Although several scholars have expanded their selection criteria when editing anthologies of Latinx literature, they rarely include writings by colonial Creoles. Focusing on Francisco de Florencia (1620–1695), this chapter argues that his 1694 provincial chronicle of the Jesuits in New Spain deserves to be studied with other colonial texts that have been described as “symbolic precursors” to Latinx writings. Unlike other Spanish explorers and missionaries who traveled to the Spanish Borderlands, Florencia was born there; his hometown was Saint Augustine, he lived most of his life in Mexico City, and he spent almost a decade in southern Europe representing his religious province. Florencia’s frontier crossings offer early modern examples of border crossings, themes that emerge in the ways he deals with transnational experiences and influences, questions of belonging, and a sense of space. Even though sacred (or ecclesiastical) history is often overlooked in studies of Latinx literature, an analysis of the ways in which Florencia engages with earlier Spanish accounts of the Jesuit missions in La Florida is a unique window onto Creole identities in the early modern Spanish world.

This chapter examines what happens when we decolonize the materiality of the nineteenth-century Hispano-American anthology, when we move away from the anthology as a book form with colonial publishers, titles, sections, bylines, and expand it to centralize the (formerly) colonized and their ephemera, that is, Hispano-American editors, readers, and writers as well the Spanish-language newspapers they edited, read, and wrote for. What do these perspectives teach us about the emergence of what we now call a Latinx people and literary tradition? Mirroring the instability of the region following the US–Mexico War and the ontological uncertainty of its readers, newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público represent the formation of a pre-Latinx literary tradition. The newspaper’s editor and proprietor, Francisco P. Ramírez gave expression to what I call a Hispano-American borderlands anthology of poetry before there was a formalized creation of a Latinx poetic tradition in the United States.

The Ottoman Empire’s territorial and maritime reach throughout its nearly 600-year existence led to a plethora of adversaries at whose expense the empire continued to expand. The resulting boundaries that constantly shifted over time prove to be sites of cultural, socioeconomic, as well as political history. Ottoman borders are critical windows into the dynamics shaping the larger empire, including the great urban centers often located far from these frontiers. The territorial limits (or beginnings) of this multiethnic empire, extending from South Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and Libya, to the Danube and the Caucasus, are crucial tools to gain insights into the complexities that constitute the processes by which the Ottomans administered as much as lived in these regions. Be they witness to the stability that accompanied peace between neighboring states or the frequent volatility caused by war, the empire’s edges served as theaters for intraimperial development that shaped subject and state alike.

This chapter reconstructs the ethical ambiguities and popular anxieties that emerged during a spectacular period of coffee smuggling in the 1970s, centered in Chepkube village near the border of Kenya and Uganda. The criminalized trade provided residents with newfound wealth and consumptive possibility; magendo, as it was known, also was a stark challenge to the Ugandan state’s ability to monopolize the valuation of its most important export. However, participants’ unease did not reflect the illegality of magendo. Rather, the excessive and rapid riches acquired through coffee smuggling challenged prevailing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. In other words, existing ideas about how proper value should be morally produced—through laborious effort and familial networks—were undermined by the sudden revaluation of coffee. Smuggling is a form of arbitrage, a style of economic action premised on the capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, of measurement, and of appearance. Magendo participants actively worked to produce such differences in order to acquire wealth; yet arbitrage generated an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. Based on oral histories and fieldwork on both sides of the border, this chapter reveals how the careful orchestration of social relations and material goods is at the heart of valuation, and it emphasizes how popular valuation practices change and conflict with state projects of governing value and defining citizenship.

The sites of Vindolanda in Great Britain and Jianshui Jinguan, present-day Gansu, have produced exciting paleographic evidence pertaining to the borders of the Roman and the Han Chinese empires, respectively. Archaeological excavations at both sites have brought to light many written sources, on inscribed thin tablets and strips of locally available woods, that cast a spotlight on what their authors associated with their assignment in the fringes of empire. Imperfect analogues as these two locations are, rich in cultural idiosyncrasy, Charles Sanft undertakes a comparative analysis that brings both data sets into close conceptual conversation. He begins his discussion with observations on the abstract nature of ancient borders: neither tangible nor “real,” borders were, Sanft argues, a projection of culturally encoded imaginaries. Following this investigative vein, he then explores the spatial essence of Roman and Han Chinese borders. Before turning to the actual sites and documents, Sanft reminds his audience of the convoluted relation between space and place; the latter is understood as a local environment that can be experienced by individuals who are, in turn, aware of the distinct experience of place. The examination of the Vindolanda tablets and Jianshui Jinguan reveals an absence of this type of experience from the written records; hence, the imagination of border postings does not find articulation in terms of experience. Sanft translates this discovery into extensive and indeed paramount conclusions on the Roman and the Han Chinese understanding of borderlands, which was subject to imaginations of far-flung imperial spaces rather than actual engagements with place.

This chapter explores the relationship between natives and migrants in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945 using contemporaries’ memoirs. It shows that migration status and region of origin served as salient identity markers, structuring interpersonal relations and shaping collective action in the newly formed communities. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that indigenous villages and villages populated by a more homogeneous migrant population were more successful in organizing volunteer fire brigades than villages populated by migrants from different regions.

This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

Major spent his career in a strategic borderland where knowledge was embroiled in long-running territorial disputes. Competing princes built collections, laboratories, and intelligence-gathering networks in attempts to strengthen the resources of the land and their hold upon it. Their rival attempts to found global colonies and establishing long-distance trading networks entangled tightly with their global collections. The Gottorf dukes intended the new university to be another fixture of a state-building apparatus that already included glassworks, a chymical laboratory, extensive gardens, a celebrated collection, a planetarium, and an impressive library. These nearby facilities offered the University of Kiel sophisticated resources. They also illustrated the dangers of intertwining knowledge tightly with use. The shifting political situation allowed and even required scholars to seek beyond a single patron for support. This setting can illuminate Major’s attempts to defend academic independence, to develop audiences across rival states and a broader public, and to develop "unprejudiced" approaches.

Identifying a predominant focus in spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetries, this chapter suggests that diasporic self-mapping is often ambivalent as poets navigate shifting or liminal spaces. The chapter argues that geopolitical differences distinguish Asian Australian experiences from those of their Asian American counterparts. It examines the mediation of migration and understanding of past and present in the work of Ee Tiang Hong, and how transnational mobility informs the hybrid and spliced practice of Ouyang Yu and Merlinda Bobis. The chapter analyses an intergenerational feminist interest in borders and journeys in the work of Bobis and Eunice Andrada. It then examines how later-generation poets may face quite different challenges in navigating ancestral homeland and the search for connections, or, alternatively, find a freedom in travelling and uncertainty. The chapter also considers transcultural and translational strategies, and discusses Omar Sakr’s mapping of “unbelonging.” The chapter concludes by asserting that the rich heterogeneity of poetries cannot be reduced to a single term, even in such a disruptor term as “Asian Australian.”

Although Spanish colonizers expected horses to enforce social order, new environments for breeding and keeping horses and colonial interdependence on Indigenous populations also subverted these expectations. Licenses to ride horses offers a widespread example of this new political ecology. Across New Spain and Peru, Indigenous allies gained access to horses according to Spanish customs that rewarded military service to the crown, cases that emphasize the powerful imprint of the horse in Spanish governance. More broadly, the development of Indigenous equestrianisms both within and outside of Spanish spheres of influence demonstrate the complex boundary work involved in navigating a new interspecies landscape and producing new forms of knowledge.

This chapter examines complex interplays of utopia/dystopia in the context of European colonization through two works: Alberto Yáñez’s postcolonial zombie narrative, “Burn the Ships,” and Yuri Herrera’s dystopian Signs Preceding the End of the World. These works grapple with biopolitical dialectics between utopia and dystopia, belonging and exclusion, and competing identities and epistemologies of mestizaje hybridity. Using as a starting point codices produced by mestiz@ scribes in the dystopian post-Conquest society of sixteenth-century New Spain, analysis draws from Damián Baca’s Mestiz@ rhetoric to demonstrate how these texts exemplify what he defines as a “powerful Mestiz@ rhetorical strategy” of nepantlism – “a strategy of thinking from a border space.” By self-reflexively engaging this Mestiz@ rhetoric through diegetic elements, these texts subvert hegemonic narratives of assimilation in the context of imperialism and the border.

The forced migration of French-speaking Acadians, Wabanaki tribes, and Loyalist refugees have rarely been considered in relationship with one another. Yet their principal movements centered on the Northeastern Borderlands of North America (bounded by Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec), and their interconnected movements spiked from the 1750s to the 1830s. This comparative assessment shows that while each of these coerced mobilities had distinctive qualities, large-scale population movement was the most basic foundation of colonialismss. Acadian, Loyalist, and Wabanaki movements shaped one another and were often associated with violence and trauma. At the same time, mobility offered opportunities and could nurture resilience. The legacies of forced migration in the Northeastern Borderlands during an early period of sustained warfare persist today, especially in the legal cases, artwork, and collective memory of Wabanaki people, who still live in their traditional homeland.

The entwinement of Attica and Boiotia brought with it challenges and opportunities. This geographical entanglement will be analysed to understand how the geological situation influenced neighbourly relations. The entwinement ensured considerations of proximity were always at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds. It also created a distinct relationship between the Athenians and Boiotians. Scholarship previously focused on border disputes as the governing mode of interaction in the borderlands, yet the lived experience was different, as this investigation shows. Analysis of the Mazi and Skourt plains, and the adjacent lands of Plataia and Oropos, demonstrates that these contested lands were not the cause of hostilities, but often a consequence of a pre-existing war; that is, territorial disputes were the result rather than the cause of enmity. Boiotia’s maritime connectivity through its harbours provided another strategic consideration for the Athenians, whose interest in the region was partially predicated on the function of these harbours as strategic hubs in the Corinthian Gulf. Finally, Boiotia’s role as a buffer is investigated and how that influenced neighbourly relations. The security it provided Athens meant that the latter consistently aimed to obtain Boiotia as a shield for its hinterland, whether through force or willingly.