A Study of “Missed Encounter” between American Culture and Latin Culture and the Border Theory

Myoung Ah Shin

doi:10.21049/ccs.2011.25..55

Many States such as Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, California, New Mexico, Florida were obtained either from Spanish Empire or from Mexico. In 1848 due to the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty America could obtain half of the original territory of Mexico. American identity cannot be understood without the history of American expansionism further consolidated by the Spanish-American War in 1898, which brought other ex-Spanish colonies such as Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines to the US. The US’s interest in these territories dates back to the Monroe doctrine in 1823 when Monroe “declared the Americas off-limits to any new European colonization.” America justifies their expansion based on the notion of Manifest Destiny which was created by O'Sullivan at the hight of American fever to annex Texas to US. The intent of this paper is to study how Anglo-Saxon and Latin Culture clashed against each other especially right before and after the Spanish-American War. In this study the American hero, Theodore Roosevelt and Latin American hero, José Martí will be compared, though they did not meet each other during the Spanish-American war due to Marti's early death in 1895 at the battle for the Cuba Libre. Their comparison is significant in that the former represents the American expansionist spirit and the latter the spirit of Anti-imperialism and Anti-Anglocentrism. Along with the concept of Manifest Destiny of America, ‘American exceptionalism’ is also mentioned which motivates U.S. to expand further even after the Spanish-American war in the form of 'informal imperialism' characterized by ‘gunboat politics’of the US. These discussions will draw attention to how recent theorists such as Bryce Traister criticizes the Border Theory represented by José David Saldívar. Here the Border Theory is criticized to repeat the discourse of the globalized capitalism which prefers the weak state and the transnational aspects by focusing 미국문화와 라틴문화의 ‘어긋난 조우’와 탈경계성 연구 85on the in-betweenness of the border. In the end the paper will focus on how the Border theory as represented by Saldivar is political enough and sets up a resistant example against American expansionism of today in its focus on the call for pan-American and pluri-versal subjectivity of the borderlands. This point will be supported by a discussion of how Saldivar's view is confirmed by Walter Mignolo who advocates the "bottom up" resistance of the indigenous people of Chiapas and other social forums such as World Social Forum and the Social Forum of the Americas derived from the Zapatistas' movement whose motto is "A World in which many world co-exist."

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* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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[book] Saldívar, José David / 1991 / The Dialectics of Our America. Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History / Duke Univ. Press

[book] Saldívar, Ramón / 1990 / Chicano Narrative. The Dialectics of Difference / Univ. of Wisconsin Press

[book] 슬라보예 지젝 / 2005 / 탈이데올로기 시대의 이데올로기: 20세기에 대한 철학적 평가 / 철학과 현실사

이 논문은 한국연구재단의 지원을 받아 작성되었습니다.

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