Narratives of Border Crossings

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Border Narratives ◽  
Cultural Negotiations

How can we understand borders in terms of aesthetic practice? As borders are increasingly moving into the centre of cultural negotiations, the essays in this volume focus on anglophone fiction, film and TV series which employ border-crossing narratives and engage in narrative poetics of cultural encounters. Addressing the complex roles of borders in cultural representations, the articles analyse recent reconceptualisations of borders as processes and practices in border narratives. This book will appeal to anyone interested in cultural border studies as well as ethnic studies. With contributions by Pirjo Ahokas, Francesca de Lucia, Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou, Astrid M. Fellner, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Bettina Hofmann, Nadine M. Knight, Page Laws, Ludmilla Martanovschi, Janna Odabas, Silvia Schultermandl and Elke Sturm-Trigonakis.

scholarly journals Bordering the Future? The ‘Male Gaze’ in the Blade Runner Films and Originating Novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-28
Author(s):  
Kathleen Staudt
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sentient Beings ◽  
The U.S

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), author of numerous science fiction narratives from the 1950s-1980s, some of which Hollywood made into films, grappled with the nature of reality, the meaning of humanness, and border crossing between humans and androids (called ‘replicants’ in the films). The socially constructed female and male protagonists in these narratives have yet to be analyzed with a gender gaze that draws on border studies. This paper analyzes two Blade Runner films, compares them to the Philip K. Dick (PKD) narrative, and applies gender, feminist, and border concepts, particularly border crossings from human to sentient beings and androids. In this paper, I argue that the men who wrote and directed the films established and crossed multiple metaphoric borders, but wore gender blinders that thereby reinforced gendered borders as visualized and viewed in the U.S. and global film markets yet never addressed the profoundly radical border crossing notions from PKD.

scholarly journals When the Border Crosses You

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Noémi Fazakas
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
World War ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Special Regard

AbstractThe article discusses the Transylvanian case of border crossings, the historical changes experienced by the communities living on this territory between 1918, the end of World War I, and 1944. The study starts with a short theoretical introduction to border studies and to the concept of border crossing, discussing aspects such as the issue of state and societal borders, power relations and sovereignty, and the negotiation of new identities within new state borders (understood both geographically and ideologically). The article analyses several fragments of texts that were published in one of the most important Hungarian newspapers in Transylvania, focusing on the concept of the border, on language rights, and minority rights as well as on some aspects of the linguistic landscape with special regard to the visibility or erasure of minority communities. The article concludes that the discussed instance of border crossing is particular in its nature as it shows similarities with the typical cases of border crossing; however, the staticity of the community itself and the movement of the border creates new possibilities for discussion.

scholarly journals Borders and resilience: Asylum seeker reception at the securitized Finnish-Swedish border

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110000
Author(s):  
Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Border Controls ◽  
And Control ◽  
Cross Border Cooperation

The past decade has witnessed a shift from “open borders” policies and cross-border cooperation towards heightened border securitization and the building of border walls. In the EU context, since the migration influx of 2015–2016, many Member States have retained the re-instituted Schengen border controls intended to be temporary. Such heightened border securitization has produced high levels of anxiety among various populations and increased societal polarization. This paper focuses on the processes underpinning asylum seeker reception at the re-bordered Finnish-Swedish border and in the Finnish border town of Tornio. The asylum process is studied from the perspective of local authorities and NGO actors active in the everyday reception, care and control practices in the border securitization environment enacted in Tornio in 2015. The analysis highlights how the ‘success’ of everyday reception work at the Tornio border crossing was bound to the historical openness of the border and pre-existing relations of trust and cooperation between different actors at various scales. The paper thus provides a new understanding of the significance of borders and border crossings from the perspective of resilience and highlights some of the paradoxes of border securitization. It notes that although border closures are commonly envisioned as a direct response to forced migration, the everyday practices and capacities of the asylum reception at the Finnish-Swedish border are themselves highly dependent on pre-existing border crossings and cross-border cooperation.

scholarly journals To Leave Your Kindred and Your Father’s House. Contemporary Dutch Christian Border Narratives

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 174-196
Author(s):  
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar ◽  
Krina Huisman
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Border Narratives ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Dutch People ◽  
Christian Denomination

In this article the authors analyse a collection of essays written by young Dutch people who grew up in the Reformed Liberated Church, a small Christian denomination in the Netherlands. Traditionally, this church is characterised by its inwards nature: members strive to live their lives within the confinements that the church and its institutions stipulate. This has changed over the last few decades and the essays attest to the effects these changes have had on individual lives. We discuss the underlying narrative structure of their accounts and how the authors negotiate different lifestyles and interpretations of the Christian faith on either side of the borders that demarcate the Reformed Liberated tradition. We discuss if – and how – the essays work towards an outcome of ‘discordant concordance’ (Ricœur) where narrative identities remain whole, despite relatively drastic border crossings in the course of the lives that formed them. We address how these stories give insight into how people use the stories they tell to define what needs to be remembered and forgotten when we cross borders. Finally, we discuss the relevance of these essays and our analysis of them for our understanding of today’s globalised and multicultural societies in which many are in a permanent state of transition. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on February 17th and published on August 28th 2017.

‘Into A Mirror Darkly’

2020 ◽  
pp. 243-264
Author(s):  
Judith Rauscher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Star Trek ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Trump Administration

This chapter argues that contemporary representations of border crossing on screen engage with a specifically 21st-century U.S. manifestation of what Lora Wildenthal in following Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar calls “imperial feminism.” It examines how the most recent product of the Star Trek franchise, the TV series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–ongoing), interrogates the legacies of U.S. imperialism and, less overtly so, of U.S. imperial feminism. The analysis focuses on the geographical as well as the metaphorical border crossings that occur in the series when the crew of the Federation starship Discovery jumps to an alternative universe which is dominated by the fascist Terran Empire. It argues that Star Trek: Discovery can be read as a feminist text that exposes the limits of two very different kinds of post-sexist futures: one, the Mirror Universe, in which the empowerment of women depends on openly imperialist and racist ideologies and another, the Prime Universe, in which these ideologies threaten to make a comeback in the context of violent conflict. By contrasting these two possible futures and by connecting them through instances of border crossing, Star Trek: Discovery not only speaks to issues of intersectional feminist critique, it also responds to the political, social, and cultural changes in the United States leading up to and associated with the Trump administration.

Evaluation of Biometric Technologies for Access Control at Transportation Facilities and Border Crossings

2005 ◽  
Vol 1938 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Yuko J. Nakanishi ◽  
Jeffrey Western
Keyword(s):  
Access Control ◽  
Human Error ◽  
Iris Recognition ◽  
Performance Data ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Fingerprint Recognition ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Hand Geometry ◽  
Transportation Facilities

To ensure that only authorized individuals–-legitimate workers, travelers, and visitors–-enter a transportation facility or border crossing, their identities must be ascertained. Because manual procedures are time-consuming, resource intensive, and vulnerable to human error and manipulation, the use of biometric technologies should be considered. This paper discusses several biometric technologies–-fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, facial recognition, and hand geometry–-and assesses their feasibility for use in access control at transportation facilities and border crossings. The advantages and disadvantages of the technologies are provided, as are cost, accuracy, and other performance data. Potential privacy and data issues are also discussed.

Globalization, Culture, and Communication: Renationalization in a Globalized World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koichi Iwabuchi
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Nation Branding ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Globalized World ◽  
Container Model ◽  
National Borders ◽  
Culture And Communication

Cultural globalization has promoted seemingly opposing forces simultaneously, such as recentering and decentering, standardization and diversification, and renationalization and transnationalization. The intensification of transnational flows of media culture and the associated cross-border connection and communication has been destabilizing national cultural borders and engendering the formation of diverse mediated communities among hitherto marginalized people and groups within and across national borders. At the same time, we have observed the increasing pervasiveness of the inter-nationalized modes of media culture flows and communication—“inter-nationalized” with a hyphen is intentional—in the sense of highlighting the nation as the unit of global cultural encounters that resolidify exclusive national boundaries. The synergism of the process of market-driven glocalization and the state’s policy of soft power and nation branding has further instituted a container model of the nation, as the inter-nationalized circulation and encounter of media culture have become sites in which national identity is mundanely invoked, performed, and experienced. In this process, national cultural borders are mutually reconstituted as transnational cultural flows and encounters are promoted in a way to accentuate a nation-based form of global cultural encounter and exchange. While lacking in a historically embedded, coherent narrative of the nation, it works to institute a new, container form of the nation in which cultural diversity within national borders is not given its due attention and thus sidelined. Facilitation of border crossing of culture and communication does not necessarily accompany the transgression of clearly demarcated national cultural borders.

Ethnography Across Borders

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Representation ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Community Participant ◽  
The Social ◽  
Representation Language ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Potential Shifts

Ethnography is about cultural representation, which implies a gaze and set of questions and assumptions about who is being represented, by whom, and what for. In this sense, ethnography always is conducted across borders where borders imply a set of differences to confront and understand, even while the ethnographer is expected to effectively overcome these through embedded practice in the field. If the enterprise of conducting these studies is always marked by border crossing, then what are the different ways in which border crossings happen in knowledge production through ethnography? How does the definition of “border” change the way ethnographic studies are performed? Potential shifts in the meaning of “borders” heightens the importance of interrogating cultural representation, the social locations that ethnographers occupy, see, and speak from, and how perspectives on cultural representation and actual representations will differ. These dynamics build up when, as here, ethnography across borders implies the presence of the nation-state, either as palimpsest or direct actor in the relations and daily lives of the community-participant in the ethnography. Borders are necessarily evoked—geopolitical, social, cultural, national, regional, global, and personal ones, such as gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Ethnography across borders emerges in this instance as a methodology and a stance to deconstruct the ways in which ethnographers and ethnographies are radically situated in their own histories, and how radical contextualization of those histories is required to understand across borders and uncover the limits of cultural representation, language, and ethnography as a tool to understand the lives of people, their histories, and communities.

scholarly journals “I Will Always Be Crossing Ocean Parkway; I Have Crossed It; I Will Never Cross It.” Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Eleonora Rao
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
American Girl ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Duke University ◽  
American Society

In Crossing Ocean Parkway (1994), scholar and literary critic Marianna De Marco Torgovnick—now Professor of English at Duke University—traces her story as an Italian-American girl growing up in a working-class Italian neighborhood of New York City that could not satisfy her desire for learning and for upward mobility. De Marco’s personal experiences of cultural border crossings finds here specific spatial reference especially through Ocean Parkway, “a wide, tree-lined street in Brooklyn, a symbol of upward mobility, and a powerful state of mind” (p. vii). Border crossing or trespassing inform this text. De Marco moved from an Italian immigrant milieu to a sophisticated Jewish community, via her marriage, and from a minority group to a successful career in academia. There are also crossings between being a professional, a wife, a mother, and a daughter; between being an insider and an outsider; between longing to be free and the desire to belong; between safety and danger, joy and mourning, nostalgia and contempt. In representing her younger self as “outsider” to her received community, she provides a sharp analysis of the tensions within American society.

Cultural Border Crossings in the UAE

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Hatherley-Greene
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Second Language ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
English Language ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Drop Out ◽  
Classroom Culture ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Learning Program

"Over the course of one academic year, I documented the experiences of new first-year male Emirati students at a college of higher education in a rural location of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Using the metaphor of a cultural border crossing, I found that the congruency between the pre-dominantly Arabic life-world associated with Emirati families and government schooling and the largely dominant Western/English language culture in institutes of higher education was broadly related to the students’ self-perceived level of preparedness for academic study and the competence of Emirati students in their second language, English. Four types of border crossing experiences were described – smooth, managed, difficult, and impossible – with easier and smoother crossing experiences associated with close congruency between the two different cultures. Suffering from the effects of neo-indigeneity, absent parents, poor secondary school experiences, and a disempowering ‘rentier effect’, I found that the failure of male Emirati students to make satisfactory border crossings to college life initiated a process of departure manifested by high absenteeism leading to eventual withdrawal. This occurred more frequently with students placed in the lower levels of an academic bridge program where cultural and linguistic ‘discomfort’ were felt the most - 66% of the new students left college during the year with a staggering 97% drop-out rate in the lowest level alone. Mainly Western teachers who developed a classroom culture based on ‘warm demandingness’ and caring rapport-building appeared to have the most positive impact upon the students. The development of students’ soft-skills in a new experiential learning program was assessed using a Mental Toughness Questionnaire which surprisingly produced lower post-test scores, indicating greater self-awareness and honesty. A key emerging question asks - whose interests are being served (or not) by compelling first-language students to cross cultural borders into higher education colleges and asking them to study using the dominant second-language of English?"

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