The colloquium “Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization,” is proud to host a keynote lecture by Alejandro L. Madrid, professor of ethno/musicology, Latin American and Cultural Studies at Cornell University. This lecture offers an assessment of the relevance of border studies in today’s increasingly toxic political moment nationally and internationally. The presentation takes as point of departure Mexican songwriter Juan Gabriel’s performance of diasporic self in the film Del otro lado del puente (1979) and the idea of being from “the other side” —which Mexicans and Mexican-Americans use both, when speaking of the land on “the other side” of the Rio Grande and as a synonym of “homosexuality”— to explore the relationship between the geographic borders of the nation-state and the imagined borders of heteronormativity. I suggest that asking what does it mean to look at oneself from the estranged perspective of the Other’s side enables one to take Juan Gabriel’s moralistic musical commentaries about Mexican-American culture —enunciated from the singer’s perceived ambiguous masculinity— to speak about fading notions of fixed national, ethnic, and gender identities that the trans-border experience questions on an everyday basis. I intend this case study to provide the basis for a critique of border theory by addressing a problematic outcome of traditional border studies, the tendency to, as sociologist Pablo Vila suggests, construct the border subject “into a new privileged subject of history.”
Monday, September 24, 4:30 pm at Konover Auditorium
For more information, contact: Jesus A. Ramos-Kittrell at jesus.ramos-kittrell@uconn.edu