border and bordering ? Politics, Poetics, Precariousness

This volume focuses on the idea of border and its various geopolitical, sociocultural, and cognitive incarnations. In recent times, border has emerged as a common trope in contemporary language with phenomena such as ‘bordering’, ‘borderless’, ‘building borders’, ‘breaking borders’, ‘crossing borders’, ‘porous borders’, and ‘shifting borders’. Whether concrete or shadow, borders are omnipresent. The volume contains sixteen essays on various aspects of thinking border as well as border-thinking in literature, philosophy, historiography, strategic studies, films, and TV series. Such a collection is symptomatic of the very interdisciplinarity of border and the varied experiences of bordering as manifested in different modes of expression. This study of the multiplicity of experiences is intrinsic to our understanding of border, so much so that borders can only be read through an interdisciplinary approach. This interdisciplinarity is immanent to the concept of border and imminent (“to come”) to the phenomenon of bordering. Also, the volume quite explicitly deals with the metaphors of border(s): as border(s) may not necessarily be always visible and tangible but also cognitive and metaphysical. This volume intends to attract not only academics but all readers, and that is precisely the reason why it has been designed in such a way. This book, therefore, is not yet-another volume on critical border studies and area studies. In doing border, the book enables us to go beyond the boundaries of border studies and area studies―as its authors believe that ‘studies’ of border studies and area studies have become as regimented as the borders of the nation-state.

Jayjit Sarkar teaches in the Department of English at Raiganj University, India. His publications include Illness as Method: Beckett, Kafka, Mann, Woolf and Eliot (Delaware: Vernon Press, 2019).

Auritra Munshi teaches in the Department of English at Raiganj University, India. His research areas include Diaspora studies and migration.