in crossing the border into the Promised Land in search of better economic opportunities and a better life are some of the glaring aspects of contemporary politics, which this photograph highlights. The photograph also brought back the unsettling memories of little Aylan, the three year old Syrian boy, who got drowned and whose body washed up to the shores of the Mediterranean. Contemporary politics is increasingly becoming border politics as it is being performed on a daily basis at the borders. Border penetration and border management has turned into an everyday reality nowadays. The family of three, escaped from El Salvador, undertook a long journey, crossed borders, took desperate measures, and finally succumbed to the pressures of stringent immigration laws and border surveillance technologies. Such laws and technologies are often overtly hostile and violent to the immigrants and asylum seekers: the dehumanized ‘others’ of any modern nation-state. The large scale performance of violence at the international border is now quite rampant these days: an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of human civilization.
The second epigraph is the Instagram post of Ronald Rael, Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley who along with Virginia San Fratello, Associate Professor of Interior Design at San Jose University, installed pink seesaws along the metal walls between the El Paso in Texas, the United States and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The installation of the seesaws, and that too pink seesaws (#universal love #friendship #affection), transformed for that moment the otherwise extremely serious and contentious US-Mexico border into something ‘kitschy’. The same border which saw the young Salvadorian family falling prey to its violent politics just a few months before transformed in this case into an objet d’art. This act of children coming from both sides of the border and playing together suspended momentarily, through its poetics, the immanent violence and hostility amongst the citizens on both the sides. The wall, as Rael himself points out through his post, became “a literal fulcrum” for US-Mexico relations: an embodiment of connection, hospitality and altruism. This performance filled with “joy, excitement, and togetherness” was certainly not an act of undermining the realpolitik: at the cost of any one of those ground realities of the immigrants. Instead, it transcended momentarily the boundaries of conventional politics—an act where a border frees itself from the politics of bordering, an act where a border ceases to remain a boundary and becomes a bridge, and consequently subverting the idea of ‘good fences make good neighbours’ into ‘good seesaws make good neighbours’.
We are frontier-making and frontier-crossing beings: we make, break, cross, remake, break again and cross again the borders of the land and of the mind. Borders are equivocal. Borders limit, borders connect, but more importantly borders are omnipresent. Borders exist in the way we perceive the world, and there is an inherent politics as well as poetics in the manner a border exists. Border-politics and border-poetics are immanent to the way we understand border and its various incarnations. We all are in that way connected and disconnected. This (dis)connection may be based on causality or acausality or even complicated causality but the fact of the matter remains that we are all (dis)connected; and as Professor Rael attempts to make us realize how the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other.
A border is not always a signifier of transcendental nihilism, rather, as Derrida understood, thinking and (de)creating at the threshold. It is not a telos or the Ultimate but a crossing over—keeping up strategically the possibility of overstepping, trespassing and transgression alive. Derrida, while referring to Seneca, writes: “… the border (finis)… would be more essential, more originary, and more proper than those of any other territory in the world” (1993: 3). A border is not the end but by the end. There is always a sense of possibility at the border. Border is death, in the Derridean sense. The French word for death, trépas, entails both passage and trespass at the same time.
The work, as the readers will find, postulates a different take on border and bordering: different from that of critical border studies with its rigorous methodologies. It deals with the lived experiences—both epic and banal—at the borders. It is precisely for this reason that we have incorporated the word ‘bordering’ in the title itself as it signifies border as a ‘becoming’ or simply, a process. Bordering is spacing and timing. There is a sense of ‘world-making’ in bordering. Border makes and unmakes itself through bordering. The volume also makes an effort in this direction by trying to understand this making and unmaking of borders with the help of phenomena like bordering, debordering and rebordering. We have tried to capture all the three aspects of border(ing) here: the creative aspect (poetics), the debilitating aspect (politics) and the more perplexing, precariousness. The perspectives in the volume are different from the perspective of traditional methodological schemes of social sciences. Though not completely denying the former’s merit, the volume takes a different path altogether. For example, we have given equal importance to popular culture which for a long time traditional social sciences have ignored. Our take on border and bordering is more credible, grounded, and close to the lived realities of the time. Unlike other works which tend to overemphasize the abstract academic discourses and almost ruthless methodologies, free from the experiences at ground zero. It is indeed difficult to intellectualize through the prevalent methods of critical border studies of how the same border could entail two completely disparate experiences: the photograph of the bodies of a father and his daughter lying upside down on the banks of the Rio Grande near Matamoros, Mexico and the image of the children playing with the recently installed pink seesaws along the same metal walls.
The disparate chapters in the volume are symptomatic of the very interdisciplinarity of borders and the varied experiences of bordering as manifested in different modes of expression. This study of the multiplicity of experiences is intrinsic to our understanding of borders: so much so that the volume prescribes, that borders can only be read through an interdisciplinary approach. This interdisciplinarity is immanent to the concept of border and imminent (“to come”) to the phenomenon of bordering. Also, the volume quite explicitly deals with the metaphors of border or border as metaphor: as a border may not necessarily be always visible or tangible—that these can also be cognitive and metaphysical. The volume, therefore, intends to attract not only academicians but also common readers. This is the reason that it has been designed in such a way. Please note that this is not yet-another volume on critical border studies and area studies. In thinking border, we have moved beyond the boundaries of border studies and area studies—as we believe that nowadays ‘studies’ of border studies and area studies are as regimented as the borders of the nation-state.
Border and Bordering focuses on the idea of border and its various geopolitical, sociocultural and cognitive incarnations. In recent times, border has emerged as a common trope in contemporary narratives with concepts such as ‘bordering’, ‘borderless’, ‘building borders’, ‘breaking borders’, ‘crossing borders’, ‘porous borders’ and ‘shifting borders’. Whether concrete or shadow, borders are omnipresent. They have been frequently erected and decimated in history and will be in future depending upon the need of the hour. Such ‘needs’, as this series has highlighted, are always generated from the above, by the above. It seems social sciences and humanities are obsessed with borders and the latter have been invoked intermittently to prove a point and also the opposite: that is, to negate a point. Even in the daily humdrum of life, we never fail to feel the eerie presence or rather absent-presence of border. At times, it is WE who knowingly or unknowingly create these building blocks: brick after brick piled upon each other and cemented together, so that we can keep the ‘other’, the ‘stranger’, the ‘foreigner’ at bay. Borders are important in keeping “us” safe and feel secure from “them”. Borders are in the air we breathe. Is it possible then to do away with borders altogether? But before coming to that we need to posit another question: is it possible to do away with modernity? Because, as the work suggests, the birth of modernity is also the birth of the borders.
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Modernity creates its own exceptions: spaces within a space, which, although counter-intuitive and counter-discursive to the project of modernity, are actually an integral part of the so-called project as anything else. Such spaces are deemed as “pre-modern” so that these can be claimed, shaped and with time subsumed under the
