This book examines both border policies and oppositional narratives of “the border,” 2011–2021, demonstrating that the term designates not merely a line of territorial control but also a set of social relations shaped by persistent, racially differentiated colonial structures and, more recently, by neoliberal modes of accumulation. These relations are shown to determine access to wealth and/or resources and to enable the management of labor, the extraction of surplus, and the accumulation of capital. Discussion in the book is informed by the history of these policies and by the critical literature on borders. Various cultural texts focusing on two border zones―the US–Mexico and the EU–Southern Mediterranean―are analyzed: specifically, two novels, two films, and two murals examined in conjunction with a music video. A path to a borderless future is suggested: an abolitionist refusal of border rules with an insistence on the necessity of abolition.
Author(s): Kanishka Chowdhury
Series: Politics of Citizenship and Migration
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 264
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Border Rules and Oppositional Currents
Description of the Project
Why Cultural Representations Matter
Scope of the Work: Analyzing the EU-Mediterranean and the US–Mexico Borders, 2011–2021
Summary of the Six Chapters
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Border Rules: Imperialism, Race, and the Politics of Development
Borders: Fluidity and Rigidity, Mobility and Statis
Imperialism and the Border at Home and Abroad
Borders, Primitive Accumulation, and Surplus Populations
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Theorizing Borders in the Shadow of Imperial Violence
Imperial Violence, Race, and the Specter of the “Failed State”
Border Critiques: Scapes, Edges, and Other Negotiations
Borders: A Materialist Critique
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Narrating the Border: Fluidity, Gender, and Resistance in Rabih Alemmedine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope and Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World
Contexts and Labels
Decentering the Gaze: Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope
“Morbid Phenomena” in the Borderlands: Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Documenting the Migrant Journey in Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow and Diego Quemada-Díez’s La Jaula de Oro
Human Flow and Poetic Protest
La Jaula de Oro: Dramatizing the Real
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Visualizing Borders: M.I.A.’s “Borders” and Mural Art in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso
M.I.A.’s “Borders”: Pop and Politics Across the Waters
The Politics of Space: Murals in the Sister Cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso
Under the Bridge/Bajo el Puente
Sister Cities/Ciudades Hermanas
Works Cited
Chapter 7: A Borderless World: Abolition Democracy and the Politics of Refusal
Abolition and Solidarities Across Borders
The No Borders Movements and the Idea of Refusal
Abolition Democracy and No Borders
An Abolitionist Refusal of Border Rules
Works Cited
Index
