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borderland |
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This has been identified as \'the governing trope of the postmodern\' (Welchman, 1996, p. 175). It is a site for the production and disruption of \'difference\' — especially between nation-states, first and Third Worlds, colonizer and colonized (see colonialism and postcolonialism). A number of influences focus attention on border construction, border crossing and border theory. These include: poststructural theories that stress the formation of identity at the border and through the construction of inside and outside (see Orientalism; post-structuralism; subject formation, geographies of), and shifting borders resulting from emerging regionalisms, supranational organizations, and globalization and transnationalism.
The border of the nation can be a site where displays of nationalism are intensified to consolidate the nation-state (Radcliffe, 1998). The periphery may also be a place where state control is less stable (cf. core-periphery model). In the Indonesian context, Tsing (1993) explores the simultaneous and contradictory production of the periphery of the nation (as marginal and primitive) as a means of consolidating the Javanese centre, and the instability of centralized state control in this periphery. Alternatively, or simultaneously, borderlands between nations \'tend historically to be zones of cultural overlap and political instability where the national identity and loyalties of the people often become blurred\' (Augelli, 1980, p. 19) and can be places where regional cross-national identities dominate, for example: \'Mex-America is a distinct region. LA is the capital city of Mex-America\' (Avalos and Welchman, 1996, p. 197). Anzaldua (1987) describes the dual perspective of the \'consciousness of the Borderlands\', but holds the imaginative potential of borderlands (to produce hybridized mestiza — literally, mixed American Indian and Spanish ancestry — identities (see hybridity; third space) in close tension with histories of legal and illegal immigration and unequal relations between the US and Mexico, as well as other exclusions.
The supervision of national borders, and the borderlands of home and exile, of belonging and not belonging, are experienced and enacted at different scales and in different places — not just at the boundary of the nation; Harlow (1994) traces instances of border patrol through the prisons and racially-segregated neighbourhoods of the US, a patrol that speaks to the blurring of the boundary between US citizens and third-world populations, even as it re-enacts it.
Attempts have been made to rethink the meaning and potential of borders. Mouffe (1995) envisions the project of radical democracy as a perpetual questioning of borders that necessarily exclude; Haraway (1990) urges border wars that both take \'pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and … responsibility in their construction (p. 191) … We are responsible for boundaries; we are they\' (p. 222). Emerging from these reconceptualizations is the border as \'a place of feedback, exchange and process. The border is not univocal, or only polymorphous. Its breaks are not fetishized as a final cut: they are instead, or they may be, re-sutured, re-circulated or re-bonded\' (Welchman, 1996, p. 178). In joining these border wars, academics are advised that \'border controls … govern national boundaries and university disciplines alike\' (Harlow, 1994, p. 123); strategies to exceed these boundaries include participatory action research, among others (see activism and the academy).
References Anzaldua, G. 1987: Borderlands/La Frontera: the new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Augelli, J. 1980: Nationalization of Dominican borderlands. The Geographical Review 70: 19-35. Avalos, D. and Welchman, J. 1996: Response to The Philosophical Brothel. In Welchman, J., ed., Rethinking borders. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 187-99. Haraway, D. 1990: A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In L., Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 190-233. Harlow, B. 1994: Sites of struggle: immigration, deportation, prison, and exile. In Higonnet, M. and Templeton, J., eds, Reconfigured spheres: feminist explorations of literary space. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 108-24. Mouffe, C. 1995: Post-Marxism: democracy and identity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 259-66. Radcliffe, S. 1998: Frontiers and popular nationhood: geographies of identity in the 1995 Ecuador-Peru border dispute. Political Geography 17: 273-93. Tsing, A.L. 1993: In the realm of the diamond queen. Princeton: University of Princeton Press. Welchman, J., ed., 1996: Rethinking borders. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. |
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