BIG_Review 3.1

Fall/Winter 2021

 In this issue, you will find two special sections and a portfolio. First, in a special section edited by regional specialists and BIG_Review Board Member, Dhananjay Tripathi, we are proud to showcase the research of emerging scholars working on South Asian border studies. Five articles present new research on the interrelations between states, borderlands, identities, and exclusions by emerging scholars Sampurna Bhaumik, Malvika Sharma, Sariful Islam, Rachel Irene D’Silva, and Uddipta Ranjan Boruah. In their own ways, each of the authors reveal distinct challenges confronting the markedly securitized, sectarian, and postcolonial borders of the Indian subcontinent.

Then readers explore the nostalgic—some would say idealistic or even naive—portfolio of Valerio Vincenzo, featured on our front and back covers. Here, the photographer captures European borders not as barriers but as open, sprawling, and unmarked spaces, daring us to (re)capture lost or aborted imaginaries of another world.

Following the portfolio, BIG_Review’s new Art Editor Elisa Ganivet presents a special section of original artwork on borders. Readers are first treated to an inside view of the historical role of aviation in border delimitation in an essay written by Ina Neddermeyer and Jürgen Bleibler, curators of a recent Museum exhibition in Germany. Ganivet then presents illustrated interviews she conducted with three artists working on borders in their own peculiar ways: Randa Maroufi, Taysir Batniji, and Emeric Lhuisset; the interviews are bilingual, presented to the reader in both English and French. Then (for French readers exclusively) Hélène Mutter’s essay explores the implications of the pixelized and flattened renditions of borders in Google Earth.

Lastly in the art section, in both English and French, author Christian Gattinoni touches on the paradoxes of borders through glimpses into the diverse creative works of the 2021 Fotolimo festival in the Catalan region. Finally, the issue concludes with a remarkable pair each of book and film reviews, by authors and researchers Aurélien Portelli, Eric Rigaud, Marion Christina Rohrleitner, Tonia Harris, Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman.