Border Aesthetics book

Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. Eds. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe. New York: Berghahn, 2017.

Border aesthetics is essential to an understanding of borders and how they are crossed by humans, art and other media. This book explores six concepts – ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsests, sovereignty and waiting – that provide theoretical starting points for the formulation of such an aesthetics. Each is developed in detail through interdisciplinary discussions of literary texts, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, shifting urban landscapes, political cultures and migration.

We argue that there are no “natural” borders until a political and linguistic ecology makes them part of the border aesthetics of a community. Throughout the book the activity of border crossing is both constructed and altered by the implicit and often hidden assumptions that have been deployed to frame the border, or by representations of the border for those and by those within and outside its gates. Intersections are created in each chapter and between chapters through an emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of the border and bordering processes such as b/ordering, othering and borderscaping.

Table of contents

Introduction (Stephen F. Wolfe/Mireille Rosello) 1-24

1. Ecology (Mireille Rosello/Timothy Saunders) 25-49

2. Imaginary (Lene M. Johannessen/Ruben Moi) 50-67

3. Invisibility (Chiara Brambilla/Holger Pötzsch) 68-89

4. Palimpsests (Nadir Kinossian/Urban Wråkberg) 90-110

5. Sovereignty (Reinhold Görling/Johan Schimanski) 111-128

6. Waiting (Henk van Houtum/Stephen F. Wolfe) 129-146

Intersections: A Conclusion in the Form of a Glossary (Johan Schimanski/Stephen F. Wolfe) 147-169

Index 179-187

For references to each article in RIS import format (for bibliographic databases such as Endnote), download this file.

For other project publications, see Publications.