On the Borderwaters and Watery Borders of a New World Order

Abstract

Field Trip 31 graphic.com/science/2020/06/why-covid-19-will-end-up-harming -the-environment/#close. Hayslip, Le Ly, with Jay Wurts. 1989. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace. New York: Penguin Books. Keats, John. 2015. The Complete Poems of John Keats. New York: Digireads. com. Lewis, James G. 2006. “Smokey Bear in Vietnam.” Environmental History 11, no. 3: 598–­ 603. Luce, Henry. 1941. “The American Century.” Life, February 17, 61–­ 65. McKinley, William. 1898. “Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation.” http:// www.msc.edu.ph/centennial/benevolent.html. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press. Washington Post. 2011. “Vietnam Begins First Phase of Agent Orange Cleanup.” June 17. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011 /jun/17/vietnam-begins-1st-phase-of-agent-orange-cleanup/. On the Borderwaters and Watery Borders of a New World Order Brian Russell Roberts Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) has launched a thousand ships. And perhaps rightly so: it begins with the materiality of the sea. And from thence it takes the sea as an allegory within the border–­ borderlands complex that it outlines. Consider the book’s opening poem, which has Anzaldúa standing on the beach in Border Field State Park, on the U.S. side of the U.S.–­ Mexican border, as a chain link fence is rippling up out of the sea along the geopolitical edge where Tijuana and San Diego meet (2). On the beach, Anzaldúa is standing at another edge as well, standing at the edge where earth and ocean overlap . More than lapping up onto the shore, however, the sea has a larger project within the narrative. Its waves are tearing a hole in the border fence (1). Anzaldúa says, Miro el mar atacar la cerca en Border Field Park. [I watch the sea attack the fence at Border Field Park.] 32 Field Trip She feels her heart seeking to mimic the waves, to imitate the sea’s surges (2), and she continues, The sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders. (3) To map Anzaldúa’s fence and sea onto the discussion of borders and borderlands that the poem prefaces, it is clear that the fence allegorizes the “border,” or what Borderlands terms “a dividing line,” while the sea allegorizes the “borderland,” or “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (3). The cultures of the borderland, like the sea, cannot be fenced—­ especially as the hearts of Anzaldúa and others surge like the waves of the sea against governmentality ’s unnatural boundary. It is only somewhat incongruous that the watery figure of the sea is Anzaldúa’s inciting metaphor for the borderlands, an overtly landed paradigm for understanding the arid regions surrounding the U.S.–­ Mexican border but also the “landscape” that prevails “wherever two or more cultures edge each other” (preface). I say only somewhat incongruous because of course any allegory depends on a difference between the tenor and the vehicle, so this difference between the watery vehicle (the surging sea) and landed tenor (the insurgent borderlands) is to be expected. And yet, the incongruity might also turn us toward Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s (2008, 212) suggestion that we not “strip theory of watery metaphors but that we should return to the materiality of water to make its metaphors mean more complexly.” What would happen if, rather than taking the sea as a natural metaphor for cultural impulses that do not love a border, we looked to the hydrological materiality of natural–­cultural ocean–­human interactions? We thus view a sea change in how borders are conceptualized, moving from a received notion of the border as terrestrial and toward a late twentieth-­century and still largely emergent notion of the border as preponderantly watery. Consider the startling implications of the popularly ignored 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which provides for a territorial sea extending twelve nautical miles from a country’s shoreline and an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) extending two hundred...