‘Not everyone alive in the present is automatically included in its sense of “living” or “present”.’ This quotation from Esther Peeren's book The Spectral Metaphor offers a thought-provoking frame for ‘Borders’, the theme of our next three chapters, in which migration into the UK and US vividly embodies colonialism's afterlife. The process of crossing a country's border is experienced very differently by travellers, depending on what part of the world you are from. EU
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
Migrating borders and moving times explores how crossing borders entails shifting time as well as changing geographical location. Space has long dominated the field of border studies, a prominence which the recent ‘spatial turn’ in social science has reinforced. This book challenges the classic analytical pre-eminence of ‘space’ by focusing on how ‘border time’ is shaped by, shapes and constitutes the borders themselves.
Using original field data from Israel, northern Europe and Europe's south-eastern borders (Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, Sarajevo, Lesbos), our contributors explore ‘everyday forms of border temporality’ – the ways in which people through their temporal practices manage, shape, represent and constitute the borders across which they move or at which they are made to halt. In these accounts, which are based on fine-tuned ethnographic research sensitive to historical depth and wider political-economic context and transformation, ‘moving’ is understood not only as mobility but as affect, where borders become not just something to be ‘crossed’ but something that is emotionally experienced and ‘felt’.
1 EU cross-border Passagenwerk Olivier Thomas Kramsch For us, the solution was in the direction of the horizon. We were those who scrutinised the horizon. We looked forward, not back. To the question, ‘What is thinking?’ we didn’t respond, ‘Being’ [like Heidegger] but with ‘the possible’. (Henri Lefebvre, cited in Hess 1988: 54) Thoughts from a deckchair in Wyler, Germany Walking through the village of Wyler, the last German settlement before the border crossing into the Netherlands, one drifts past cavernous, odoriferous farmhouses, fleeting images of green
4 Postsocialism, borders, security and race after Yugoslavia The historical legacies shown in the last chapter do much to explain the contradictory racialised imaginaries of the Yugoslav region's ‘cultural archive’ ( Chapter 1 ) and the shifting nature of translations of race into discourses of ethnic and national belonging ( Chapter 2 ). Though many past applications of postcolonial thought to south-east Europe have bracketed race away, identifications with racialised narratives of Europeanness predated state socialism, yet alone the collapse
7 Silenced border crossings and gendered material flows in southern Albania Nataša Gregorič Bon My friend Maria and I were sitting on the front porch of the house of the village teacher, Naso, admiring his garden in the spring sun.1 Naso was in the kitchen, preparing a welcome drink (qeras/kerasmo2). Within a few minutes he was in the doorway, holding two glasses of peach juice, which he carefully set on the table in front of us. He smiled and said: When a man is at home alone he brings the drinks in his hands and not on a tray as his wife would do. This is
3 Border crossings, shame and (re-)narrating the past in the Ukrainian–Romanian borderlands Kathryn Cassidy In April 2008, I celebrated my birthday in the village of Diyalivtsi,1 where I had been living since October 2007, while carrying out research on informal economic practices in the Ukrainian–Romanian borderlands. My host, Rodika, and I had spent some time preparing food and drink for visitors and the first to arrive were our good friends and neighbours Luchika and her daughter Zhenia. Luchika and her son-inlaw Dima were both cross-border small traders of
I N 2005, SUDANESE men, women, and children, adopting the same route that smugglers and traffickers had used for decades, started crossing the Egyptian border to ask for refuge in Israel. In 2014, around 47,000 individuals who had taken the same path were present on Israeli territory, among whom were 8,852 Sudanese nationals and 34,475 Eritreans (Shani et al. 2014
2 Permeable borders, performative politics and public mistrust Rita: I was just taking the train from Victoria to Clapham Junction. And Clapham Junction when I get off from the train, I saw so many UKBA [UK Border Agency] people they were there, I saw them with large dogs, blocking the entire area. I had a visa and have it now also. But I got really scared because I could
; Jenkinson, 2016 , 2018 ). Meanwhile on the Eastern Front, at one point, one-third of the Serbian population was on the move along with hundreds of thousands of Italian and Greek refugees in the Mediterranean and Balkans. Farther north, equally great numbers of Jewish, Armenian, and Turkish refugees traveled along the Eastern European border with Russia ( Cabanes, 2014 ). Many of Europe’s refugees had become stateless through having been expelled by conquering armies, and as documentation linking people to countries was not common ( Cabanes, 2014 ; Ngai, 2004 ). By the