Imagined Borders/Lived Ambiguity: Intersections of Repression and Resistance

(Hardback)

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This edited volume examines the theoretical versatility of the concept of borders. The impulse to categorize, while present from antiquity in Western culture, has increased in intensity since the advent of the modern age with its corresponding political rise in the ideology of the sovereign nation-state. While the concept of immigration is the common mental image Westerners have when discussing borders, immigration is only the tip of the iceberg for this book. The belief in mutually exclusive, clear, and concrete categories, a necessary ideology in the age of the nation-state, creates large swathes of exceptions where people live ambiguous lives nationally, racially, sexually, ethnically, and in terms of gender. National identity, race, sexuality, gender, and the intersections between are the main categories discussed in the book through the lens of borders and ambiguity. The fervor over categorization, best embodied in recent political history by the Trump administration in the U.S., is both a desire to identify and thus control various dangerous populations, as well as creating the very ambiguity categorization is intended to alleviate. The volume weaves together discussions on the subjective meaning-making in ambiguity, policies that create ambiguity, historical creations of ambiguity that persist to the present, and theoretical considerations on the relationship between borders and ambiguity.

Reviews

What I especially appreciate about this timely assemblage is that it brings together various and varied cross-disciplinary approaches/perspectives to bear on the effects of borders, categories, categorizationsmaterial and imaginary. These are thought-provoking, critical, not predictable interventions. -- Aneil Rallin, author of Dreads and Open Mouths: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly
We live in a world in which not adhering to dominant ideas, identities, and politics have real, often severe, and in many instances deadly consequences. This volume offers an array of articles, synergistically aligned to challenge us to think about both the absurdity of borders and how they affect everyday people, especially those who do not fit neatly into prescribed boxes. Here is a timely and provocative book that goes where few academic books dare, but should. It is a book we should all have on our shelves, if only to offer alternative rigorous scholarship that re-centers itself on scholars (and scholarship) denied, ignored, or minimized. This is one book we should all be reading. -- David G. Embrick, University of Connecticut

Author Bio

B. Garrick Harden is associate professor of sociology at Lamar University.