An important dimension of the "meaning" of the border text exists in the difference between the referential codes of author and reader. Since the special ontology of the border text makes the reader a conspicuous collaborator in the "writing" of the text, the same relationship of difference can obtain between the reader and herself as between reader and author. For the reader willing to engage in "border crossing," the "non-identities among the codes of the writer, the reader(s), and "sociohistorical semiotic" contexts create an ontologically special place or space within which "a remembering occurs" whose form varies with the desires and historical and political knowledge of the border crosser. Framed by a largely theoretical introduction and a meditative conclusion on the semiotics of work by Sandinistas and Chicano poets as well as her own creative writing, Hicks's discussion of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (Rayeula) and A Manual for Manuel (Libro de Manuel) and Luisa Valenzuela's He Who Searches (Como en la guerra) and Other Weapons (Cambio de armas) inventively challenges readers to "deterritorialize" their categories of literary and political analysis.

Performance artist, video maker, and activist as well as tenured professor of comparative literature, Hicks has created a theoretical work that is to academic theory and criticism something like what performance art is to theater/art/literature—a kind of genre-free zone in which the relations among and between performer, performance, and spectator/reader, writer, and text are not governed by the logic of identities and identification. Hicks's book changes its shape—as a good border crosser, trickster, or shaman does—from a good though unorthodox academic book about interesting Latin American texts to a highly charged "border handbook," an invaluable guide to the "border effects" being played out and ignored in the Southern California (or "occupied Mexico") region from which Hicks has taken her inspiration.

Hicks uses holography as her metaphor for the multidimensional border text. Her introduction, "Border Writing as Deterritorialization," is an intrepid and intelligent extension of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedpus and Kafka. In it she explains how holography creates an image from more than one direction: "A holographic image is created when light from a laser beam is split into two beam and reflected off an object. The interaction between the two resulting pattern of light is called an interference pattern,' which can be recorded on a holographic plate." By analogy, the border metaphor produces an interaction between the connotative matrices of more than one culture. The holographic "real," then, is always understood to be a translation rather than a representation. It actively undermines any hierarchical original/alien distinction, resisting domination by the "monocultural or nonholographic" real and giving the reader the opportunity, instead, to "practice multidimensional perception and nonsynchronous memory. " In her discussion of Cien años de soledad, for example, Hicks reflects on the collective amnesia about objects and their uses that afflicts the residents of Macondo after the arrival of the gypsies (with their ice) and the banana company. Read from a holographic perspective, she suggests, Macondo's amnesia may be seen less as an instance of "magical realism" than as "realist" or "historical" documentation of the cultural effects of technology and capitalist exploitation and commodification. The Anglo reader, meanwhile, is also made aware of the precapitalist, pretechnological referential codes she or he is lacking. Time is experienced nonsynchronously by both characters and readers. García Márquez's remarkable experiments with tense, the text's flight from linearity , and the wildly uneven development of its character has perhaps less to do with the "irrationality" of the inhabitants of Macondo than with the effects of cultural domination.

But, just as characters in Cien años read and respond to events in Macondo differently, so readers can be expected to respond differently to border texts--which count on this manifestation of difference in their operation. Hicks mentions, almost in passing, an immensely suggestive instance of the kinds of difference that may obtain (and be overlooked in Anglo-American literary theory and criticism) among subjectivities belonging to the "same" place and time. For the Mexicanos living in the U.S.-Mexico border region of San Diego-Tijuana, the main, socially-structuring dichotomy tends not to be Freud's male-female, but documented-undocumented. An African-American gay male fiend of mine, raised in New Orleans and now teaching in another southern state, corroborates her point, observing that the race, much more than the gender, of the person he lives with is the issue in his community. Hicks argues that neither psychoanalysis nor Marxist categories are adequate to the critical study of the characters in the works of these three authors. On the contrary, both Freud and Marx offer equally treacherous paths away from the real for Valenzuela, whose texts, Hicks maintains, overtly reject European models of subjectivity. Valenzuela, in fact, presents us with the possibility that Argentina's frightful recent history is directly lined to the aesthetics of the Renaissance humanist subject, whose repression of whatever threatens it ends up maintaining the disease of fascism. According to Hicks, Valenzuela has responded to the situation in Argentina by rewriting entry into the stable order of the Lacanian symbolic as a betrayal, using the Lacanian model to indict the years of Argentina's "dirty war."

Some of the epistemological impasses of postcolonial and postructuralist theory begin to appear less than absolute from this border vantage point. Hicks's close-up look at the holographic "real," a non-ontological and therefore not easily dominated cognitive space, may usefully complete the images of irremediably colonized spaces offered by theoreticians working with the history of the British presence in South Asia, for example. There will also be readers who resist this way out. Many of us prefer the nice, stable impasses of an essentially realist epistemology (and/or its deconstruction) to the radical multiculturalism advocated and practiced by Hicks, which literally leaves nothing, including "ourselves," the "same."