As a half-Caucasian, half-Pakistani individual adopted by white, American parents as an infant and lacking any knowledge of or connection to my biological parents or their cultural backgrounds, I often feel as though I am on the outside looking in on experiences of heritage. Certainly, my personal heritage is a product of the context in which I was raised, but I lack a sense of connection to any kind of ancestral meaning, and notions of heritage that precedes one’s birth having an impact on selfhood often seem constructed or otherwise inaccessible to me. For this reason, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera was particularly meaningful among the texts that I read over the course of the semester. I had not read the book before, and while I was familiar with the idea of conflict at the Mexico-United States border, Anzaldúa illustrated for me the equally contested borders within people based on complex racial backgrounds, histories, and languages. It was strange to me, at first, to read how relevant Anzaldúa believed her Indian, Aztec, and Spanish heritages were to her. In Borderlands/La Frontera, she writes about those groups’ histories as if the people are warring inside of her. I struggled to grasp how her understanding of ancestry could mean so much, how the actions of the people she was genetically descended from could matter in her life in the present.

I still don’t think I completely understand how the connections of ancestry can bear such powerful importance in people’s lives. Perhaps it’s simply because I do not have access to that information for myself. I cannot say with any certainty who or even which groups of people I am descended from. But when people imagine their ancestry and attach meaning to it, it seems to me that they’re often working with guesswork to an extent as well. No family line is certain, and imagining that the experiences of people you have nothing more than a biological connection to are relevant to your own life seems nonsensical to me. Anzaldúa’s narration of how her past, and her ancestors’ pasts, influenced the conditions in which she grew up and the attitudes of her people, however, helped me begin to realize how the past informs the present in the context of a cultural group. Those biological ties to the past may not have direct influence on personal identity, but their cultural value and reinforcement do.

I think reading Borderlands/La Frontera has helped me be more cognizant of the complex connection between heritage and identity in other works that I read and analyze, as well as in my personal encounters with others. I will now consider the intricacies of separate, conflicting ancestral lines and the histories that inform the development of a culture to a particular moment, and I hope that my understanding of how authors represent their nations, cultures, and languages will be informed by Anzaldúa’s unmasking of the concept of unified culture. Using Anzaldúa’s vision, I will be more confident about critically assessing the concept of heritage, whereas in the past I have shied away from such an approach because the discussion of ancestry feels like territory I am not authorized to occupy.

On a personal level, I also feel that Borderlands/La Frontera has been constructive for me in that it has complicated and deepened my understanding of what it means to identify as Mexican or Chicano. I am not, to my knowledge, connected to a Latino background, but Spanish speakers often mistakenly identify me as Latino. There is something confusing and painful about being associated with a particular group identity when I can’t actually participate in that experience. Reading Anzaldúa’s text, however, has helped me see the difficulty and often painful contradictions of reconciling self, culture, and race that exist even for those who have clear cultural and ethnic associations. As a result, I find myself feeling a sense of fellowship with those diverse cultures that reach out but don’t quite connect with me, because Borderlands/La Frontera has inspired me to wonder whether the experience of being outside of stable racial identity is not something that separates me from others, but a struggle many of us share. Anzaldúa certainly makes a strong case for the prevalence of conflict within single racial and cultural groups, and throughout the semester we have learned just how significantly people all over the world experience rupture in the national, cultural, and ethnic categories that shape identity. Even the most stable narratives of identity are never simple, and never produced without the triumph of some voices and the repression of others. This recognition will contribute to the way I think about myself as well as others, both academically and personally.

As a high school and college student, I heard the instruction many times, from nearly every teacher I wrote an essay for: Use academic sources, not those that are only published online, and not — emphatically not — Wikipedia. As an instructor, I now find myself giving the same advice, suggesting that students choose peer-reviewed, academic publications over informal articles and depositories of information such as SparkNotes and Wikipedia. While the move to embrace technology and new media in the classroom has turned tweets and blog posts into viable objects of critical analysis, a bias toward the stable, authoritative voice of texts that are privately written, published and purchased remains in academia. This is the form of knowledge that allows a voice to speak with the authority of the intellectual, state-sanctioned academy, knowledge that, as Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish, “presuppose(s) and constitute(s) at the same time power relations” (27). Such a voice must be fixed as a referent; it offers a complete thought with a position that is assumed rather than negotiated. It invites neither collaboration nor interrogation.

It is clear, then, how sources such as Wikipedia that can be cooperatively edited, that bring together competing voices, and that do not and never will exist in a stable, final form fail to access the authority that is particular to academic constructions of knowledge. In “The Encyclopedia Must Fail! – Notes on Queering Wikipedia,” an article published in online, open-access, open-peer-reviewed journal Ada, Noopur Raval addresses issues of how even sources of knowledge like Wikipedia may continue to enforce ideological limits on who produces knowledge and what information should be accessible. The content of Raval’s argument raises important questions about just how open collaborative sources like Wikipedia truly are, but the form that argument takes provokes pressing questions as well. Raval’s article appears in a context that, like Wikipedia, lacks the permanence and imposing presence associated with professional publication. The source is solely online, targets a “diverse and fundamentally interdisciplinary readership,” and allows online, open peer review through its review website (Ada). It is neither specialized nor professionalized in the manner of those reassuringly academic sources my past professors and I have recommended to students.

Raval’s article calls our attention to the importance of analyzing “the transactions, the people, and conditions of knowledge production that facilitate or create challenges to diversity programs within any movement.” In her critique of problems she believes Wikipedia must address, Raval reiterates the issues that exist in traditional forms of knowledge: only some voices are represented, information can be suppressed, and access is not universal. If these are problems a source like Wikipedia cannot fully resolve, we can easily imagine the attack Raval might mount on traditional forms of academic knowledge. The expensive, highly specialized books and journals that are produced and reviewed by a small field of scholars who possess authority do little to increase diversity, access, or freedom of expression in the production of knowledge.

Given the content of Raval’s article, publication in Ada seems well suited to her engagement with collaborative, open access bases of knowledge. However, the article’s publication in such an open format emphasizes to me the fundamental problems that still exist in how we construct, access, and reference information from collaborative and variable sources. Though Raval addresses failure as a means of critiquing through commentary and collaboration, her depiction of failure as a “subversive process” that “gains transformative potential as a strategic tool in history writing and permanently etches difference in its grain” can also speak to the form of her article. I wrote earlier that sources like Wikipedia and, perhaps, like Ada, fail to represent academic authority. If we assume such failure in Raval’s article, can we read it as a form of subversion? If so, how effective can that subversion be within a wider field of academic discourse?

Though I agree that the extremely limited ability for diverse groups to access and contribute to academic knowledge is problematic, I wonder whether shifting to the open format of Ada and articles like Raval’s is a tenable option. Reading Raval’s article, I found myself wondering whether I would be willing to cite it in my own work. Whether because of the author’s work, the open review process, or its transposition to the website, the article contains several errors in grammar and style, and its online context does not engender a sense of reliability. I realize that the neat and resolved image of academic perfection and finality to which I’m comparing the article often acts as a barrier that prevents us from engaging with knowledge that doesn’t fit our arbitrary standards, but those standards are safeguards as much as limits: they allow us to assess the quality of information we bring into our own work. Even if those standards are not wholly rational or effectual, their undeniable influence makes it difficult for me to conceive how we can foster academic engagement that truly melds professionalism and accessibility.

Speaking from within the discipline of English literature, I struggle to imagine methods of interrogating the advent of fixed and authoritative knowledge in both content and form as Raval does without sacrificing the very authority that allows such an argument to be taken seriously. Yet perhaps my very perception of what kind of response would constitute a serious reception is limited by my academic training. Perhaps Raval’s article and the format of Ada step toward targeting a wider audience, with goals beyond the academy that can be enacted through our publications themselves, rather than through post-publication packaging of concepts or academic hashtagging that attempts to make our ideas meaningful to the public. Most troubling, perhaps my very resistance to integrate my idea of academic professionalism with the open forms of knowledge Raval discusses is indicative of an ideologically driven instinct to privilege sanctioned forms of knowledge over diverse, accessible, and less regulated media forms. As individuals within academia, we are often made poignantly aware of the systems that, like the Wikipedia policies Raval describes, “can be instrumentalized to systematically include or exclude factual information.” My academic training has made me cognizant of how such systems exclude certain groups, perspectives, and realities as well as particular facts. Yet despite this awareness, questions of how to combat those intellectual structures of exclusion in the present and especially in relation to the open production of and access to knowledge are often overlooked. Even when disciplines focus on granting a voice to the oppressed or critiquing social structures, they face the difficulty of breaking down academic barriers while speaking from behind them. Thus, I close this post still considering the question of how we can truly engage with issues of accessibility and openly confront the instability of knowledge in the form as well the content of academic work.

In our class meetings thus far, we’ve often returned to the concept of transnationalism, discussing the vocabulary of the transnational and what kind of an experience we are describing when we talk about transnationalism. One idea that we have returned to is that of simultaneity. Transnationalism is a not a story, or a phenomenon experienced as a step-by-step process. In real lives, the transnational exists because of the all-at-once, uncontainable nature of people, products, cultures, histories, and imagination. These all exist at the same time around the globe, and occur both at the same time and in the same place within the individual consciousness. In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the visual form of the graphic novel contributes to Satrapi’s ability to represent the simultaneous, placeless nature of transnationalism in ways that a purely linguistic narrative form could not. As an English student, I’ve been trained to see the complexities of the text and the various ways authors use language to communicate multiple and even conflicting messages in their works. While reading the graphic novel, however, I was most often struck by the extra-lingual, information that was not only communicated by the drawings rather than the text, but in particular information that could only be communicated by the images, because it went beyond the text’s capacity for signification. I believe these extra-lingual messages are essential to the representation of transnationalism in Persepolis.

One way Satrapi mobilizes visual imagery to more vividly express transnationalism is by representing meaning with blank space. An unlikely frame emphasized this strategy to me: that of the before and after comparison of Marjane’s hairy and shaved skin (274). In this frame, Marjane’s hairy skin is represented by a rectangular swatch that is covered in hair (“Me before.”). Alongside that image is a completely blank rectangle that Satrapi writes is “Me after” (274). On a surface level, this makes sense; the hair is present in one image, while the next shows it removed from Marjane’s now smooth and blank skin. Beyond the surface, however, this frame struck me in its use of blank space to convey meaning, prompting me to think about Satrapi’s use of this device throughout her graphic novel. I was especially interested in the difference that this use of blank space highlighted between textual and graphic representation. While blank spaces appear in text to indicate divisions between words, paragraphs, and sections, blank space cannot, in prose, represent part of the body, or the removal of hair. Yet in this black-and-white work of fairly uncomplicated illustrations, blank spaces often represent important parts of the story. For example, blank background space is present in Satrapi’s illustrations of Iran, Austria, Turkey, and Spain. By making the nothing of blank space represent physical spaces in her illustrations, Satrapi creates a sense of nonspatial places. While the illustrations represent real places, comparing their shared negative spaces demonstrates that they all lack fixed or isolated location as it is relative to the people in those spaces. The only times when spatial location is truly defined is when it is at its most abstract and meaningless, such as on the map of the Middle East that Marjane and her parents see on television in Madrid (78). The map presented in the broadcast clearly defines borders, yet such a representation of space is as meaningless to the individuals moving across and within those borders as the Spanish report that the Satrapis cannot understand. From within the borders of a country, or of a frame in the graphic novel, place lacks national definition. The blank spaces that represent walls, skies, and ground, the very points of orientation by which one might ascertain location and relation to one’s surroundings, are indistinguishable. Thus nothingness comes to represent location, and in doing so, enacts the same dismantling of local orientation that simultaneity of location effects in transnational experience.

The representation of simultaneity is accommodated especially well in Persepolis not only through the extra-lingual expression of meaning through nothingness, but also in the graphic novel’s capacity to bring elements together in single frames. When Satrapi presents frames that represent, for example, the influence of Britain, the propaganda of the Iranian government, and the intimate space of the family home all in one simultaneously accessed image, these elements are experienced as contemporaneous (83). The frame illustrates that such forces exist all at once and in shared spaces, both physically and internally in individual experience. Their relations are complex, the result of multidirectional tension and simultaneous interpretation and reinterpretation in the context of one another. To represent such nontemporal and nonspatial presence with the inherently temporal form of language is a daunting prospect. Thus, I believe Satrapi’s placement of transnational messages, individuals, and products on the equal and displaced footing of her graphic frames is another way she utilizes the graphic novel to represent transnationalism in a more lifelike manner than she could have achieved through language alone. As a final image of Satrapi’s use of images to displace, level, and merge transnational elements, I consider the frame that depicts Marjane’s and her parents’ trip to Italy and Spain (77). Perched on a magic carpet and surrounded by the swirls that often indicate Marjane’s imagination at work, the three are simultaneously in Italy, Spain, and the nowhere space of Marjane’s mind. Buildings that may represent both Spanish and Italian architecture and landmarks bracket the interior, where a dark haired woman twists among the strands of Marjane’s imagination, perhaps embodying one culture, perhaps two, perhaps more. Like the Satrapis, she is entangled in the transnational nowhere and everywhere. The evacuation of fixed location, visual simultaneity of national symbols, and merging of individual consciousness and multiple cultural experiences in this frame exemplify how the form of the graphic novel amplifies Satrapi’s figuration of the transnational. In Persepolis, transnationalism is presented as a placeless, timeless, uncontainable phenomenon that can only be experienced all at once, just as Marjane is at once, and inseparably “a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the west” (272).

Throughout Global Matters, Paul Jay argues that neither cultural nor material approaches to globalization are sufficient, but that those studying globalization must recognize that culture and material economy “have always overlapped” and “are becoming increasingly indistinguishable” (56). Even more emphatically, Jay writes, “globalization is characterized by the conflation of cultural and economic forms” (34). Thus Jay does not merely claim that the cultural and the economic cannot be separated, but that their fusion is integral to the process of globalization. After considering Jay’s argument in relation to other theorists’ depictions of globalization as well as my own experiences, I would tentatively agree with Jay on both counts. While culture cannot be reduced to a material experience, neither can the material commodities that facilitate cultural participation be reduced to merely symbolic entities disconnected from the global flow of products, capital, and labor. Therefore, I believe Jay is correct to approach the cultural and the economic as unified forms of experience that are unevenly accessed and applied by people around the globe.

Arguing for cultural and economic coincidence, however, requires some discussion of how we define a cultural or an economic experience. If Jay’s claim is correct, it follows that in a global context there is no noneconomic cultural experience, nor any non-cultural economic exchange. Instead, as Jay writes, “Culture is a set of material practices linked to economies, and economic and material relations are always mediated by cultural factors and forms” (45). Rather than analyzing Jay’s statement by articulating specific forms of cultural and economic experience and attempting to confirm that they always comprise both cultural and economic components, I propose approaching the question of conflation by considering what it means to participate in a cultural or economic network. How does one participate in culture? Jay cites forms of cultural expression such as films, novels, advertisements, music, and performance, all of which exist largely as commodities in societies worldwide. This is, perhaps, the more easily established part of Jay’s argument. It is clear that many culture-infused commodities traverse the globe, spreading cultural forms and economic reach in a single package. To access culture, one must ultimately make purchases, whether to obtain products, education, physical immersion, or recognition from others as a member of a cultural group. Thus, culture always carries some form of economic ramifications. Similarly, the commodities through which consumers enter economic networks always wield cultural meaning, whether it is experienced consciously or not, and that meaning creates further desire for both cultural and economic extravagance. It would seem that cultural and economic forms are arguably experienced simultaneously as individuals engage with them in diverse locations and situations.

One could object that certain forms of culture are not entwined with economic forces — language, religion, or ethnic traditions, perhaps — yet even those experiences that are not purchased as commodities negotiate particular economic relationships as a result of the cultural perspectives they engender. Continuous participation in a culture requires economic engagements that shape one as a consumer as much as culture shapes individual identity. Consumers’ languages, religions, interests, activities, and customs shape their interactions with economic markets. Even cultures of poverty position individual relationships to economic forces through traditions of need, desire, and labor.

Regardless of one’s cultural association or economic status, the mutual mediation of cultural experience and economic engagement is a self-perpetuating arrangement. Arjun Appadurai writes in Modernity at Large, “consumption creates time and does not simply respond to it,” emphasizing the cyclical quality of the process by which cultural forces create consumption and consumption enacts experience, which shapes and reshapes cultural identity and fuels further consumption (70). If we accept Jay’s argument that the economic and the cultural are thus intertwined, how does their union pertain specifically to globalization, such that Jay claims “globalization is characterized by the conflation of cultural and economic forms” (34)? Jay’s argument suggests that the overlapping capabilities of the economic and the cultural to inspire desire, confer identity, and elicit participation across diverse networks are essential to the realization of globalization as Joseph Stiglitz defines it: “the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world,” or, as Jay emphasizes, a process of “convergence” (53). The proliferation of simultaneously cultural and economic symbols, products, and experiences carves the global, multidirectional channels along which the convergence among consumers of both culture and commodities will continue to advance. Jay’s globalization is thus facilitated — even rendered inevitable — by the conjoined forces of culture and material economy.