Rome Borders Powerpoint #1

“What is Rome? Where is the real Rome? Where does it begin and where does it end? Rome is surely the most beautiful city in Italy, if not the world. But it is also the most ugly, the most welcoming, the most dramatic, the richest, the most wretched….The contradictions of Rome are difficult to transcend because they are contradictions of an existential order. Rather than traditional contradictions, between wealth and misery, happiness and horror, they are part of a magma, a chaos.” Pier Paolo Pasolini from The Smiles of Rome

Rome Borders Blog:http://romeborders.blogspot.com/
The Rome Borders blog is a resource for your writing, your independent study projects and your Rione project. I will post resources through the quarter. You should also post resources that you find while researching your independent study and rione projects.

What is Border Studies?
Border Studies is within the field of cultural studies and combines the disciplines of political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, media theory, film/video, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history/criticism. Issues addressed include cultural phenomena such as identity politics, ideology, nationality, ethnicity, “race”, social class, and/or gender and sexuality. You will dig into all of this in your readings and as you explore the city.

Why Borders Studies?
Interdisciplinary and fluid, no singular static definition or method of study
“For all disciplines, borders determine the nature of group (in some cases defined territorially) belonging, affiliation, and membership, and the way in which the processes of inclusion are institutionalized” (Newman 143).

“We live in a hierarchical world of rigid ordering and that borders—be they territorial or aspatial—are much a part of our daily lives” (Newman 156).

The contradictions of globalization are evident. “Borderless” and “deterritorialized” world is not a reality. Globalization creates categories and compartments (Newman 143)
How have borders shifted. Where and why are the boundaries being drawn. Who is drawing these boundaries?

Related disciplines
English
--The study of literature is a way to make sense of our world, a way to interpret and “decode” the human condition and our place within history, our current society, and the cultures of the world. It connects us to the past, present, and future. It connects us to our fellow human being. Literary theory is one of the discipline’s tools. Close reading, i.e. deep analysis of texts, deconstruction and reconstruction of texts, are other components of English. The discipline is interdisciplinary and is also linked to Interdisciplinary humanities and culture studies.


Study of Identity politics

Identity politics can be thought of in terms of the process of formation of solidarity groups to secure identity and rights of a community and individuals within that community. Think about EU Identity and contradictions between national identity, communities within the nation, and individual identities. Italians want to be “Italians” and not “Europeans”?

Key Terms of Border Studies
Border concept - Border crosser - Border crossing - Border crossing narrative - Border figure - Border formation – Bordering – Borderland - Border narrative - Border planes -Border poetics- Border studies - Border subjects - Border theory - Border zones – Contact Epistemological border – Liminality - Symbolic Border - Temporal border- Textual border - Topographic border

Other Words related to "Border"
Frontier
Divide
Bridge
Hybrid


Types of Borders and Borderlands
Borders are not just physical manifestation of boundaries and spaces; they are also psychological, language, textual, cultural, gendered, and emotional (social boundaries, historical amnesia/memory, identity politics). They are represented in art, literature, politics, monuments and memorials, and in our own actions and reactions.
Borders (and borderlands) are both macro and micro, influencing nation state, city, ethnic and cultural, neighborhood, family/group, and individual identities (mixed race identity for example).
Borders are not fixed, are not solid, are socially constructed. Borders are created both overtly and covertly, by nation states, individual movements, and demographic changes in populations.
Borders and identity politics are intimately related.

Borders Around the World

and more borders