This chapter examines the period around independence in Rwanda and Kivu. The 1950s saw the maturation and increasing salience of “national” and “ethnic” aspects of people’s identities as they became central to political discussions over “autochthony” and access to resources. Changing political contexts made the ground more fertile for “ethnic,” as well as “national” identity to become part of the political vernacular.

For Rwanda, it focuses on the refugee waves that were the result of political violence against Tutsi in the period between 1959 and 1964. It shows that focusing too narrowly on the forced nature of their mobility disguises previous connections that were conducive to helping Tutsi refugees establish themselves in Congo. The chapter thus reiterates the importance of looking at people’s “personal information fields” as well as other preexisting affective or other ties in understanding the patterns of their mobility. For Kivu, the chapter tries to explore what other fault lines become visible when one shifts the attention away from “identity” as the sole explanation for violent conflicts, such as the “Kanyarwanda wars” in the 1960s.

A last point this chapter makes is the changing meanings of the border between Rwanda and Congo, for people living in its vicinity as well as for the Belgian administration. Whereas the Belgians had always benefited from the close connections between Kivu and Rwanda, this changed almost overnight in 1960 when Congo became independent. Both Rwandans and Congolese had used cross-border connections to build political networks and to organize out of the reach of the colonial state and traditional authorities. After Congo’s independence, the loss of control over subversive activities just across the border caused anxieties for the Belgians in Rwanda. For Congolese and Rwandans, independence turned the border into a national boundary, separating Rwandan from Congolese political sovereignty as well as altering the sense of national belonging.

This chapter argues that Western border thinking emerges concurrent with early formulations of conquest and labor management. Tracing an arc that begins with Spanish philosopher Juan Maldonado and concludes with African philosopher Achille Mbembe, the chapter discusses the utility of borders to the concepts of self, property, and freedom. It further argues that such conceptual work of borders has also been challenged and reconceptualized by contemporary poets and novelists including, most famously, Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Sandra Cisneros, Alfredo Aguilar, and Eric Gansworth (Tuscarora). Each of these attend to the ways borders serve as generators of revenue for states and as abjection machines, but also as places of habitation, as processes, and as dense horizontalities, rather than as fixtures on a nested hierarchy of scales.

In most scholarly accounts, borders are portrayed simply as thin, jurisdictional lines; they define where one sovereignty ends and a new one begins. Recently, scholars have shown that borders are increasingly becoming wide and zonal – an important advance in our understanding. In this chapter, however, it is suggested that even these accounts are insufficient to change our paradigm as they still rely on the state/territory/border triad as their baseline and see contemporary changes as deviations from this norm. In other words, while such work can generate shifts in our understanding of borders, they nonetheless perpetuate the border’s naturalness. To redress this problem, this chapter begins by defining the “Westphalian” border as it is conventionally understood – distinguishing two features, borders-as-authority and borders-as-control. Second, it looks at the development of modern bordering to locate when this “Westphalian” border starts to take shape. The chapter concludes with a reconceptualization – referred to as the Accordion Model – which captures the conditional and oscillating relationship between states, territories, and borders. The hope is that by doing so, we might chip away at the hegemonic hold that the linear border – and the state/territory/borders triad – has on our political imaginaries

The border exists not only as a function of its physicality, but also of the way its discipline is internalized by migrants and asylum seekers. At the intersection of both, this chapter focuses on how asylum seekers are led to minimize the element of migrancy in their trajectories, making the reasons why they aspire to seek asylum in some countries than others invisible to international law. Contra this invisibility, it makes the case that asylum seekers, even as they flee persecution, are migrants too, drawn by certain countries rather than others on the basis of varying life projects and ongoing connections. The impossibility to normatively articulate such an ambition within the categories of international law must count as one of the considerable costs imposed by the border’s disciplining effect.

Human space is transformed into territory through multiple types of delineation, from closed limits materialised in the landscape (such as fortresses, barriers, etc.), to open and blurred limits forming transition areas, known and practised by actors. In the kind of territorial state which Egypt had been since its birth, it was essential for the rulers to spatially mark the limits of their sovereignty. During the New Kingdom, the economic and political integration of the border districts was made possible thanks to the khetem border posts and their administration. The aim was to ensure the integrity and security of the kingdom, by investing or even overinvesting in its periphery, in terms of political decision, discourse and representations. The king and his administration were well aware that the integrity of the state was at stake in these border zones. Yet, in spite of the uniformity of the discourse, and the fact that the same name was applied to all border posts around Egypt, as well as the same title to the person in charge of these settlements, it appears that the system adapted to and was intimately linked with the local situation and the specificities of each border region.

Ascertaining whether or not nations existed in the ancient Near East is not merely for the sake of determining historically when these territorial relations of social kinship appear.1 If the evidence, however complicated, suggests the existence of nations in the ancient Near East, a more accurate understanding of not only antiquity but also “modern times” should emerge, as the classification of the self and others on the basis of birth and residence in a territory would not have originated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and certainly would not be novel to the so-called “Age of Nationalism” of the nineteenth century.

In this chapter, we examine the nascent research on Latinx immigrant romantic relationships, with a particular focus on Central American undocumented and mixed-status immigrant partners rearing children in the United States. We use a socioculturally-attuned lens to reflect on the ways in which the context of illegality shapes romantic relationships between partners, where at least one person is undocumented. As we discuss, illegality is a term used to refer to the US immigration laws, policies, and practices that expose immigrants and their families to discrimination, exploitation, victimization, criminalization, detainment, deportation, and family separation based on liminal legal statuses. We argue in this chapter that illegality is a powerful structural force that transcends cultural explanations of Latinx immigrant romantic relationships. We draw upon a recent study of Central American immigrant women in romantic relationships to apply our socioculturally-attuned lens and underscore how illegality conditions and constrains their relational experiences and opportunities while residing in the United States. We conclude with considerations for family and relationship scholars of immigrant family life seeking to advance immigrant justice.

This chapter begins with a consideration of the importance to sovereignty of the right to deport. Beyond exploring what constitutes sovereignty and how such power is preserved and held, it examines why so little attention has been paid to life after expulsion. Expulsion (real or threatened) kidnaps time, creates unlimited forms of captivity, invigorates shame, normalizes violence, and stabilizes concepts such as citizenship and belonging. Showing the long buried links between colonial and US treatment of Indigenous peoples and contemporary deportation practices, the chapter reveals how knitted into the imaginary of belonging forced removal has become. While scholars have slowly begun exploring the experience of life after forced removal, writers of fiction have taken up the question as well and have begun offering portraits of the experience of navigating detention camps and rebuilding a life that might be sustainable after the violence of expulsion. Novels by Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, Lisa Ko, Helton Habila, Mohshin Hamid, and Jenny Erpenbeck are examined in detail because of their careful attention to living a deportable and deported life.

This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of processes of migration, the crossing of borders, and the question of identity formation. These themes are central to Rushdie’s work, which reflects his own journeys. His novels have featured prominently national and transnational migrants. Indeed, Saleem Sinai’s journeys in Midnight’s Children traverse the entire subcontinent. Focusing specifically on Shalimar the Clown and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and with reference to The Satanic Verses, Shame, and a selection of short stories and essays from Imaginary Homelands, this chapter explores how Rushdie has approached the question of migration, identity formation, and the position of being in diaspora. The representations of community, home, and belonging and of the diaspora condition emerge in his works through border crossings, liminal spaces, and the sensory and somatic disorientation of the migrant.

This chapter focuses on recently published personal stories of migration, whether in the form of narratives of migrants asserting their autonomy of movement as they confront ever more abundant and perilous challenges, or of repatriated migrants unable to respond to a highly fortified border industrial complex that subordinates them with ever harsher callousness and cruelty. These stories – a travel narrative by a Haitian migrant, a series of children’s books written by deported mothers, and a digital storytelling project – reflect recent phenomena that have yet to be taken up meaningfully in more prestigious and widely distributed works. The chapter focuses on testimonial genres, with the aim of understanding their effectiveness in communicating lived experiences within and across the open wounds of contemporary borders in the Americas and in relating the emotional consequences of forced displacement, undocumented border crossing, migrant criminalization, xenophobic violence, and detention and deportation regimes. These stories were all published with a certain urgency from what for many migrants remains the deepest, most painful, and longest-festering lesion in the Americas, the USA–Mexico borderlands. These stories’ poignancy is achieved less through literariness than from raw experience, as they document new dynamics of human displacement in the Americas.

Christine Cusick argues in this chapter that “an ethics of environmental engagement [often] decenters a sense of nation,” revising our sense of identity honed within discourses of political modernity. She focuses on this crucial aspect of ecological dwelling, countering the rise of nationalist discourses in the twenty-first century. Irish literature, like many other postcolonial literary traditions, is in a bind here: Questions related to borders and border transgressions (central to the discourse of political modernity) need to be rethought in the present. Cusick notes that “Implicit in the question of border mapping is the familiar question about how a critical discourse might approach texts as locally embedded without denigrating global import.” The essay draws on the work of the geographer Nessa Cronin and the polymathic narratives of Tim Robinson but moves beyond them to center contemporary Irish writers.

Best known for her links to Italy, where she moved at eighteen, Vernon Lee was a Pan-European who viewed western Europe as a single entity unified by shared culture and history despite local languages and customs. Born into an expatriate family, she learned multiple languages as her family shifted residences during her youth, including stays in Germany and Switzerland. More important, Vernon Lee’s wonder and imagination were awakened by her German-speaking Bernese governess who taught her German fairy tales and legends as well as history and literature; the governess also imparted a profound experience of female love. This chapter posits Lee’s foundational German-related childhood experiences as key to her psychological, sexual, and imaginative formation; her supernatural and historical writing; and her sexuality. After demonstrating the Anglo–German conversation of Lee’s supernatural tales, especially ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Woman’, with German lore and the romantic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the chapter focuses on the novella Ottilie (1883) as a site of Lee’s conceptualisation of haunted historical narrative. It concludes with a feminist reading of Ottilie and proposes the novella’s suitability as an imagined history of Ottilie von Goethe.

What caused MCP strategy to radically change in October 1951, and to what effect? This chapter shows the MCP believed it had to change as geodemographic control tightened, and how it switched to a ‘long war’ strategy with lower force and incident levels but more determined subversion and greater use of the deep jungle. It then traces how that new strategy played out over 1951–4, until by the latter date the headquarters had retreated to south Thailand, numbers were falling slowly but inexorably and the MCP had started to contemplate negotiation. Above all, this chapter threads together the story from the communist perspective, both above with Chin Peng and colleagues, and from below in its struggles in the New Villages.

Mary Pat Brady’s chapter poses an alternative approach to hemispheric fiction by reading not according the scales of concentric geometries of space (local, regional, national, transnational), but instead reconceptualizing what she terms “pluriversal novels of the 21st century.” She argues for attending to the complexly mixed temporalities, perspectives, and languages of novels that reject the dualism of monoworlds (center/periphery) for the unpredictability of stories anchored in multiple space-times. While this is not an exclusively 21st-century phenomenon, she shows that pluriveral fiction has flourished recently, as works by Linda Hogan, Jennine Capó Crucet, Julia Alvarez, Gabby Rivera, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Evelina Zuni Lucero demonstrate.

This chapter uproots the border from the perimeter of the country, from the traditional dyad in which it is embedded and releases it in the urban landscape. The premise is that just as the category of space has been mobilized in the work of geographers such as Doreen Massey, it is possible to transfer this process of destabilization to the concept of the border and the shifting categories of crossers and gatekeepers. Borders are always in the process of being reconfigured, always in the midst of being drawn but also blurred. Through a selection of works by Latinx and Asian American writers the chapter looks at borders not only in their “ordering” dimension but also as sites that allow for reordering strategies of self-definition. These writers occupy a border in process and write from within the border. As a result, the places of resettlement where ethnoracialized and subaltern subjects have been traditionally relocated become repossessed to constitute a privileged standpoint and a self-fashioning from within. This double perspective of urban borders allows both to acknowledge the productivity of boundaries as well as their violation and subversion.