Reviews - Trinity University

Border Matters
along the margins of Saldivar’s remapped critical discourse.
It is an unfortunate absence, for Americanists would reap considerable
benefit from Saldivar’s head-on engagement not only
with the so-called New Americanists and New Western Historians
(whom Saldivar mentions on occasion), but also with
those literary and cultural historians who, since the heyday
of Frederick Jackson Turner and Barrett Wendell, have challenged
the notion that “mainline” American identity rests
squarely on any single cultural pillar. This is not to suggest
that Saldivar should somehow feel responsible for situating
border discourses within the context of 100 years of
Americanist scholarship, but it’s always useful to engage at
least a handful of touchstones-by considering the left-leaning
transnationalism of Mike Gold, for example, or by giving
more credit to an important and now-overlooked Western historian
like Herbert E. Bolton-whose critiques of American
culture cannot be reduced to any assimilationist Bildung, and
indeed whose work might be described as contributing to earlier
forms of border theory. Any effort to remap American cultural
studies should at least acknowledge that this
field-Imaginary constitutes an ever shifting surface, often
made-up of peaks and valleys, and always full of surprises.
Michael Soto
Harvard University
139