Borders, Bordering, and the Transnation

Abstract

The hope for a better life that drives increasing numbers of refugees to seek shelter has corresponded to an increasingly hysterical sealing of national borders around the world. Whatever the world would look like without borders, refugees have been reduced to the condition of homo sacer – bare life – in what Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception outside the law. This article considers the oxymoronic conditions by which the nation-state produces ‘states of exception’, not only to record the sinister development of the incarceration of asylum seekers, but also to emphasize the tenacious and innovative nature of the processes and techniques by which subjects inhabit borders of all kinds. Despite the powerful structural effects of the state—particularly its effects on transnational mobility— individual subjects inhabit the borders of nations in ways that demonstrate their political mobility, constituting what I call the ‘transnation’. While the transnation—the outside of the state that begins within the nation—may or may not engage in physical travel, it reveals the utopian possibilities offered by the actual proliferation of national subjects. The article considers the function of literature in the transnation, particularly the utopian possibilities it offers to move between the structures of the state.