Description
Book SynopsisBorder and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness focuses on the idea of border and its various geopolitical, sociocultural, and cognitive incarnations. In recent times, border has emerged as a common trope in contemporary language with phenomena such as bordering, borderless, building borders, breaking borders, crossing borders, porous borders, and shifting borders. Whether concrete or shadow, borders are omnipresent. The volume contains sixteen essays on various aspects of thinking border as well as border-thinking in literature, philosophy, historiography, strategic studies, films, and TV series. Such a collection is symptomatic of the very interdisciplinarity of border and the varied experiences of bordering as manifested in different modes of expression. This study of the multiplicity of experiences is intrinsic to our understanding of border, so much so that borders can only be read through an interdisciplinary approach. This interdisciplinarity is immanent to the concept of border and imminent (to come) to the phenomenon of bordering. Also, the volume quite explicitly deals with themetaphorsof border(s): as border(s) may not necessarily be always visible and tangible but also cognitive and metaphysical. This volume intends to attract not only academics but all readers, and that is precisely the reason why it has been designed in such a way.This book, therefore, is not yet-another volume on critical border studies and area studies. In doing border, the book enables us to go beyond the boundaries of border studies and area studiesas its authors believe that studies of border studies and area studies have become as regimented as the borders of the nation-state.
Trade ReviewNever before in human history did the issues of border and border crossing figure so prominently as they do at the present time. Large-scale migrations, forced or voluntary, in the age of transnationalism have foregrounded debates about the relevance of national borders. Recent surveys conducted by social scientists demonstrate how economic and social transactions continue across borders despite stringent surveillance of border areas. At the same time, citizenship and statelessness have become a raging issue. In the context of such a situation the publication of the edited volume entitled Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness which includes articles on actual and metaphorical dimensions of border studies is very timely. Himadri Lahiri, NSOU, Author of Diaspora Theory and Transnationalism (Literary/Cultural Theory)
Table of ContentsForeword by Bill Ashcroft; Preface by Jayjit Sarkar and Auritra Munshi; Introduction; Contemporary Fiction as a Cultural Map of Migration; Statelessness and the Tensions between Open Borders and the Claims of Community; Rejection, Reconstruction and Erosion of Borders: The Identity Path of Grisélidis Réal; A Place Not Our Own: Gulf Emigration and Bordered Lives in Benyamins Jasmine Days; Challenges and Resistance to the Partition of Bengal: Impact of Baul and Marafati Oral Tradition; Bordering the Screen: Separation Themes in Popular Film and Television; Representation of Incarcerated Women in Orange is the New Black: An Intersectional Feminist Approach; Tracks and Borders: Railways in Rays Apu Trilogy; Oceanic Borders: Climate Refugees, Borders and Extinction in the Necrocene; Fuzzy (B)ordering: More than Human Agencies and the Ethics of (Dis)avowal; I alone . . . was on both sides: The Hyphenated Self in Hélène Cixouss Reveries of the Wild Woman; Borders in South Asia: Language, Culture and Religion from Colonialism to Globalization; Missing Links or the Diasporic Journey of a Rebel: A Study of H P Malets Lost Links in Indian Mutiny (1867); Un-blinding Doctrine and Exiting Molar Lines in Arnolds The Scholar Gipsy; Reorganising (B)orders: Reading the Womens Writing in Colonial Bengal; Erasing the Borders: Tagores Engagement with the Subalterns in Sahaj Path; Contributors; Index.
