Thinking Borderlessness: Alternative Forms of Embodiment and Reconfiguration of Spatial Realities in Emma Donoghue’s Room (by Jayana Jain Punamiya) (original) (raw)
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Borders and boundaries are not limited to the domain of geography. The discourse and metaphor of borders extend beyond geopolitical to sociological, biological, affective, linguistic, racial, gender concerns and so on. They regulate power as they enforce a spatial code yet are always unsettled. Thus, any instance of border-crossing contests power and leads to the tentative creation of alternative forms of resistance. In this article, I argue that Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) depicts a variety of cross-border assemblages that contain the flow of corporeal, bio-political, and affective borders within traumatic and larger social spaces. This, in turn, leads to the tentative creation of alternative affective communities and resistance to dominant power structures.
Chapter 4: Imagined geographies, shifting borders
Imagined geographies, shifting borders This chapter argues that the 9/11 terrorist attacks have challenged the US’s belief that it was invulnerable to threats from those external to its geopolitical borders. The resultant escalating ambience of irrational fear has created the conditions for Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception to emerge both within and externally to US sovereign borders. In the context of this proposition this chapter examines the relationship between border and the nation-state, giving specific attention to Michel Foucault’s model of the discipline society. In his seminal text Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault asserts that the prison has become the central form of discipline in modern society through the regulation of the behaviour of individuals in the social body. This has been done through the regulation of space and the borders that contain it. This chapter also explores a number of art practices that respond to Agamben’s notion of the state of exception. Briefly, Agamben’s state of exception empowers one state with the authority over others beyond the normal limits of traditional law. A state of exception may also occur within the borders of an existing sovereign state. In this investigation of the relationship of border to the nation-state, special attention is given to the transformations in society commencing from the mid-twentieth century that sees the borders of nation-states increasingly redefined and extended. It does so by applying Stephen Graham’s reading of Agamben’s states of exception. Graham proposes that these transformations mean that zones or ‘prisons’ are created that ignore the universal human rights of those seen as symbolically Other. These investigations support and illuminate the overall argument of this thesis. Elizabeth Anker observes that the events of 9/11 provided the opportunity for these states of exception to emerge external to US sovereignty. Anker proposes that the very idea of sovereignty was altered permanently following 9/11.
Undesigning Borders: Urban Spaces of Borders and Counter-Practices of Looking
Undesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design (Routledge), 2018
Today, borders are not merely geographical lines of separations, divisions and differences. They are design spaces of production, circulation and consumption of images and relations. This chapter discusses the ubiquitousness of borders by discussing a specific national project of internal borderwork in Sweden and bringing forward the stories of those who are affected by it. Consequently, it argues that while borders frame certain moments and events as natural, catastrophic or normal, they deframe their own presence and politics persuasively. Borders as spaces, produce and sustain certain normalised ways of looking that allow them, paradoxically, to skip the sight. One way to resist these spaces of violence and exclusion is to envision counter-practices of looking at borders, to articulate other ways of looking at borders, at what borders could be, where they operate and how they move in time and space. As an example, the chapter ends with a presentation of a project that aimed at undesigning borders in the everyday life of two Swedish towns, where the police were heavily engaged in a series of racial profiling operations to find undocumented and deportable migrants.
Being and Becoming: the body and border landscapes
Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2017
Essay published in the catalog for the fine art exhibition "Where is Diana?" at Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, Madrid, Spain. June 2017. Diana Coca, in her exhibition Where is Diana? uses landscape and performance to invite the viewer to contemplate the relationship between the body, systems of control and the construction of the subject in the contexts of national borders and globalization. The movement of people across national boundaries has been accelerated by an integrated world economy, and in recent years, by war, terrorism and organized crime violence. Today about 244 million people, or 3.3 percent of all people in the world, live outside of their country of origin. Another 40 million people live as refugees in their own country, having fled war, extortion or local gang violence. These internally displaced persons often go unrecognized by international support systems designed for refugees. Nation-states have responded with new techno-social controls and enhanced surveillance systems to manage border crossing, and the result is that our bodies have become sites of multiple encoded boundaries. Coca takes up this problem of bodies and codes of state control, and through her own travel, she places borders and border crossing at the center of her artistic practice. Having completed residencies in Beijing, China and in Mexico City and Tijuana, Mexico, she creates a series that enacts the time-space compression characteristic of the postmodern condition and uses her images to stage the disorientation and violence of the protocols of state regulation of migrant mobilities. Her images of a lone black-clad figure in the landscape are both exhilarating and unsettling, linking disparate spaces through the migration and presence of the same singular figure. The landscape and the figure alike suggest alienation and the disintegration of identities that were once rooted in particular histories and specific local places.
The aesthetic turn in border studies: Visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion
Geography Compass, 2022
In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the “aesthetic turn” that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, suggesting possible avenues for future critical aesthetics-engaged research on COVID-19 era border reconfigurations. To do so, we first briefly outline the theoretical evolution of border studies, paying attention to recent conceptualisations of borders as dynamic processes of social and spatial differentiation. We then build on the borderscapes concept to unpack research on border aesthetics, with particular attention to the heterogeneous roles played by visual objects such as maps, photographs and videos in shaping both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes of bordering. Finally, we bring these contributions into discussion with recent insights on the COVID-19 pandemic, sketching several ways to advance aesthetic concepts and methodologies in academic research on borderscapes that are emerging with, and will likely outlast, the pandemic. We suggest that border studies and affiliated sub-fields can gain useful insights from attending more explicitly and robustly to dynamic visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion.
Thresholds and Tresspasses. An Embodied Exploration of Borders’ Imaginaries
Passage, 2023
The national boundary line that separates Italy and Switzerland is today highly dematerialised and mostly invisible. Yet it continues to exist as a “borderscape,” reproduced by a series of crossing practices such as crossborder work and migration, and by their associated imaginaries. Based on oral history, photography, and performative walks, this essay gives a first-person account of how this border is kept alive or contested by those practices that routinely cross it. The starting point is the story of women workers employed in a manufacturing factory in the border area who used to go to the border woods to harvest flowers. Moving between border factories, workers’ parking lots, migratory trajectories, and smuggling routes, the essay tests on the ground the notion of a borderscape at the interception of experiences and representations.
Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries: Image, body and territory
SOPHIA JOURNAL, 2018
Introduction Pedro Leão Neto This 3rd number of Sophia1 from the series Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries, with the theme “Image, Body and Territory”, has as invited Editor Iñaki Bergera, who is an invaluable author and collaborator of the editorial project scopio Editions since its first years of existence. This publication has three major peer-reviewed essays, where its authors challenge our understanding on issues related with the theme “Image, Body and Territory” and where photography practice and discipline is always significantly present. Introducing the notion of a vernacular of economic growth, Kallen McNamara borrows the eyes of Gavin Brown in order to uncover aspects of our daily urban environment that are culturally out of focus, but may be more expressive of our contemporary world than we might like to admit. Her essay is a significant exploration of how a subjective gaze of a particular author, in this case Gavin Brown, is used to critically read in a meaningful manner various aspects of the most conventional and banal aspects of the contemporary urban reality of the city of Houstan. Kallen also makes an interesting creative link between Gavin Brown´s contemporary gaze and the New Topographics landscape aesthetics, which had a significant effect on photography universe, not only in the United States, but in Europe and, as Kallen bring to light, is an aesthetics still influencing contemporary photographers, as happens in the case of Gavin Brown. (read more at https://www.sophiajournal.net/) Editorial Bodies and territory: visual footprints of our inhabited built world Iñaki Bergera In recent times, the complexity —and rich potentialities— of our contemporary world is being fruitfully described and depicted by photographers and visual artists. The interest of urban landscape at large, understood as the natural scenario of our contemporaneity, expands its borders and boundaries towards a more intricate appraisal of the territory and our physical (body) and conceptual (inhabitant) relationship with it. As the following papers explore, it is not just a matter of arranging a visual report —from a documentary perspective— of the space we live in but, rather, interpret and suggest the threats and opportunities that our personal dialog with the territory implies. As every negotiation, this conversation implies mediation, a pulse between a desired natural balance and the dramatic and unconscious footprints of our human action. Our presence —passive or active, spiritual and fleshly— is no more innocuous. By being at and dwelling the territory, the place gains the constrictions of an often contradictory conciliation. It is there where a thrilling visual narrative emerges, where the accurate and sensible eye of the visual artist finds a highly potential field of exploration and complaint. (read more at https://www.sophiajournal.net/)
Analele Științifice ale Universității Ovidius – Seria Filologice/ The Annals of Ovidius University - Philology, 2006
The paper aims to discuss borderlines and borderlands, focusing on aspects connected to the cultural identity of the communities living on borderlands or divided by frontiers of some kind, yet united through other means. Various approaches concerning what we have discussed as the dual nature of borders are presented, the examples supporting the theoretical background being drawn from Ireland, physically divided between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The conclusion emphasizes the necessity of a unifying vision, meant to accommodate identity and otherness across border.