Abstract

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

Stephen F. Wolfe is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His publications as co-editor include Border Poetics De-limited (2007) and a special issue of Nordlit entitled “Border Work/Border Aesthetics” (2014), as well as essays focused on the culture of borders.

Johan Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo and visiting Professor of Cultural Encounters at the University of Eastern Finland. His publications include the co-edited volumes Border Poetics De-limited (2007) and Arctic Discourses (2010), and various essays on border poetics.

“This well-structured book offers a refreshing and novel approach to the now fairly crowded field of border studies, advancing an innovative and humanities-facing theoretical framework grounded in aesthetics.” · Hastings Donnan, Queen’s University Belfast

“By pushing aesthetics beyond its canonical topics and giving special attention to the link between aesthetic sensitivity and political context, this volume introduces a groundbreaking perspective and provides an impressive starting point for further wide-ranging investigations.” · Tonino Griffero, University of Rome