Romola Sanyal Reviews "Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border" (Penn Press) in Antipode (original) (raw)
Related papers
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2022
Two recent books on Northeast India-Jungle Passports by Malini Sur, and Ceasefire City by Dolly Kikon and Duncan McDuie-Ra, engage with the intersections of frontier dynamics and everyday life in the region. Sur, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Northeast India-Bangladesh frontiers, examines how the border shapes mobility, identity and citizenship of borderland communities. Kikon and McDuie-Ra on the other hand, carried out urban ethnographic research in Dimpaur, the largest tribal city in Northeast India, and joins the discourse on frontier urbanism through an analysis of everyday spaces and stories in the city. While both books seek to expand the understanding of frontiers and borders using different approaches, there are several interesting thematic overlaps in their observations and analysis, that will be discussed in this review essay. Frontiers are zones of transition within which borders emerge or intersect and border dynamics play out, and where the distinctions between communities and spaces often become blurry, since these are the spaces where one set of social, political and economic geography fade into another (Korf & Raeymaekers, 2013). Such fluid sociospatialities in frontiers are usually separated by the drawing of political borders to secure the state territory. However, the notions of borders and frontiers are not limited to the margins of the state; they proliferate and become manifest across different contexts and multiple scales (Rumford, 2006; Leaf, 2016). Through reflecting on the two books, this review essay stresses the value of studying borders and frontiers at multiple scales. It also suggests that the lens of urban geopolitics can be effectively used for such multi-scalar conceptualization. Northeast India, which is connected by the narrow Siliguri corridor to the rest of the country, is a frontier region that has long grappled with border-making and re
Sovereignty and statelessness in the border enclaves of India and Bangladesh
Political Geography, 2009
This article investigates the 198 political enclaves along the northern section of the border between India and Bangladesh. The enclaves are a remnant of the partition of British India in 1947 and are effectively stateless spaces because most are small and located several kilometers within their host country, which has prevented any administrative contact with their home country. Drawing on interviews with current enclave residents, this article describes the creation of the enclaves and analyzes the disputes that prevented their normalization over the past 60 years. The enclaves provide an important site for scrutinizing the connections between bordering practices and sovereignty claims. They also demonstrate both the social benefits the sovereign state system has brought through the establishment of law and order and the devastating consequences it has caused by territorializing those basic social protections. The article concludes that the failure to exchange the enclaves displays the powerful role nationalist homeland narratives play in institutionalizing the concepts of sovereignty and territorial integrity, often at the expense of human rights.
2022
A conventional book review of Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe's experimental ethnography would miss the point of their imaginative prose. Th at point being: research creates non-representational kaleidoscopes of worlding, even if buttoned-up genres of academic prose pretend otherwise. Consider that proposition seriously before you embark on Muecke and Roe's writerly adventure down the Lurujarri Trail, which weaves its way through ochre landscapes, beige concepts and blue legalities. Each chapter of Th e Children's Country is recast as a narrative day on a week-long hike through Western Australia. But the trail that Muecke and Roe recreate is not a snow globe idyll. Rather, it is a fi cto-critical recomposition of the Lurujarri Trail, which Roe fi rst established to share his Aboriginal 'songlines' with Australian publics. Roe wanted to share these songlines (which are part landscape, part music and part dream) because he was concerned that extractivism would obliterate such practices of walking with Country. Th ese songlines, which hybridise nature and culture, are hard for cosmopolitan Moderns to grasp. Roe appreciated this modernist shortcoming, however, and designed the Lurujarri Trail as an embodied pedagogy to teach Moderns about Aboriginal dream-tracks. Taking the embodied pedagogy of this trail seriously, Th e Children's Country seems to ask: if this trail was a scholar, what book would it write? Muecke and Roe answer this question by writing performatively. Performative writing (which becomes steeped in its object, rather than desiccating its object) has become an established technique in the subfi eld of experimental ethnography. Th e Children's Country off ers an Australian spin on performative writing, deploying Muecke's characteristic 'fi cto-critical' style-a style which emerges as an oasis in the binary desert between fi ction and fact. Ficto-criticism encourages its reader to wonder where the story stops and the truth begins. It surprises because it does not use criticism to 'undermine' truth. Instead, it highlights that 'facts are always carried by stories' (p. xvi). It is as if Muecke and Roe composted fi ction and fact into an earthy storytelling aroma. Th e Children's Country performs these fi cto-critical experiments while simultaneously engaging transdisciplinary debates that are oft en called 'multispecies ethnography' or 'cosmopolitics'. Drawing on the concepts that have gained traction in such posthuman subfi elds, Muecke and Roe develop new approaches to These book reviews are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal's subscribers. 150 BOOK REVIEWS networks and ontologies through phrases like 'modes of belonging' (p. 125). Th ey defi ne this phrase in contradistinction to Latourian modes of existence, which attend to what a network is, rather than what a network has. Moving beyond nuanced defi nition, Muecke and Roe also propose posthuman updates to classical concepts, such as totemism, by suggesting: 'Aboriginal "sciences" may have invented totemism as an extended multispecies kinship system' (p. 62). Th is multispecies update to totemism bolsters the accreditations of the Lurujarri Trail as a landscaped lecturer who teaches Moderns about the merits of Aboriginal governance. Totemism, in this view, is reconfi gured as a 'time-honoured system for ecological management' (p. 146) that incorporates 'non-humans into representative democracy' (pp. 51-52). Th is totemistic democracy emerges in contradistinction to the naturalistic government of Modern Australia. Muecke and Roe's fi cto-critical account of the Lurujarri Trail defl ects the cut-and-dry concepts of critique. But I am so well trained! Like a dog sniffi ng for stimulating aromas in a bed of roses, my critical instincts encounter curious scents when Th e Children's Country describes itself as a 'partisan text', which presents its 'case in the best possible light, to the point of avoiding counter-evidence' (p. xvii). Th is partisan approach is particularly well-illustrated when Muecke and Roe mention 'Indigenous sciences' (p. 86)-or what is frequently called TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge). A complex debate swirls around TEK. But Muecke and Roe seem to sidestep this complexity, perhaps because it provides evidence against the merits of Indigenous science. For example, while Muecke and Roe persuasively describe an incident in which Indigenous science locates endangered turtles more accurately than Western science, a review of the TEK literature turns up many anecdotes in which Indigenous peoples do not conform to the fi gure of the 'ecologically noble savage'. I suggest, then, that a partisan text is more persuasive if it confronts (rather than avoids) counter-evidence. Showing why common critiques of TEK do not apply to Australian Indigenous sciences would make it harder for the well-trained critic to pick up provoking scents in the green gardens of Th e Children's Country. While wandering along the Lurujarri Trail, with Muecke and Roe by your side, it may help to glance at the legal calendar in the appendix, treating it as a temporal map through a spell-binding literary landscape.