border? We tend to think of borders as geographical, as outlining territory, particularly the territory of a nation. The wall and the fence appear to embody them completely. But boundaries are profoundly ideological. A border is not a thing but a practice, a practice that produces power relationships, and establishes inequalities between those who are in and those who are not. Most importantly, perhaps, borders are synonymous with global capitalism and the precarity it constructs by constituting migrants as exploitable workers and individuals with low status and limited rights. Borders are both a consequence and a production of power relationships. And the process of othering on which they are based is fundamental to the fiction of identity produced within those borders. The practice of bordering answers that perennial question “Who are we?” How else can we discover who we are than by determining who is other? As Saussure made clear, signs signify not by referring but by their difference from other signs. How else can we discover who we are than by determining who is other than by establishing borders of difference? Bordering practices, whether carried out by the hegemonic activities of the state, or the cultural bordering that sets up borders of ethnicity, sexuality, class, satisfy the myriad ways in which subjects might determine their ‘others’. The scope and variety of theses bordering practices are explored in this volume.
Bill Ashcroft
Professor Emeritus
School of the Arts and Media
UNSW
Preface
The volume contains sixteen essays on various aspects of thinking border as well as border-thinking: as we find in literature, philosophy, historiography, strategic and area studies, film and TV series. Such diffusion and diversity only reinforce the idea that borders, and especially the more unfathomable bordering, are omnipresent in almost all discursive practices: be it in discourses which are considered “normative” and/or in the discourses which are now being called “precarious”. Border and bordering are forms of world-making. Border and bordering are knowledge and sites of knowledge production, at the same time. The phenomena have become so pivotal to our understanding of the contemporary world that these have ceased to remain mere an episteme and become a method in itself. The volume contains essays which are about these precarious entanglements between thinking border and border-thinking. The work is also aware of the fact that there is no water tight compartment and more often than not the poetics, politics and precarity leak into each other. The poetics of border and border in poetics are not free from the politics of border and border in politics, and vice-versa in every possible way. Precariousness, on the other hand, and especially the spectral aspects of precariousness haunt the poetics and politics of border and, in general, the ontology of any being (including the concept of nation-state) in a quite Freudian/Derridean way.
This making and unmaking of borders would not have been possible without the support of the contributors from all over the world. It is mostly with their support and cooperation that we have been able to deliver a collection like this. We are grateful to Prof. Bill Ashcroft for writing a generous foreword for the volume. We thank Jakob Horstmann, the commissioning editor and the series editors of Beyond the Social Sciences: Michael Kuhn, Hebe Vessuri, and Shujiro Yazawa at ibidem for helping us to shape and materialize this project. We would also like to thank the members of the Department of English, Raiganj University for their help. We are also indebted to Prof. Himadri Lahiri, Prof. Pramod K. Nayar, Prof. Swatahsiddha Sarkar, Prof. Ranjan Ghosh, Prof. Nandana Dutta, Prof. Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Prof. Swargajyoti Gohain for their constant support and encouragement. A section in the Introduction was published earlier in The Himalayan Miscellany: An Area Studies Journal in Social Sciences Vols. 28 & 29 (2017-18). We are especially thankful to the editor of the journal for allowing us to republish it. We are also grateful to our friend Jagannath Basu for his relentless assistance and vital suggestions. And, last but not the least, our respective friends and family members for being so considerate and for extending their support when needed.
Jayjit Sarkar
Auritra Munshi
Raiganj University
March 18, 2020
Introduction
I’ve been a crime reporter for many years, and I’ve seen a lot of bodies—and a lot of drowning…. You get numb to it, but when you see something like this it re-sensitizes you. You could see that the father had put her inside his T-shirt so the current wouldn’t pull her away.
He died trying to save his daughter’s life.
Will it change anything? It should. These families have nothing, and they are risking everything for a better life. If scenes like this don’t make us think again—if they don’t move our decision-makers—then our society is in a bad way.
Julia Le Duc to The Guardian (Wednesday, 28 June 2019)
One of the most incredible experiences of my and @vasfsf‘s career bringing to life the conceptual drawings of the Teetertotter Wall from 2009 in an event filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness at the borderwall. The wall became a literal fulcrum for U.S.—Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side. Amazing thanks to everyone who made this event possible like Omar Rios @colectivo.chopeke for collaborating with us, the guys at Taller Herrería in #CiudadJuarez for their fine craftsmanship, @anateresafernandez for encouragement and support, and everyone who showed up on both sides including the beautiful families from Colonia Anapra, and
@kerrydoyle2010, @kateggreen, @ersela_kripa, @stphn_mllr, @wakawaffles, @chris_inabox and many others (you know who you are).
#raelsanfratello #borderwallasarchitecture #teetertotterwall #seesaw #subibaja
Ronald Rael [@rrael] (2019, July 29)
The first epigraph is an excerpt from an interview given by Julia Le Duc, the Mexican photojournalist, to The Guardian after she took the now-famous photograph of the bodies of a father and his daughter lying upside down on the banks of the Rio Grande near Matamoros, Mexico. The father, Oscar Alberto Ramirez, 23, and the daughter, Valerie, barely 2, drowned while crossing the US-Mexico border. This haunting image of the young girl tucked inside her father’s shirt as they both lie flat face down took the world by storm, created ripples around and quite naturally brought Julia Le Duc all of a sudden to the limelight. The photograph reminded us of how the borders have become ‘lines of death’, and of
