Suchergebnisse

Paradoxically cast as material and imaginary; utopic and dystopic; militarized and peaceful; masculine and feminine; and white, brown, and Other, Latinos hold long-standing concerns regarding borders and their representations and possibilities. Indeed the term "borderlands" offers the promise of disrupting stagnating debates on identity. It likewise holds the pitfalls of becoming subject to appropriation sans the anchor of long-standing identity politics. Indeed, these tensions infuse competing approaches to the border, those who take the materiality of the international boundary between the United States and Mexico as a point of departure versus those who take borders in all their permutations as instigating new mediations of difference and broad new cultural imaginaries. Feminists, critical race scholars, Chicano and Latino scholars, and scholars vested in questions of decoloniality have used metaphorical renderings of the border as points of departure. They contrast sharply with those who see it as a site of violent subjugation and oppression. Borders are of particular import as border controls and undocumented border crossings have intensified across the globe during the long moment of neoliberal globalization and particularly following 11 September 2001. Many works, of course, draw from both these currents. In this respect, the vast interdisciplinary nature of the scholarship and the heavy influence of intersectionality, or the notion that race, class, and gender intertwine complexly and are mutually reinforcing, render such categorization fraught if not problematic.

Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands explores everyday life and senses of identity and belonging along a contested border whose official functions and local impacts have shifted across the twentieth century. It does so through the accounts of contemporary borderland residents in Ireland and Northern Ireland who shared with us their reflections on and experiences of the border from the 1950s to the present day. Since the border is the product of the partition of the island and the creation of Northern Ireland, its meaning has been deeply entangled with the radically and often violently opposed perspectives on the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and the political reunification of the island. Yet the intensely political symbolism of the border has meant that relatively little attention has been paid to the lived experience of the border, its material presence in the landscape and in people's lives, and its materialisation through the practices and policies of the states on either side. Drawing on recent approaches within historical, political and cultural geography and the cross-disciplinary field of border studies, this book redresses this neglect by exploring the Irish border in terms of its meanings (from the political to the personal) but also, and importantly, through the objects (from tables of custom regulations and travel permits to road blocks and military watch towers) and practices (from official efforts to regulate the movement of people and objects across it to the strategies and experiences of those subject to those state policies) through which it was effectively constituted. The focus is on the Irish border as practised, experienced and materially present in the borderlands

Recently, the Regional Initiative to Integrate South America has begun promoting a transboundary road that would bisect the forested borderlands and connect the two largest cities in the region, while the state governments seek to promote a direct ecological railroad alternative. Both transportation initiatives promise to alter forests and rivers and transform economies and cultures, but these projects also lack the base geographic information necessary to understand their potential transboundary impacts and benefits.