Border Crossings Across Languages and Di

In our age of purportedly unsurpassable walls, mobility restrictions, and heightened security, borders are often imagined and understood as physical lines of demarcation protecting state sovereignty and defending cultural specificity. This course seeks to destabilize this notion of a fixed, immovable and potentially sealed border through representations of contemporary border-crossing across various media, in order to show the border, instead, as a concept and device regulating human mobility well beyond its physical location. This course will incorporate literary, visual, and political texts that complicate and expand the imaginary -- spatial, temporal, and poetic -- of the border and border crossings. 

Divided into four parts that underscore the evolution of human interactions with the border from the early 20th Century until the present, this three-credit undergraduate seminar is focused on Europe while including other migratory spaces of the Global North, most notably North America. We will start with a general overview of the border as a concept and a mechanism that simultaneously enables and restricts movement. We will then engage with post-WWI crossings of the borders of the British and French empire as significant historical elements of the creation of the border in relation to discriminated and racialized groups of the 20th Century. Moving on to exploring the formation of the European Union as predicated on a space of free internal circulation opposing a political objective of “zero illegal entries”, we will look at the formation of EU and the US borders as a result of ongoing processes of illegalization. Lastly, we will study the iterations of some of these processes on the High Seas, only in theory a space of free circulation.