Barbed Wire Fence Research Articles

Beyond the Surface: Decoding Pityriasis Versicolor Through Clinical, Dermoscopic and Microbiological Exploration

Abstract Background: Pityriasis versicolor (PV) is an asymptomatic, superficial fungal infection caused by the Malassezia species and causes discolouration of the skin leading to altered pigmentation. It is usually a clinical diagnosis, but in doubtful cases wherein potassium hydroxide (KOH) mount is unavailable, alternative modalities like dermoscopy aid in the management. Aims and Objectives: To evaluate the clinical and dermoscopic patterns in PV and correlate with the associated risk factors and study the fungal culture. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted for 12 months. A total of 115 patients clinically diagnosed with PV showing positivity on KOH mount were recruited. Dermoscopy was done, following which the scales were scraped and cultured in the laboratory on Saborauds dextrose agar and modified Dixon media, and the results were analysed after 3 weeks. Results: Among the 115 participants, on clinical evaluation, 79 patients had achromic and 36 patients had chromic lesions. The dermoscopic features were categorized into domains such as scaling, pigmentation and other features. Fine scaling was the most common feature observed in 88.7% of the patients. Pigmentary changes were noted in all the patients with non-uniform pigmentation being the most common. We have also observed and described newer dermoscopic findings such as barbed wire fence appearance of ridges and furrows, fluffy cotton ball appearance of hypopigmented perifollicular lesions and sprinkled pepper appearance of pigmented dispersion. Out of the 115 KOH mount positive cases, 51 (44.3%) showed growth on fungal culture with Malassezia furfur being the most common species to be isolated in 18 patients. Conclusions: Dermoscopy is a new, popular non-invasive diagnostic modality, which shows specific features like fine scaling, pigment alteration, ridges and furrows with perifollicular involvement, and can be used to diagnose doubtful cases of PV as an adjunct or substitute to a KOH mount.

Thin barbed wire fences of religions, where football binds millions: exploring the ultras phenomenon in the Kolkata maidan

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore the ultras phenomenon in the Kolkata maidan as a mediatized spectacle in the context of sports fandom in 21st-century India. In contrast to the typical portrayal of football ultras as violent groups of conservatives in the global paradigm, this paper examines the Kolkata ultras as a distinct community formed by specific fan groups of two prominent football clubs—Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. Exploring the complex configurations of sports fandom and ultras activities, this paper considers the Kolkata football ultras as a pastiche of their European counterparts. Through their gallery activities, including the display of tifos, the Kolkata ultras attempt to narrativize the settlers-migrant conflict between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal in a neoliberal economy. While turning the identarian discourse on a visual level, the paper also analyses how the display foregrounds a change in the politics of sports fandom in India through their anti-NRC-CAA tifos in recent times.

Morbidity and Mortality of Birds of Prey Admitted to Rehabilitation Centers for Barbed Wire Injuries, New Mexico, USA, 2016-2021.

Interest in the role of fences in wildlife movement and injuries is growing, especially in the western US, where many miles of barbed wire fences crisscross the landscape. However, literature is limited on the effect of barbed wire on avian populations. From 2016 to 2021, six New Mexico, USA, rehabilitation centers accepted 49 raptors injured by barbed wire. Eight species were represented; the majority were Great Horned Owls (Bubo virginianus). Other owls, buteos, and a single falcon were also affected. Most of the injured birds came from counties with low human population density. The injuries tended to be severe, and most birds died or were euthanized; 11 survived, and only eight birds were released. During the study period, barbed wire injuries accounted for over 12% of Great-horned Owl admissions to rehabilitation centers and 7% of all owl admissions. At one New Mexican wildlife rehabilitation center, raptors admitted for barbed wire-associated injuries were more likely to die or be euthanized compared with those admitted for other reasons. Given the welfare effects to these birds, more research is needed to determine whether wildlife-friendly fence modifications, such as a smooth top wire or rail, would mitigate injuries to birds of prey.

열린 ‘죽의 장막’과 닫히는 개혁개방 시기의 국경

This paper aims to explore the changes in border management in China and the reasons behind them. Prior to the reform and open door policy, China was a closed country, known as the “Bamboo Curtain”. China was a forbidden land for many foreigners, but the situation on China's margins, comprising mainly “cross-border” ethnic minority regions, was different from macro international relations and our perceptions. China's borders had no barriers to cross, and ethnic minorities moved freely across borders.
 After China's opening and the international movement of foreigners and Chinese people became freer, the management and control of the border was actually tightened. Since the mid-1990s, border areas have been equipped with barbed wire fences to prevent movement, and some areas have been militarized. China's borders have become increasingly controlled during the reform period. Since the reform, China's borders have become a space for international movement, exchange, and trade. At the same time, border areas have also become places where smuggling, illegal crossings, and international problems such as North Korean defectors.

Entangled by Borders: Bodies, Citizenship, and Gender in Assam

This paper will scrutinize the politics of border construction in Assam through the lens of Border Studies and Memory Studies. The unique geo-political location of Assam vis-à-vis its crisis of identity and belonging as a result of the 1947 Partition, makes it a complex site of study. My scrutiny of the literary and cultural memory of this region will be based on a comparative reading of a selection of short fiction entitled Barbed Wire Fence: Stories Of Displacement From The Barak Valley Of Assam (2012) by Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das, and Debendranath Acharya’s Assamese novel Jangam on the 1942 Indo-Burmese exodus (Sahitya Akademi award, 1984). My intervention is driven by the persistent need to deconstruct the 1947 Partition as a monolithic history of violence and disruption, and to draw attention to the many instances where multiple borders and multiple forms of disenfranchisement took place. The texts that I am close-reading, focus on such similar histories of disjuncture that shaped the history of Assam vis-à-vis issues of bodies, citizenship, and gender. Using news articles and commentaries from 2019 to 2022, I will subsequently connect the traumatic events surrounding the 1942 exodus and the 1947 Partition to the current state apparatuses that are using biomarkers to discriminate against perceived others and eliminate them from the protection of the nation-state. I will connect the past trauma with the insecurities and (im)possibilities that have cropped up surrounding the implementation of a Citizenship Amendment Bill, and creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC).

An explosive landscape: Arranging the barnacle goose on the Solway Firth

By the end of the Second World War, the Svalbard barnacle goose population had dwindled to a couple of hundred birds. Flying in from the Arctic to spend the winters on the Solway Firth (the estuary that separates England from Scotland), they were a favourite target of wildfowlers in the area. Since then, a ban on shooting and the Solway goose management scheme that pays farmers to maintain a goose friendly habitat has seen the barnacle goose numbers increase. Today, an uneasy truce has formed between conservationists, farmers and wildfowlers who have different and often conflicting interests in the goose. Adding to that is the Solway's rich military history: once host to huge munitions factories during the First and Second World Wars, this now derelict military infrastructure curates the tidal landscape through awkward access zones, barbed wire fences and secretive burial sites. In this article I argue that the military infrastructure of the Solway, particularly that of the explosive propellants produced in the factories, have left resonances that not only inflect the land itself, but also the trajectory of the barnacle goose. Explosive propellants are used in different ways by the goose's stakeholders: cannon nets by conservationists, bird bangers by farmers, and explosive shot by wildfowlers. Yet this is a dynamic situation that must account for goose agencies and complex entanglements of human, nonhuman, and technology: an explosive landscape that arranges goose life along the flyway.

Remaking the Law to Protect Civilians: Overlapping Jurisdictions and Contested Spaces in UN Protection of Civilian Sites

ABSTRACT The UN Protection of Civilians sites in South Sudan were separated from adjacent towns by barbed wire fences, mounds, watchtowers and patrolling peacekeepers. Building on and contributing to recent legal geography scholarship on jurisdictions, we explore how legal norms, institutions and rivalrous claims of jurisdiction remake these places of protection and blur spatial boundaries by creating trails that entangle the worlds inside and outside of the sites. The article also provides an unusual example of a powerful public authority – the United Nations – resisting claims that they have jurisdiction. The article is based on qualitative research in Wau and Bentiu.

Ribbon Remembrances at the Tokai Forest Gender Based Violence Roadside Memorial: Mapping Materiality, Artivism and Multimodal Afterlives in Cape Town

ABSTRACT A multitude of brightly coloured ribbons tied along a barbed wire fence blow wildly in the Cape South Easter wind giving kinetic energy to the Ribbon Gate Gender Based Violence (GBV) roadside memorial bordering Tokai Forest in Cape Town. The memorial was created after the violent murders of Sinoxolo Mafevuka (d. 02.03.2016) and Franziska Blöchliger (d. 07.03.2016). It is continuously recreated by the public, whereas other sites of GBV, such as Unineye Mrwetyana’s (d. 24.08.2019) memorial in Claremont, also in Cape Town, are no longer memorialised. GBV protest is multimodal encompassing, performance art, artworks, slogans, internet archive images, #protest movements, social media, exhibitions, poetry, audio-visual productions, podcasts and differentiated material forms, including ribboning. The Ribbon Gate contests the official South African post-transition memorial landscape by appropriating roadside memorial practice, GBV artivism and the accrued cultural power of cause ribbons. Since the 1980s increasingly ribbons evoke compassion, empathy and hope in the context of the underrepresentation of women, women’s rights activism and symbolise violence perpetrated against women, children and L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+. Ephemeral GBV memorial practice, such as the Ribbon Gate, utilising the theoretical lens of public critical potency, as theorised by Lutheko Modisane, is redefined as multi-gendered, creatively subversive, and a social protest form where ribbons represent a language of resistance.

Dispatches from Kolob

Dispatches from Kolob

The Shadow of Lives Lost in the Mediterranean Over Europe

Europe’s treatment of refugees provides growing evidence that the continent is losing its moral compass, and that Europe is increasingly callous – so-called Fortress Europe. Brute force, deterrence, including pushbacks and barbed wire fences have become the instruments with which European governments have responded to irregular migration and refugees. This article seeks to bring to the fore the contradiction between the EU’s self-proclaimed values — human dignity and human rights — and the callous policies of nation states and the EU’s migration regime. My main focus lies on the calamitous conditions of refugees and the thousands of deaths that have occurred in the Mediterranean Sea since 2015, the year that refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war started making their way to Europe. Importantly, the Mediterranean is the deadliest border in the world; it is the veritable global epicenter of lethal border crossings. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, I undertake a humanist critique of the European status quo. The EU, as a force for a better, more livable world, is on its way to becoming irrelevant, something that was evident well before the Covid-19 pandemic. This is what is principally at stake today.

Fences, Goods and “Police”: Figurations of the Border in Manjira Saha's Chhotoder Border

ABSTRACT In this article, I closely read Manjira Saha’s 2018 volume Chhotoder Border. a collection of children's line drawings and short narratives collated from school children in the India- Bangladesh borderlands. Certain recurring tropes emerge from these rough drawings and short descriptions, rife with spelling mistakes. The border, an English word repeatedly transcribed in Bengali, does not need an introduction or justification in the lives of these children of the borderlands–the materiality of the border is represented through barbed wire fences, through the “police” who are at once scary and helpful, and the repeated, casual reference to trafficking in goods. I identify the materiality and the affective dimensions of the border through the narratives and drawings in Chhotoder Border. This article analyses the linguistic and visual texts collected by Saha in the volume to understand the framing of the materiality of the Indo- Bangladesh border as well as its affective import among the students who are the contributors to Saha's volume. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning discourse around the “cultural aspect of borders”. By investigating the “figurations” or narrative tropes/themes present in these border narratives this article furthers the understanding of discursive construction and circulation of borders.

Development of bamboo- (Bambusa bambos) based bio-fence to protect field crops: Insights from a study in India's Bundelkhand region

Stray/wild animals can cause serious damages to crops, leading to accusations and counter accusations among villagers. In the Bundelkhand region of India, this problem is more severe due to “Anna Pratha,” that is, letting loose animals to open graze. Protective measures employed by farmers (barbed wire fencing, conventional fencing, etc.) are not fully effective and also require periodical maintenance, which involves additional costs and manpower. This necessitates the evolution of a cost-effective and long-term solution to minimize the problem. The current study seeks to evaluate the potential of thorny bamboo (Bambusa bambos) as a bio-fence creating deterrence to stray/wild animals at the ICAR—IISWC RC, the research farm of Datia, Madhya Pradesh, India. After 21 months of planting, bamboo plants attained the maximum plant height up to 4.47 m with the highest clump spread diameter of 30.50 cm. However, the growth of the bamboo bio-fence to be effective depends on the edaphic and management conditions. The findings revealed that planting bamboo at a distance of 80.00 cm in the continuous trench can be an effective bio-fence to avoid man–animal conflict. Huge crop losses were reported before the establishment of a bio-fence. In 2021–2022 (when bamboo plants turned into a closely spaced thicket, making a bio-fence), only two incidents of the invasion of animals were reported with no crop damage. The initial cost to develop a bamboo bio-fence was estimated at INR 5,796 for a length of 100 m. Therefore, the present study suggests that bamboo bio-fencing is an economical and effective crop protection measure against damage by wild/stray animals.

How did the deer cross the fence: An evaluation of wildlife-friendlier fence modifications to facilitate deer movement

Fences are a common feature throughout the landscape of North America’s Great Plains region. Knowledge surrounding the harmful implication that fences have on the movement of wildlife, specifically ungulates, is expanding. Across the region, it is accepted that there is a need to mitigate the impacts of barbed wire fencing and that “wildlife-friendlier” fence designs are emerging as a practical tool to meet these goals. Here we evaluate the response of sympatric deer species to the implementation of two fence modifications, fastening the top two wires together using clips and the installation of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe to encompass the top two wires. We also aim to determine the optimal top wire height to allow for successful crossing by deer, with the goal to provide a more robust understanding of effective wildlife-friendlier fence standards. We used remote trail cameras to capture crossing events and recorded responses for mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Using generalized linear mixed modelling, we tested the influence modifications had on crossing success and decisions prior to and after the modifications were installed compared to control sites. We found that these modifications had little impact on deer crossing behavior. We determined that wire height had the greatest impact on the permeability of fences, but that deer permeability was strongly influenced by species and sex. We found that the current maximum recommended top wire height of 102 cm (40 inches) is adequate to allow individuals of both deer species to cross over the fence, with the exception of female mule deer. Our results also indicate as the top wire height reaches 110 cm (43 inches) or higher, that the probability of successfully jumping over the fence dramatically drops off, with the exception for male mule deer. We recommend the installation of clips as a cost-effective method to lower top wire height and PVC pipe to improve fence visibility and potentially reduce entanglement events, all while effectively keeping livestock in intended pastures.

Impact of home improvements and health education on the transmission of Trypanosoma cruzi Chagas in a rural area of western Mexico.

Chagas disease is one of the most important vector-borne diseases in Latin America. Instituting home improvement preventive measures and increasing health education contribute to successful control of the triatomine insect vector. The impact of home and road improvements and health education upon the inhabitants of 37 human dwellings in three small towns in western Mexico were studied. Initially, few house roofs were made of concrete and few walls were cement-lined. Almost all houses initially lacked metal window screens and none used barbed wire fences. One year after the intervention, all of these measures were more common, and almost 100% of houses continued to use window screens and barbed wire fences ten years post-intervention. By ten years post-intervention, >75% of houses had cement-lined walls. Initially, 24.3% of human dwellings were infested with Triatoma longipennis Usinger; at one and ten years post-intervention, only 2.7% of dwellings were infested. The abundance of peridomestic opossums decreased after intervention and remained low ten years later. Approximately 10% of dogs were infected in both surveys. Human infections decreased from 2.98% to zero by 13 years post-intervention. Implementation of these intervention measures led to the successful control of Trypanosoma cruzi Chagas transmission in these towns.

No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani

Reviewed by: No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani Marja Karelia Boochani, Behrouz. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Translated by Omid Tofighian. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2019. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than eighty million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced in recent decades because of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and war. As a result of the huge influx of migrating populations, many countries have closed their borders to migrants, leading to the establishment of refugee camps around the world. One such camp was established on Manus Island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. It was officially referred to as Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, functioning under Australian jurisdiction. [End Page 243] Yet no processing seems to have taken place on Manus Island; it was effectively a refugee detention center with prison-like conditions. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, written by Behrouz Boochani, exposes life at Manus prison to the outside world from an insider's perspective. Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer, and filmmaker who was illegally detained on Manus Island for more than five years after being forcibly taken there in 2013. He and other asylum seekers had traveled thousands of miles hoping for freedom in Australia, but due to the country's borders being closed to asylum seekers, their journey continued to Manus Island. Boochani asks: "Why did I have to arrive in Australia exactly four days after they effected a merciless law" (89)? No Friend but the Mountains is an autobiographical account of Boochani's experiences and observations while detained in Manus Island prison. He tapped the book on various smuggled-in mobile phones on WhatsApp and sent it to his contacts in Australia by thousands of text messages. Although the book begins with descriptions of near-death experiences and starvation during his journey from Indonesia to Papua New Guinea by truck and by boat, the majority of the narrative refers to his forced detention in the Manus Island prison. Boochani considers writing an act of resistance, an action to expose the unjust treatment of the prisoners on Manus Island. His writing is a blend of prose and poetry while many segments of his prose also reveal poetic tendencies. Writing music and poetry provided him relief from the atrocious conditions of the camp. True to his journalistic profession, Boochani describes events as an observer, as if he were an outsider relating what he witnessed, particularly when writing about physical torture of his fellow detainees. However, he includes himself when referring to psychological torture, such as round-the-clock surveillance of the prisoners, seemingly interminable waiting in line for food, sometimes unsuccessfully, waiting for a turn to use a telephone as mobile phones were not permitted, waiting to use the toilet facilities or medical services, and waiting in line for his twice-weekly cigarette allotment. "I have always despised waiting" (88), writes Boochani. For him, waiting in line was a mode of torture: "A twisted interlocking chain of hungry men / Bodies mutate under the burning sun / Heads in an oven fired by the sun / Undergoing sickening transformation / A long line of men of different heights, weights, ages, and colors" (189). [End Page 244] The constant uncertainties of life at Manus prison, which Boochani considers another form of torture, is what Dr. Shanthi Robertson from Western Sydney University refers to as chronomobilities, profound changes in everyday experience of time. This is particularly relevant in detention centers such as Manus Island, where prisoners are confined within an enclosed area surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, not knowing when they might be released, where they would be sent once released, or what their eventual fate would be. Boochani's will to survive was intrinsically tied to his memories of Kurdish mountains: "The vision of mountains upon mountains / Mountains within mountains / Mountains that are hiding chestnut oak trees" (31). Orchards of chestnut oak trees and waves of mountains surface in his memories throughout his time in captivity, inspiring him to write poetry and sing songs about them while sitting under a tree by the prison's fencing. Looking out...

Infinite Parking Lots

Infinite Parking Lots Kathryn Marie Dudley The question before us, it would seem, is where we are when there's no there there. That is how Gertrude Stein formulates everybody's autobiographical dilemma upon discovering that the place where they came from no longer exists as the place where they once were.1 Encounters with vacancy, we could say, produce perplexity and affective shock. They can induce startling moments of confusion in our embodied movement through space and time. In Stein's case, the jolt was precipitated by a confrontation with the specter of an office park occupying the site in Oakland, California where her childhood home once stood. An event like this, we might suppose, would be hard to miss. But Stein being Stein is who she is because she noticed it. Not everybody does. And there, it seems to me, is intrigue of an anthropological kind. The contributors to this volume have all, each in their own way, noticed the vacancies of late liberalism. They not only notice them but also dwell in the affective break of that shock—that space on the roadside that lies beside, beyond, and underneath imperial desires to condemn and bypass the debris produced by centuries of hubris and ongoing violence.2 This mode of inhabiting the noticed unnoticed—this ethnographic attunement—affords us an instructive opportunity to reflect on the disorienting and reorienting affects that vacancy instantiates. To be agitated by sites of vacancy is [End Page 465] to experience them as uncannily animating and transformative—and not necessarily in a for sale or rent sort of way. Sites of vacancy can arouse us as happenings in their own right. Contrary to the enterprising figure of vacant real estate as a blank slate upon which to scrawl the signs of restoration or renewal, these breaks in the landscape can be said to seethe with struggles over hegemonic regimes of value. If the jack-o-lantern grins of abandoned Main Streets could speak, they would surely say that resale and profitable flipping are never inevitable. No matter how toxic or venerable their histories, vacancies introduce question marks into scenarios of boom, bust, and redevelopment as usual. Whether they become host to community gardens, convention centers, prisons, or encampments of the evicted, the lacunae of accumulation by dispossession resist both the knee-jerk nostalgia of empire's ruins and the historical erasures of capital's boosters.3 In vacancy's gaps—between densely storied pasts and yet-to-be-authored futures—ghostly matters emerge, alerting us to wavering presents in filling our about-to-be-exhaled breath with premonitions of a divergent otherwise.4 It is this—this placement in the midst of things—that gives vacancy, as a situated analytic, traction in my imagination. It echoes Brian Massumi's voicing of a Deleuzian muse to start our inquiries in the middle of transitions from one state of being to another rather than at putative beginnings or ends.5 With all due respect to Gertrude, this vantage point highlights the space-time in between residential bungalows and commercial office parks. These interludes, in contrast to whatever precedes or follows, beckon us toward ever-present histories and futurities that are not yet—and may never be—realized. Vacancy, in other words, situates us where we are now and asks us to wonder: What is here here? And the longer we stay in this place of wonderment, the more surprising the answers can become. Not long ago, I confronted the figure of a parking lot in the least likely of places. I was talking to a desert advocate about habitat fragmentation on public lands in the American West. We were discussing a quarter-million-acre span of high desert that lies between two federally designated antelope sanctuaries. Wild lands and wildlife, I learned, are faced with perils far in excess of the ubiquitous barbed-wire fencing around livestock allotments and the relentless expansion of oil, gas, and mineral mining. More elusive, but ever-intensifying, are the horrors of anthropogenically induced drought, wildfire, and life-extinguishing riparian blight. In these [End Page 466] fragile ecosystems, the Anthropocene's fallout does not land equitably on all multispecies worlds...

Book Review: Rowing Through the Barbed Wire Fence by Rima Karaliene

Translated by Dovilas Bukauskas. Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Publishing, 2017.

Private Military and Security Companies and The Militarization of Humanitarianism

The widespread use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in United Nations peacebuilding missions often undermines the effectiveness of these missions. PMSCs tend to encourage, in unnecessary ways, what is called security risk management and promote the militarization of humanitarian efforts. They encourage humanitarian aid organizations to protect their personnel with barbed wire fences, security guards, armed convoys, and secure aid compounds, even if the security risks are relatively low. Consequently, these militarized humanitarian efforts heighten the perception of risks and intensify security measures, which create physical and psychological barriers between humanitarian aid personnel and the local communities in which they carry out their tasks. This situation undermines local ownership of peacebuilding efforts and makes them less responsive to the local communities involved in these efforts. This article provides a comparative analysis of the nature of this problem and its effects in the Global South.

Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel's Gate by Rhona Seidelman (review)

Reviewed by: Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel's Gate by Rhona Seidelman Eyal Katvan Rhona Seidelman. Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel's Gate. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 240 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000386 This book focuses on the Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah Camp/Quarantine during the years 1949–1952. Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah served as the central immigration processing camp in Israel soon after the founding of the state, opening its gates in 1949 and officially closing in 1962. It also, and primarily, served as a quarantine center. In this regard, the book deals with the history of quarantine, isolation, and public health. It was published shortly before the Covid-19 outbreak, which makes the subject matter of the book more relevant than ever. But this book is also relevant for readers and researchers interested in the Israeli immigration experience. The book addresses the activities of the camp/quarantine from different angles (Confines, Structure, Meaning, and Memory) and from the different perspectives of the various "players" involved. In other words, it presents the picture as seen in the eyes of the beholder (if using Foucault's terminology, then the "eyes" reflect the well-known examining gaze): journalists, reporters, photographers, managers, clerks, police officers, physicians, and health professionals (using medical rationales to justify their practices), politicians (justifying or opposing these practices, depending on their political agendas) and the immigrants (new or veteran; sick or healthy; Holocaust survivors or immigrants from Arab states). This is where the book's strength lies: in its ability to examine this unique locus from a multidimensional perspective. The methodology helps readers understand that the immigrants' experience and the diverse interests of the stakeholders were quite complex, and far from homogeneous. Seidelman outlines it well: As the details of this story will show, Shaar Ha'aliya affected individuals differently. At this first moment of arrival, the large categorizations of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi are not a reliable way to understand whether a person would [End Page 494] have felt welcome or happy or discriminated against and traumatized. Some North Africans were deeply scarred by their time there, while others hardly remember it. Some Europeans were unmoved by what they found there, while for others, the camp conjured memories from the war and the Holocaust. One man who was there for weeks considered it "fine," while others who were there for several hours considered it horrible. How one experienced Shaar Ha'aliya was largely an individual matter, the outcome of the interaction between factors of language, background, time, lodgings, food, weather, interpersonal relations, age, expectations, and past experience that resulted in one's own personal encounter and memories. (11) Seidelman describes in detail not only these (institutional or personal) players, but also the absorption process, as well as the power dynamics and the ways in which the new immigrants were not passive: they protested, escaped, demonstrated, initiated strikes, and the like. This leads to the understanding that alongside the manifest functions of the camp/quarantine (i.e., public health) it also had additional intentional and unintentional functions and consequences: symbolic, political, and professional, among others. The book is titled Under Quarantine. Indeed, it discusses the quarantine and the question of whether Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah was a camp, a quarantine, or both. It also examines the uses and abuses of the quarantine. But the quarantine is only one component of the bigger story, as depicted so well in the book (by, for example, describing the use of food as a control mechanism). In my view it is the equivalent of the camp's barbed-wire fence (the physical barrier around the camp), which appears as a central and recurring theme of this book. It is a book about Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah, where medicine and public health played an important role (and justification), but perhaps not the main role. In this sense "The Fence" might fit better as a title, conveying to readers that the book expands the (physical and symbolic) hole in the fence so as to allow one to view not only the practice of medicine but the entire experience of Shaʿar-Ha-ʿaliyah. This is a story of...

A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space

The attempted extirpation of Indigenous populations has been an enduring condition of the ‘idyllic proceedings’ of primitive accumulation. For Marx, such acts of evisceration characterised the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness of the West, is read here as one such ‘annal of mankind’ written in ‘letters of blood and fire’. More pointedly, by contributing to an interdisciplinary approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, it is argued that Blood Meridian should be considered a quintessential novel of the racial and historical geography of the frontier economy and its spatial expansion within the uneven conditions of capitalist development. This is evidenced through the real spaces and historical occurrences that shaped capitalist expansion recounted in the novel. The latter include the racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state between the 1840s and 1850s in Mexico through the actions of the Glanton Gang; the slaughtering of the buffalo that reached its peak in the 1870s marked in the novel by bonepickers that trawl the calcined architecture for skeletons to turn into commodities for the West; and the systematic mapping and simplifying practices conducted through outposts of appropriation on the frontier, such as Fort Griffin, which signal the barbed-wire fencing of rangeland into ranches. The meridian of bloodiness marked by these racialised acts is therefore revealed as an intrinsic aspect of the literary economy of primitive accumulation.