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CFP: Desbordes/Undoing Borders: Towards New Border Epistemologies

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: post(s) - Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Deadline: Wed, June 30th, 2021

For the 7th edition of post(s), we are accepting academic essays that examine problematics proposed by our new guest editor, Astrid M. Fellner. The Call for Papers is open until June 30th 2021. The proposals should be submitted through the OJS platform. For more details on the publication process, please visit our website.

Desbordes/Undoing Borders: Towards New Border Epistemologies

In which ways can artistic practices undo borders? What does an undoing of borders entail? What type of new border epistemologies arise in interstitial spaces? The concept of the border has been used as a very powerful metaphor in the conceptualization of the multiplicities of identities, giving rise to the idea of “mestiza consciousness” (Anzaldúa 1987), which emerges in the in-between that allows contradictions and ambiguities in the production of new forms of identities (mestizaje or hybridity). This borderlands consciousness gives rise to border thinking. Pensamiento fronterizo (Mignolo 2000) describes a way of thinking which is deeply rooted in the subaltern experience of coloniality and the borderlands while at the same time freeing thought processes from colonial and modern epistemologies in order to promote alternative, decolonial ways of knowing, thinking and becoming. Western norms of knowledge production have suppressed ways of knowing of Indigenous communities and cultures of the Global South, contributing to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has termed “epistemicide.” Border thinking engages in a critical re-thinking of what knowledge is and how it has been produced in the Western philosophical tradition. Exposing an awareness of modernity’s underside—that is coloniality—border dwellers employ border thinking as an embodied consciousness and epistemic location from which reality is lived and thought. Border dwellers therefore embody border cultures, which are characterized by a productive borderlands poetics, that is representational forms of productions which negotiate, perform, and constitute borders at the intersection of territorial and political borders and textual configurations.

The idea of borders neatly separating territories, entities, and categories has recently been challenged by an understanding of border practices which suggest that borders are densely intervowen fabrics of various discursive and material practices. Borders, therefore, should not only be grasped in the sense of a geo-political line but as cultural signifiers that mark specific modes and histories of being, thinking, doing, making sense and sensing. Recent theorizations such as “desbordes” (Viteri 2014) or “bordertextures” (Fellner 2020) have championed approaches which do not examine spatial, material, temporal or cultural aspects in isolation but investigate their intersectional and performative interactions with the aim of forging new epistemologies of borders.

This issue provides a space for explorative investigations of different approaches to borders, borderlands, border knowing, and the undoing or unknowing of borders, focusing on interactions between material and immaterial manifestations of the border and the various forms of medial, visual, literary, and other cultural expressions.

For the purpose of this call, the editors highlight the need to assess the enigmatic surface of culture (Geertz 1973) through which our webs of signification are constructed and through which we gain knowledge about the world. And as such, what happens on the overlapping, crisscrossing, merging, layering, and clash among borders of those surfaces? For this case, it´s worth thinking about these webs as a multilevel encounter of surfaces. Appadurai (1996) also exposed how postcolonial identities are shaped by surfaces -scapes- whose borders are constantly being recreated by the imagination of people who confront their reality with the materiality that shapes their world. Whether it´s media as entertainment, or ideology; money that migrates around the world handed off by workers to their estranged families afar; or the encounter with the Other; the contemporary cultural experience of people at large is material and digital by its ubiquity and personalization. And most important, as Miller (2005) espouses: “The surprising conclusion is that objects are important, not because they are evident and physically constrain or enable, but often precisely because we do not ‘see’ them. The less we are aware of them the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behaviour, without being open to challenge. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so.”

In this sense, this edition wonders how the invisibility of the material world that we shape and that shapes us is confounded with its invisible-borders and the multilevel encounters of their surfaces expressed through art, media, utensils, practices, and texts (generally speaking); we seek a partial understanding about the taken for granted notion of non-existing borders, or a continuum between ourselves and the culture that´s permanently being produced, reproduced, undone, and transformed.

The papers in this issue thus may address a wide spectrum of topics and questions concerning borders and desbordes: queer borders, posthuman borders (between nature/culture, human/machine/species), im/material borders, intersectional borders (between race/ethnicity, class, sexuality), etc. What visual forms speak to the many lived border experiences? How can borders be undone? Which cultural artifacts form part of border cultures and border imaginaries? What forms of cultural hybridity, of “multitemporal heterogeneity” (Canclini 1995) occur in borderlands which have the power to undo borders? In which way can cultural practices then constitute powerful counter-formations to the view of borders and border regimes as infrastructural events, technological operations, and forms of “border bricolage” (Dijstelbloem 2020), that is assemblages of various human actors, technology, and surveillance apparatuses? In other words, we are interested in the creative and subversive potential of bordertextures and the multilevel encounter of surfaces of border cultures and the many ways in which they serve as powerful decolonial practices.

Anzaldúa, G. 2012 [1987]. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Fourth edition, 25th anniversary. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Appaduari, A. 2003. Modernity at Large. Sixth Edition. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South – Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014.

Dijestelbloem, Huub. “Borders and the Contagious Nature of Mediation.” The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration. Ed. Smets, Kevin et. al. London: Sage, 311–320.

García Canclini, Néstor 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis, London: U of Minnesota P.

Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books Inc.

Fellner, Astrid M. 2020. “Counter-Mapping Corporeal Borderlands: Border Imaginaries in the Americas.” Geographien der Grenze. Ed. Florian Weber, Christian Wille, Beate Caesar, Julian Hollstegge. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. 287–300.

Mignolo, W. D. 2012 [2000]. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Miller, D., ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press.

Viteri, María-Amelia (2014): Desbordes: Translating Racial, Ethnic, Sexual, and Gender Identities Across the Americas. Albany: State U of New York P.

Astrid M. Fellner is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Germany. She is Project Leader at Saarland U of the EU-funded INTERREG Großregion VA-Project “University of the Greater Region Center for Border Studies“ and is Action Coordinator of a trilingual Border Glossary. She is also the co-founder of the trinational and trilingual UniGR-Master in Border Studies, in which she (co)-teaches several classes in the field of Cultural Border Studies. She has been interested in Border Studies since her studies of Chicanx literature and culture as a Fulbright Scholar at University of Texas at Austin in 1990/91. In 2002, she published her monograph Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-Representation (Braumüller). Within the field of Chicanx Studies she also edited the volume Body Signs: The Latino/a Body in Cultural Production (LIT Verlag, 2011) and authored several articles on Chicanx literature, Indigenous border literature and artistic practices, forms of (queer) border knowledges and decolonial practices. She also engages in Comparative Border Studies, working not only on cultural practices in the US-Mexican borderlands but also on the US-Canada border as well as in European border areas. Currently, she is working on a project entitled “Alterna(rra)tives in the Canada-US Borderlands.”

Posted on Thu, March 25th, 2021
Expires on Wed, June 30th, 2021

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