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[10] marc priewe resistance without borders: shifting cultural politics in chicana/o narratives when reading Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance reports and transcripts collected in his 1996 book, The New World Border, one notices a small black-and-white image of the Western Hemisphere printed in the corner of each even-numbered page. This map without borders slightly changes its appearance from one page to the next, and when the thumb is placed so that the pages flip quickly, the images create the illusion of movement: the Western Hemisphere begins to revolve around an imaginary dividing line between North and South America. This flip book changes GómezPe ña’s monograph from a mere representation of performance into an actual performance, whose meaning emerges as a result of an interaction between artist, artwork, and audience. Furthermore, the rotating image accentuates the performances transcribed in The New World Border by suggesting a playful subversion of power hierarchies that are inscribed in the top–bottom arrangement of North and South America on a conventional map. This subtle form of resisting the cartography of b/ordered nation-states in the Western Hemisphere ties in with recurrent postnationalist and transnational themes in Chicana/o novels, poems, films, performances, and music of the last twenty years. To varying degrees, these narratives deviate from Chicano cultural nationalism and its conceptualization of “Aztlán” as an imaginary homeland, reject assimilation to U.S. culture, and discard the desire to return to Mexico either physically or culturally. Instead, they are characterized by decisive, though not necessarily perpetual, artistic movements between national discourses and the demands they impose on cultural expressions. Such a poetics, exemplified by Gómez-Peña’s flip book, tends to blur the lines between culture-specific signifying practices on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border and produces fictional universes in which this side of the border seems always already on el otro lado de la frontera, and vice versa. This chapter seeks to outline the possibilities and limits of resistance as a form of cultural politics in contemporary Chicana/o narratives, whose aes- [266] marc priewe thetic and epistemological points of reference seem to lie “beyond the nation.” The central question to be addressed is the extent to which these narratives can still contribute to projects of resistance, liberation, and empowerment, or whether they, in their emphasis on transculturation, border crossings, and poetic transit, adhere to the economic logic underlying “cultures of globalization .” I claim that a number of recent Chicana/o texts open up and negotiate multiple sites of resistance by dwelling in a seemingly contradictory space between counter-hegemonic aesthetics and accommodations to global capital . In addition, while some Chicana/o narratives continue to posit a necessary critique of national inclusions and exclusions based on certain markers of difference, they also illustrate a tendency to redefine, and even provisionally reintroduce, national imaginaries for counter-hegemonic purposes. By doing so, they create fictional worlds in which traditional, current, and future identity scripts and national allegiances are both tested and contested. This reading approach is energized by salient points of intersection between Chicana/o studies and American studies projects. By reciprocally seeking and exploring common conceptual ground, scholars from both fields have in the recent past enhanced our understanding of the aesthetics and politics of cultural resistance. For instance, the New Americanists’ notion of postnationalism can be applied to analyze artistic reconfigurations of the Chicano homeland and the conceptual center of resistance during the civil rights era: Aztlán. Instead of disappearing into oblivion with the waning of political and cultural nationalism in the 1970s, the notion of Aztlán has been repeatedly resuscitated and reformulated by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Robert Lopez (alias El Vez), and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, among others , to reflect on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in nationalist discourses and to continue the legacy of Mexican (American) emancipation into the twenty-first century. In addition to revising the meaning of the ethnic referent “Chicana/o” via postnationalized and transnational inscriptions of Aztlán, the narratives addressed in this chapter also interrogate the notions of “America” and “American .” Because they refrain from an assimilatory and a nationalist stance, these texts force practitioners of American studies to once more come to terms with the “no longer” of the melting pot as one of the pillars of the U.S. national narrative. At the same time, they also point...

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