The Other Border Wars - (Illuminations) by Shannon Dowd (Hardcover)

About the Book

Highlights the Transformative Effects of Border Conflicts on Culture and Politics

Book Synopsis

The Other Border Wars: Conflict and Stasis in Latin American Culture questions bordering as an organizing principle of culture, conflict, and politics. Shannon Dowd argues that Central and South American border conflicts such as the Chaco War, between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932-1935); the Soccer War, between El Salvador and Honduras (1969); and the Falklands/Malvinas War, between Argentina and the United Kingdom (1982); can be considered as stasis, meaning civil strife, rather than polemos, meaning international war. Through analyses of literature, film, and theater, Dowd shows that border conflict is entwined with domestic strife, reinforced by stagnant geographical lines, and magnified under globalization. Deploying a capacious theory of stasis to question modern sovereignty and bordering, Dowd examines border zones from the outbreak of hostilities to the present, highlighting the lasting legacies of enclosure and violence. The Other Border Wars asks readers to consider how cultural expression challenges the purported fixity of Latin American borders, and even the very idea of bordering.

Review Quotes

Literary and cultural critics will find in this book an imaginative and original thesis.-- "Revista, Harvard Review of Latin America"

The Other Border Wars is a text every Latin Americanist wishes they had written. It is a long-awaited and longer-needed meditation on the history of Latin American wars from a perspective informed by the history of imperial political theology and its effects on the notion of sovereignty. In the book, through extensive analysis of literary texts and film production, the clash between maps and territories is rehearsed and the conceptual difference between polemos (war) and stasis (civil strife) comes to be destroyed in an exemplary critical manner. The result is a scholarly tour de force that will change the very questions through which we approach Latin American cultural and political histories, and certainly the intersection between the two.--Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University

Brilliantly argued and full of unique and important insights, The Other Border Wars is certain to become required reading for scholars and students interested in questions of politics, sovereignty, war, literature, and visual culture in Latin America.--Patrick Dove, Indiana University

About the Author

Shannon Dowd is assistant professor of Spanish at Niagara University in New York. Her research examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature, film, and theory.