(B)Orders of Immobility Politics of Movement and Poetics of the Frontier (original) (raw)
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Against the promise of free movement and mobility celebrated by the narrative of capitalism and globalization, the border stands as a stark reminder of the terrorizing history of death, destruction, and humiliation at the frontier. Like the Atlantic Ocean, home of the invisible and brutalizing memory of the slave trade, the Mediterranean and the Sonoran Desert today have become a dead zone, a dark trail of loss and sufferance amidst faint dreams of open lands and seas and freedom to roam. The growing militarization and securitization of the border unleashed by sophisticated technologies and algorithms of surveillance reflect a disturbing precariousness of empathy which seeks to conceal and banalize the trauma of crossing frontiers. By framing the debate of borders around security, threat and territory, the narrow calculus of border thinking multiplies and mutates beyond the physical spaces of the frontier, animating in the process a narrative of invasion, cultural purity, and territorial privilege. This article offers a critical reading of the politics, performance, and poetics of the border, border practices and border thinking in our current fractious conjuncture. Using the works of Caribbean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant, I argue for a different interpretation 284 Echchaibi JRAT 5 (2019) 283-311 and poetics of the border, one which does not nullify rootedness but refutes the tyranny of the "totalitarian root". Under this alternative imaginary, the degeneration of borders into zones of non-being and the converse image of mobility as a human right force us to re-visit old fundamental questions about the distribution of the earth.
Ecozon@ 13.2 (The Postcolonial Nonhuman), 2022
Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully apply interspecies concepts of mobility to understanding the roles played by geopolitical borders, as well as the various, ongoing forms of colonialism that have produced and continue to perpetuate these borders. This essay applies bioregional, material, decolonial, and borderlands ecocriticisms to historicize prevention through deterrence enforcement measures in the Mexico-US border region, and discusses several significant entanglements of interspecies actors in migratory contexts, exploring a range of ways that nonhuman nature has been and continues to be deployed materially against migrants. In historicizing US enforcement tactics, the essay tracks the distribution of human agency from settler colonial, ethnonationalist, and neoliberal US policy makers, to armed paramilitary human bodies, then into structures of the built environment, and, finally, to the ways that agency is further diffused across complex webs of multiple kinds of human and nonhuman actors-plants, animals, landforms, watercourses, climate and weather conditions, and so on. While in some instances, nonhuman animals are deployed against migrant and other indigenous and mestizo people, in other multispecies entanglements, animals participate in the revelation and denunciation of state sponsored violence, leading to larger questions of the status of other nonhuman animals in the borderlands. The essay's primary focus is on illustrating the practical untenability of, and the severe harm done in, continuing to regard the borderlands from settler colonialist or human exceptionalist positionalities.
América Latina en Movimiento, 2020
Against the background of changing capital/labour relations, extractivism, climate change, warfare and generalised violence across the globe, contemporary migratory movements have increasingly been characterised by specific processes of violence, exclusion and subordination, such as the virtual sealing of borders and transit corridors across the world, the criminalisation of undocumented migrants and refugees, and the sheer deaths and disappearances of uncountable people, particularly at the US-Mexican borders and in the Mediterranean. We'd like to ask you some questions relating to the specific mechanisms of this violence as you have framed it within your own academic work. The first question we'd like to ask you relates to a theoretical proposition that has been crucial for you own work in-between anthropology and geography, that is to say the understanding of borders not merely as geographical lines but rather as processes of political, legal and social production. What is the relationship between the productivity of borders and the spaces of death crossed by undocumented migrants and refugees on both sides of the Atlantic in which you have conducted research? Not only do I reject the simplistic and superficial cartographic notion of borders as geographical lines, I contend that we cannot think of borders as things (De Genova 2016). The common assumption is to imagine that the border is an objective place, a site, and in that sense, a kind of real thing. Consequently, we begin to associate the border with the other things that populate such a space-things such as border fences and checkpoints, but also therefore border guards. This latter detail is instructive, because once we recognize that Search
Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative, 2018
National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence. In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers. Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music. Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/coloniality-of-the-us-mexico-border
Becoming Fugitive: Migration in the American and EurAfrican Borderlands
ACME: A Journal of Critical Geography, 2023
This article tells the stories of illegalized migrant people moving through two violent, transcontinental borderscapes: the EurAfrican border that spans Western Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, and pushes further south each year across Africa; and the American border that stretches from the interior of the United States, through Mexico and Central America, and into South America and the Caribbean. Comparative analysis of these borderscapes reveals similar logics, practices, and policies of border enforcement, as well as strategies that migrant people use to subvert them. We argue that fugitivity provides a critical lens for understanding the co-constitution of borders and border transgression, and reveals how the border manufactures its objects—producing fugitive subjects, spaces, and relations across expanding spatial and temporal distances. As a lens rooted in histories of racialized control over human mobility, fugitivity allows us to chart contemporary territorializations of racial domination through bordering alongside constant challenges to these territorializations through movement. Ultimately, fugitivity provides a method that not only maps out the violence and failures of bordering, but one that imagines alternative geographies emanating from the underground of marginalized people, spaces, and relationships.
Refuge and colonization of the future: borders built by words
2020
This paper aims to think the forced migration to Europe under the perspective of a journalistic narrative which is based in repetitions and reiterations of words. When they produce meaning it results in a strait view where the migrant and refugee are the reason of disorder. Thus, we try to grasp how this process contributes to what we called colonization of the future, according to Giddens (2002) and Gomes (2004) concepts. In this process, an ordering is projected through the words based on a thought built during the European colonization. Its reminiscence is accumulated and form layers that appear in the journalistic narratives and on the borders. Narratives and borders are the metaphor and materialization of the conflict that impose to the migrant and to the refugee the condition of the difference, the condition to be the “other”. We propose that there is a journalistic narrative on the border that contributes to the production of meaning which its result is to discuss just for on...