Border

Were we to imagine an earlier iteration of this keywords project—one published around, say, 1989—“border” would most likely have been left off the list entirely, though “margin” or maybe “minor” might well have been included. In the intervening years, as violent border conflicts erupted across the world and as the US government heavily militarized its border with Mexico, the term has become prominent in academic work. Accounting for this shift—understanding the concept’s fortunes, as it were—entails movement among academic concerns, theoretical conversations, and sociopolitical and economic developments over the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. To be sure, a loosely defined field of “border studies” has been around in some form or another since Frederick Jackson Turner ([1893] 1920) argued for the significance of the frontier and Herbert Eugene Bolton (1921) published The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest and certainly since the end of World War II, when regional area studies began to receive sustained governmental support. During this period, the most prominent borders were located between East and West Germany, North and South Vietnam, and the officially segregated US South and the unofficially segregated US North. By the mid-1980s, however, the United States had failed in its effort to maintain the border between North and South Vietnam, segregation had been rendered illegal if not eliminated in practice, and efforts to dismantle the border between East and West Germany were gaining momentum. At the same time, philosophers, artists, novelists, and scholars who had been meditating on the less prominent international border between Mexico and the United States began to gain broad attention and to publish significant new work.