Boundaries, borders and margins are related concepts and realities, and each of these can be conceptualized and organized in closed or open ways—with degrees of closure or openness. The logics of statis and closure, as well as cults of exclusivist and exclusionary sovereignty, are reflected and embodied in the closed xenophobic conceptualization and organization of boundaries, borders and margins. But, an open conceptualization of the borderlands, where mixing and hybridity take place at a rapid, even dizzying, pace, gives rise to Creolization—at the threshold of sovereignties, as something that can also be imagined.

At present, our border zones are spaces of anxiety-ridden security arrangements, violence and death. The existing politics of boundary maintenance is wedded to a cult of sovereignty at various levels, which produces bare lives, bodies and lands. We need the new art of border-crossing to bedefined by the notion of camaraderie and shared sovereignties and non-sovereignties. Border zones can also be zones of meetings, communication, transcendence and festive celebration of the limits of our identities. Thus, we need a new art and politics of boundary transmutation, transformation and transcendence, in the broadest possible sense, that entails the production of spatial, scalar, somatic, cognitive, affective and spiritual transitions.

Crossing Borders is a powerful theme and metaphor for all of us in the midst of COVID-19 (since 2020) and the current geopolitics of war that is hovering over Eurasia. We need these modes of knowing and being that shun violence; ontologies that are fluid and seeking instead of aggressive, self-certain, arrogant and violent. Amidst this chaos, we need new modes of knowing, or epistemologies, where knowing of, or about, the other is also a festive and artistic process of knowing with the other. We need an artistic ontological-epistemology of participation for a new art of border-crossing where the boundary between ontology and epistemology is continually redrawn with emergent negotiation and creativity.

Ananta Kumar Giri is a professor (sociology and anthropology) at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

Arnab Roy Chowdhury is an assistant professor (sociology) at the Higher School of Economics Moscow (HSE) University, Moscow, Russian Federation.

David Blake Willis is a professor of anthropology and education at Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, California, USA. 

Preface; Towards a New Art of Border Crossing:  An Introduction and an Invitation; Part One: Towards A New Art of Border Crossing: Reflective Horizons; Towards a New Art of Border Crossing; The New Art of Crossing Borders: Pandemic Disease, Climate Crises, and Epidemic Racism as Planetary Challenges; Fluid Identities and the Overcoming of Boundaries; Conjuring at the Margins: A Transcontinental Approach to Interpreting Border Art; Tagore’s Engagement with Border Crossing; Garrison, Thoreau, Gandhi: Transcending Borders; Comparare Philosophy Within and Without Borders; From Hegemony to Counter Hegemony: Border Crossing in Philosophical Discourse; Part Two: Towards a New Art of Border Crossing: Movements in Societies and Histories; Between the Left, the Liberal, and the Right: Postcolonialism, Subaltern Studies, and Political ‘Border Crossing’ in India; Directions: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and the Modern History of Migration; Crossing the German-German Border from the End of World War II until 1990: From Escape to Alienation; Overcoming the Borders in Southeast Asia? An Analysis of Trans-Border Collaboration in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region; Post Oil Migration Futures in the Khaleej: Thinking With/Out Borders; Transnational Communities and the Formation of Alternative Socio-Political Otherness; Part Three:  Towards a New Art of Border Crossing: Religion, Politics, Art and Transcendence; Crossing Borders and Creolization: Creating and Negotiating New Worlds; The USA–Mexico Border in Film and the Subaltern Narrative of the Tohono O’odham Nation: The Politics of Documentary Films as a Medium for Change; High Tech for the External Border: Publicity Campaign and Text Based  on the Script of a Radio Documentary; Journeys and Myths: Transcending Boundaries in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island; Transgressing Borders and Boundaries: Religion, Politics, and Art from the Pharaoh Khafra to the Work of Siona Benjamin; Transgression, Transcendence and Meaning Creation in Art: Mystico-Artistic Route for Re-enchanting the World