BIG_Review 4.2
Spring/Summer 2023
This outstanding collection of scholarship and artwork enriches border studies and cultural reflections on (and against) borders, and it is available for free, in open access CC-BY-NC (except where stipulated).
Leading the issue, guest-editor Birte Wassenberg, historian and Europeanist, presents a Special Section with five research articles advanced from a doctoral seminar on Europe’s changing borders called Frontières en mouvement, or Frontiers in Motion. The papers (by scholars Claude Beaupré, Yaël Gagnepain, Nicolas Caput, Tobias Heyduk, and Morgane Chovet) illuminate diverse aspects of borders, cross-border governance, and the pursuit of continental integration. Together, the section works toward a more realistic assessment of European borders, demystifying euphemisms of ‘Europe without borders’ and moving beyond reductive binaries of open/closed or good/bad.
In the Chief Editor’s Choice Portfolio, readers experience the unsettling visual creations of Israeli artist Ariane Littman. Mapping the Wound: Feminine Gestures of Empathy and Healing (featured on the cover) curates years of performative art and multimedia sculpture in which Littman applies bandages and gauze to Israeli maps, landmarks, and citizens, treating subject and object alike as wounded and torn. The work is powerful and timely, as Israeli citizens have been protesting en masse since early 2023 the authoritarian overreach of the Netanyahu government; in this context, the Palestinian question is jarring, even when muted or unheard.
Following the special section and cover portfolio, readers are treated to an eclectic series of academic, artistic, and policy treatments of borders today. Our Poetry section features poems by Sotirios Pastakas and Dvora Levin with exquisite verses on the morbidity of borders. Our Art & Borders section brings you a special mixed-media collection called Embarked Lives, featuring Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez’s oceanic portrayals of cross-border migration. Readers are also treated to a Review Essay by a scholar of borders and film, Michael Dear, who constructs a history of the genre of US–Mexico-border cinema. And Malvika Sharma, student of border studies and native of the borderlands of Jammu and Kashmir, shares lived experiences of a homeland divided through the art form of Short Story, in a dreamy fiction inspired by real yearning and hope. Changing tempo, our Policy section presents two detailed reports on quite different technologies of cross-border governance, with Veasna Yong focusing on the behavioral technique of ‘nudging’ and Mary Isabel Delgado Caceres wading into the potentials of digital blockchain. This issue also features a Research Note in the form of an alternative map of the Canada–US border region, showing not the international boundary line but rather different kinds of Indigenous communities that straddle and thereby call it into question (even as the authors, Guntram H. Herb, Vincent Falardeau, and Kathryn Talano, are sensitive to their own adoption of settler knowledges and to themselves not being Indigenous). Readers will then enjoy two excellent Film Reviews of contemporary cinema showcasing the plights of refugees seeking access to European society, by borders scholars Şeyma Saylak and Natasha Sofia Martinez. Finally, the new issue closes with two Book Reviews: Michael J. Carpenter summarizes the contribution of Maurice Stierl’s important book Migrant Resistance, and Molly-Ann P. Taylor shines a light on Michel Hogue’s landmark Métis and the Medicine Line.