Border Poetics

This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and representation in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in border studies, the volume shows how borders, borderscapes, and migration are approached in public and private spheres as a part of the political aesthetics of the border. Claiming that aesthetic images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political negotiation of borders, the volume addresses issues such as encounters with borders in material and digital spaces, migration, and border-crossings.

The contributions explore narrative and images in literary and media texts, documentaries, and border art, as well as borderland identities, migration, and trauma in geographical contexts including Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, Mexican-US borderlands, and Chinese borderlands.

Bringing Chinua Achebe's seminal text, Things Fall Apart, into the current global scholarship on refugees provides a consideration of the problem of displacement from a literary perspective. While there is a substantial body of criticism on Things Fall Apart, there has not been tangible concentration on the psychology of Okonkwo's exile in the text. This article expands upon the literature by locating Achebe's seminal text and the narrative strand of Okonkwo's exile in the discourse of refugee studies. By examining Okonkwo's pre-exilic and post-exilic life as intrinsically connected to his exile, it foregrounds the inevitable psycho-traumatic effect of exile on the refugee's mind that plays out in the form of violence on the self, and on the victim's human and material environment.

Borders are traces, that is to say, they are a form of writing – and thus they are also texts to be read. We often think of that which is on the other side of the border as something unknown, and the border itself also in some sense unknowable, inviting interpretation. I will here be examining some literary and cinematic narratives in which national borders are crossed for elements of an epistemology of the border. Such narratives often transform crossings into readings, suggesting that these crossings are allegories of the reading of the narrative itself – the reader crossing over into the text. If border crossings are movements of bodies in space, what do these narratives tell us of the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text? What can these narratives tell us about the figurality of community and identity? Can national affiliation be seen as an act of reading borders? I suggest that narratives of border crossing, like border crossings themselves, are structured around a double vector, sometimes transformed into a swirling confusion of directions, constituting the border zone and its associated identities.

Utopias have usually been imagined as being separated in time and space from our contemporary societies. But if utopias seem to require borders conceived of as divides, what would be the utopian concept of a border be? Why has migration figured so little in previous utopias, and what would a utopian form of migration be like? Borders in the world today are ethically and socially dysfunctional, crying out for new solutions. This chapter weaves theories of utopia, nations, borders, migration and science fiction into readings of fiction and poetry by Roda Ahmed, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ursula K. Le Guin and Mohsin Hamid. It argues that border utopias are necessary if we are to understand the epistemological limitations underlying current border practices and the possibility of new border imaginings.

The deportation of unregistered migrant Maria Amelie after the publication of her book Ulovlig norsk (2010) was a major media event in Norway. In her following book, Takk (2014), she constantly refers to windows, mirrors and camera lenses. Glass becomes a symbol of traumatic experience and configures the in/visibility of the deportation borderscape, creating a political aesthetics of the border.

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Border poetics is a set of strategies for analyzing the crossing of borders or territories, the creation of frontiers, or the failed crossing of national or symbolic borders; that is, to analyze and identify processes of border-making and border permeability in contemporary societies. This book explores the possibilities and limitations of such strategies through theoretical essays and through close readings of actions and experiences of "bordering" significant political, national, cultural, or aesthetic frontiers in literature, film, and art. In doing so, it argues for the intimate connection between borders and narrative, and establishes a shared vocabulary of study and reflection with which to discuss narratives of bordering. Bringing together contributions by academics from different regional traditions of border studies in literary and cultural studies, it is also timely reminder of the globality of border experience.

CONTENTS

Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe. "Entry Points: An Introduction". 9-26.
David Newman. "The Lines that Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our "Borderless" World". 27-57.

I. ÆSTHETICS
Rüdiger Görner. "Notes on the Culture of Borders". 59-74.
Wolfgang Müller-Funk. "Space and Border: Simmel, Waldenfels, Musil". 75-95.
Larsen, Svend Erik. "Boundaries: Ontology, Methods, Analysis". 97-113.

II. MEDIA
Debra A. Castillo. "Borders, Identities, Objects". 115-48.
Reinhold Görling. "Topology of Borders in Turkish-German Cinema". 149-62.
Lene Johannessen. "De-Symbolization and the Cultural Act". 163-76.

III. ZONES
Malene Vest Hansen. "Public Places - Private Spaces: Site-specific Blurring of Boundaries in Sophie Calle's Jerusalem Projects". 177-97.
Jane Aaron. "Border Blues: Representing the Welsh border in twentieth-century Anglophone literature". 199-216.

IV. READING
Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe. "Imperial Tides: A Border Poetic Reading of Heart of Darkness". 217-34. Index Contributors

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies.

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

This working paper gives some of the interpretations and working hypotheses reached at this stage of my contribution to research within the EUBORDERSCAPES project Working Package 10, Research Task 3: ”Cultural Borders of Europe ‘Bordering’ and ‘Re-bordering’ Europe through Fictional Narratives: The Case of Immigrant ‘Others’”. The paper examines migration literature written and published in Norwegian by the children of migrants or migrants born elsewhere but growing up partly in Norway, for rhetorical and narrative figurations of borders and border-crossings which can provide keys to changing conceptions of borders and to the values these are ascribed. The paper argues for the close connection between border concepts in the corpus and the status of the books as performative acts crossing from private experience to public discourse. This process is often explicitly addressed in the texts themselves and is part of an extended borderscape. I intend later to address further texts, the negotiation of border concepts in the reception of texts, the social context and research literature on migration in Norway, and research literature on migration literature in general.

The vastness of politics as a subject of discourse can best be grasped in border studies because politics encompasses both spatial and imaginary borders that distinguish one nation/state from another. The existence of spatial borderlines creates territorial demarcations that differentiate geopolitical settings within which policies that establish national identity are forged. But where the disparity in policy exists, national identity tends to fall apart. This is the case with Nigeria whose national identity was built on a questionable colonial policy which neglected the diversity of interests and cultures among the various ethnic groups hastily amalgamated into a single political entity. Literature grapples with political complexity and makes it easily comprehensible through narrative performativity. Chukwuemeka Ike’s novel Sunset at Dawn delineates the intricacy of bordering and debordering that shaped (and continues to shape) the Nigerian nation. I argue here that the identity formation in Nigeria is largely a function of the tensions that characterize both spatial and ideological borders of ethnicity, highlighting the novel’s exposure of the nuances of socio-spatial negotiation which calls for ethnic inclusivity in nation-building.

Post-traumatic conditions are the result of the wounding of bodily or psychic borders. As trauma studies has shown, they are framed and often propogated culturally. Crossing territorial borders can cause traumas: the crossing of the border by migrants and others often involves the crossing of their own bodily or psychic borders. This article will examine autobiographies and novels published in Swedish and Norwegian for the way in which they figure the traumatic effects of migrant border crossings. It will apply a border aesthetics approach, bringing the status of aesthetic narratives as borderings of the sensible (cf. Rancière’s concept of the “partage de sensible”) together with the bordering of the sensible which takes place in the fixations, substitutions and blindspots of trauma. It will argue that published narratives of migrant border-crossing introduce a longer, despectacularizing temporality to the border traumas they involve, necessitating investigation of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts.

Anthropological uses of life histories are reexamined in relation to a spontaneously created poetic text reflecting on personal experience and especially the consequences of participating in anthro- pological research. The life of an important traditional chanter on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba is presented in both his own words and mine, illustrating ways in which the critical and inquisitive skills of a good informant can both awaken some resentment in traditional societies and also create the conditions for artistic innovation.

Post-traumatic conditions are the result of wounds crossing bodily or psychic borders. At the same time, crossing territorial borders can cause traumas. How do migration narratives figure the traumatic effects of border-crossings? To answer this question, I apply a border aesthetics approach, arguing that the borderings of what may be sensed (cf. Jacques Rancière’s concept of the partage de sensible, the “distribution of the sensible”) in the borderscapes of migration narratives are often regulated by the epistemological borderings that take place in the fixations, substitutions and blind spots of trauma. I suggest that migration literature can combine different styles of presentation—for example, images and narrative—in order to create new forms of political aesthetics and counteract the desensitizing logic of media spectacle.

This chapter brings together the concerns of border aesthetics and ‘post-national’ imagology. Setting out to map images of Northernness in contemporary migrant literature that features viewpoints originating from the global ‘South’, it discusses the border processes implied by stereotypical images of the other and of the self. It addresses a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written in Norwegian by migrants arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including testimonial narratives by the child refugee Amal Aden and ‘illegal’ migrant Maria Amelie, along with semi-autobiographical novels by Romeo Gill and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Migrant narratives negotiate discourses of arcticity, winterliness, nordicity etc., known from imagological research on Northernness. The chapter asks to what degree various topoi of Northernness contribute to the bordering processes in the texts, or whether these narratives produce new images of Northernness and new vocabularies for addressing the border-crossing. The narratives deploy chiastic switchings between North and South, circling disorientations, entropic white-outs and liberating and destructive verticalities in order to figure the border in new ways at different points of their physical and symbolic journeys. The ambivalence of these images shows that they are related not merely to borders but also to the epistemological borders negotiated.