Kapka Kassabova and Ben Judah: Writing Borders and Borderscapes in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article addresses the role of border and borderscapes in two contemporary texts by writers based in Britain, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe [Kassabova, Kapka. 2017. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. London: Granta] and Ben Judah’s This Is London: Life and Death in the World City [Judah, Ben. 2016. This is London: Life and Death in the World City. London: Picador]. Reading these texts as narratives of border in the context of contemporary discourses on Europe and Brexit, the article shows how the texts challenge the general bordering tendency to represent Europe and Europeans as Britain’s Others, marked by difference and ethnic, cultural, and geopolitical borders. Examining the works in the context of the borderscape concept, the article shows how the texts’ border-crossings challenge such binary thinking and offer ways to locate alternatives to simplistic versions of national identity. The article shows a transforming discourse of borders that underlines their porosity and points to the emergence of new identities as the result of border-crossings. The borderscapes examined in the article (Bulgaria’s southern border and London) reveal diverse belongings and becomings in historical and contemporary contexts that generate new identities.