José Saldívar (1997, xii) argues that the border as it has evolved in the hands of Chicano and Chicana intellectuals must be understood at least in part as a “paradigm,” one that leads to an “ontological question: what kinds of world or worlds are we in?” Taking such a question seriously provides the opportunity for “border thinking,” that is, moves beyond the constraining effects of Western epistemology’s categories of knowledge and the explanatory macronarratives that have structured both the emergence of state power and the resistance to it (Mignolo 2000). Border thinking entails a shift in perspective to coloniality, to thinking, as Norma Alarcón (1996) would put it, “on the hyphen.” Beginning with a geopolitical term, the best border theorists have developed an epistemological approach equally cognizant of “real” borders and of their fantastic, fantastically violent effects.

This is an excerpt from Mary Patt Brady's entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 32).