Imagining the Border Otherwise: Global engagements with solidarity, relationality and survival

The proposed project is an original and intellectually urgent project that addresses the question of whether, and in what ways, the border matters beyond its physical infrastructure. It is an intellectual history that excavates the question of borders in the political thought of four foundational thinkers: Gloria Anzaldua, Temsula Ao, Jean Genet and Huey Newton.

Just as the national border proliferates and expands its capacity to enact violence, so does resistance to it. The hardening of borders through ever more draconian immigration regimes, expanded surveillance apparatuses, militarized border patrols, and border guards with broad remits and police powers, has seen a concomitant push back against a political status quo and social imaginary structured around nation-states that are designed to keep some people out as a way protect those within. The people rendered outside the remit of citizenship, without a claim to the state and safe haven are locked up in cages, detained at will, and left to flounder on seas in the name of 'state security' and 'border sanctity'. This we are told is the will of the people, with the 'people' (largely) coded as white, heteronormative, law-abiding citizens. Human rights lawyers, migrant support NGOs, refugee councils, and scholars working on border-crossings and the politics of (im)mobility that enable and shape the movement of people have meticulously documented the harm caused by ossified national borders and the security regimes that underpin them. Whilst this critique is not new, there has been a renewed interest in the safety and well-being of people caught in the crossfires of the battle between often despotic regimes and hostile or unwelcoming states. For those defending these people without access (even if they legally have the 'rights') as well as for the people themselves, the national border signifies a site of blockage, stoppage, and violence. The border restricts entry, looming large in this imaginary as a, if not the, culprit in a long list of crimes against innocent people fleeing persecution, intimidation, or a life without hope. The opening up of national borders then becomes the logical solution to this state of affairs, with some agitating for border abolition as not merely the most radical but also the most utile option.

This project is sympathetic to many of the claims of border sceptics and abolitionists, whilst at the same time striving to open out the conversation about the national border in order to examine its entanglements with other technologies of racial capitalism, not least private property and policing. Looking at borderlands and frontiers as generative spaces that teach us something about the limits of a border imaginary, it invites diverse audiences (academics, practitioners, policy makers) to tarry with the thought of four mid-twentieth century writers, who were already imagining a different way of resisting, rejecting, as well as surviving with the border. The four scholar-activists: Anzaldua, Ao, Genet, and Newton, all offer insights into the multiple ways in which borders - primarily national but not solely - condition existence in a manner that is at once disruptive and creative. Working with and through their thought, Thinking the Border Otherwise tries to carefully navigate the many debates and issues animating border studies as an academic field today, as well as engaging with wider concerns around the nature of security, racial capitalism, private property and the abolition of carceral systems that affect lived realities of people around the world. It does not pretend to offer a quick fix or even a long-term readymade solution to the many ills plaguing our common existence, but rather seeks solace in the promise of a future imagined by those that came before. Rather than mourn the loss of this potential future, the research builds on their expansive visions to argue that that another world is not just possible, it is also necessary.