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This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and representation in different borderscapes. It provides fresh insight into the ways in which borders, borderscapes and migration are imagined and narrated by offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border. The case studies in the volume contribute to the methodological renewal of border studies and present ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. The case studies address the role of borders in narrative and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, video art and survivor testimonies in a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from northern Europe, via Mediterranean and Mexican–US borderlands to Chinese borderlands. The disciplinary approaches include critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies and political geography. The volume argues that borderlands and border-crossings (such as those by migrants) are present in public discourse and more private, everyday experience. This volume addresses their mediation through various stories, photographs, films and other forms. It suggests that narratives and images are part of the borderscapes in which border-crossings and bordering processes take place, contributing to the negotiation of borders in the public sphere. As the case studies show, narratives and images enable identifying various top-down and bottom-up discourses to be heard and make visible different minority groups and constituencies.
point, this time arguing from the perspective of the reader or viewer, in an essay about his map-making process: ‘we could not use or even bear to look at a map that was not mostly blank’.2 In describing the means by which he created maps of the Aran Islands, Connemara and the Burren, Robinson also describes the aesthetics of writing about place; his maps and his books both function as ‘conceptual model[s]of the terrain projected onto paper … representation[s] of spatial relationships in a symbolism that facilitates calculations’.3 In the same essay he explains that
how these places are a locus, that is, the anchor point of a multidimensional message. The second part of the text will highlight the links between the different aesthetic productions at the borders, a performative ‘inter-visualisation’ that would constitute a type of ‘global art’ (Belting, 2009 ) of the border. Finally, this overview will allow me to lay the foundations for a renewed reflection on the relationship between aesthetics and politics as mediated by the space. In a post-political approach to images, i.e., one that reveals the conceit of the quest of
opening scene in the showers of the school gym. Fantastic border-crossings are highly ritualised. Evoking the explicit invitation a vampire needs to cross the threshold, the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In / Låt den rätte komma in (dir. Tomas Alfredson, 2008 ) embeds this border ritual in its title. From the same writer, Border / Gräns (dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018 ) further illustrates the fruitful combination between the aesthetics of the fantastic and the themes of the border. Set on the Swedish border, the film voices concerns about the
concerns the relationship, practical and analogical, between the photograph and 150 Stitching memories the map, and in particular the challenge that the excessive, visibly fractured temporality of photographic mapping poses to the lingering notion of the map as having a snapshot (a)temporality, in Wood’s terms, or of being ‘a slice through time’, in Massey’s words (2005: 107). The stress on atemporality effects in studies of the aesthetics and cultural impact of geomedia, and the conflation of the cartographic and technological/cultural versions of timelessness in
of classical modernism and suggests the idea or, rather, the promise of overcoming all sorts of limitations and restrictions. Friedrich Schlegel's famous 116th Athenaeum fragment points to this narrative behind modernism and avant-garde movements: the Utopia of delimitation and the unification of the heterogeneous ( 1972 : 37). In this specific cultural and philosophical context, freedom and delimitation become synonyms. This may be seen as the core of the eroticism of modern aesthetics. The postmodern virtual space
. Stroh (eds), Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking. Leiden : Brill , pp. 29–44 . Rancière , J. ( 2004 ) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible . Trans. G. Rockhill. London : Continuum . Rasmussen , S.A. ( 2013 ) Skyggeferden . Oslo : Humanist
other questions suggesting the many different ways in which the contributors to the book might understand these queries. In this epilogue we attempt to link our different chapters by summing up how they deal with the central concepts in each question. However, as we exit the book we aim to do so in the opposite order: paradoxes , spheres , aesthetics. The chapters use specific cases in order to provide a number of provisional answers to the three main queries we started with, but here we reflect further on the theoretical issues that span the
The aesthetics of borders In the first chapter of this volume, Wolfgang Müller-Funk reminds us of Georg Simmel's pioneering work in border theory around the beginning of the twentieth century. As a sociologist, Simmel used borders, limits and thresholds as ways of understanding society, but also involved them in his numerable essays on aesthetics. Often, social and aesthetic boundaries cross ways in his work, such as when he compares the boundaries of a social work with the frame of a painting ( 1997b : 141), and it seems
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.