Rajaram, Prem Kumar & Carl Grundy-Warr (eds.)
2007 Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Notes: xl, 330 p. : ill., map ; 23 cm. ISBN: 9780816649259Reviewed 27 Jan 2009 by:
Daniel S. Margolies <dmargolies@vwc.edu>
Batten Associate Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan College, Norfolk, Virginia, USAMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Illegal aliens - Congresses
Emigration and immigration - Congresses
Border patrols - Congresses
Boundaries - Congresses
ABSTRACT: These interdisciplinary essays discuss borders, migrants, sovereignty, territoriality, belonging, and non-belonging around the world, particularly in Asia and Europe and provide diverse, although sometimes heavy approaches to this subject.
This stimulating collection of essays focuses on borders, migrants, and discourses of sovereignty, territoriality, belonging, and non-belonging around the world, particularly in Asia and Europe. The multiple meanings of borderlands and their jurisdictional and spatial malleability around the globe are captured by these authors through different applications of the concept of "borderscapes", which echoes other evolving –scapes widely utilized to characterize postmodernity and globalization in Arjun Appadurai's classic writings, among others. Focusing on the complexities of these borderscapes opens the interpretative lens to a wider conceptual and global field of focus than simpler studies of territoriality, with focused explorations of what Suvendrini Perera neatly characterizes as the "deterritorialized spaces of indeterminate sovereignty" (p. 207).As Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr write in the introduction to this volume, "the term borderscapes is an entry point, allowing for a study of the border as mobile, perspectival, and relational" (p. x). Nevzat Soguk strongly concludes the volume by demonstrating that "borders acquire their meanings always contingently, through the activities and practices undertaken around and through them" (p. 284). The authors in this book resist the facile deterritorialization of the state which has come to characterize so much scholarship on borderlands and globalization. Rather, each essay adroitly approaches borderscapes conceptually and systemically (in part after the work of Jacques Ranciére), to reveal "that society is in process, that political order is always contingent, and that the border between norm and exception, belonging and nonbelonging, is in a state of flux and dispute" (p. xxiv).
This is an important interdisciplinary collection that combines geography, social and political theory, philosophy, and cultural geography into a full analysis of territoriality and the mutability of "landscapes of power" (p. xxvi). These essays explore the construction of limits, barriers, zones of inclusion, and exclusion by the state, and what the editors call "space[s] of utopic unity" (p. ix). The definition and utility of spatiality is a major emphasis of these essays, though it is applied in different ways. Some of the essays (such as Alexander Horstmann's essay on the Thai-Malaysian border) detail vital political issues directly reflective of the theoretical formulations. These essays discuss ways the law is deliberately withheld or suspended in borderscapes, and the many ways laws are shaped internally as well as externally to define, differentiate, punish, exclude, or otherwise control people.
What animates these essays is explaining how borders are not just established, but used to further the ends of the state in terms of using spatiality to shape justice, manipulate norms, and to impose the Foucaltian notion of "governmentality" (p. 93). Nevzat Sogut finds a "constant to borders in time and space... in the logic of the statist and territorial governmentality" (p. 284). The essays in this book explore what they see as an ontological relationship between landscape, territory, state, nation, society, and the application of justice. The authors effectively concentrate on the interplay between changing legal, spatial, and citizenship structures. It is the experience of migrants, in particular, which helps to reveal the 'hidden geographies' of the borderscapes.
The book is divided into four sections of unequal length which provide a comprehensive view of the theoretical and empirical background to modern borderscapes. The first section of four essays concentrates on the structural ways the state manipulates territoriality, the second on morality in the borderscapes, and the latter two on "map[ping] the hidden geographies at the borderscape" (p. xxxi).
Didier Bigo's essay introduces the volume with a wide-ranging consideration of the creation of anomalous zones and how the discourses of permanent emergency are used by states to create a "banoptican as a form of governmentality" (p. 4) in varieties of detention camps for foreigners. Bigo coins the term banoptican to differentiate a system of 'exception' rather than the control and surveillance central to Foucault's well known panoptican idea. As he describes in a borderscape context, "the Ban is the moment of exception as decided by the sovereign" (p. 11). Bigo considers what he artfully calls "zones of indetermination" (p. 30). He uses the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay as an example of territorial and legal limbo, contrasts it with the looser styles of the banoptican found in French refugee camps, and considers the technological definition of abnormality as yet another approach to exception
The concept of fluid, flexible, and highly contested borderscapes in considered in a variety of different contexts in this volume. In one of the best articles in the book, Mika Toyota explores how the Thai state structures its internal exclusion of hill tribe people and denies their belonging in the society as citizens as a function of "the new racialized domains of the Thai internal borderscape" (p. 108). Alice M. Nah examines migrants and refugees on Malaysian borders and describes the notions of fixed illegality that are deeply challenged by changing and even indeterminate Malaysian state legal structures. Elspeth Guild turns his attention to the internal borders shaped by the continuum between internal and individual concepts of security and more traditional state external security and considers the centrality of juridical evolution on the issue. He is particularly interested in the challenges brought by European Court of Human Rights decisions to the legal construction of security in the United Kingdom.
In one of the most interesting essays in the book, James D. Sidaway also considers the regional transnational effect on borderscapes. He opens a new view into the Spanish-Portuguese borderland and discusses its profound transformation as a result of the European Union. He describes the change as "a certain local disintegration of ways of life" as a result of the drive to eliminate borders in Europe (p. 174).
The essays in the third part of the book shift directly to compelling ethnographies of the 'hidden geographies' of the borderscapes, most effectively by Suvendrini Perera in his study of Australian involvement in constructing the "many-dimensioned map of an emerging Pacific borderscape" (p. 219). Karin-Dean's essay on the perceptions and realities of Southeast Asian border "in the lived space" (p. 198). The final section has essays propelling beyond the other issues. There is a deft concluding essay by Nevzat Sogut examining migration oppositional stances in borderscapes that may be the fullest essay in this important volume.
This is an interdisciplinary, theoretically sophisticated book that will be of greatest interest to scholars of governmentality, migration, territoriality, legal spatiality, globalization, and for other specialists on Asian studies. All of the essays are stimulating. Some of them are very straightforward, clearly argued, and well supported. Others, though interesting, have their ideas denuded by excessively dense, turgid, jargon-ridden discussions. The essays work well together theoretically and provide diverse approaches to this important subject. This book will be suitable for advanced level undergraduate or graduate courses.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Margolies, Daniel S.
2009 Review of Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge. Anthropology Review Database. January 27. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3204, accessed February 10, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)