point clearly reinforced by Trump’s 2017 travel ban on Muslim majority countries Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen as well as North Korea and Venezuela. Shapiro believes the maps necessarily create this ‘enmity’ between ‘vulnerable bodies’ and that this aspect of mapmaking, which he dates back to the Westphalia Treaty of 1648, has dangerous consequences in the modern world:
Ultimately, the biopolitical dimensions of USA’s anti-terrorism initiatives (the decisions about what lives to waste and what ones require exclusion or containment) are deployed on particular bodies, both those that are targets and those that are the ones that must confront those bodies in dangerous terrain. (Shapiro, 2007, p. 299)
When Shapiro discusses Tomas Munita’s photo of an American soldier in an abandoned building used as a look out post in Afghanistan he points to:
… a history of vulnerable bodies seeking temporary refuge and a place for safe observation in hostile landscapes that seem both benign, because they are temporarily devoid of hostile engagement, and threatening, because their encompassing scale appears to thwart human attempts to manage them securely. (Shapiro 2007, p. 293)
Here the vulnerable body is that of both the state actor (in this case an actor from a foreign state, protecting state interests far from the borders of the territory they seek to protect) and, if we consider the unseen other, their opposite, out of view because they are also vulnerable to attack. Mapping has sought to alleviate the fear of the state and thus its actors by creating a defined territory that can be easily defended against outsiders. The project of the nation state has relied upon this concept since its birth. As Neoclaus states: “the political importance of the map is obvious: it is one of the most explicit assertions of sovereignty” (Neoclaus 2003, p. 419). If an area such as the ‘jungle’ does not exist on the map then it does not exist in the state and can be easily defined as an area of ‘otherness’. The refusal to accept the existence of a portion of society, and thus their potential claim to state resources such as health care or financial support, is a fundamentally violent act against ‘vulnerable bodies’, in this case the body of the migrant. Yet this perceived vulnerability must also be called into question, as Yurimar Bonilla, cited by Sheller (2018, p. 104), “Vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and colonial condition.” and as Jones argues it is the border itself which creates the violence it seeks to prevent (Jones 2017, p. 91) and the state which creates an individual’s vulnerability to such violence.
The etymology of ‘territory’ itself gives pause for concern:
The notion of ‘territory’ is derived from a complex of terms: from terra (of earth, and thus a domain) and territōrium, referring to a place from which people are warned off, but it also links to terrére, meaning to frighten. And the notion of region derives from the Latin regere (to rule) with its connotations of military power. Territory is a land occupied and maintained through terror; a region is space ruled through force. The secret to territoriality is thus violence: the force necessary for the production of space and the terror crucial to the creation of boundaries. (Neoclaus 2003, p. 412)
This clearly links back to Shapiro’s argument: the state’s mapped territory must be defended, it is a place from which some people will be ‘warned off’. This definition suggests that the creation of a territory necessitates the maintenance of said territory through violent means and such violence is ultimately enacted on the bodies of both those who are perceived as threatening, but also those who are employed to protect the state. A juxtaposition which can only exist in relation to the border, leading Jones (2015, p. 5) to assert that: “The hardening of the border through new security practices is the source of the violence, not a response to it.”
The Lines on the Map
Liminal spaces can act as moments of interaction between the people and cultures of the world while at the same time performing an act of transition within the self. As the traveler leaves his or her place of origin they step into the role of others through both an internal and external process. Such moments are imagined and documented in literature, but before pursuing this further we must look at the term ‘border’.
Within this framework, borders may be understood as:
…arbitrary dividing lines that are simultaneously social, cultural and psychic, territories to be patrolled against those whom they construct as outsiders, aliens, the Others; forms of demarcation where the very act of prohibition inscribes transgressions; zones where fear of the Other is the fear of the self; places where claims to ownership—claims to ‘mine’, ‘yours’ and ‘theirs’—are staked out, contested, defended and fought over. (Brah 2003 p. 198)
Avtar Brah’s definition of borders exemplifies the complex nature of the term. He describes them as being both physical and psychological barriers combining social and geographical dimensions as we have seen above. In this understanding of the term, borders can exist beyond the lines on a map to become aspects of societal beliefs. In constructing a sense of self through such shared beliefs it is possible to construct an ‘us’ thus enabling the construction of an ‘other’. In the texts discussed below, ideas of borders are related to both the physical and the psychological while beginning to consider the idea of the ‘other’ as someone who exists on the opposite side of a border.
Many characterised interactions between the state and outsiders are a contrast between civilisation and barbarity, but we know this version because states write their histories from their perspective, while many mobile people did not record their experiences. (Jones 2015, p. 91)
Literature, especially that which deals with migration, potentially redresses this imbalance, and calls into question how civilised the bordered state truly is when the violence enacted upon the mobile migrant body is brought to light and removed from the invisible liminal area. Due to the nature of mapping, borders become normalised in the public consciousness as do the hierarchies associated with those who can and cannot cross them. This suggests that they are as much a work of the imagination as they are a geographical reality, a concept described by James Procter as “imaginative geography” (Procter 2003 p. 1).
Brah also highlights the relationship between borders and narrative: “Each border embodies a unique narrative, even while it resonates with common themes with other borders” (Brah 2003, p. 198). This narrative is not the sole preserve of the state, there are other voices present. In fact the border itself is in some way defined, can only exist, in relation to the other. As Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it, borders are:
Constantly guarded, reinforced, destroyed, set up, and reclaimed, boundaries not only express the desire to free/to subject one practice, one culture, one national community from/to another, but also expose the extent to which cultures are products of the continuing struggle between official and unofficial narratives: those largely circulated in favour of the State and its policies of inclusion, incorporation and validation, as well as of exclusion, appropriation and dispossession. (Minh-ha 1996, p. 1)
Migration literature is arguably a form of unofficial border narrative. Yet even set in opposition to an official state narrative or map, it unavoidably reinforces the border through the very method it utilises to destroy it. Crossing the border, especially clandestinely, similarly recognises its power while also negating it.
Migration Literature
Within literary criticism there has been a shift from the literature of exile to migrant literature which is said to offer a “transnational, cosmopolitan, multilingual and hybrid map of the world that redraws boundaries” (Mardorossian 2002, p. 17). Yet this term still defines the author rather than the literature, maintaining the borders which so much of this literature seeks to cross. In Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie,
