Borders and Boundaries
Why is our world divided into territories with supposedly inviolable lines? Why are they fought over? Are borders necessary to provide us with security? Or to protect the integrity of peoples and cultures? Have borders always existed? How have they changed over the centuries? How do they relate to the inherent workings of the mind and of language? How do subnational borders relate to national borders? Why, despite an increasingly interconnected world, are borders more important than ever?
A boundary is a real or imagined line demarcating space – something quite useful in geometry, and in many aspects of the human world; in cognitive science, the term is employed metaphorically to designate not just spatial, but also temporal or even conceptual divisions. A border is a specific type of boundary, one with geopolitical significance – a significance which continues to increase, despite decades of talk and certain active tendencies to the contrary.
Over the four weeks of this seminar we will focus on political borders, while also giving some attention to the more abstract notion of a boundary. We will engage with several different angles on these issues. The focus will be on theories of borders and boundaries, but there will also be readings from empirically oriented research, with special attention to the US/Mexico border and its wider effects. We will look beyond the physical locations of borders to understand the role they play in political imaginations, and in our conceptions of the world. Thus we will spend a significant amount of time trying to unpack theories of nationalism and the nation-state. We will also scrutinize the related ideas of sovereignty, territory, secession and annexation.
People have been on the move for millennia. Even as the nation-state form and its associated conception of citizenship consolidated in the nineteenth century, migration boomed, thus immediately problematizing the boundaries of these units. Nevertheless, it was only in the twentieth century that nation-state borders really began to be actively controlled. This was manifested in the passport becoming a near-universal requirement for travel and migration, in turn further magnifying the importance of citizenship. Thus we will look at how the institution of citizenship and its physical manifestation in the passport relate to the broader question of borders.
Though many studies of borders omit them, we will spend one week pondering political borders below the level of the nation-state. In federal countries such as the US, subnational borders have a high level of importance for many matters of modern life such as education and taxation. The historically rigid borders of the states and the flexible borders of localities raise questions about a democratic deficit, which we will look into. Another form of subnational border flies below the radar but is increasingly important: those of special districts, set up for infrastructural or various financial reasons, but often taking on roles beyond their initial scopes. But we will tie all of these phenomena back to the global scale and the division of the world into nation-states.
Authors to be read will likely include Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Benedict Anderson, Katherine Johnson, Reece Jones, Mahmood Mamdani, Steffen Mau, Nicholas de Genova, David Gordon, Daniel Lazare, Thomas Nail, Alex Sager, Nandita Sharma, John Torpey, and Harsha Walia.
