La Frontera: Environmental Histories of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Catalog description

Counterintuitive as it may seem, borderlands are effective tools for disrupting binaries and nature/culture dichotomies. In their inherent tension, borders as in-between zones create space to re-examine colonial, capitalist, and modernist paradigms. What does a borderlands perspective add to our understanding of the environment? Or, conversely, what does the centrality of the environment add to the ways we view the borderlands region? This course will introduce you to the relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands where we will come to appreciate, for instance, how a river can disrupt geopolitical boundaries, how desert nature can cross the corporeal boundary through sensorial pathways, or how the border wall itself is both real and violent as well as imagined and porous depending on the time, place, and which multispecies form we consider.