Somewhere Between Ethical Demands and Material Constraints

In "Who's Going to Cross the Border? Travel Metaphors, Material Conditions, and Contested Places," Nedra Reynolds draws on individual accounts of occupying places and moving across locations to demonstrate the limits of metaphors of travel in the discourse of composition studies. As Reynolds explains, the metaphor of travel carries with it conditions of privilege?specifically, traveling is an activity that requires ready access to the kind of leisure time and disposable income that many do not have. She also explains that the movement across vast and unfamiliar territory that characterizes travel is rare, that most people live most of their lives within small areas that do not demand from them extensive travel. This being the case, Reynolds concludes that uses of travel metaphors to conceptualize, explain, and enact theories and practices of writing place undue emphasis on the privilege of easy movement across multiple borders, misleading us about how writers really do occupy the spaces of writing. As she suggests, "rather than advocating travel to get us away from the discourses of territoriality, we should work toward an under standing of the contested spaces that keep people divided" (560). I find this a provocative conclusion. On the one hand, Reynolds recalls us to the discourse of territoriality; on the other hand, she pushes us past old debates about the boundaries of discourse and provides ways for us to continue discussion of the important issues of identity, differ ence, and territories of writing. To explain what I mean, I recall here that Reynolds begins with Gregory Clark's claims for the advantages of travel metaphors in composition studies. As she observes, Clark came to travel metaphors as a response to the collapse of talk about discourse commu