Concept: Border

Definition:

1. a line separating two political or geographical areas, especially countries.
2. the edge of something, and the term is usually employed to define the line separating two political or geographical areas.

Related terms: borderscapes, borderlines, frontier, boundary, citizenship, illegal immigrant, surveillance

Description: Borders have always been central to the conversation about migration: travelers become migrants as they traverse borderlines between countries, cities, and other politically charged configurations of space, to begin a new life. The concept has become particularly relevant in recent years as the world witnesses ongoing migratory movements, stemming from various humanitarian crises in Central America, Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Asia; these movements are portrayed by newsmedia as the impetus of masses of people to transcend geopolitical borders and bring their cultural values with them. For better or worse, borders have become central to policymaking in response to those movements, as the global discussion revolves around building impenetrable walls on borderlines or, on the contrary, boosting the transition to a more open world with more permeable frontiers.

Narratives of the border and border-crossings continue to thrive in various old and new media forms – from poetry to novels to television drama to graffiti and map art. Along the Arizona-Mexico border, for instance, the physical barrier is used as surface for border art in which people on both sides voice their concerns. Equally, some artists have been challenging the borders between scholarship, autobiography and imaginative cultural forms, written, visual and performative.

But the gap between people’s responses to political maps of borders as compared to artistic ones remains. In a collaborative experiment by artists and media designers in Colombia and Venezuela in 2000, a map erasing the border between the two countries was circulated and respondents were asked to create their own map of the territory. While most communicated a notion of shared identity and cross-border interactions, they also tended to reinstate the political border as it normally exists, thus showing their internalization of maps based on state-defined territories.

The complexity of experience of people inhabiting borderlands, migrant or not, has led to increasing interest in the idea of borderscapes, where emphasis is being placed on the border as a sign-system.

S.C. 2016

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