Border Narratives, Border Aesthetics

In the last two decades dominant approaches that view the border mainly as a marginal geopolitical site of exclusion have been seriously challenged both by migrants’ practices and by scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not only that today there’s a compelling shift towards investigating the border as a dynamic site of control and transgression, exclusion and inclusion, but that scholars have also begun to view borders as a group of practices that are central to the constitution of social and political life (Balibar, 2004; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). This shift is also informed by the multiplication of borders and their increasing heterogeneity with the advent of the new technologies of security and sovereignty.

This seminar focuses on this new regime of borders as it finds expression in the content and/or artistic strategies of contemporary global literature and media. It is particularly interested in papers that analyze narratives and aesthetic approaches which articulate territorial borders with a range of other boundaries including linguistic, gender, sexual, temporal, class, species, etc., and, in so doing, meditate on the constitutive role of border regimes in the making and imagining of the world.

The seminar is open to the discussion of a variety of creative works, such as novels, fiction and non-fiction films, graphic novels, new and/or multi-media art that explore the border as a mise-en-scène of control, surveillance, and dispossession at the same time as they are able to imagine it as a site of political possibility and transformation. One of the goals of this seminar is also to expand the geographical focus of cultural border studies not only by addressing the existing research divide on this topic between European and North American humanities, but also by rendering more visible scholarly and artistic work from other parts of the world that further complement and/or complicate these debates.

With these issues in mind, faculty, graduate students and artists working in literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, visual arts, urban studies, critical border and migration studies are invited to submit proposals on topics which may include:
- Border-crossing narratives and b/ordering of class, gender, and race
- Border and questions of hybridity, ambiguity and translation
- Borders and bodies, border-crossing and embodiment
- Border as a narrative and/or aesthetic device
- Borders and more-than-human worlds
- Spatial, temporal and psychic aspects of security architectures (walls, checkpoints, camps, gates, fences, etc.) and their relation to everyday life
- Digital borders, smart borders and new technologies of security and sovereignty
- Subversive gaze, mass-mediatized gaze, surveillant gaze
- Alternative representations of migrants that challenge narratives/images of securitization and humanitarianism (i.e., that problematize their criminalization or victimization)