Border aesthetics: concepts and intersections

Introduction / Stephen F. Wolfe and Mireille Rosello -- Ecology / Mireille Rosello and Timothy Saunders -- Imaginary / Lene M. Johannessen and Ruben Moi -- In/visibility / Chiara Brambilla and Holger Pötzsch -- Palimpsests / Nadir Kinossian and Urban Wråkberg -- Sovereignty / Reinhold Görling and Johan Schimanski -- Waiting / Henk van Houtum and Stephen F. Wolfe -- Intersections : a conclusion in the form of a glossary / Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe.

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject's conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas―ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting―the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.