In this 400-500 word journal entry, you will reflect on how the experience of migration, and the borders that shape it, transform both personal identity and cultural expression. After engaging with the assigned readings, videos, and artworks by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Shirin Neshat, Jacob Lawrence, and Kour Pour, respond to the following:
Tasks
Journal Questions (respond to all in your entry):
- Choose two artists from the materials (e.g., Gómez-Peña, Neshat, Lawrence, Pour).
- How do they visualize or perform the experience of crossing—or living within—borders?
- What strategies do they use (style, symbolism, media, voice) to express inclusion, exclusion, displacement, or transformation?
- Be specific. I will not accept broad summaries of the artworks. Cite the exact place in the text or describe a particular facet of a painting that illuminates the borderlands concept.
- Connect at least one of the artists to Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands.
- How does their work echo or expand on Anzaldúa’s ideas of contradiction, hybridity, and identity?
- Be specific.
- Reflect personally:
- Which artwork or performance resonated most with you and why?
- How did it help you think differently about borders, not just geographically, but in terms of culture, gender, or language?
