Border Rules: An Abolitionist Refusal

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: Border Rules and Oppositional Currents -- Description of the Project -- Why Cultural Representations Matter -- Scope of the Work: Analyzing the EU-Mediterranean and the US-Mexico Borders, 2011-2021 -- Summary of the Six Chapters -- Works Cited -- Chapter 2: Border Rules: Imperialism, Race, and the Politics of Development -- Borders: Fluidity and Rigidity, Mobility and Statis -- Imperialism and the Border at Home and Abroad -- Borders, Primitive Accumulation, and Surplus Populations -- Works Cited -- Chapter 3: Theorizing Borders in the Shadow of Imperial Violence -- Imperial Violence, Race, and the Specter of the "Failed State" -- Border Critiques: Scapes, Edges, and Other Negotiations -- Borders: A Materialist Critique -- Works Cited -- Chapter 4: Narrating the Border: Fluidity, Gender, and Resistance in Rabih Alemmedine's The Wrong End of the Telescope and Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World -- Contexts and Labels -- Decentering the Gaze: Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope -- "Morbid Phenomena" in the Borderlands: Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World -- Works Cited -- Chapter 5: Documenting the Migrant Journey in Ai Weiwei's Human Flow and Diego Quemada-Díez's La Jaula de Oro -- Human Flow and Poetic Protest -- La Jaula de Oro: Dramatizing the Real -- Works Cited -- Chapter 6: Visualizing Borders: M.I.A.'s "Borders" and Mural Art in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso -- M.I.A.'s "Borders": Pop and Politics Across the Waters -- The Politics of Space: Murals in the Sister Cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso -- Under the Bridge/Bajo el Puente -- Sister Cities/Ciudades Hermanas -- Works Cited -- Chapter 7: A Borderless World: Abolition Democracy and the Politics of Refusal -- Abolition and Solidarities Across Borders.

This book examines both border policies and oppositional narratives of "the border," 2011-2021, demonstrating that the term designates not merely a line of territorial control but also a set of social relations shaped by persistent, racially differentiated colonial structures and, more recently, by neoliberal modes of accumulation. These relations are shown to determine access to wealth and/or resources and to enable the management of labor, the extraction of surplus, and the accumulation of capital. Discussion in the book is informed by the history of these policies and by the critical literature on borders. Various cultural texts focusing on two border zones--the US-Mexico and the EU-Southern Mediterranean--are analyzed: specifically, two novels, two films, and two murals examined in conjunction with a music video. A path to a borderless future is suggested: an abolitionist refusal of border rules with an insistence on the necessity of abolition