the line: the border a wall separating people from families, traditions, and ancestral lands all annexed in the mid-nineteenth century. These borders have markedly different psychological functions on either side of the cartographic marks which delineate the continental United States. boundary with Canada, we are told, is the longest undefended border in the world, often barely visible its border with Mexico, we can see, is an intensely defended and increasingly physical barrier. North American borders, despite the blending of cultures which occurs in these zones, are dominated by discursive constructions which emphasize, and emanate from, the ideological edifice of nationhood built by but one of the three nations of the continent: the United States. 1 Borders and borderlands are always already transnational: regions where nations meet and intermingle.
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