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This essay focuses on the work of Mexican/Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose main aesthetic principle lies in the criss-crossing of cultural, geographic and linguistic borders. Through his unique fusion of genres, discourses and media, Gómez-Peña creates a hybrid art form that also transgresses more conventional definitions of what constitutes culture. One of the central features of his "New World Border" (1992-1994) performance is the artistic transposition of site-specific border identities and texts to a global level; i.e., the border (and its transgression) becomes a metaphor to address a multiplicity of aesthetic, cultural and socio-political agendas. His performance "Temple of Confessions" (1994) aims, among others, at debunking the rather celebratory discourse of mainstream U.S. multiculturalism. In addition, his project of "reverse anthropology", which informs a number of his performance pieces, seeks to retain the resistance potential of minoritarian art by subverting hegemonic power hierarchies. As will be shown, his representational strategy of "as if" is used by Gómez-Peña and his collaborators to envision a postnational and transcultural spaciousness of the Americas.
The language situation in the Philipines between the many different native languages and English is complex. The book under review outlines the various contact situations, focussing on the contact between Tagalog, the most important indigenous language of the Philipines on the one hand and English on the other. This serves as the basis for a detailed discussion of the sociological determinasts of the contact continuum between Tagalog on the one hand and Standard English on the other. The main asset of the book is to be found in its well informed survey character resulting from personal teaching experience.