largefert.blogg.se - The nature of an edge or ecotone

‘routes’, thus indicating the significant role of mobility in the process of identification and the construction of Otherness. Cultural and Postcolonial Studies have contributed to rethinking cultural borders, to highlighting the complexities of multiple, at times intersecting, ‘modernities’ besides the West, and to reconsidering ‘roots’ vs. In the wake of the decolonisation era, the vertical centre-periphery model has given way to new conceptions of North-South and South-South relations.

London: Vintage, 2002 6.ĥThe current globalisation period seems to have erased many borders in a ‘liquid’, hyperconnected, transnational, transcultural world. They are also sites of encounters, agony and regeneration. From the chars of Bengal to the disputed post-Partition borders of Pakistan or Bangladesh, from the trading city of Abu Dhabi to the forest encampments in Mayotte, those borderlands have a rich history of both relegation, mingling and conflict. Others settle there for generations and live on cultural, economic and social discontinuities. Borders are borderlands, thick contact zones into which people, whose journey has been interrupted by legal and physical fences, find refuge in border towns or gather in shabby camps waiting for an opening. They are thresholds that can be crossed, liminal spaces that allow interactions, passage and flow of people, migrants, refugees, goods and capitals, knowledge and ideas, cultures and identities. Borders can be more blurred, fuzzy and subjective than one may think.ģBesides, following the path of rivers or mountaintops, traversing deserts or crossing seas, borders are more often than not ecological ecotones as well as sites of experimentation and cultural innovations. 4 Some check points transforming emigrants into immigrants are more transient than permanent. Some remain unstable for decades and continue to exist as loose demarcation lines and objects of constant disputes between two nation states.

4 The Line of Actual Control (LAC) has been at the heart of the Sino-Indian border dispute between I (.)ĢHowever, boundaries complexify, if not destabilise, the very space they shape and segment, as exemplified by the arbitrary division of colonial Africa and the Partition of India, the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, or the sealed border between North and South Korea.

3 They may appear as the hard edges of nation states, keeping people in or out. Borders are initially imagined and drawn as clear-cut, fixed lines that reorder the world and construct it through exclusion more than inclusion. As social constructs, borders can be erected and controlled, imposed or negotiated, contested and transgressed or bypassed, remapped or abolished they reflect fluctuating, at times conflictual power relations and shifts in self-representations, or reconfigurations of the place and more largely the world we live in. They are inner and outer margins that determine categories and differences they delineate the contours of individual and collective identities-whether territorial, national, ethnic, ‘racial’, religious, linguistic, gendered, etc. Both ‘barriers and bridges’, 2 they are conceived of as dividing lines between two distinct elements, the inside and the outside, belonging and unbelonging, normative and subversive practices, ‘we’ and ‘they’-the Other, the foreigner.

Paris: Le Seuil, 2010.ġBorders, whether physical, geopolitical, social, or cultural, are ontologically ambivalent.

1 Our thanks go to Thomas Lacroix for his active reading of this volume and for the constructive sugg (.).