 Good afternoon, everyone. I would say we would have to start because, you know, type scheduling, so I'm the German in the group, I have to watch over the time management, and so this is telling me we should get started. And now it's my pleasure to welcome you back to our second session for today on the river as metaphor. And I have two small organizational matters for the rest of the day. So we have one of our speakers, Dr. Daniela Johannes, who can't be with us in person today. So we're going to zoom her in later at around 250, which is excellent because again, that means, you know, time management is off the essence, which I hope I'll be good at that. So we'll see. And so this is our second speaker. And then just a quick reminder, if you have a look at your programs after the session at around 430, there'll be a short coffee break. So we can take a breath and get some refreshments for the final round of conversation and discussion with all of our speakers. And I'm going to tell you right away this is going to be improvised. So for the rest of the day, we all deserve a little improvisation. Okay, so let's begin the second panel today. Again, you know, I'm just thrilled to be here. I'm happy to see everybody back in the same room doing what we love at Academic Sympathia and Conferences. I'm excited to see my students and students from New Zealand, whom I just learned so much about with their beautiful projects. And I want to start the panel before I introduce the first two speakers. I want to just briefly, very briefly recite from Natalie Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Post-Colonial Love Poem. She's a Mojave poet and part of the Aguila River Indian community, and she holds the chair in modern and contemporary poetry at Arizona State. And she speaks to our panel in many different ways. Natalie Diaz knows life in the borderlands, even if it's not the US-Mexico border, but it's the tri-state area of Nevada, California, and Arizona. She knows life as a Native American woman, a Latina, and a queer woman. The Mojave people are in their language, the people by the river. And finally Diaz is also the director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State. So here we go. In her piece, exhibits from the American Water Museum, the river figures prominently. In exhibit number 99, she tells the creation story of the Mojave. Before the city, the creator pressed his staff into the earth, and the earth opened. It wasn't a wound, it was joy. Out of this opening, left earth's most radical bloom, our people. We blossom from the original body, water, flowering and flowing until it became itself, and we, us, river. In the spirit of the river, not just as a divisive, but as an organic, even generative body and border, here are our first two speakers. Catherine Cazerias is an independent researcher and writer, trained as an urban anthropologist at Ecole des Votés d'Ivations Sociales à Paris, and her work focuses and has focused on the mode of production of public space in a built-up environment, on the terms of access to the public space and to the city in general, and on the conditions of existence in the interstices of the urban space. Elisabeth Le Bovici is an art historian and a critic, and she lives in Paris. She's been a culture editor for the Libération newspaper for many years, but she's also a blogger for Le Bovici. She was formerly an HIV AIDS activist, and with Catherine Cazerias, their founding members of the Lesbians of General Interest Fund. Since the 90s, Elisabeth has been involved in writing on feminism, activism, on queer politics and contemporary art, and their publications are manifold and beautiful, and I encourage you to check them out. Their talk today, which they're giving together, is entitled, Crossing Over with Borderlands La Frontera, and Reference to the Work by Anzal Dua. The talk discusses the frontier as a living, shifting, bridging and ultimately productive space for minority cultures and subjectivities. Please help me welcome Catherine and Elisabeth. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm not used to speaking in public, so just stop me if I go through that. First of all, I would like to thank everyone here who made this possible, the scholars, the students, the people here at Moudam, the team, which is kind of fabulous. And I would like also to thank, of course, Elisabeth, without her, I wouldn't be standing here. And I would like also to thank Romney Tim Johnson, who is the editor of one part of the Allureo to the River book. Thanks to Tim, I'm also on that stage today, so it's a great pleasure and immense honor. And I'm happy to go to start, well, actually I'm very shy and I'm very stressed, but also I'm very happy because the three talks we had this morning, the three papers, are kind of not an introduction, but I could draw threads from Edeca, I4 and CJ. I hope you enjoy what I've been preparing and the view I can give to you from my own vantage point. And then I leave, of course, the microphone to Elisabeth, so we did a text together in the book. It was our first experiment and it was kind of really successful, we loved it. And so we thought that we may try to do an overall presentation, but then you know how things go, when you start to think and you start to write, and then sometimes it goes different ways, so this is what happens. So I'm giving my part and Elisabeth will join afterwards, she will go on. The central point, I hope I can get to the central point of our talk is of course called Gloria Anseldois. It was also one of the starting points for our journey since we started to work on this huge project. So like Gloria, in a way, I'm just, you know, taking one thread and trying something else. Thank you for your attention. So I titled this paper How to Tame a Wild Dream, in reference to Gloria Anseldois' essay called How to Tame a Wild Song, in which she tells about the relationship with the different languages she has spoken since childhood, how she uses them, where and with whom. The text can be found in Borderland La Frontera, a new Mestissa, published in 1987. This is the first chapter of Borderland, entitled The Homeland, as planned, El Obro, Mexico, that will start as my starting point today. In this chapter, on Sadova, we come to the history of Mexico and the ties that have been woven over the centuries between Mexico, Europe and the United States. Gloria takes into account that of her family, agricultural day laborers, who have, among other things, suffered severe drought until they lost their people's land. Anseldois recounts the context of her birth, the early childhood, and she writes, In my childhood, I saw the underdrying farming. I witnessed the land cleared, so the huge pipes connected to underwater sources sticking up in the air, as children would go fishing in some of the canals when they were full and hunt for snakes in them when they were dry. As I find when one reads and rereads for the land, some things slip by and others jump out. This description only struck me after seeing the Helena distribution here at Midan in February. I connected the description of Anseldois to the series of images to reproduce of the diet that divides El Pasoam to Del Rojad. Instead of the truck, I saw Gloria and her friends raging in the water when it was there, or kicking up dust in dry weather. Anseldois and her family lived a little further east, so of course she never switched in the canals with the grass. But she has witnessed transformations that have disrupted her environment, her family's life, and their huge territory. She recounts the repeated droughts that prevented her grandparents from farming, leading them to lose the little arable land they had. She also tells of the working conditions of the farm workers in the large farms of the Rio Grande Valley. She tells how the mojados, the wet backs, try to cross the river on an insatiable raft for some, on foot for others, and how the border patrol waits for them on the other side. How to get water, to grow cotton, how to find the water necessary for daily life are two of the questions that underlie the rectifications implemented in the 19th and 20th century on the course of the Rio Grande. CJ, as a rest, tells the story of the river beautifully in the book that accompanies the exhibition. He shows the course on the insiandre, the drought, the arms that appear, and the arms that disappear, and those that remain alive. The outflows that flood both your land and the marking of the border between Mexico and the United States. Today, I would like to follow the thread of these rectifications and look at two examples that affected two rivers, the European cities. Let's go first to Brussels, where the SEM, which is called SCWNE, crosses the city from south to north. It is around part of its river that Brussels has developed. Like many rivers, it has long been used to transport goods and people. It was used to reach Antwerp and the SEM, but navigation along its yanders was complex and might even more difficult when the water was too low or too high. The first major rectification took place in the 16th century when it was decided to be the canal that would follow the river from south to north, but in a straight line. The waters of the SEM were devoted to the canal and the travel time was reduced by three. So instead of one week, you would take one or two days to do the whole journey. The boats disappeared from the river, but the economic activity of the SEM continued. On its banks, small-scale industries such as breweries, tanneries, and textile workshops are established, as well as zero meals for the bakeries and for the beer and another meal that produced paper pulp. All of these industries used water in their manufacturing process, and all of them used the riverbed to discharge waste materials. Water was grown, used, and discharged dirty at various points in the river's narrow flow. The SEM flows through the heart of the population. The population also weighs on the life of the river. Since its course is used for the needs of daily life, i.e. for drinking, cooking, washing, and disposing of our food waste. The SEM flows, hidden by houses and factories, and reappears in planned sites when it's current overflowed and floods the cellars, the streets, and the marketplace. In dry period, this flow becomes so low that it can no longer evacuate the wastewater that stagnates and sink up the environment. In case of storms or heavy rains, the flooding is worse in the city, because the two states are usually kept locked to preserve the navigation of the canal. And badly engineered constructions, such as bridge, pier, plug the arrival of the trade trees. At the beginning of the 19th century, the SEM had become an open sewer. On top of the flood, there are cholera epidemics linked to the insaliburity of the river, the insaliburity of the municipal constructions that border it, and the lack of drinking water that causes the use of spoiled water. Studies on the consequences of the insaliburity of the river start to be carried out, but the recommendations remain in the drawers. Drainage work, for instance, could have helped, but neither the local or regional governments nor the industrialists, except the finance SEM. The SEM is dying from understated care. In 1930, Brussels becomes the capital of the new state and begins to complete with neighbors such as London, Amsterdam or Paris, where issues of urbanization and better health of the good environment are already addressed. The city is embarking on the conquest of water in a move to board the train of modernity. The question of how to sanitize and how to reduce the scope and damage caused by flood and how to sanitize in order to fight the deadly cholera epidemics is again considered. The first state is like in 1932, with the construction of the new canal heading south, meant to increase and free decide the opportunities and conditions of navigation. Then in 1855, Brussels organizes from a newly built fountain the first solution of drinking water to homes, which is an expensive system for the users, only the most fortunate can access it, but it works. The sub-state and major change for the city happened in the mid-1860s when the voting of the SEM is decreed. The idea is to bury the unhealthy river in a watertight channel more than two kilometers long. The interest of the method in the eyes of the engineers and local government is twofold. On the one hand, burying the river and clearing the city of the source of olfactory, visual and sanitary pollution. It is about time. The other benefit is just as important, the city can finally get rid of a set of very old and unhealthy buildings and begin digitization work that will put it at the level of more flamboyant European capitals. The work begins, of course, with the expropriation of the houses that stand in the area to be reformed and rectified. It is more than a thousand houses, which for a city the size of Brussels 10 is a high number. Once the SEM may down the ground, the city can build an airy and fancy artery on the recovered stretch of land. This is similar to what is happening at the same time in Paris, which openly serves as a model for the new marrying Brussels. In Paris, Osman, the president of the SEM department, and Emperor Napoleon III, with the help of a strong team of engineers, are reorganizing the heart of the city by destroying round-down buildings, redesigning the world system through universal expropriation, annexing neighboring villages to increase the size, the density and the resources of the capitals, and putting in place specification that it is usually homogenized a very large part of the real city, the city of Brussels. In Brussels, again the vaulting process, the river is integrable but it is still alive. The emissions of two new wastewater collectors have been added to its underground core, but no care or management system is yet in place. It continues to flow in the same unhealthy conditions without any sanitation system until the very beginning of the 2000s. The second example of domestication of living water brings us back to Paris. I could talk about the SEM, S-E-I-N-E, and how it is powerful sometimes unpredictable marshy banks once tamed by a system of stone caves, pierced and bridges. One could also say that the artificialization and the rectification of the river brought an added value to the city of life, but it's another story. And anyway, the SEM, S-E-I-N-E, still flows in Paris, plainly visible, legible and taken care of. There was a time when, despite it, the river Dievre flowed. It is even said that the SEM, in a very different part, stole part of its bed. The Dievre is not the most powerful of rivers. It's flow weakened in the hot months, floods are quite frequent, and yet it was too quickly developed. One of the oldest rectifications stepped back to the 8th century when a canal was built to divert its water in order to feed a meal. Wood was then used to consolidate the banks of the channel. In the 12th century, one of the abeyes that made up the urban fabric of Paris at that time, diverted the river to feed another canal that was also built to run a flower meal. In the 17th century, its waters are diverted by an underground aqueduct in order to supply the king's court exercise. It was a period that, for the development of aristocracy's pleasure houses, complete with gardens and fountains that required access to a large quantity of water. People then did not hesitate to divert the Dievre, sometimes without authorization. The banks of the Dievre are home to a large number of industries. Authorities and scientists prefer to see them damaging the Dievre rather than the waters of the SEM. It's sacrifice is made knowingly. After the meals came the slaughterhouses, the tanneries, and the dying factories. Those are renowned for their production of high quality dies and pigments. It is thus a set of polluting industries that gradually set the session of the banks, use the water of the Dievre in their manufacturing processes, and evacuate in its bed the unusable underdirties. Strong regulations are put in place in the 16th century, and the body of Dievre guards is created. Craftsmen, industrialists, and residents are asked to take care of this water, to clean the river every summer when the water is low, to reinforce the banks with wet landslides in case of flooding, not to fill in unauthorized canals and above all, not to throw in the water the remains of carcasses and other rubbish. I don't know to what extent this comment was respected. If one compares this with the issue of the tracing and marking of the boundaries of Paris, which was subject to numerous regulations at the same time, one can think that the area of action of the river guards was quite narrow and that illegal diversions are endorsing continued. The Dievre is not only home to industries. In Paris, it's night also hosts some hospitals, barracks, pools, and prisons, all of which, in the absence of a proper suit, withstands its charge of water and the waste process of it into its flow. It is easy to imagine the visual aspect of the river, tinted by prussian blue and carrying the animal fat and bones discarded by the leather manufacturing. It is perhaps more difficult to imagine the smell that it could float day and night in some parts of the city. As for the public health consequences that such a situation generates, there are similar to those found in Brussels. Polluted water is the source of disease, cholera epidemics are common, the human toll is high. Public health issues around the Dievre alert to the authorities at the end of the 18th century. The Academy of Medicine recommends to clean it up, to cover it, to rectify its cause, to move other industries outside the city. The decision to cover the river is taken in 1824. The works follow a wave of expropriation and last about 20 years. They are taken up again by Osman at the beginning of the 1860s when he decides under the increasing pressure from the residents in search of a more healthy environment to completely eliminate the river from the public space. This time the works take 60 years. The river is driven underground and integrated into the Parisian sewer system and regular cleaning is imposed by law. But the Dievre has not stopped suffering yet. At the end of the Second World War, a global plan for the development and coverage of the river is once again being considered which would lead to a complete coverage of another segment of the river. Today, part of the Dievre south of Paris Paris is the subject of a plan to reestablish peace in the open air. Local authorities are seeking to redeploy biodiversity in the densest urban area in an effort to reduce urban heat islands leading to concrete and soil ceilings while enhancing the living environment of residents. We are witnessing the same movement in Brussels where the Serhna river finally cleaned up is supposed to be natured back into the city. I would like to finish with a story of safe domestication. The day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian forces decided to open a dam to repel Russian soldiers. The dam was built in 1960 on the USSR regime on the European River near Kiev. The day after the dam was unlocked, a Russian missile damaged the dam, leaving the open plain heavily flooded. The overflow presented the Russian invasions at this point of the border. It also presented the implementation of a large-scale housing project that would have led to the concreting of a large part of the plain and the whole thing of the open river and its disappearance into an underground collector. The wild and tame preserve from now. Thank you. Hello. So, I went back to see the exhibition I had seen in February and I went back again after hearing you this morning. And I saw the exhibition as if I was actually pushed by the river, you know, going with the river. But more than that, pushed by the flow of the river. And this is something I want to explore with you today. To me, there are two very interesting features in what they make, in their effect, in the emotions they provoke in the spectators that you can see in this show. And which are linked for me, one to the scale of the works who were discussing that this morning. The scale of, not only of the map, the geographic map, but also of the works you see upstairs of the letters and the sequences. We'll be talking about that with you today. As you can see, the photographs are not very big. They're relatively small. They're not posters. They're not enormous. They're small. And I think what they do, in fact, is actually concentrate, which goes with the printed quality of the print, which makes everything so important. So in order to get a larger picture of that, you have to go to the smallest section. The second feature we also discussed this morning about the show that makes it so important to me is, of course, because there is no text. There is absolutely no text outside what is in the photographs. It's the words are in the photographs. There's nothing else. There's no text. There's no label. And there are no wall labels. So what happens? And even if there were, by the way, what would you learn as somebody who doesn't know the place? And this large place. There is something like a disorientation that happens with the picture. And this is something, again, a feature that I would like to think about while walking with you within what I'm trying to do today. This disorientation means also that you have to trust the picture. You have to trust what you need. You have to trust the sequence of the picture to actually get the knowledge that you're going to get. So there are many ways to approach the flow of the show. And the one I wish to choose today is the approach precisely the movement, the journey to the river, our river. I think we can all convene here that it has nothing or very little to do with the report on or about the river as a given object. An already made object reflected in a given body of work given up for us to see. To me, on the contrary, it is also a journey in the making, in the picturing, journeying, cruising to paraphrase to the Esteban Munoz. It is an act. It is a verb. It is a performance. It is a performance, a performative tool. The colonial writer Olo uses similarly a verb when he addresses Gloria Anzaldur's language. Languaging, or doing language, is making a cognitive tool that involves speaking, writing, two or more languages simultaneously fracturing and intruding the flow. As a verb, language is an embodied use of language. And I see here Zora Leonard and Gloria Anzaldura on parallel frequency, making an embodied language that yet doesn't factor the world between human and young human between cosmologies and chronologies. In French, la langue both refers to the language and to the tongue. La langue as in mother tongue actually. In English, such term creates an exclusive unsurpassedness, an exception for the English language as if in English language and tongues were meeting in a kind of womb. Gloria Anzaldura doesn't make an exception. She doesn't meet in a mother tongue. She offers the language the machine of her tongue. Forced by perseverance. Forced because she fuses in the same experience the living body, the tongue as an organ and language as a tool of communication. Languaging, languaging as a political act explores the flesh of the world and gives a concrete existence to writing. The forked tongue, the tongues of fire, the wild tongue that the dentist wishes to tame in ordering her mouth to behave all these movements of the tongue that one finds among many others in Gloria Anzaldura's texts unfold also the cold switching or meshing or the messing up that are implied in the dynamic of Anzaldura's language practices and writing. Implied so to say in their forms and I want to add another person the French writer Monique Wittig when she writes that the material used in language are already a form but also matter. With writing, words are everything. It's an essay called The Frozen Horse. We'll go back to you later. To me it's not so far from Anzaldura's cry for form whether written or spoken which is not about explaining or reflecting the reality but it is shaping it to grit over troubled water. And she'll do it like the changing language is the necessary step to changing one's perceptions of the world. She does more than invent a language actually. She incorporates several. In the list she makes in Bordeaux and Zafronterra the humor fits up in 1987. The language in the border is made of the language of the zipper baby is made of standard English working class in slang English standard Spanish standard Mexican Spanish North Mexican Spanish dialect Chicano Spanish with their regional variations in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Pachuco called Pachuco Spanish the secret language for the barrio, the vernacular. Her employing of multi-language enables her and us as readers to think within or again rather to the border. That is to touch the terrain or the passageways for this liminal state between worlds, between realities between systems of knowledge between symbolic systems. The matter of her language therefore is precisely that border which is permanently crossed by language inadvertently passing from one to the other. I'm quoting her. There at the juncture of culture language cross pollinate and are revitalized. They die and are born. And Gloria and Zaldu add, presently this instant language Chicano Spanish is not approved by any society but we Chicanas no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture to translate to Anglos to Mexicans to Latinos apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway. So you we are requested to come in to come in between. On the bridge no one is an insider no one is an outsider. On the bridge there is a risk to be affected and possibly changed by a language constantly shifting by a border aesthetic. Consent and appropriate assail. Consent to be not a single being ask writer, ask writer Fred Milton. Consent not to be a single being is the general title of Motons and Solody in three parts. The three parts they call black and blurs, stolen life and universal machine. The expression Consent not to be a single being is a derived translation from a conversation between writer Edouard Rissan and cultural theorist Nancy Nassau manifests an archipelagic thinking which implies to get rid of individualistic illusions and intricate in language or human and non-human companion past, present, or future allowing for different voices to remain distinct while contributing to a cohesive world, whole of a world. As Moton writes in the preface to black and blur this marks the displacement of being a reality that is condensed in one term blackness. I was so interested about this morning by the way words could condense worlds and collide worlds. For instance you know hydro-sociality for instance necro-hydrology hyper-visuality all these words could condense a number again the displacement of being and singularity. In Anseldure's use of words consent not to be a single being has a few names these names are never country, homeland, nationality, citizenship Anglo words abolished in her language her language practice better uses her language practice uses the words which relates to a move of the consciousness that is never at ease with unity on the contrary in her language one word can collect and condense, conflict and collisions contrary to many normative conceptions of the plural self Anseldure's new Mississa must actively and publicly negotiate between the demands of contradictory groups advocating I'm quoting her a compassionate strategy with which to negotiate conflicts and difference within the self and between others thus we can no longer blame you nor disown the white part the male part the pathological part the queer part the vulnerable part there is no whole unified as Gloria Anseldure's address to language cannot be circumscribed or defined just as Chicana just as Dyke just as woman of color just as writer just as disabled person I see the Mississa says Anseldure as a geography of self of different bordering country who stands at the threshold of two or more worlds and negotiates the cracks between the world another world the pamphlet translates such in between state of living in between overlapping and layered spaces of cultures and locations a milieu where fixed categories erode where they crack and become permeable and begin to break down letting go with the flow identity like a river is always changing always in transition always in the pamphlet like the river downstream you're not the same person you were upstream you begin to define yourself in terms of who you're becoming it is about a crossing psychological, cultural, sexual and linguistic border the physicality of the river is always of the skin of her words for me there aren't little obstacles with different identities intellectual, racial, sexual it's more like a very fine membrane sort of like a river an identity sort of like a river it's one and it's flowing and it's a process again, Anseldure to the river Anseldure gives a language practice a border language it's theory in the flesh as she claims one where the physical realities of our lives are a skin color the land or concrete we grew upon are sexual longings all fused to create a politics borne out of necessity the flesh of a body that has been made monstrous by patriarchal, racist, heteronormative, enablery, hegemon claims need for utterance words she says and my passion for the baby struggles to render them concrete in the world and on paper to render them flesh keeps me alive this is the border language a practice, a longing that Anseldure addresses to those who do not have even a room of their own the one Virginia Woolf with an advocating for in which to write for people on the toilet or waiting in line for welfare and public transportation not as public writer but as a practice of change as a local centric river colliding poetry myths her stories and stories proverbs, memories, dreams all that composes in what she calls an autohistoria teoria with an incredible sense of panache that shapes it from essay to short story, book of poetry daily meditation to writing manual children's novel a play, an exploration of imagination a co-edited multi-zone collection a dissertation edited by one of her fellow writers all of them continuing to question the global design of text and contemporary academic productions Anseldure's whole struggle is to change the discipline, to change desire to change how people look a poem, a series or our children's book so she says, I have a struggle between how many of these rules I can break and how I can still have readers in the book but what for it got to do with it at first it looks strange to the Trojan the wooden horse, off color outside, barbaric like a mountain it reaches up to the sky little by little they discover the familiar forms which coincide with those of a horse the Trojans, writes Monique Leique gradually adopt the forms that they find at first too dull, too old, too simple too Greek, too non-modern then they want to make it theirs, their monument and shelter into their walls but what if it were a war machine the Trojan horse metaphor that Leique points to any importance literary work or any work with a new form as she says it's sort of the same that the one Gloria Angelou uses it's really incredible Leique used the metaphor of the Trojan horse and Angelou uses the Trojan moulin that's much like Marshall the Trojan moulin indeed the Trojan moulin is not a wooden construction that passes as a monument it is a person stumbling under the weight of all the baggage with a new mystic consciousness that she pushes and infiltrates the system the academy, the labels, the theory the white colored wool the Trojan moulin is feeling worn by the dangers of water crossing in her emancipatory voice the return of the repressed the exciter, the lesion written through by cultural matrix that only the imperial critics can deconstruct and owe both agree I think on one point as a Trojan horse or mula writing always occurs in hostile territory in a language of the given in a normative social space which is normed above all by language in this territory the Trojan thing appears strange, queer and assimilable then the beauty of its form prevails through this aesthetic apparatus the one of working the words into a form to see, to read to hear words can be quoted come back to us whole again and I think that's exactly what she really may be feeling with her at the distant time the sensibilité the Trojan horse the Trojan moulin are thus a war machine not machines that make war but machines perpetually in struggle, perpetually in motion, undermining and undermining the literary and social conventions revealing their that are revealing their incapacity to translate they are as say a revolutionary machine to come not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of the collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere literature is the people's concern that's in a book called what is a minor literature it is incredibly pleasurable to put together two of the particularities of this war machine, this languaging both at work in monique and androgyne's writing at senses they are indeed graphic in all senses of the term one is the use of capital and low-case letters like in Borderlands capital letter and Borderland with low-case or in like Le Corlesien where all anatomical terms are in capital letter but it's also the use of the flash that characterizes the particular point of view of the writer we take a flash into pronouns such as I recent flash E altering literally the typography not only of the personal pronouns but also of first person suggested all split by a flash with Ancindua the literary machine carries a double pronoun I'm quoting her a word I split to show that are we that we they are both us another like the flash I and E in Le Corlesien's writing not opera graphically performs the secure between two generally opposing terms such as the close for the personal and the personal the remote the flash as a juncture between the two shores is not a hyphen because it's not the question of coupling of making the dualism or even of dialectics or safe words it is rather a question of bridging of alliance here the I is dilated twice to by not and by not as opposed to rhetorical it is a sign that an individual story is all the more necessary that completely different her story is sharing within it maybe the flash imagine that as the graphic the medical north of the equator the movement is clockwise to all our knowledge on this side moves clockwise south of the Ecuador the movement is counterclockwise the river flow the other way as a Mestiza I'm living on the equator some of my culture the indigenous and the Mexican pulled me counterclockwise this come with its own perception of being and over here in North America all the knowledge I learned school all the ways I've learned to look at life pulled me the other way I think that post-coloniality is situated right there if you consider the counterclockwise to be the colonized culture and the clockwise to be the colonizing culture when there is this tension you're trying to accommodate both cultures and still be comfortable it is a struggle to find these seeds the second one that's why Gloria Angelou are you might ask well what I've tried to stress is the difference between the reference to a writer poet theory who has lived in the Rio Grande Valley and the shifter of forms that move beyond and break away with epistemological binaries of the western salt in this process which one could call the decolonial process one also breaks away with the decimatory engaged by this binary transphysiologists and anthropologists more than 30 years ago had called these binaries a great divide seen as exported from the great divide between humans and non-humans a divide producing a decimatory that exists only in western and for post-centrism and epistemology as a consequence of a modern thought preoccupied with purification and where nature would always be constructed that separated exteriorized and objectified of meaning from the society of humans so to go back to the life of these of us being here it is worth noticing that neither though Lennard's work nor and though he was writing or making any apriori declaration as to what might distinguish humans and non-humans they produce this sort of line of continuity we'll be talking about this morning seeing this river as this continuity and this fragment they don't separate what the modern would divide from themselves that is all what they would call pre-modern thought and cosmology by the way of the pre-modern thought what they do I think introducing this continuity is just starting from the middle where nothing apriori is happening the middle to which the address is formed to the river already thank you thank you so much for your talk talk I should say and I would suggest that we actually hear our second speaker right away Dr. Rangina Johannes and that we then continue with us but say now to have more time to mention an answer at the very end of our session today so I'm going to actually go to the podium and introduce our second speaker it is my pleasure to welcome virtually our speaker Dr. Danila Johannes who is an associate professor of Latinx studies at Westchester University of Pennsylvania she holds PhD from the Arizona State University and has a connection to Natalie Diaz here as well her research focuses on the significance of the sonoran-divered environment as a crucial aspect of U.S. southern border securitization which propels the politics of nature as means to control life and death within the space of the nation and for their connections to our first panel here this morning as well at Westchester Dr. Johannes is currently the director of the Latin American Latinx studies program and the chair of Multicultural Faculty Commission within the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Office her talk today is entitled water affects womanhood in borderlands volcanic literature and she talks about the re-envisioning of archetypes such as la Gioroma through the art of literature Dr. Johannes welcome to the conference it is my pleasure please give it up for Dr. Johannes thank you very much hello everyone good afternoon good morning for me it's funny how I look at you looking at me and I look at myself looking at me I guess it's interesting from the gaze perspective since we are here at the museum thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to present even though I couldn't come in person I'm very sad about that fact I wish I could be with all of you and also I missed the exhibition which I'm very sad about but we're going to try this Clania River water affects in womanhood in Borderlands Chicano literature I'm also delighted to hear the other presentations because as I hear them I can make many connections to what I am trying to explore here so we will see the presentation has an epigraph she is La Giorona daughter of the knight traveling the dark to rings of the unknown searching for the lost past herself I remember her following with me once a very lament I like to think that she was crying for her lost children Mexicanos from Borderlands La Frontera the weeping mother of the US Mexico border is the woman who failed a role model in motherhood and is the raptor convent who ever cried her lost children at the river bends the image of the flowing river a symbolism of a never ending flow of life here is a symbolism of death drowning and death the river seems to impart death on two bodies whose life may be categorized as worthless or unqualifiable for the nation thinking here of migrants but also other outcasts of society in all of this in a confluent relation with her tears I will be exploring how the legend of La Llorona can help understand the materiality of the river in affective relation with the gendered body in the traditional legend the woman literally drowns in a river as she is figuratively drowning in tears in this confluence the river is positioned as an agent both affective and material figuring a cycle of sorrow and injustices the human long human relation at play here is one that reflects more concrete assemblages at the crossroads of border politics and the complicities of nature in controlling and qualifying bodies for a bigger or a broader chain of exploitation in this way La Llorona can function as embodied on those spectrum expression of pain for historically situated oppressions including dispossession, capital accumulation precarity gender systemic violence and death while on one hand the act of infanticide for drowning her children in the subsequent self-drowning acts of suicide led to a moral condemnation of the woman that leaves these acts as a result of isolated punishable mother denaturalization understanding the river on the other hand as an affective terrain of historic human non-human assemblages can help at identifying the presumed wrongdoing as a systemic one and reorienting the blame the work of several Chicanas in the last couple decades is populated with retailings of these female archetypes in the great majority with a re-inscription of La Llorona out of the original category of the bad mother and into bigger announcements I will first give a quick context of the archetype and reformulations from a borderline perspective and then I will explain how I understand the theory of assemblages in relation to the role of the river and I will finally then deeper into the literary example that I take for today by Chicanas writer Irina Grande to examine how the river can appear in assemblage with the literary trove of La Llorona in order to disarticulate sources of oppression and claim alternative moral spaces La Llorona or the women female spectrum who wanders riverways in search of her dead children and that populates contemporary borderlands literature but has existed since pre-Columbian times in the Codec Florentino circa 1540 as compilated by Leon Portofilla an indigenous account of the conquest with people heard a women woman night after night she passed by in the middle of the night wailing and crying out loud in her voice according to Kathy Weiser in her study of the women woman of the U.S. Southwest in the most popular version the woman wants to avenge her lover's betrayal and in turn betrays her own children by drowning them in a river after realizing what she has done she drowns herself but is condemned to wander riverways in an eternal state of grief this archetype of failing motherhood has served the borderlands culture to teach generations of Mexican origin and Latinx girls about Marianismo, moral values of motherhood and female abnegation as well as to tell women out of rebellious understanding of womanhood in short as Soledad Vidalput said in a historical encyclopedia of Latinas in the U.S. the archetype has served as an instrument of social control by labeling a moral unethical unethical motherhood in the hopes of preventing women from acting outside prescribed societal norms feminist chicanas writers from the 80s sought to rewrite the myth conserving the archetype as a symbol of tradition ancestry, cultural survival and at the same time wins pride in it as other than the traitor and the killer utilizing the figure as an example of female resistance to a demonic culture in an interview in 1988 Chicano writer Sandra Cisneros for example discusses the difficulties of growing up Chicana not belonging to either culture always trying to find middle ground where revisions and reinventions of cultural and sexual roles might be possible only to be told you are a traitor to your culture from her Chicano point of view the in-betweenness of inhabiting the borderlands positions Chicano in the eyes of society as inevitable solgouts to always have to betray either culture as a means of survival Gloria Anzaldua also claims in this regard this is a form of annihilation alien in the dominant culture yet criticized by her own with no tolerance for vivians Chicanas who reject the tyranny of colonial gender norms are condemned and punished like abandoned by the mother the culture, the Raza for being unacceptable faulty damage and to avoid this rejection people may want to conform to the values of the culture and push the unacceptable parts to the shadow when Anzaldua recuperates the dark and condemned parts of the original archetypes as a way to model other subversive alternatives of this female power Portlorist Shirley Arlora asserts in her article La Llorona the naturalization of the legend the story of La Llorona teaches that I call an event or action is being capable of producing everlasting grief or remorse or deserving of everlasting punishment of course this punishment is gender specific and it is directly attributable to personal blame due to the emotional character of the response which interprets the act of philicide as a fit of rage and presumably a reaction for the male's abandonment when mothers kill their children as Cordelia Candelalia writes I call insanity is automatically assumed and usually proven to explain the horror in a quote rage and sanity therefore are not only used to explain or justify the woman's behavior but also to disempower her leaving her hopeless and unable to redeem herself moreover her actions such as treating an endless and irreversible cycle of violence starts with her betraying and killing her children and vengeance but leaves the original betrayal of the man and other structural determinations out of this logic in this incomplete but irreversible cycle the myth leaves no space for redemption the Herbert again citing Kearney asserts that on the absolute inculcable character of her punishment that makes her the embodiment of insidious characteristics which in turn move her to harm others those others are not only her own children but the children as the metaphor of the future and the future of a nation and here lies a very connection of La Llorona with the figure of La Malinche known as the terrible mother or the mother on earth of the Mexican in Chicanax Nation Malinche is a professor's Indian mistress and translator who was who was so to him as a slave at a young age because of her being sexually utilized by the colony the Mexican culture labeled her as la chingada the whore or the rape mother in her offspring the first Mexican mysticism the popular insult hijos de la chingada in Mexico but maybe you have heard about Navinas according to Mexican cultural critique of W. Pass she represents a complete openness and voluntary submission to the colonial order in this view her sexual, political, linguistic and cultural openness is also her complete passivity and powerlessness which led to the downfall of indigenous Mexico although historically sacrificed by her own people who sold her as a slave she's characterized as a traitor in mythology La Malinche is not only represented as sexually vulnerable and therefore aligned with her basic power of the colony but also a character that sold her culture and abandoned her Mexican children because of her being a knowledge facilitator a translator between languages and cultural worlds therefore obviously when we women have that power we are usually the traitors the tendency in traditional depictions of La Malinche as in La Llorona is to place the blame of heinous acts on her at what time depicting these female archetypes as murderers seductresses treacherous in an adventurous, active way but nevertheless in pain in a passive lamenting for eternity in contemporary Borderlands literature we envision the archetypes of womanhood as Simerca asserts to redefine and quoting and expand the role of women beyond the traditional focus of marriage and of course but besides a lesson of women's behaviour and sexuality the alleged can be understood as a practice against oppression that demonstrates the agency of Mexican American and Latinx women to recreate the archetyping ways that counteract social determinations not only sexuality and gender but also class and race and revert this unbreakable cycle of violence by redirecting the blame out of women's bodies first feminist wave of chicanas sought to recuperate the archetype as a feminist icon some examples Anzaldua in Borderlands literature or in her poem I'm not going to focus on Sandra Cisneros in Women's Hollywood Creek Alma Lucia Nueva in The Weeping Woman Ana Castillo in So Far From God at the end Vera Montes in her short story Cary de Cassell Terri Moraga in Loving in the World Years Moreover, by rewriting the archetype they refuse the traditional moral judgment by interpreting the weeping not as passive sadness but as a claim or for justice Anzaldua asserts in condemning Malinche as the traitor we instead condemn ourselves as chicanas and as women the worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer instead it is the culture that betrays women and we are the lost children that La Gila or La Llorona weeps about I quote again, not me all my people but they me I wish to examine more contemporary feelings accounts of La Llorona and how we carry this first wave legacy in times of advanced capitalism Reina Gamble's novel that I'm going to focus on the main expose not only the original injustices of patriarchal ideology and social defendinism as these blind spots in the legend but as a way to read outside of the traditional moral blame we will see next how the river is an agent that comes here with a protagonism that will anticipate the flaws of hegemonic power economic power as it inundates the lives of the characters in the story and also shares culpability for the infanticide but let me focus first on some theory to understand the river as an assemblage as a border assemblage it is important to define a river by what happens under around the river mainly as terrains human geographers have defined rivers as terrains to emphasize how water is in every relation with its surrounding matter as geographer ten bus asserts water is I quote preeminently as a means of surroundings that means inseparable from all that modifies it breaks it, reforms it and all that it in turn affects the river today needs to be understood as a relational practice that encompasses both the physical aspects of the river's surfaces flows, currents and mobility in contact with human interventions what we normally call the natural flow of the river is actually in vital articulation with forms of biological life and affecting matter as well as political power this becomes relevant when talking about rivers at the border as part of a bigger nature politics network in the 90s the 1993 specifically immigration and naturalization service launched part of a series of border enforcement operations along the US-Mexico border the operation blockade in El Paso, Texas which involved the deployment of border security along some 20 miles of the Rio Grande riverbed where the river adjoins urban resources the explicit intent of these measures was the principle of attrition through the terrains assuming that by funneling immigration away from urban centers immigrants would be dissuaded from crossing the border but instead, as Jason de León says well in addition to funneling traffic away from downtown this strategy also made migration less visible and created a scenario in which the policing of undocumented people occurred in areas with few witnesses out of sight out of mind moreover this strategy brought to the front the evidence of nature as part of the terrains and displacement strategy border patrol publicly acknowledged that the extreme environment that cross cut the border could strategically work in the control of migrants flow always utilizing the nature of the metaphor migrant flows this was formally laid out in policy documents later referring to the environmental conditions as a potential resource for securing geopolitical borders against migration the border environment is diverse mountains, deserts, lakes, rivers and valleys form natural barriers to passage temperatures ranging from sub-zero along the border to the searing heat of the southern border effect illegal entry traffic as well as enforcement efforts illegal entrance crossing through remote uninhabited expenses of land, water and water along the border can find themselves in mortal danger out of quote in an earlier memorandum officials labeled this rich environment as hostile terrain a terrain that is less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement the INS declarations not only acknowledge border rivers as a terrain in conjunction with other damaging effects of the environment such as the desert but perhaps more importantly this shows how the sovereign forces of the state have the capacity to use extraordinary measures in this case the non-human power of nature to control, exclude and disempower subjects already at the outcast of society as Lin Duffy calls it the raw physicality of the elements of nature at the border are instrumentalized as exclusion tools of the state and at the same time they function to mask the violence of the state so in defining a river as a kind of human non-human assemblage no materialist ideas of Jane Bennett in Viva Matter are coming useful here according to Bennett following the philosophies of the loose and the body and Spinoza matter is first interrelational and as such it holds active powers this is rather than passive inactive or inert non-human things in substance such as those found in a terrain can play an essential role in the emergence of power she proposes that matter is alive but not in a mechanistic or spiritual transcendental way but in its efficacy or the ability to produce effects this presupposes that matter acts in complex webs trajectories, propensities at the contact of in relation with the bodies that it becomes in contact with the power of a body to affect another implies a corresponding inseparable capacity to be affected Bennett bases this argument on the delusion concept of assemblage and whole groupings of diverse elements of vibrant materials of all sorts and not necessarily governed by any head but an aleatory accumulation of different forms that become one power this way the affected power to influence events is not in any separate element nor the sum of elements considered alone it is in its relational character the vital affectivity of vibrant matter comes from the agency of assemblages following Bennett's lead a river is a vibrant matter that takes its agency to affect bodies precisely from being more than a river fluid variations and meteorological erosion that result in flooding which can certainly result in human effects or for instance drowning is seen here as an assemblage the crossroads where these events happen become of even more impact since a river as demonstrated earlier can act as a crucial part of sovereign filtration this way in assembling a border materiality a river flows as a mechanism of qualifying bodies the vibrant matter of the river at these crossroads acts in assemblages with specific histories of exploitation, exclusion social displacement of bodies the outcasts are mobilized along political trajectory considering a border river as an assemblage is not as much what it is as it is what it does as border it can act in a seemingly selective way in its capacity to enable or block physical and social mobility of a brown body specifically and as well as to eliminate them by drowning and so I'm going to enter the literature section and bear with me she's going to write a Rainer Landon that grows 100 mountains published in 2006 she starts with a I walk in fantasy scene for those of you who have read this in which there's a shack at the river banks in a small migrant town in Mexico that is being flooded by the river and threatened to be washed away and we have Juana the protagonist who is in charge of the house and her little baby sister Anita while her mother looks for help and they wait for the father to cross the river to Sue Corbin who never comes with a crying baby in her arms and the river water above her waist Juana climbs up a table where she ends up falling asleep to the baby's cry and her own hunger, cold and tiredness when she wakes up at the table and consequently drown the Juana archetype is someone here in the body of a helpless girl where the cycle of violence the cycle of deception revenge the everlasting punishment is re-envision as one containing the precarity of existence and gender oppression as two elements that serve to denounce a deeper problem in capitalist accumulation and social displacement the drowning of baby Anita is as much materially affected as it is emotional we have a family physically pushed to the precariousness of making a living by the river this is the setting of urban marginalization and social displacement which sets the conditions for the family to be in forced relation to the inclement of the weather and the effects of nature in relation to the river it is not the river alone but the river as an assemblage which turns into a political engine that is the fluvial variation turns into the aggressive intrusion of the flood only in relation with the precarious location and the proper conditions of the shack as an intruder in the private space of the house the river stops acting as what I call natural to instead apply socio-political agency by destroying belongings and precisely tearing down the property of an already dispossessed family and invited to the shack the river snacks everything it touches I quote from the novel pushing plastic cups clothes pieces of cardboard soggy tortillas flowers and candlesticks she glanced in the direction where the altar should have been but all she saw was water in a cold to this it is added the unsolicited contact of the water with the body of the phenol character I quote Juan's body tremble as she lowered her legs into the cold water the water reached to her waist in a cold the dominant presence of the river in the house here gets materially affected in contact with the bodies reflecting a sovereign relation of the state with the social margins and hinting at collateral womanizing bodies the uncontrollable forces of the river are effectively paired with social precarious and poverty here represented as hunger as two indomitable forces affecting Juan's body all at once I quote the sun of the rain falling on the roof of the river as she lowered her legs she glanced at Juan's body tremble her stomach had begun to eat itself and seemed her eyelids were tied to rocks the river becomes an actor in this tripartite assemblage with the capacity to act and incapacitate human in this case female human action we see the river exercising political power in the pleads Juan's body of its human capacity provoking her to shut down and neglect her surrounding speaking to her baby sister from the beginning of the novel the river is a force represented with own will as if it was a capricious entity on which every action of the family defended I quote it is the river that doesn't let Miguel come home Juan anointed she wondered if her father knew she hoped that soon he would try to cross the river to come for them and take them in a fall. Assuming this quote Juana, her sister and her mother are shown as heavily reliant of unmasking health in order to survive it is the absence of the father at the time of the river flooding which unchanged the events that led to Anita's dying however no critical recognition of this fact is encountered at this point what we do encounter is as in every La Llorona hotel is the moral condemnation of the woman in this case Juana for unintentionally drowning the baby in the constant hopes that the father and husband would come back for them as if what is preventing the expected functions of motherhood was the absence of the male I quote if Anita was still alive this is Juana's mother Anita was still alive none of this would have happened Miguel wouldn't have left and I would still have her by my side why did you fall asleep why did you fall asleep Juan I told you not I told you to care of her I told you say something and I quote even though Juana is not the baby's mother for the rest of the novel sister and provoking her death as well as provoking her mother's eternal you don't like sadness for losing a child and a husband however as the novel advances we learn that although these losses are legitimate causes for sadness there is a third element that comes in a source of oppression that precedes these family losses when Juana's father leaves he leaves for El Otrolado the other side without paying rent and Juana and her mother are left not only sunk in water literally but sunk in a long standing death although many slums of colonias that search by the river banks in Mexico are associated with popular land takes of undeveloped fiscal property here it appears as well these slums have already been appropriated and are now generating profit for the owner which comes from ceasing the extreme necessities of displaced bodies the precariousness of living of Juana's family is marked by these predatory rent practices if on one hand the river creeps into the shag with an intrusive character of water I quote swelling so much the water would overflow creeping into the shag like un ladrón at sea and of course the river is not the only one who creeps into the house as a field the landlord shows up and announces the after-day to collect and pay debts it is the constant threat of the landlord to appear and announce and come in the shag uninvited which starts creeping into the female character's life to the point that it starts affecting Juana's mother's body when Elias shows up showed up the next day Juana tried to close the door on him the door back open where is your mother? Don Elias has a mask face was pale and she had lavender eyes under her eyes she hadn't been sleeping well her stomach couldn't hold anything down her legs were now two weeks to support her and of course Don Elias the landlord presents them with a vision and a rest and starts exerting a mask to pay off rent in exchange for sexual favors I quote Don Elias was pressing his huge belly against her mother now as I was saying Senora there are other ways we can arrange for you to pay back your debt and a quote not only he starts sexually exploiting a mask body but later as she gives birth to a child he proceeds to actually steal it from her in the original version of La Llorona she is the one who steals other parents' children in this story not only is the woman taking advantage of reminding us of the pillage of colonialism but she is also taking away the offspring of her own rape furthermore she's punished and further incarcerated for kidnapping when she attempts to recuperate her own child from the hands of her rapist the landlord here ends up being the real thief as Neo-Marxist Adam Smith would put it landlord has its origin in robbery since landlords like old men like to reap where they never saw the binding disruption of debt in the life of a marginal subject is embodying the fear of the landlord who profits from the necessity of the poor who at the same time is the section predator making a clear connection between capitalist exploitation and gender oppression meanwhile the water of the river plays a parallel role as a detrimental force associated with urban displacement and the elimination of bodies of the margin in terms of motherhood we see the La Genota mothering function re-embodied in the character of Juana who unwillingly lets her baby sister drown in the river however it is the water who invaded her personal space hers and not her who drowns the body and who due to her pressing remorse and submitting herself to trade sexual trade in efforts to find the whereabouts of her father Ana Maria Tarbonel and critic in from La Llorona to Gritona identifies two possible meanings of rivers in folkloric tales of La Llorona she says I call Llorona tales of maternal betrayal interpret the water that surrounds La Llorona water becomes either the source of her victim's death or her means to escape while tales of maternal resistance define water as the source of river the interpretation the interpretation of water in this novel is complex because the river is capitalized as an assemblage playing on the side of the oppressor and several times anticipating the intrusion of other destructive forces in the intimate spaces of the river symbolically this novel starts with Juana's bodies this is to conclude something the river water and ends with her crossing a bridge we couldn't say that this bridge is a bridge of redemption of the mothering character nor is she above water as a way of escaping his damaging effects since her father's death is irreversible her mother's mental illness is irreversible as it is poverty instead the water of the river functions as the conduit through which the river realizes of the pervasiveness of sexism, classism and state exclusion at hostile terrains in addition the novel brings to the front a critique of gender moral condemnation through highlighting both predatory rental exploitation and sexual predatory behavior as comparable systems and affected forms of oppression in termizing children it is not what Majorana architect does to them but what the river as a metaphor of oppressive mainstream systems is the forms which hounds them and in which they find themselves drunk with the rest of the mission and thank you so much for listening thank you thank you thank you so much thank you very much Daniela Johannes for joining us I'm going to continue right away with my dear colleague our third speaker is Astrid Felna Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Salan University of course you are also here with reinforcement from the university which is phenomenal you are the co-speaker at the German Research Foundation and Canadian Social Science Foundation funded interdisciplinary international graduate research training program entitled Diversity, Mediating Difference in Transcultural Space that Zana and Yuni and Yunitria are conducting and leading together with the University of Morayan you are also project leader of the EU funded interreg project University of the Greater Region Center for Border Studies of course with Christian Villa and you are an action coordinator of a trilingual border glossary which is a handbook of around 40 key terms in border studies which is much needed of course and much anticipated your activities and publications really are manifold in the areas of border studies you are really an expert here as well your publications exceed border studies you have of course worked on Latino literature in the United States post-revolutionary American lit Canadian lit Indigenous studies gender and queer studies and cultural studies today you are talking to us about bridging rivers and doing borders, queer border practices on the US-Mexican border welcome Astrid and I look forward to your talk and your kind introduction it's wonderful also to be able to give a paper in this context and the last one but I think I can actually really also I don't know quote from some of my colleagues there's also a couple of things that I will repeat that have already been mentioned so please bear with me I would like to leave my slide yes I would like to begin with a poem and the poem is called River Poem by Jigana Queer playwright, poet, feminist activist artist and it reads and now actually I think I have to turn around because it's so small on my page that I won't be able to read it so let me try this it works the river poem goes like this in a sueño mi amor me pregunta dónde está tu río and I point to the center of my chest I am a river cracking open before all the parts of me just thin tributaries lines of water like veins slowly beneath the soil skimming the bone surface of the earth sometimes desert creek sometimes city wash sometimes like sweat sliding down a woman's breast bone now I can see the point of juncture comunión and I gather my forces to make the river run rivers we have heard all day today basically act as borders they constitute national boundaries they're fluid borders borders that change that freeze over and solidify but they also crack open and shift I am a river cracking open this line in this poem establishes a clear connection between the river and the body veins they become lines of water in this poem running through the body like desert creeks or city washes border crossings you could say a communion a coming together which helps gather forces that keep the river running the image behind this poem here the one that you can maybe see better here situates us on another border it shows my colleagues will recognize it it shows the reflection of the Ukrainian flag in the sea I took this picture at the shores of Odessa before the pandemic actually this image reminds us that nation states materialize on the shores of waters and as we can see in the current war of aggression they come to matter brutally in a political sense differentiating different jurisdictions rivers divide or rather are being used as dividing lines they serve as you know the separation of territories but as we've heard here rivers also connect like my image here they reflect in the sense that they back they bend back identity categories like nationality for instance but also images of ourselves the reflection we see of ourselves in the water mirror is the light waves of ourselves sorry the light waves that bounce our images back at us these pictures that we see of ourselves always fractured shifting disappearing in a glittery dance turning our bodies into a ghostly shape this is why I would like to suggest here the watery surface of riverine borders has the power to shift solid demarcations and can contribute to an undoing of borders the beholder of the fractured image can gather force to quote again here to undo borders to make the river run in my talk this afternoon I want to highlight new border epistemologies that draw on this creative and revolutionary metaphorical potential of riverine borders which to undo fixed lines lost my line here sorry touching upon this evasive potential of artistic border practices which queer and destabilize borders my contribution zooms in on instances of overlapping crisscrossing merging layering and clashing of river borders in particular I want to look into the crossings of rivers borders and the body bits of poem will flow into my theoretical observations on riverine borders showing how metaphorical language can turn into border reality and meta-reality the point of juncture that the speaker of Morada's river poem talks about the meeting point where all parts of the self come together is of course important to all identity construction this is a recurring metaphor you could say in riverine poetry poems in which the river becomes the dominant symbol the opening poem of the groundbreaking collection this bridge called my back which was edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Czeria Moraga in 1981 the opening poem is called the bridge poem and although we do not find a direct reference to a river here this image of bridge suggests a riverine setting this poem was written by Donna Kate Ruskin the speaker expresses her refusal as a border person to serve as a mediator between various groups as she says and I quote I'm sick of seeing and touching both sides of things the poem moves from outspoken rest at the beginning to a redefinition of the metaphor of the bridge as a connecting line to her own power as the speaker says and I apologize that this turns out black here was white in my power point somehow the colors came out different here so as the speaker says the bridge I must be is the bridge to my own power I must translate my own fears mediate my own weaknesses this is you could say when the eye can gather force to make the river run to establish a connection to here too also the previous poem here the redefinition of the function of the bridge is particularly useful here for the conception of multiple subjectivity bridge forming a link between the different fractures of the self and I think this alludes to the previous presentation here bridges then also serve as anchoring devices in the fluid environments of rivers their material objects that are supposed to offer a safe ground for river crossers bridges and rivers are generally speaking primary icons used to establish the location of border aesthetics you see why and what kind of image we have chosen for our collaborative borderland project the result of which you could see here before and here are two more bridges we've seen plenty of bridges by national bridges earlier but these are two bridges that I crossed in the last week Republic and Poland bridge in Czerci and right now this morning of course on the way to Mudom the bridge Hruschenian bridges where crossings materialize in border realities you could say now in the US-Mexican context to take you back to the other border again the cultural entrenchment of the river you know as constitutive of the border you could say is perhaps most clearly visible in the way that it metonymically marks those Mexican workers who traverse the river as mojados wet packs I think that was also mentioned before the river thus should be clear by now has tremendous symbolic currency but rivers are not only icons they are territorial border they also symbolize social borders which separate and unite people through categories and distinctions which are responsible for privileging and marginalizing people it is this focus in symbolic and social boundary dimensions of borders that has led to a series of theoretical liberations about bordering processes and border crossings recently for instance there are practices which suggest that borders are densely interwoven fabrics of various discursive and material practices has taken hold borders in this processual way of thinking as we call it in our border studies classes should not only be grasped then in a sense of a geopolitical line but as cultural doings that mark specific modes and histories of being, thinking doing, making sense and sensing recent theorizations like borderscapes and riverscapes also has already been used but also border textures but one concept that we are and by we are primarily me and Christian Wille and I here have started to develop in our center for border studies now recent theorizations like that which do not examine social, material, temporal or cultural aspects in isolation but investigate their intersectional and performative interactions they have taken hold borders are thereby unmasked as contingent, social and cultural productions and as instruments of power following this performative view of borders borders are the results of doings, of stylized repetition of acts that constitute political struggle bordering processes that however also allow for the power of ordinary people to challenge borders from below as Judith Butler has proposed in her groundbreaking undoing gender doing one's gender in certain ways also applies the possibilities of undoing dominant notions of sex, gender, sexuality and personhood in analogy undoing borders then refers to the unperforming hegemonic modes of bordering and de-bordering processes as Harsha Walia has powerfully argued undoing border imperialism is a highly political act as she states and I quote it is through this kind of active engagement against imperialism capitalism, state building and oppression along with a nurturing of emancipatory and expansive social relations and identities forged in and through the course of struggle the visionary alternatives to border imperialism can be actualized now taking my cue from Maria Amelia Viteri's book Des Bordes in which she analyzes the many fold overflowing of Latinx borders of sexuality as they intersect with categories like race, class gender, immigration status and citizenship we have actually edited the collection that we called Des Bordes Undoing Borders and I now want to conceptualize riverline borders as we are talking about them as forms of Des Bordes which are used to deconstruct and undo borders now as Viteri Amelia Viteri explains her concept and I quote she says the concept of Des Bordes in Spanish captures this fluidity and mobility and the way in which immigrants and the borders encompassing them exceed any fixed definition Des Bordes implies not only undoing but also overflowing or exceeding all pre-discursive categories in our context of undoing border imperialism on the US-Mexican border Des Bordes then refers to precisely this overflowing this heightened movement you could say of border crossings and the transgression of the ordering principle of borders Josima Reyes' poem eres un río eres un río you are a river a poem for a poet testifies to this movement of border crossings building on a movement which is inherent in the figure of the speech of the metaphor or aid metaphor in the first place because metaphors actually rely on thought movement the speaker of the poem addresses a you liking his lover to a reader appealing to the power of the river and I've just selected a couple of sections here where this likening of the river actually takes place you are the river that carries my truth that with raw emotion tells people how hard it is to be young to be confused you are a river and my only request to you is to never stop flowing never stop speaking let me drown in your truth your word clean this body with your voice you are a river so strong that society can't hold you back because nature must take its course and like truth water is difficult to hold captive te doe gracias de todo corazón I thank you el alma pesado que traigo por dentro for being that river that water that resistance that voice that gives me meaning the river as Reyes makes clear is the voice that gives the speaker of the poem meaning the voice of the river then is also the voice of the border signaling the transformative potential that crossing the river can entail and this transformative power of river crossings too is a frequent metaphor in border writing on the US-Mexican border let's just think of a story that my colleague and friend Daniela has just mentioned and briefly talked about let's think of Sandra Cisneros's story woman hollering creek which per se is not a queer border story but I would say actually has a queer moment a moment of undoing you could say a moment that hinges on the potential of undoing the border when a woman she's called Cleophilus who has crossed the border north to live with her husband in Texas is unhappy because he beats her and she wants to go back to Mexico she gets to know a queer border woman by the name of Feliz and this is how the narrator of that story describes the moment of border crossing and you won't be able to read it unfortunately sorry I don't know what happened but I'm reading this out to you the small river a creek which is right there in Spanish is called woman hollering it is a direct illusion to this archetypal figure that Daniela Johannes has just talked about the figure of the Yorona the Gritona woman hollering the weeping woman who wails for the lost children now I'm sorry let's see if I can read it because it's also so small on my screen here okay so let me try so she says and this is the narrator speaking of course because boys look how cute let me see sorry at home you have to do a close oh can you read it yeah I cannot read it I'm sorry and I didn't print it out but it's so small on this section here and I can't move over there so she says she should have warned you every time I cross that bridge because she won't be creative here okay so boys look at you I scared the two of you right sorry should have warned you every time across that bridge I do that because of the name woman hollering boys I holler right so she goes what kind of talk was that coming from a woman the narrator right but then again Feliz was like no woman that you'd ever met can you imagine when we crossed the Arroyo and just started yelling like a crazy she would later say to her father and her brothers just like that who would have thought who would have thought pain or rage perhaps but not a hood like the one Feliz had just let go makes you want to holler like Tarzan so the hollering like Tarzan Cisneros transforms the image of La Llorona into a positive image of strength every time Feliz drives her car across that river she opens this is another quote she opens her mouth and lets out a yell as loud as any mariachi explaining you know that she does that every time because of the name woman hollering so taking the river here the border as the point of view you could say from which her knowledge production any knowledge production you could argue should start is actually the first step I think in the process of undoing the border allowing for an expression of a way of knowledge that you could say is called border thinking this instance for me here is when the river kind of starts to speak right it's woman hollering but here the narrator turns you know basically the voice of the woman into the voice of the river or it's the voice of the river speaking through the woman right and it's not a voice anymore but it's a Tarzan joy of triumph so to speak I interpret this as at this kind of destabilizing moment of when actually the river speaks and it is when the border speaks because the river is the border here and this is the moment I think when we kind of read about what and I quote here again because we've just also heard you quote Walter Manolo here and his you know border concept of border thinking when basically the border speaks and we get to this moment when the other side gets so to speak is brought into meaning you could say right so border thinking this way of you know this other type of knowledge you could say which is deeply rooted also in subaltern experience engages in the critical rethinking of what knowledge is and how it has been produced in the western philosophical tradition now exposing an awareness of modernity's underside that is coloniality border dwellers you could say employ border thinking as an embodied consciousness so in this case here as a as a hollering right as a Tarzan kind of shout of joy as she describes it here and this is the epistemic location then from which reality border reality you could say is lived and thought and this brings us back to Yossi Maria's poem when he says you are the river that carries my truth this is the speaker of the poem comparing his lover to a river that keeps on running and providing nourishment for the soul acting as a site of resistance and as the speaker says producing knowledge and giving meaning so let me come to my last part here and it gets even a little crazier you might say because I'm trying to get into this other side I'm trying to get into this undoing, unperforming border crossings and undoing the X here and so I'm getting into this experimental way of trying to bring this into language and actually talk about it so in a way then as I would like to suggest to you this poem this poem contributes to an undoing of hegemonic understandings of the borders of borders and in that way constitutes an act of unperforming border crossings but how can we then understand this undoing of the border in terms of aesthetic practice or for that matter how can we imagine a borderland poetics which focuses on cultural crossings as means of undoing the border now on the US-Mexican border it's been since the 1990s you could say if not before that borderlands have become the focus of critical interest especially also now in literary studies because as was emphasized in Chicano-Chicanx criticism they represent this is a quote from Johnson and Mickelson they call it a politically exciting hybridity a place where intellectual creativity and moral possibility happens figurations of border crossings refer than not only to literal acts of crossing of territorial borders triggered by the movement of people but they also refer to the many meeting points and the multiple crossings that symbolic or conceptual borders constitute and it is these crossings of boundaries also of binary oppositions which create conflicts in a border narrative in which in turn then also get the story going so to speak border crossings then become the site of that cultural crossing that is the site of the X the crossing which you could say we always need because that occasions a story so to speak because within a story there's also movement now in order to illustrate this highly metaphorical talk here I would like to refer into another poem and this time Alfred Arteagas poem and in his poem X Antecanto the Chicano sign he actually wrote about the X as a sign for border crossing the X he says stands for the CH right or Chicano in Chicano verse verse marked with a cross the border cross which Portuguese X is quote our mark our cross our X our sign never seizing being born at the point of two errors colliding X the gently laying of one line over another line X you'll see my poem if you recall that I believe hinges precisely on this X as I want to state now in my conclusion his poetic meditations on border crossings not only touch upon this X but flesh out this crisscrossed in between space the site of various crossings of territorial generic symbolic temporal and epistemological borders his poem doubly bridges borders you could say focuses on corporeal realities of border crossings and constitutes a powerful counter formation to the view of borders and border regimes as we have also talked about here today as infrastructural events or technological operations as we can see it is in this interstitial spaces of border poetics that new border epistemologies may arise riverine borders there can serve as powerful metaphors which open up spaces of possibility and set free this creative potential this creative potential which really goes also against logic and against linearity and against language really like the Borchen which almost takes this is my last slide here almost takes the shape of an X but a fluid looking X that emerges at the conjunction of two watery lines figurations of border crossings metaphorically evoke a point in space that contains all other points now if you're familiar with this concept and his short stories you know that you know the Jorge Luis Borges Argentinian writer is you know a new vantage point a point in space that contains all other points and you know as he says anyone who gazes then into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously without distortion overlapping or confusion without this fracture that I showed at the beginning of my image here and so I do that this you know achieving this kind of position position here this where you can see this new vantage point so to speak is not an easy place to go to or to arrive right it is not a harmonious position because I think you could compare this we could talk about this later to her notion of this new consciousness and it's I think it is one of those that new vantage points so to speak so Anzadua makes that clear she says that this is not an easy position to get to and then also to to work from or to actually live there she says and this is the undoing of the border right but I think we have learned something from Anzadua we know I think what living in the borderlands means and we know that this is a difficult process and we know that I just quote the last paragraph here that this new vantage point can only be achieved this new border epistemology you could say or the riverine borders in this metaphorical sense if you kind of live at the crossroads and I quote and this is my end she says to survive the borderlands I would now say to survive also riverine borders so to speak you must live sin fronteras be across roads be a river in other words be as Yossi Maria says water that resistance that voice meaning thank you thank you so much time for questions now 25 minutes approximately so don't be shy we I'm inviting questions for all of our speakers so all four of them so if you have them make yourself known there are two microphones in the room we're willing to run to cross borders just to get to you should we maybe just come up here or how do we do that so that we can get to the mic here absolutely sure we could have one question for the speaker one microphone for the speakers or everybody is welcome to come up on stage and then share this microphone however you like sure absolutely we have to share the mic here because otherwise I don't think you know you can hear us yes absolutely so floor is open my students don't be shy you know you've read all the stuff the miracle will happen today today is your day so thank you all for all of that my question is for Kathleen I really just loved I have to put you on the spot that's what you were dreading I just love your description of everything you talked about and there were two phrases in particular that caught my attention one was I talked about the Brussels sin as invisible but still alive when it was encased and then it gets more polluted I think this is the yes that it suffers still it just keeps going through these iterations before it gets and so you're attributing this kind of agency it's personification which I really love I know there's a lot of people who can personify things but I think that there is a way to know or to guess with great accuracy at least with bad that's happening so could you speak at all to the intentionality you might have had behind using that particular language to give this kind of personified agency to how you're describing the river as this alive thing that has desires and it suffers and it may then also by extension feel something like pleasure were it not to be encased thank you so much for the questions it's a very political I'm very I don't know it just came out to me like this I think because maybe of two or three reasons the first one is the assignment we will give you know it's already something that physical that's incarnated you can feel the flesh I can feel the flesh and the second source would be of course there is work on the discussions we've been having for six years and we've known each other for almost thirty years as I told you the way sees the world sees the river and sees our practice is something which has to do with giving life to things giving life to advantage points to ideas also and maybe the third source would be this is a French cultural trait you know the river is often spoken of as a feminine body known French I read a few well maybe one or two years ago when I was researching I started researching on the deer I read this piece of Lisbon which was a really famous writer in the 19th century he was a kind of a a very disagreeable guy and I was an exogenous not sure if he was a racist but I could say he was but he has a way with words and the way with colors and he was an incredible writer a human being but still he wrote this piece about La Dievre it's like a pamphlet it's 20 or 30 pages and the thing is just in a way obnoxious but in another way too interesting because it talks about La Dievre as if it were a woman and it says that really specifically as a woman who's been raped we saw that I think it's I don't know Daniela sorry Daniela we saw that in your talk too but this is the kind of in maturing I accumulated I'm not 20 years I'm not 25 years things that are sediment in my brain in my in my knowledge system and something I'll start to write on it comes like this but I think it's French mostly but thank you for the question thank you for asking you know flesh in the river giving the river a body where is the line between giving the river a life of its own metaphorically speaking about La Dievre it's just a shared observation that I had about all of the talks that we had in the second block where it was in all of your presentations it kind of personalized that the river in has agency and in all of your talks there was a different significance to that agency in Daniela's talk it was a rather negative agency and in both of your talks it was more of a positive influence would you agree or disagree that this is also sort of like a good, complete music base music base I suppose the agency the river itself is a very ambiguous concept I think it's what you focus on right it's always difficult right it's also, I don't know I was thinking the focus that I have put on this creative evolutionary potential is also very much still a 1990s type of thing so maybe we should change that now but on the other hand it still speaks to me and I still think it's so important to capture on this or capitalize on this creative potential this utopian moment I don't think any one of us views that work or the, I don't know getting to the other side and rivers the first door I guess now I think it was when we could hear the river you let the river speak I think for us it's more difficult to do this in language because we only have language to talk about it and you notice how difficult it is I wish I could take pictures I wish I could paint but as a language person I only have language how can I make the river speak well we have poetry of course and now for us as critics to get this out and I focus on this revolutionary moment so I focus on the agency so I pick those quotes that do that Dariela might have she looked at another novel and looked at it's a different interpretation and I think it depends on your own perspective as a critic of what you choose to focus on I think thank you for all of your talks they were really inspiring and I stuck a little bit with your idea you just briefly mentioned it of the minor literature and then you were talking about languaging and this breaking of the binaries and I was thinking what would if we take this idea of becoming minor what would it look like to apply this to border spaces, to borders that sometimes also very powerful tools of separation, very violent creating binaries and boundaries so what would becoming minor mean for a riverine border for your question first of all when I listen to your this morning and so of course a very small boy with a different I thought it was like coming out of the closet it's such a big thing and then it's so little it's just that so it stuck to me the other story I could say is when you were speaking I was thinking of my friends and I can read my friends they are incredible musicians American literature fans and one of their music pieces is about being fans and trying to get you know on the other side and having a problem with your passport and your papers in front of the person who has to search you so when you're a trans person and you go on the other side and you go to the border who is going to search you so I think it has to be sorry the difference I am here can you hear me can you hear me yes we can this new hybridity we all have come used to I wonder yes we can hear you I am attentively listening to this discussion interesting interesting to know how the river carries this ambiguity someone noted that especially thinking about Asadua when she proposes that the the deity governs over rivers is a serpent with a with a double with this duality the forked tongue that someone talked about and how this state in Asadua position identity in this very ambiguous in-betweenness borderlands as a way to you know highlight how power can be taken if not given with the possibility to go either way but now in terms of the river it's not that the river is bad it's not that the river is good in the analysis that I in my study we see something as terrain it's not any part of nature acting by itself that gives it the moral goodness or badness but how it interacts with the politics and I think this this is also a crucial aspect here because we tend to see nature as natural and well when we talk about terrain and affect the capacity to affect is always in relation to the politics so I just wanted to remark that how nature can be political and peace will be great too thanks thank you so much for your talks I have some questions comments for all of you so when I was listening to the first because I thought about how much I really try every day of my life to go against binary in my thinking but as a Euro-Westerner I keep encountering these mental borders especially when trying to come to terms with indigenous cosmologies so I was wondering if you had any more practical advice for me on how come closer to thinking utopically and if I may first ask better would you like to reply first or this is a great question and I really enjoyed the one you asked previously about the total island and the cosmology I'm not a specialist of that at all but what I can say about dealing with binary and non-binary is maybe we just have to let it go it's not the question I mean your brain is as good as anyone's brain and your thoughts are as good as anyone's thoughts and you should just let it go and just do what you want to do and it's very simple the way I do things too you know and it's one of the things I learned from Gloria and Samuel and so you know we are all these things and there are things we're not but maybe when you wish to do it it's just enough to make you keep going let it flow yeah that's what I always say to you let it flow or keep the river running yeah wow thanks for those motivating words wisdom I've got to get the tattoo somewhere and actually that leads me to my next question referring to Astrid's talk when you are quoted that Ampadua poem I must be a bridge to my own power I think there is also a positive exclusionary potential in that I can read it as she is saying I will no longer work for people like myself as a woman feminist but instead commit herself completely to the identity politics that matter to her which is completely legitimate but is this something that we can also see rivers as doing positively in some of the texts that were mentioned as in affirming sovereignty which can be especially important for really dispossessed communities when we don't just try to look at the politicization of rivers from the position of incredibly privileged settler colonial perspectives regimes what do you think of that would you like to first respond or should I ask my question to I think this is a big question what I thought was interesting in all of our presentations we hadn't talked about this before but I think we come from the same I don't know how you call that exactly but we were talking about rivers and I couldn't agree more with you than this was our homework this is the topic do an essay on it it's a river we're coming at it from a very similar angle so we all talked about identity we all talked about the multiplicity of identity positionalities different so this bridge poem which I really like because it focuses on the bridge but the bridge and I ask homibaba this question once the bridge connects two things and again the vantage point the viewpoint I should say very often is on the true side so this would be your binary view and here the poem actually says well focus kind of on yourself and the self is not necessarily in the middle it's this and that and neither and both and so on it's kind of yeah the self to this and so I think in that sense I find this poem quite useful and I find it useful also in the conceptualization now again on the river because now I would liken this self actually as the river because the bridge is why I had my images but the river is at the center of attention during this symposium and it should be and I found it a productive metaphor and this is why I like the poem because I thought it doesn't talk about the river but I think the self could then conceptualize as the river and now we come full circle to your previous question because I would say let it flow and so on become the river I think that that once again is great advice because it allows me to think of my positionality is bridging my identity aspect that are not identical to anyone else's but are still being relevant to everybody else because if I can be a bridge of my intersecting identity aspects so can everybody else and does it mean we will all meet it definitely means that we all can become aware of pursuing a common utopia so my question to Daniela Johannes referred to the aspect of femininity so all of the examples appeared to be not only feminine in terms of gender but also in terms of female sex concerning these archetypes that have been rewritten by Shikana feminists is it actually necessary that they are of feminine gender and female sex at the same time or wouldn't it be even more subversive if they were women with an X instead of an A and do you possibly have any examples of protagonists such as this in this specific context or maybe even men who have committed infanticide and then I'm thinking of the novel Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel Asprey is nodding maybe some other people here know it too in which a man does this in the beginning and he's sentenced to death but kills himself first and his sister she takes the blame but then she finds a partner who is basically personally everything her brother is not but a deeply culturally traditional spiritual refugee from Cuba and I like to imagine that in the future they will recreate not only personally the family the protagonist never had but also the kind of people that is proud of their a hybrid post-colonial identities and that still carries on indigenous religions so would it be possible to read that as well as rewriting a Maninche figure but even if the person who did the infanticide and whose role is being rewritten is not a woman at all right great absolutely and here I specifically I don't propose that the figure of the woman is the one that is highlighted but the forces of the river as a parallel force to the man's womanizing and possession of women so it's not really the woman who feels the baby besides it's not even the mother of the baby in this case is the sister but what you say makes a lot of sense also in the context of what I'm doing we have ordered her a lot today but also in relation to your previous question when she claims that it is the culture that betrays us and not as the culture what she wants to say we need to accept not the duality but someone highlighted this dismantling the dualities and so that we come to a moment when we can talk about all of this without that even marrying but yeah I would be interested in thinking of examples that highlight other subjects with other positionalities in the position of the traitor and but I think this novel does dismantle these kinds of binaries by highlighting the political forces of the river at least that's what I want to propose the river is not being male or female but in between as we have been talking about the borderlands. Thank you so much Daniela for being with us virtually and thank you to all of our speakers again for all of your presentations for this wonderful second panel thank you for our active audience we're going to have a coffee break now because you know we deserve it so everybody take a break and we'll reconvene at 5 o'clock for the final round up thank you so much hello everybody welcome back to the final the final countdown the final round of this study day at Mudam all of our speakers here in the front it's wonderful to see you all together in one place and we thought what we're going to do is to just invite final comments for those of you who wish to share final thoughts I have two final points that I think might link the panels together might tie up our journey together our day together well and then we will breeze off into the sunset as they say for some very well deserved rest okay good idea obviously before we dive into discussion I do want to make a point again to thank everybody who is here today and I want to reiterate the thanks from I'm sure Christian and Astrid and myself and Gert who cannot be with us to the Mudam equip Sarah and Chloe and Carol and our tech support you guys are there thank you very much for all of your hard work today this has been an amazing opportunity I'm very proud of all of our students who are in this room and our colleagues from Ukraine and wherever you come from this is an amazing opportunity for all of us and you've been brave since 9 o'clock this morning so good on you you've worked hard on all the things so this is great amazing so what stood out to me I don't know Christian how you feel but what stood out to me today in all of the panels who came together miraculously or maybe two aspects and I'm just throwing them at you and then you can say whatever you want whether you think this is nonsense or not or what you will make of that and the first point I think that was recurring in these panels was the visibility and the invisibility of the river as border or of borders more generally and how the visibility and the invisibility might be connected to ideas of knowledge knowledge production and knowledge ability and to be honest to matters of life and death so very often we think what we can see we can control and you know we're seeing and knowing all related and so if I can see the border if I have my little boy with a European flag I know exactly where the border is and that gives me control and security for decision making processes for orientation even for identity formation and so on and so forth but then Ivor Duncan's talk came around and he showed us that invisibility can be a tool and a strategy in bordering processes that means if the border is made invisible and so I connected that in my head to my own research and that's maybe for another day but it struck to me that there seems to be so historic we need to know yes absolutely so historically right if you look at the US Canada border and if you consider people who are fleeing enslavement from the US to Canada the border is both hyper visible and invisible because there too sometimes they didn't know they were already in Canada because there was no orientation and because ignorance about geography and orientation was a strategic tool of enslavers and so I was fascinated when you said sometimes refugees and migrants are in these no man's land areas where it's very hard to discern and to physically see where you're going and I was struck by the metaphorical language in all of our talks today visibility and invisibility that's a strong metaphor as well and so as literary scholars we're thinking always in terms of symbolic meaning and symbolic language so that was something I took away from all of your talks today and the second point that I thought was red thread was the river itself and we came to understand it in both positive and sort of life affirming terms but then also in more critical or even negative terms so what happens if we try to contain the river artificially what happens if the river becomes a threat or a threat main agent so whatever you want to make of this we're going to be passing around mics are there mics next to you just one reflection to come back to something what I said this morning and to come back to the term of border textures I think very often our discussion it was not really about the border as a geopolitical thing or animal or something and it was not about the river it was about the whole we talked about the regime infrastructure the relational the relations between different things which acted as a border and I think that the term of the texture the texture which constitutes the border is a very useful term or perhaps also the border texture that can also be that is dynamic and it's change in time so I think it can also be analysed in a historical perspective just to say that and now I think everybody can react on these three points these three inputs or you can also add something you know we'd like to start no really amazing points so I'm jumping in I thought the point about visibility there's something about the deception that's mobilised through our preconceptions our preconceptions of what a river is or I did research in south of Italy with activists working with people in reception centres and one of them was talking really interestingly about many of them talking about how the beach is conceived in Italy as this space of leisure and then actually it's that misconception that visibility of the beach as a space of leisure actually hides the invisibility of how other people experience these environments so I think that's one kind of deception that we have through our perceived notions and then just going back to this thing about the invisibility of the river when we encountered it because of the militarised space of the river actually allowed us to see the river in a different way it made us understand that we have to look for the river elsewhere so we followed its tributaries we went to see it in a far richer way than if we were able to just go and just focus at the border at the banks of the river and then that would really just limited our perspective by having that limitation of research and that's quite a predatory kind of situation but it allowed us to see the much more expanded way in which that kind of ecosystem exists in existence Very good point, thank you the notion of visibility and invisibility relate to something which is today, I mean mainly relate to something which is exemplified in every of our talks but who who is the who has the things and the notions that are shifted throughout our talk I thought it was very interesting is it the person who tries to go through who is visible or invisible is it the river who becomes invisible because you don't see it because it's raw because the borders have changed because it's not where you're supposed to be and you don't see it so these shifting notions and they relate again to one question that we asked is what is the river's identity so this question of visibility and invisibility can be related to the position of the river as being affected as an entity or not and also to when you talk about these notions of course we relate them I mean I relate them strongly to questions of subjectivity of sexuality and suddenly I'm lucky thank you and there's other mics next to you so if you really do feel free to jump in this isn't a police or regime okay I have maybe one last thought that sticks in my mind and it was the thing that I also think about in my research but didn't talk too much about today is that like you see the river as a border as a border for humans to humans but I also turn it around in my research thinking about the construction about tracing the river with concrete heavy materials that we are bordering the river we are strengthening the river banks and taking away the river's ability to move freely to expand so like seeing this from the other perspective that in my research becomes super I mean many times when there are floods like last summer with a big flood that we have experienced in Germany when suddenly the river braves over these embankments that we have created and there takes its own space and for me this spoke also when I think about mattresses to the second part of the panel thinking from the middle thinking from the river and what we have also written about the border thinking from the border and I don't know where this thought is going I think this is worth continuing to think about what does it mean when we change the perspectives and turn it around the overflowing but again it's interesting I'm still pondering on the question that I think it was you sorry that I'm pointing at you that you raised again from which point of view it depends on if I as a as a critic as the person who adopts my research objects if I then look at this overflowing as something that is revolutionary in a sense binary breaking and so on overflowing as a destructive force as you just mentioned so again there is this ambiguity and it's also multiple meanings of course of these words so it's also the language that creates these ambiguities it's in the words it's not only the river it's everything else too that has multiple meanings I was finally answering a question and this is of course the debate that I know that we are going to continue to have as we are both working on this theoretical concept of border textures I was thinking I want to briefly mention that we do have the concept of border scapes and in our little working group we have a discussion going on whether the world needs the concept of border textures it is different from the concept of border scapes which is the one that if you haven't heard of the other checkers out anyway and there is the concept of river scapes or river scapes which I don't think anyone really has used and I was thinking actually of playing around with border textures and seeing how I could incorporate this into our riverine borders the homework task but then I couldn't do it because I thought texture for me is still the textiles, blah blah blah whatever right and here we have fluidity, liquid all of that and how does that relate to texture and then I was thinking yes it does because river scape would be for me kind of coming back to my interpretive strategy or my also method of how I analyze things is the object of analysis right if we talk about the river so to speak but border texturing the river would be then bringing it into this larger texture of all of these other forms of discourse societal practices and so on and so forth border regime and that I think is where the concept of border textures is important and I would leave it in conjunction with the concept of border but river scape of course is interesting and I was really actually surprised you didn't use this concept around I don't know I was just wondering and you had this wonderful picture I'm not a geographer I really truly admire you because you bring in these kind of hard social science quote unquote facts here with more kind of then wonderful interpretive strategy here I can't do that but I saw these sediments and layers and whatnot and I was thinking of different river scapes also you know so I don't know I was just wondering about that playing back the question to you I guess I'll take a stab at all of this I think that anyone speaking of floods anyone who's been in a flood one of the most terrifying and humbling experiences you can experience and I was in one in Texas in 2015 right as I was really starting to think in deeper ways about rivers and the more I tried to push the boundaries of categories of river thinking the more I realized that there's no such thing as a flood but that's just rivers being rivers a flood is only an operable category in the context of human civilization that it disrupts which is not easy to say if you've been staring down the barrel of flood water but I think one of the things we were talking about over the break that I think is going to be my answer for the invisibility question that hasn't come up today except a little bit in that poor which I'm very sympathetic to it like it's really like it is personified but just because it's wet doesn't mean it's water and I think that if you look at if you actually sampled water in a real grand it's pure poison it's mercury, it's lead it's VOC it's plutonium left over from the Manhattan Project in northern New Mexico it's chemical fertilizer from agricultural runoff, it's DDT from also commercial agriculture in this context and so there is a sub visual it's not it's invisible to the human eye but it is arguably the most important factor concerning surface water whether it's open ocean or whether it's fresh water rivers and lakes really anywhere and that is what we would think of as a quality of the water and so of course that matters for us surviving and drinking it and not being in cancer and birth defects and everything else but especially in that section between opacophotis which has been most hammered by industry and by channelization it's basically completely hostile to any form of life and so this is interesting from not the point of view of river history but from the point of view of desert history where in the context of desert history the most axiomatic truth is water's life and even if it's living in the desert it's going to have to have some kind of water source even in the Atacama even in the Sahara even in the North American desert and in the case of the Rio Grande it's running through the Kuala Desert we actually find that most ancient environmental axiom to be completely reversed where the river is actually a dead well and isn't that interesting to consider from the point of view of desert history and from the point of view and the last thing I'll say is you heard my you heard my I think utopian deep history time like I think one way to get to utopia is to just go back before people were even here and think about the Pleistocene that might have been nice, megafauna or something but I also think about deep futures and this goes back to the conversation we were having earlier so I don't need to explain this concept to anyone in Luxembourg or in Europe and that is the borders change one way or another sooner or later and we can expect the same thing to happen in the context of the US Mexico border despite the fact that all the infrastructure surrounding that river constantly making an argument to anyone who sees it that it is permanent that it is natural, that it is self-evident but it's not and so one way or another the political borders will change they not the first political border in that region the Spanish had 10 before that I think so and so would and so what I think that when I imagine the long arc of human history in the desert what I imagine is millennia of low density desert populations this very strange couple of centuries where we developed just enough technology to mask desert conditions and in that context we also start to develop what we think of as technologically precise political borders which is part and parcel of that masking technology that doesn't last forever and ultimately I do think that rivers will prevail and it will take them on their clock a long time to heal as it were but they will and the population of human beings will go from an unreasonably high density now back to low density in a way right but I think about that long arc of history as a way to put into higher release the oddities of of modernity and technology that we that even those of us who try to to get perspective and take some few steps back and look at it often fall into the crisis facing for granted but add one more thing to be a comment I really like what you said about what you've been hearing and what you've been hearing and what you've been hearing and I want to thank again the people who came to this interview and those online who are watching and maybe I will go a bit further or a bit and maybe I'll dissenter the debate but from what I've heard today I'm really impressed by all this knowledge that's been fabricated and shared the notion of disability but to go a bit further and beyond that I would really love to know what the students are working on because I'm when I started three years ago I did a diploma with a guy called Michel Agil he's a naturopologist quite famous and he's working on the question working on he's working with people who are refugees who are intent and he's a brilliant guy and then I followed him for a couple of years and at the end I was also there are people who are asking for asylum status and there are on the other side people who study those people asking for a status and at the end of the day it is after that what's wrong here or what's right here because it's very difficult you know it's like putting your brain in a boiling moment and what do I do that's what I was telling you at the post how do you handle things how do you go on with working you know that on the one side you're doing your best so that the situation gets better you can maybe fix things but on the other hand you're feeding yourself to the situation of those people you know so it's really exciting and great to see that there is a center on border studies you have now refugee studies you know the list of queer refugee and blah blah blah but I would like to know how when you're 18 25 how and what do you expect from studying in this kind of environment why would you choose to study older studies or would you go into refugee studies and what is your hope when you do that or what is your passion what brings you what motivates you what is your flow in a way what's your resource like when you do this and it's not a trick question okay thank you I think I'm the only one from border studies so when I applied for the study program I was visiting the border from Germany to Poland which was still closed during the pandemic and I stood in front of the fence and I think that was one moment when I thought well it was the first moment in my life when I got here in the border that I really saw there's something in between I can cross the border from Gorcelec the one city that was divided by the river and the closed bridge and then I thought well it's interesting I feel something and I want to study it and I found border studies and I applied for it and now I'm super motivated because it has so many different fields in it and you just get so many knowledge of different fields and it's so interdisciplinary that I think it will be so important also in the future because many things get even more entangled nowadays and I think it's really important to get a feeling that you have to have the kind of tolerance to endure those entanglements and start researching on it and that's why maybe also the idea of border textures with all the knots is really important and that's what is motivating me and that's how I found studies and got into it Thanks to the pandemic that we have more not most American studies students that I study with myself but I but I chose this course and purpose because I was interested in the historical aspect as well as the current aspect which I learned a lot about today the common artistic market so most of all it was the history but also in the pain later it has been time to try to once you know what is going on right now and how things will develop in the future or how they could possibly develop so it's all about packaging I am also a university student and this is kind of my first exposure to the concept of border studies. I didn't know that there was a distinct field in itself because I saw the course of the studies on the available services and I went there and it was kind of surprising how many aspects you can sort of open up with this kind of purpose through this kind of lens I was really surprised to learn how closely it ties to social justice especially that's what I'm interested in generally and this was a very interesting angle to look at it from I'm very appreciative of that and I really enjoyed this presentation I also wanted to add I'm actually not a student of the border studies but we have been working I come from Ukraine and we have been working with Professor Salner doing sort of the border studies for around five years and one of my last papers and last presentation that I was doing I was actually studying children refugees and that was the paper that I sent in when the war started I never thought I myself would be a refugee like just then after I sent my paper so I think borders are especially current and they are shifting and changing all the time that is why so you never know actually where you're from whether you are like the one who studies or whether you are the one who is being sort of studied right but I especially think that speaking of borders and speaking of refugees that's especially important to be heard and all the voices are heard so that's what I think thank you very much and I'm very happy that we're getting together you know in very difficult times to have you with us you know hopefully you don't feel like study objects but participants but I get the feeling you know the ethics of scholarship is very much on all of our minds I think and there is such a thing as doing ethical scholarships and it's sometimes getting very difficult so we're very happy to have this group together as it was today to bring students and scholars and activists and artists together so I would like to leave us with a final quote from Natalie Diaz post colonial law poem a bit provocative maybe but that's what we're here for as well and she says I cannot tell you anything new about the river you cannot tell the river to itself and so I think that's very fitting have a great evening and see you again at some point yeah be safe and healthy keep your sanity and that's it thank you so much