From distance and uncertainty to research and pedagogy in the borderlands:Implications for the future of intercultural communication

Thus, their new subjectivity emerges in the process of drawing borders arou nd their old subject positions, a process that constitutes them as nascent specular border intellectuals. Their contemplation of the condition of thei r lives represents a freedom, or at least an attempt to have freedom, from the politics of imaginary identification and opposition, from conflation of identity and location, and so on-in short, from the varied and powerful fo rms of suturing that are represented by and instrumental in the constructio n of their sedimented culture. The process of decoding as well as the emerg ing command of literacy permits them a gradual :shift from the confines of the imaginary to the outer edges of the symbolic realm.