Cultural studies and the borderlands: Hegemony, pedagogy, and postcolonial literature (Texas)

This dissertation focuses on the development of American southwestern cultural studies that investigate emergent postcolonial theory and its relation to the Texas borderlands. Included in this study are historical issues and how American hegemony shaped the colonial voices of early Mexican American literature. Using postcolonial literary analysis as the overarching discipline to investigate issues of hegemony, identity, negotiation within selected works of Americo Paredes, this researcher examined both scholarly works and representative literature that points to how postcolonial southwestern literature reflects the struggles against hegemony, overt racism, and displacement within literary text production.