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Toward a New Art of Border Crossing
Edited by Ananta Kumar Giri
Arnab Roy Chowdhury
David Blake Willis
The new art of border-crossing is inspired by a new politics, art, and a spirituality of shared sovereignties and non-sovereignties. This border-crossing challenges us to do creative, aesthetic, ethical, political and spiritual work in the fields of not only physical borders and bounded territories but also cultural, social, intellectual and civilizational borders.
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
“We humans have trouble with borders and border crossing—psychologically, socially, culturally, intellectually, artistically, economically, and politically as well as ecologically and geopolitically. This is the case in particular in twenty-first-century society faced, as it is, with multiple intertwined crises impacting every level. In this collection, 24 authors of diverse nationalities and disciplinary backgrounds probe this knotty problem relative to a variety of regions of the globe. Overall, their varied explorations amount to nothing less than a journey across borders, opening paths toward sustainable and humane survival. One comes away with an acute sense that the ideas of borders and border crossing matter—to us and the society in which we live right now.” —Piet Strydom, University College Cork, Ireland.
“The study of boundaries—and how they are defined, negotiated, and maintained—has been a key focus of the humanities and social sciences from the very earliest of times. Towards a New Art of Crossing Borders elegantly combines past and present scholarship with case studies from across the world to shed new light and inject new urgency into a topic that has never been more important to understand than it is today.” —Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and Warden, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
“I’ve been reading Ananta Kumar Giri’s works for over 20 years, and I have always been impressed both with the theoretical acumen and the breadth of contributors whom Giri has been able to draw to his works. Here again, Giri with the help of his co-editors David Blake Willis and Arnab Roy Chowdhury has pulled together what might seem like a motley crew of contributors from all over the disciplinary spectrum. Still, this collection of thinkers has found new and exciting ways to play with and within the ideas of borders—between disciplines, between cultural and philosophical traditions, and even with the notion that borders are supposed to separate people. Anyone interested in understanding the theoretical and ethical possibilities normally hidden in the border must read this collection voraciously.” —Scott Schaer, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
“I found all kinds of interesting and surprising insights in this text. All are grounded in the theory of the chapter authors. The innovation is how well many chapters weave in traditional thinkers with more thinkers from other traditions and even world views. This is a strength of the book. It is inter-civilizational in spirit. The result is a deeper engagement with border crossing itself as the inter-civilizational is an enactment of border crossing.” —Marcus Bussey, University of Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia
Author Information
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.
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Table of Contents
Preface; Notes on Editors and Contributors; Toward a New Art of Border Crossing: An Introduction and an Invitation, Ananta Kumar Giri, Arnab Roy Chowdhury, and David Blake Willis; Part One Toward A New Art of Border Crossing: Reflective Horizons, Chapter 1-Toward a New Art of Border Crossing, Ananta Kumar Giri; Chapter 2-The New Art of Crossing Borders: Pandemic Disease, Climate Crises, and Epidemic Racism as Planetary Challenges, David Blake Willis; Chapter 3-Fluid Identity and Overcoming Boundaries, SorajHongladarom; Chapter 4-Conjuring at the Margins: A Transcontinental Approach to Interpreting Border Art, Julie Geredien; Chapter 5-New Arts of Border Crossing: Tagore’s Engagement with Borders, Meera Chakravorty;
Chapter 6-Garrison—Thoreau—Gandhi: Transcending Borders, Christian Bartolf, Dominique Miething, and Vishnu Varatharajan; Chapter 7-Comparare Philosophy Within and Without Borders Agnieszka Rostalska and Purushottama Bilimoria; Chapter 8-From Hegemony to Counter Hegemony: Border Crossing in Philosophical Discourse, Saji Varghese; Part Two Toward a New Art of Border Crossing: Movements in Societies and Histories, Chapter 9-Between the Left, the Liberal, and the Right: Post-colonialism, Subaltern Studies, and Political ‘Border Crossing’ in India, Arnab Roy Chowdhury; Chapter 10-Directions: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and the Modern History of Migration, Ronald Stade; Chapter 11-Crossing the German–German Border from the End of World War II until 1990: From Escape to Alienation, Detlef Griesen; Chapter 12-Overcoming the Borders in Southeast Asia? An Analysis of Transborder Collaboration in the Greater Mekong Subregion, Detlef Griesen; Chapter 13-Post Oil Migration Futures in the Khaleej: Thinking With/Out Borders, Manishankar Prasad; Chapter 14- Transnational Communities and the Formation of Alternative Sociopolitical Otherness, Abdulkadir Osman Farah;Part Three Toward a New Art of Border Crossing: Religion, Politics, Art and Transcendence, Chapter 15-Crossing Borders and Creolization: Creating and Negotiating New Worlds, David Blake Willis; Chapter 16-Visual Construction of Borderlands: The Case of Tohono O’odham Nation at US–Mexico Borderlands [within US and Mexico] and Their Subaltern Narrative, Ahmed AbidurRazzaque Khan and AbdurRazzaque Khan; Chapter 17-High Tech for the External Border, Ralf Homann and Manuela Unverdorben; Chapter 18-Journeys and Myths: Transcending Boundaries in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, Amrita Satapathy and Panchali Bhattacharya; Chapter 19-Transgressing Borders and Boundaries: Religion, Politics, and Art from the Pharaoh Khafra to the Work of Siona Benjamin, Ori Z. Soltes; Chapter 20-Transgression, Transcendence, and Meaning Creation in Art: Mystico-Artistic Route for Re-enchanting the World, Muhammad Maroof Shah; Index
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