Presses universitaires de Strasbourg

Borders in the English-Speaking World

Negotiations, Subversions, Reconfigurations

Sandrine Baudry, Hélène Ibata and Monica Manolescu (dir.)

DOI: 10.4000/books.pus.30035

Publisher: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg

Place of publication: Strasbourg

Year of publication: 2022

Published on OpenEdition Books: 26 January 2022

Series: Études anglophones

Electronic EAN: 9791034403813

https://books.openedition.org

Printed version

Date of publication: 25 January 2021

EAN (Print version): 9791034401260

Number of pages: 314

Electronic reference

BAUDRY, Sandrine (ed.) ; IBATA, Hélène (ed.) ; and MANOLESCU, Monica (ed.). Borders in the English-Speaking World: Negotiations, Subversions, Reconfigurations. New edition [online]. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2022 (generated 31 janvier 2022). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/pus/30035>. ISBN: 9791034403813. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pus.30035.

This text was automatically generated on 31 January 2022.

© Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2022

Terms of use:
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Abstracts

This collective volume brings together thirteen contributions focusing on the transgression of borders in the English-speaking world from the beginning of the 19th century to the 21st century, in literature, history, geography, cultural studies, visual arts and political discourse. This collective volume brings together thirteen contributions focusing on the transgression of borders in the English-speaking world from the beginning of the 19th century to the 21st century, in literature, history, geography, cultural studies, visual arts and political discourse. Far from being static and immutable, borders are shown to be permeable and performative, fluid sites of division and contact, processes rather than straight and rigid lines. The chapters explore the ways in which borders contribute to the shaping of identities and are negotiated in complex and subversive ways at cultural, territorial, individual and national levels. Borders are treated from an interdisciplinary perspective that articulates the literal and the metaphorical, the concrete territory and the imagined community, highlighting the imbrication of political, social, environmental, discursive and aesthetic considerations.

Sandrine Baudry (dir.)

Sandrine Baudry is an Associate Professor of American studies at the University of Strasbourg (France) and a member of SEARCH (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire). Her research focuses on conflicts around the uses of urban space. She has published several articles and book chapters on urban gardening, and co-edited with Aneta Dybska a special issue of the European journal of American Studies on “Spatial Justice and the Right to the City” (10:3, 2015). Her current research deals with the political and spatial dynamics of Native American visibility in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Hélène Ibata (dir.)

Hélène Ibata is Professor of English and visual studies at the University of Strasbourg. Her work on Romantic visual culture includes The Challenge of the Sublime: from Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art (2018, Manchester University Press). She has also published articles on the sublime, romantic artist travellers, early panoramas, book illustrations, exhibition practices, William Blake and J.M.W. Turner, in journals like Word and Image,The European Romantic Review, Romanticism on the Net and The British Art Journal.

Monica Manolescu (dir.)

Monica Manolescuis Professor of American literature at the University of Strasbourg and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an honorary research fellow at the University of Kent and a visiting professor at the ICU Tokyo. She is the author of Lolita. Cartographies de l’obsession. Nabokov/Kubrick (Presses Universitaires de France, 2009, with Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris), Jeux de mondes. L’ailleurs chez Vladimir Nabokov (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2010) and Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities. Art, Literature and Urban Spaces (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Table of contents

Introduction

Sandrine Baudry and Hélène Ibata and Monica Manolescu

Part I. IMPOSED BORDERS AND CONTESTED GEOGRAPHIES

Contested Borders: Northern Irish Murals and the Visualisation of Territory

Caroline Lehni

I. Murals and the Contested Imaginative Geographies of Northern Irish Borders

II. Murals, “Peacelines” and the Community Divide

Conclusion

A History of Shifting Settler-colonial Borders: Reading the Native/Non-Native Territorial Palimpsest in and around Rapid City, SD

Céline Planchou and Sandrine Baudry

I. The History of Overlapping Geographies in and around Rapid City

II. The Modern Resurgence of Lakota Geographies in the City

Conclusion: Notes on the Epistemology of Overlapping Geographies

The Decolonial Frontier: Landscape, Maps and Borders in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks

Anna-Grace Scullion

I. Landscape and Sense of Place in Tracks

II. Vernacular Landscape in Tracks

III. Erdrich’s Cartographical Map

IV. Borders in Tracks and the Decolonial Frontier

Conclusion

“Indigeneity”, “Statism” and “Federal Character”: The Manufacture of Inter-communal Borders in the Federal Republic of Nigeria

Joseph Egwurube

Introduction

I. The Foundation and Origin of Nigerian Federalism

II. Federal Character and the Spatial Differentiation of Nigeria

III. Indigeneity and the Reinforcement of Inter-state Borders

IV. “Statism” and Dis-amalgamation

Conclusion

Part II. NATURAL AND SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES

Writing Without Borders? Thoreau’s Remapping of Borders Through Language

Julien Nègre

“One man’s tenuous hold on the earth”: The Metaphor of Barbed Wire in Ron Rash’s Writing

Frédérique Spill

I. Barbed Wire, Passion and Revenge in One Foot in Eden

II. A Curling Metaphor

III. “Barbed Wire,” a Poem

Conclusion

The Past in the Present: The Black Forest in Victorian Periodicals

Stefanie Lethbridge

I. Victorians, Periodicals and the Black Forest

II. Pre-mediated Forest Experience

III. Border Crossings

IV. Looking Out of the Forest

Part III. BORDERS AND THE SHAPING OF TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES

“dark strangers crossing the nation’s threshold”: Confinement and Border Crossings in the Fiction of George Lamming and Sam Selvon

Silvia Gerlsbeck

I. Seventy Years On: The Legacy of Windrush

II. “suppose you had one island”: National and Artistic Borders in Lamming’s The Emigrants

III. Upstairs – Downstairs: Selvon’s Moses Ascending and the (Im)Mobility of the Artist

“Whey Mi Belang”: Borders of Class, Race and Gender in Reggae Lyrics and Afro-Caribbean Oral Texts

David Bousquet

I. Borders and Freedom of Movement for Jamaicans

II. Borders, Refugees and the New World Order

III. Borders, Colonialism and Rootlessness

IV. “Rasta burn bridges”

V. Garrisons and Internal Borders

VI. Gender Distinctions

Conclusion

Undermining Borders in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Sara Arami

Part IV. NAVIGATING LIMINAL SPACES

From the “Angel in the House” to the Suffragette: How the New Woman Crossed the Border Between the Private and the Public Spheres, Great Britain, 1854-1918

Laurence Cristina

Crossing Lines in Imperial India: a Geocritical Study of Subversive Transgressions in R. Kipling’s Kim and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Amandine Guyot

I. Lines of Colonial Appropriation

II. Line-crossing: Transgression and Subversion

III. The In-between Space of Line-crossing: Thickness of the Alternative Space

Conclusion

“You people aren’t even black anymore”: Tentative Reconfigurations of Geographical, Social and Racial Borders in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Julia Siccardi

I. Creating ‘Places’: Social Relations Dislocating and Re-creating Borders

II. Institutionalized Borders: the Permanence of Physical Spaces and Social Order

III. Subjective and Normative Borders: Dealing with Blackness and Alterity

Contributor's biographies

Credits

Introduction

Sandrine Baudry and Hélène Ibata and Monica Manolescu

The idea of the border as a founding event, a spatial demarcation that separates and shapes human communities, often conflicts or coexists with the view that it is the concrete enactment of preexisting social, cultural, political exclusion. In a now famous postulate, Simmel gives priority to the sociological component over the spatial component: “the boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially” (Simmel 1997, 142). By suggesting that the physical boundaries that communities give to themselves are the product of extant social separations, Simmel highlights the close entanglement of actual geographical separations and symbolic or metaphorical ones which has underpinned the development of the field of border studies from the beginning.

In the most common use of the term, borders are conceived as physical territorial demarcations, dividing nations, but also providing protection to them, as well as a potential structure for political and social identity. As Étienne Balibar argues, for a significant part of the population of nation-states in the Northern hemisphere, “the representation of being in the world is built around the conjunction of the border, the state, territory and security” (Navone and Rahola 2021, 122; our translation). Borders are often perceived as clearly delineated boundaries and sometimes actualized as walls, fences or other enclosures meant to neatly cut between states or other socio-political communities, and consolidate their identities and sovereignties. These borders are an integral part of power relations, as they affirm the conquest of and enact control over a territory, not only through physical, possibly weaponized boundaries, but through discourse and representations, epitomized by official map-making and place-naming (King 1996).

As this literal notion of the political demarcation commonly prevails over more symbolic or metaphorical ones, borders tend to be perceived as static, often insurmountable barriers. Yet, even political borders are both a historically contingent development and sites of contestation, which are “made and remade according to a host of shifting variables” (Nail 2016, 6, 14). Far from being immutable, they are “typically rooted in historically constructed structures of meanings”, i.e. “discursive landscapes of social power” (Paasi 2009) and are subject to the pressures of the two sides whose (often) conflicting interests they articulate. They are also permeable, in the sense of being sites where individuals cross from one space into another: “They at once separate and bring individuals together; they divide territories where different legal, political, ideological, religious, sartorial and dietary norms apply; and they also are the place where these various norms intersect and combine” (Graziano 2018, 1).

It is in fact this very tension between rigidity and fluidity, division and contact, that makes them such useful tools of analysis for the complexity of social and cultural interactions, and that has allowed border studies to develop, since the 1980s, as a rich interdisciplinary field. As Doris Wastl-Walter recapitulates, “a new, multidisciplinary generation of border scholars emerged, composed of, for instance, political geographers, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, sociologists, and lawyers, giving the field an increasingly interdisciplinary character” (Wastl-Walter 2011, 2). The interest in such an intellectual entry point has been so widespread across the humanities that some have called for theoretical limits to border theory (Johnson and Michaelsen 1997), while others, like Brunet-Jailly (2005), have been calling for a multidisciplinary theory of borders, albeit usually restricted to national borders.

One of the premises of this volume is that borders are a meeting place for disciplines which explore socio-cultural identities and their dynamic interactions, because of their capacity to articulate geographical, cultural and psychic spaces. Foundational to this ability is the fact that, in their literal and metaphorical senses, they can be thought of as sites of contiguity as much as of separation (Manzanas 2007, 12), as thresholds as much as barriers between an inside and an outside, a here and a there.

Most of all, they can be understood as processes: processes of division, but also processes of cultural redefinition and relocation. On the one hand, their production partakes of the endless creation of “categories of difference or separation” (Newman 2007, 35) that social and cultural encounters entail. As Rosello and Wolfe remind us: “[b]ordering is ordering, othering and negotiating difference” (2017, 12). On the other hand, border practices, the actual experience and negotiation of the border, may be understood as articulating questions of identity and cultural belonging, especially by those who are placeless or challenge the authority of existing demarcations. Homi Bhabha notably understood borders as “interstices,” “in-between” or liminal spaces that enable the hybrid interaction of cultures, allow identities to be recast and create alternative sites of meaning (Bhabha 1990, 1994). As he argued, borders have to be understood as performative spaces, rather than polarizing separations, where social and cultural difference is articulated in a “complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (Bhabha 1994, 2):

The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always be a process of hybridity, incorporating new “people” in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning […] What emerges as an effect of such “incomplete signification” is a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated. (Bhabha 1990, 4)

Since Bhabha, much emphasis has been placed on the border as a site of encounter between cultures, but also as a site of cultural resistance, a performative space where the locus of culture and knowledge is redefined and may be shown not to be immutable or self-contained (Benito and Manzanas 2002). “Border thinking,” thinking from the outside, has been understood as a crucial way to retrieve subjugated forms of knowledge that were invisibilized, for example by the modern/colonial world system (Mignolo 2000; Schimanski and Wolfe 2017). “Borderscapes,” rather than borderlines, have been investigated as a means to take into account the processual nature of the border as well as the “varied and differentiated encounters” that are negotiated around it (Brambilla 2015; Brambilla and Pötzsch 2017; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007).

This ongoing dialogue is a recurrent concern in this volume, which is not so much about the static (and yet repeatedly challenged) political borders that divide our contemporary world, as about borders as social, cultural, and territorial processes and practices that contribute to the shaping of identities. It is about the thick contact zones (Pratt 1992), borderscapes and cultural thresholds where cultures, communities and territories overlap, commingle, conflict and hybridize. It is especially about cultural resistance at the margin, subversive representations and reappropriations, small-scale strategies that are conceived to transgress impractical or oppressing borders, and a variety of border-crossing practices which are understood as so many “performative renegotiations” of identities (Rosello and Wolfe 2017, 2).

Most of all, it conceives the border as an interdisciplinary concept, whose articulation of the literal and the metaphorical, of the concrete territory and the imagined community, highlights the imbrication of political, social, environmental, discursive and aesthetic considerations. In other words, the exploration of the ways in which borders are negotiated at cultural and territorial levels is also envisioned as a way to cross, blur or redefine boundaries between disciplines—notably between literature, cultural studies, geography and history. Having to embrace a “specific focus on the paradoxical, on the contradictory, and on the conflicts of cultural practices and identity” (Alvarez Jr. 1995, 462) when looking at borders and borderlands may even lead to rethinking conceptual categories and epistemological postures.

The borders that are explored in this volume are for a large part the product of the expansion of the English-speaking world, of its territorial conquests and imperial project (from within the British Isles to the Americas, the Indian subcontinent and Africa), of the diasporas that it entailed, but also of the intellectual attitudes and social order that sustained it. They reflect the tensions between the boundaries imposed by European colonization and pre-colonial “territorial orders [that] were very different to European notions of territorial fixation” (Newman 2011, 40), both within the context of the British empire and in post-imperial times. Even today, territorial divisions remain as a legacy of former colonial rivalries in Africa or Asia, and imposed borders from colonial times shape national destinies, leading in some cases to the displacement of populations or warfare, but also fostering social and cultural dynamics that challenge such coercive geographies. While the contributions highlight processes of border building, definition and imposition within the English-speaking world, they also analyze a variety of strategies of resistance to its normative spaces, from the intractability of organic and natural boundaries to a diversity of forms of decolonial noncompliance.

The various contributions to this volume consider borders as pliable and multifaceted and examine the notions of subjective borders and normative borders as dynamic and malleable objects seen both through daily experiences and through literary, artistic or historical representations. Ranging from Victorian to contemporary times, and from Europe to the Americas and Africa, they offer a temporally and spatially multiscalar approach to the challenges presented by, and to, physical, natural, discursive, social or imaginary borders. They focus both on the making and transgressing of borders, and on their official or subversive representations as performative in that they can validate or invalidate imposed boundaries and categories.

The volume is divided into four parts, highlighting the complexity of border issues and the tools that the multidisciplinary and multinational approach inherent to anglophone studies can provide. For instance, the literary or musical perspective, added to the more traditional socio-spatial approach to border studies, reveals specific modes of resistance through fiction and song writing, or artistic performance. Each part focuses on one type of border or border crossing (territorial, natural, social, symbolic), and yet, in each of them the various contributions tackle issues that cut across strictly delimited thematic concerns. Each of the thirteen case studies conceptualizes the notion of borders, the result being a multidisciplinary dialogue between critical theory and a variety of literary/visual/cultural corpuses.

Part I, “Imposed Borders and Contested Geographies,” focuses on the more concrete, and seemingly more straightforward, aspects of border studies, i.e. territorial borders. Yet, the authors clearly demonstrate, through case studies covering three countries and continents (Ireland, the United States, Nigeria), how ambiguous these often reified borders can be (be it by physical obstacles, official maps or discourse), and how the study of these ambiguities and their historicity can help us uncover relations of power and domination, as well as symbolic—and not so symbolic—violence in the contemporary world. But this approach, in particular through the concept of imagined geographies, also uncovers the potential for political resistance in subverting such borders through graffiti, literature, an alternative perspective on territorial history. Because they are imposed by those who hold power over those who do not, contesting, crossing or ignoring these borders, knowingly or not, represents a de facto refusal of a given order and assigned categories often associated with inequality and discrimination.

In the first chapter, “Contested Borders: Northern Irish Murals and the Visualization of Territory,” Caroline Lehni examines the use of murals by both Republicans and Loyalists in the context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, focusing on iconographic elements but also on their location in space, in the area on and around borders between the two communities. The author demonstrates that through their imagery, those murals are used to express political views on reconciliation or residential segregation, the impact of which is compounded by their location along “peacelines” or “peace walls” within Northern Ireland. While site is always important in the study of murals, the effect is here amplified, since the message itself is territorial. As a result, even though a minority of murals do aim at crossing those sectarian borders, the majority of these performative images are not only representing physical and symbolic division, but also perpetuating, even sometimes creating it.

In “A History of Shifting Settler-colonial Borders: Reading the Native/Non-Native Territorial Palimpsest in and around Rapid City, SD,” Sandrine Baudry and Céline Planchou also explore the relationship between the concept of imagined geographies and border studies. They are taking a border town and its surrounding territory as a case study to reflect on overlapping native and non-native geographies, re-placing the drawing of arbitrary borders within the broader context of settler colonial violence. They explore how the dominant discourse on local geography is intertwined with the historical national narrative of territorial expansion and the move West, and the political project of erasure of Indigenous peoples, cultures, geographies and resistance. They also look at how current mundane practices, artistic expressions and decolonized research can offer counter narratives at the political and infrapolitical levels, and thus enable the resurgence of native geographies and spatially-based resistance. The chapter concludes with an epistemological reflection on the need for researchers to question their own ingrained tendency to validate dominant geographies as a given.

In the next chapter, Anna-Grace Scullion addresses similar issues of colonial geographies on a nearby territory, albeit from a literary perspective, focusing on an Ojibwe writer’s work. “The Decolonial Frontier: Landscape, Maps and Borders in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks” draws on the importance of land and place in Indigenous culture as well as in Erdrich’s writings and takes a look at how literature can be used as a means to redefine borders in a general context of decolonial resistance. The author focuses on the cultural and historical nature of landscapes and maps, and thus of borders, showing how Erdrich’s references to vernacular landscapes is in itself a form of resistance to the relationship to space imposed by settler colonialism, even though the land her stories are set on is fictional. She also broadens her analysis beyond the novel Tracks and the case of the Ojibwe to look at how maps, borders and the settler’s relationship to land are a general imposition on colonized people. This contribution brings a perspective both on the importance of maps and borders in the colonial project, and on the power of literature as a means to reject those imposed geographies.

Finally, Joseph Egwurube provides a different perspective on the notions of Indigeneity and identity and their relationship to imposed borders. In “‘Indigeneity’, ‘Statism’ and ‘Federal Character’: The manufacture of Inter-communal borders in the Federal republic of Nigeria,” he focuses on current intra-national borders, the political, historical and ethno-cultural dynamics behind their increasing number, and the impact they have on the rights of citizens. The author examines the relationship between the rapid redrawing of borders and the issue of national cohesion and sense of belonging, since these borders clearly define two categories of citizens, indigenes and settlers, the latter suffering from discrimination and reduced rights. Since the status of a given individual depends on whether they are living in their state of origin, the redefinition of state borders automatically redefines the new minority “aliens.” Those imposed borders thus clearly reflect the power dynamics between ethnic and linguistic groups, at the same time as they foster inequality and disunity within the federal nation, and as such are the object of contestation.

Part II, “Natural and Symbolic Boundaries,” examines the correlation between natural forms and their occasional function as borders. It also uncovers the powerful symbolic significance that arises from such natural borders, which are inextricably linked with cultural practices such as surveying, travelling, visiting, exploring. Encompassing the representations of the Black Forest visited by British travelers in the Victorian era, the marshes of New England in Thoreau’s writings and Ron Rash’s borders made of barbed wire in the Appalachian Mountains, this part foregrounds borders as highly symbolic interfaces and stimulators of the imagination. The chapters included in this section emphasize the importance of language, writing and metaphor in the representation of borders. Borders grow out of the texts that discuss them and their symbolic significances are richly layered. Instead of signifying simply as rigid forms of limitation and demarcation, the boundaries discussed in this section are imaginative, cultural and poetic tropes that ramify in many directions.

Julien Nègre’s “Writing Without Borders? Thoreau’s Remapping of Borders Through Language” examines the interaction between Henry David Thoreau’s direct experience of borders and his work as a writer. Using both Thoreau’s texts and cartographic material, Nègre makes a compelling case for Thoreau’s interest in borders without putting forth the conventionally expected argument of Thoreau writing “without borders” and challenging the fixity of human borders. As a professional surveyor, Thoreau was familiar with the scientific and technical aspects of border-tracing. He was writing in the 1840s and 1850s, a period of crystallization and stabilization of the national borders of the United States. Nègre contends that although it might seem that Thoreau simply discards the artificiality of borders, he is actually very much interested in borders as phenomena of the natural world, especially in later writings like The Dispersion of Seeds and Wild Fruits. Nègre also studies Thoreau’s interest in borders on the level of language, suggesting that Thoreau confers fluidity, through linguistic play, to the deceptive stability of borders. Borders in Thoreau are interpreted as “meaningful interfaces” which are “complexly productive” (a phrase borrowed from Lawrence Buell) and not simply targets of negative critique.

Frédérique Spill’s “‘One man’s tenuous hold on the earth’: The Metaphor of Barbed Wire in Ron Rash’s Writing” deals with contemporary American novelist, short story writer and poet Ron Rash. Rash is very much interested in the question of place, in particular the Appalachian Mountains where his works are usually set. The chapter follows a recurrent metaphor in Rash’s writing, that of barbed wire, whose symbolic significance evolves and which uncovers social, cultural and individual tensions. Several texts are analyzed: Rash’s first novel One Foot in Eden, the short story “Into the Gorge,” the poems “Watershed” and “Barbed Wire.” The chapter demonstrates how Rash turns “a mundane object into a poetic trope” and unravels the numerous semantic and symbolic meanings of barbed wire. The latter often functions, literally and figuratively, as a border: it “encapsulates man’s urge to draw boundaries in order to mark his territory,” it signifies transgression, it is associated with punishment and martyrdom, it marks the division between reason and the irrational, the living and the dead, and it can be read as an attempt to master land and fate at the same time.

Stephanie Lethbridge (“The Past in the Present: the Black Forest in Victorian periodicals”) discusses Victorian tourism in the Black Forest, a topic that has received little critical attention. In an age of growing travel practices and industrial development, the Victorians entering the Black Forest experienced a phenomenon of border-crossing from their industrialized society into the darkness of the German forest (emblematic of Germany as a whole), which functioned as a spatial and as a temporal border taking the travelers back to pre-modern times. Such “b/ordering practices” resulted in asserting and reinforcing cultural differences, since they bolstered the self-confidence of British travelers who would find confirmation of the supposed superiority of their culture. Although associated with nature in an obvious way, the Black Forest was also a pre-mediated concept and place, already interpreted by classical sources, fairy tales and gothic literature. The pre-scripted readings of Black Forest spaces rendered the experiences beyond cultural borders less alienating. Simultaneously with the crossing of physical borders, conceptual borders are reinforced, restricting the tourist’s experience to an aesthetic and cultural one. In the end, the material crossing of borders does not entail a crossing of imaginary and conceptual borders, which remain intact.

Parts III and IV underline the role played by gender, class, race and ethnicity in the creation of symbolic and cultural borders, but also in the urge to push back and transgress existing boundaries...