Sites of Dissensus : Sensing Borders and Affective States

Abstract

This essay considers the shifting representation of borders and territory in a North American context and how these sites continue to exert force on the political imagination through a language of crisis and emergency. While the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (2002) and the establishment of the U.S.-Mexico border wall (2006-8) are among the most obvious manifestations of a transformation in border policy, calls for greater protection along sparsely populated regions of the Canada-U.S. border have surfaced repeatedly in the media from 2017 onwards. In both the U.S. and Canada, the gaze toward “the border” has remained steady for some time. I argue that the relationship between sight and site was pressed into service in the creation and maintenance of national borders and that the mediated image of the border has been critical to shifting attitudes toward the role of borders and migration from the late 19th century onwards. But borders are also paradoxical sites that become knowable, however, as affective states. Drawing on the disparate work of Walter Mignolo and Jacques Rancière this paper explores the role of the senses in both historical and contemporary bordering processes through looking at a range of collaborative art and activist practices that align with relational and decolonial aesthetics. As the decolonial project becomes increasingly imperative for both indigenous and non-indigenous people in North America after the recommendations of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Report, I ask how the reactionary and populist forms of border fortification can be countered and unsettled by hemispheric perspectives and migratory routes.