Kitabı oxu: «border and bordering»
ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
For all their permeability, the borders snaking across the world have never been of greater importance. This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines.
-Salman Rushdie
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Contemporary Fiction as a Cultural Map of Migration
Statelessness and the Tensions between Open Borders and the Claims of Community
Rejection, Reconstruction and Erosion of Borders: The Identity Path of Grisélidis Réal
A Place Not Our Own: Gulf Emigration and Bordered Lives in Benyamin’s Jasmine Days
Challenges and Resistance to the Partition of Bengal: Impact of Baul and Marafati Oral Tradition
Bordering the Screen: Separation Themes in Popular Film and Television
Representation of Incarcerated Women in Orange is the New Black: An Intersectional Feminist Approach
Tracks and Borders: Railways in Ray’s Apu Trilogy
Oceanic Borders: Climate Refugees, Borders and Extinction in the Necrocene
Fuzzy (B)ordering: More than Human Agencies and the Ethics of (Dis)avowal
‘I alone . . . was on both sides’: The Hyphenated Self in Hélène Cixous’s Reveries of the Wild Woman
Borders in South Asia: Language, Culture and Religion from Colonialism to Globalization
Missing Links or the Diasporic Journey of a Rebel: A Study of H P Malet’s Lost Links in Indian Mutiny (1867)
Un-blinding Doctrine and Exiting ‘Molar Lines’ in Arnold’s The Scholar Gipsy
Reorganising (B)orders: Reading the Women’s Writing in Colonial Bengal
Erasing the Borders: Tagore’s Engagement with the Subalterns in Sahaj Path
Contributors
Foreword
The world has never been more mobile, more connected, never more characterised by the movement of refugees and asylum seekers and as nation states move hysterically to protect their borders from this mobile precariat, borders have become the most significant and most questioned phenomenon in the globalised world. So what would the world look like without borders? How might the utopian dream of a borderless world come about? Could rich nations open their borders with no regard for the control of migration? Could some nations and not others open their borders? These questions make us realise how recalcitrant borders are in political life. The ideology of the nation and the rigidity of its borders often preclude us thinking of any alternative. In the words of a US President who wants to build a wall along the Mexican border, “if you don’t have borders you don’t have a nation.” The apparent impossibility of a borderless world is due not only to the spectre raised by this mobility of people, but to the most destructive force of modern times, the force that keeps borders in place—nationalism. Nationalism is always complicated by ethnocentrism, racism and populism and as nationalism proliferates, violence increases.
Borders could only be dissolved if the distinction that holds them in place—between rich and poor nations, democratic and undemocratic, colonised and colonising, the nation and its others, us and them—was itself dissolved. In other words borders maintain the system of inequality without which modern global capitalism (and national antipathy) could not function. If rich nations opened their borders the poor would flood in putting untenable demands on resources. Like a racial melting pot “big enough to take the world and all it’s got” as the song goes, a borderless world might lead to equality, increase the wealth of the poor, and reduce the wealth of the wealthy. But at what level of economic and cultural security would it settle?
Borders exist because of fear and that fear is increasing. At the end of World War II, there were seven border walls or fences in the world. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were 15. Today, there are at least 77 walls or fences—half of which were erected since 2001. But the interesting thing about walls throughout history, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, the Berlin wall, is that they all eventually failed. While these contemporary boundary fences may be seen as a terrified response to the phenomenon of global mobility they may also be seen in a different way as a sign of the productive force of border crossers.
As Salman Rushdie says “The frontier is an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral.” So there are many frontiers, many boundaries that we cross every day. But there is, of course, a deeply psychological dimension to boundaries: we understand who we are by determining who we are not. Our ‘others’ define us. Although borders go hand in hand with the emergence of nations they go deep into the history of Western modernity and its notions of space and time. Boundaries and ocularcentrism became inextricable in Western epistemology. As works in social theory, philosophy and human geography make abundantly clear western thinking proceeds according to the metaphors of visuality. The ocularcentrism of western thought is inseparable from the notion of boundaries.
The central issue of transnational/diasporic studies as many of the following essays reveal, is the crossing of borders, a crossing that leads to various kinds of conflicts and tensions. In Step Across This Line (2002), Salman Rushdie says: ‘Good writing assumes a frontierless nation. Writers who serve frontiers have become border guards.’ The literary accounts of journeys across national boundaries belong with these stories of the journey of becoming. “In our deepest natures,” says Rushdie, “we are frontier-crossing beings. We know this by the stories we tell ourselves; for we are story-telling animals, too.” (76)
What is a 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 how brutal the borders are. The perils of international migration and at the same time the sheer desperation of the migrants 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.
***
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 category of the modern. These spaces are addressed as “alternative modernities” so that no matter what the narrative is, which is most often singular, modernity remains the protagonist. These are called “counter-modernities” so that the vantage point remains with that of modernity. Modernity includes; modernity excludes; but more importantly, modernity includes by excluding. The status quo of inclusion through exclusion is always meant to be partial inclusion and never complete; the realpolitik here is actually in this suspension and deferment. It includes the other by making it the ‘other’ in the first instance—modernity claims the other as other through the process of otherization; modernity also colonizes the other as other through the process of colonization. “The rhetoric of modernity”, as Walter Mignolo points out, “is that of salvation, whereas the logic of coloniality is a logic of imperial oppression. They go hand in hand, and you cannot have modernity without coloniality; the unfinished project of modernity carries over its shoulders the unfinished project of coloniality” (2006: 313). The other, thus, is suspended, entangled and eventually made a part of the habitat of the self: it can neither make itself completely free from the self nor is it allowed to become part of the self. Modernity is, at the same time, hospitable and hostile towards the other. Objects and beings, which in any case considered exotic and sacred implicitly, are made ‘exotic’ and ‘sacred’—the others of modernity—so much so that these ideas cease to exist altogether once modernity is bracketed out. The idea of the exotic and the idea of the sacred are among many such ideas which now cannot exist beyond the realm of modernity; the very meaning of the exotic and the sacred can now only be tweaked out of the dough of modernity. So, what remains at the end of the day are the pre-, the post-, the alternative, the sub-, and the counter- of that one all-encompassing “grand narrative” called modernity. The others of modernity are not modernity’s other, rather part of the same discursive practice.
Modernity, hence, is an end in itself. It does not lead to anywhere. It is a project, an ever unfinished project: a journey whose marked destination is also modernity. It is a project of domination and colonization, of mind and body, of physics and metaphysics, of existence and essence. Unlike the modern, which is ideationally static and sedentary, modernity is constantly on the move. Modern is being; modernity is being and becoming at the same time. While hinting at the aspect of stasis and kinesis, Dilip Gaonkar in his ‘On Alternative Modernities’ lists some of the unforgettable figures of modernity: Marx’s “revolutionary”, Baudelaire’s “dandy”, Nietzsche’s “superman”, Weber’s “social scientist”, Simmel’s “stranger”, Musil’s “man without qualities” and Benjamin’s “flaneur”, and points out how “each is caught and carried in the intoxicating rush of an epochal change and yet finds himself and formulated by a disciplinary system of social roles and functions” (1999: 3). Modernity, as many have pointed out, was a reaction to a very specific socio-cultural, geographical and historical event; but what happened eventually is, because of colonization and later globalization, that it has turned into a phenomenon which is regarded as transcendental and universal. Therefore, what was primarily conceived as and meant to be local has, because of certain definite turns in world history and politics, turned out to be universal. This is what we call dissemination of modernity which has led to the rise of, what is often quoted now as, global modernity. Our argument is: there is nothing which we can call and point out as global modernity but rather globalization of a certain set of local modernities, a set of narratives which are overtly and covertly white, west European, masculine, and Christian. Modernity is a milieu of these modernities or narratives, which are mostly provincial, and which are more often than not considered and hailed as transcendental and disembodied. It is incorrectly believed to be atemporal and aspatial in characteristics and in function. The here of modernity in such scenario becomes the everywhere and the now of modernity, the always. This is what we describe as ‘modernity-history singularity’: the point at which the history of human civilization and the historical development of modernity turned into one and the same thing. Our effort here would be to look for those openings and prospects where we could disentangle the latter from the former—where history and historiography cease to remain mere discourses of modernity and affirm agencies of their own.
The dissemination of modernity across the globe started with those initial encounters and transactions between west European countries and new found lands; stratified with the imperial powers annexing those new found lands and turning them into new territories; and consolidated with the birth of modern nation-states in those new territories. Now, in the age of late capitalism, globalization and post-nationalism, it has more or less become the dominant worldview of the world—it even dictates the way the world looks upon itself. Even in several ongoing postcolonial studies across the world with its indulgence on non-hegemonic and non-Eurocentric understandings and strategies one can easily find traces of this trope and this kind of worldview.
We would disagree with those who point out the plural nature of modernity and talk about different modernities which are absolutely discreet and different from each other. We would also, at the same time, disagree with those who suggest its singular and monolithic nature. Modernity, rather, is slightly more complicated than that. It is, we think, a complex wave of several attributes or narratives—it is neither singular nor plural in nature. It is certainly a grand narrative, consisting of much petit or micro-modernities. It is a whole: a summation of all such narratives and, more correctly, much more than the summation of those narratives. It is, for instance, white, Eurocentric, anthropocentric, capital driven, patriarchal and many others and yet, it is much more than that. These phenomena are certainly not petit or micro in their nature and function and have agencies of their own; but since they blend, add on to and eventually propel that one greater narrative called modernity, we have called these petit or micro-modernities.
A modern nation-state—an embodiment of all that modernity is and stands for—can also prove for our study a laboratory where all these phenomena could be dissected and understood in a far effective and heuristic manner. A modern nation-state with its precise and well maintained geopolitical boundaries is a reification of this grand and yet, complex narrative of modernity. The edges of the nation-state are also the edges of modernity and the space between the two edges—the space where one political block ends and another begins—is what we understand as borderland. This space, which also has its own temporality, is also the space where one set of modernities ends and another begins. But we would here negate our own thesis if we consider this space to be a vacuum; we are not saying that borderlands are free of modernity, which obviously these are not in any case. We are also not naïve enough to point out here that borderlands are spaces or zones beyond modernity—pristine, untouched and untrodden—but rather have an ambiguous, often confusing and far more complicated sort of modernity. Like that of mainland, borderland modernity is also a complex; and yet a suture of several overlapping modernities whose agencies, as opposed to the former, are feebly and not so persuasively asserted. Borderland modernity is confused and convoluted kind of modernity: borderlands are where the narrative of modernity, which works quite succinctly in and around the mainland, covers the distance from the centre to the periphery, and in the process starts to lose its might and vigor. This already ‘weak’ modernity, when at an everyday level starts encountering with the other just on the other side of the border, becomes more, as we have already mentioned, confused and convoluted. It is at this stage/state that it starts contradicting and challenging itself in a more explicit manner: it is where it becomes a paradox of/in itself. Borderland modernity is the result of some of the inherent aporias in the system of modernity, understanding of which can enable us to use it as a strategic tool—a mode of deconstructing the hitherto ‘natural’ and transcendental aspects of modernity.
