Ideological Borders Research Articles

Cross-border political competition.

Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders. This news and opinion are often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily, such as political parties, factions, or interest groups. But how does exposure to cross-border information affect the diffusion of ideas across national and ideological borders? Here, we develop a non-linear mathematical model for the cross-border spread of two ideologies. First, we describe the standard deterministic model where the populations of each country are assumed to be constant and homogeneously mixed. We solve the system of differential equations numerically by the Runge-Kutta method and show how small changes in the influence of a minority ideology can trigger shifts in the global political equilibrium. Second, we simulate recruitment as a stochastic differential process for each political affiliation and fit model solutions to population growth rates and voting populations in US presidential elections from 1932 to 2020. We also project the dynamics of several possible scenarios from 2020 to the end of the century. We show that cross-border influence plays a fundamental role in determining election outcomes. An increase in foreign support for a national party's ideas could change the election outcome, independent of domestic recruitment capacity. One key finding of our study suggests that voter turnout in the US will grow at a faster rate than non-voters in the coming decades. This trend is attributed to the enhanced recruitment capabilities of both major parties among non-partisans over time, making political disaffection less prominent. This phenomenon holds true across all simulated scenarios.

Introduction: Re-presenting COVID-19: Biopolitics, digitalisation, citizenship

This introduction briefly traces the development of historical and philosophical responses to COVID-19 in its longue durée and considers the pandemic’s lasting biopolitical effects in contemporary digital culture and its implications for democratic mechanisms and citizenship in Europe. It is argued that the present juncture constitutes a crucial and propitious moment in European thought and culture to take general stock of COVID-19 and to re-present it within the evolution of both European society and the European imaginary. Furthermore, the collective experience of COVID-19 has engendered important new confluences between humanities and the social sciences. Cinema is offered as a case study of biopolitical practice, or ‘bioart’, produced during the pandemic, revealing how ideas of community and citizenship are being re-thought and re-conceptualised ethically and politically in terms of relationality that surpasses standard disciplinary and ideological borders. Finally, the introduction outlines the six chapters comprising the volume.

Translated Solidarity

Abstract This essay traces the translation, reception, and adaptation of African anti-colonial poetics that emerged from the Congo Crisis in the People’s Republic of China in the early 1960s. It examines the Cold War mechanisms that coded translated African poetry, the socialist literary network that facilitated and constrained textual circulation, and the Maoist discourse of world revolution underlying Chinese writers’ responses to Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and African decolonization. The article argues that the Cold War served as a powerful geopolitical and discursive structure for keeping specific anti-colonial African authors, texts, tropes, and aesthetics alive and legible across national and ideological borders, while also rendering them susceptible to mistranslations and appropriations. The material, ideological, and affective configurations of the Cold War thus profoundly mediated imaginations and articulations of Sino-African solidarity in Maoist China.

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Die Grenze und die Grenzziehungen in der Essayistik von Karl-Markus Gauß

The article aims to investigate the border phenomenon and the demarcation of political and cultural borders in Gauß’s selected essays. Gauß’s essay writing originates from the European tradition of (self-)critical observation and is particularly concerned with European issues. The Austrian author examines the mechanisms of subordination and separation, the relationship between the centre and the periphery, and considers the concepts of border, nationalism, and regionalism in the Enlightenment spirit of prejudices criticism. He also recalls the Iron Curtain as the ideological border between Eastern and Western Europe and its implications. The article summarizes Gauß’s reflection on the essence of borders as artifi cial constructs and on the border’s ambivalence as a sphere of experiencing differences and a contact zone.

British Borders and/in East Africa: World War II and Multidirectional Memory in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy

Abstract The British myth of World War II has long been successfully mobilised to police the ideological borders of the UK. The article considers narratives about the war as a key site for the negotiation of British identity and the UK’s relation to its imperial past. It, first, seeks to unpack some of the contradictions of the dominant British view on the war to then consider the 2010 novel Black Mamba Boy by Somali-British writer Nadifa Mohamed. It is argued that the novel effectively opposes ideas of an ethnically homogenous nation. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory, the article shows how the novel interweaves different traumatic histories and thus presents memories of the war as an opportunity, not to consolidate national borders, but to forge new solidarities.

Implications of Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization for the Dance History Writing:

This study aims to address the issues of dance and national borders focusing on the impact of political and ideological border movements on art and culture. First, I examine the concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization and discuss their implications on art and culture. Next, I review the case of German Reunification, to draw parallels with its experience with division and reunification to Korean dance history. Here, I explore the historiography of East German art that faded due to the predominance of the West after reunification. I suggest that it is important to ask questions about the foundation on which I stand in order not to otherize myself and others. A balanced perspective shall be sought to embrace the complexity of personal history that an official narrative may miss. I finally propose to have a broad view that goes beyond not only the borders of division but also the borders of unification.

Weaving the port into the socialist city: Fluid connections and transgressive movements in Gdańsk and Gdynia

During the communist era, the ports of Gdańsk and Gdynia were Poland’s window – and door – to the world. The merchant marine economy became increasingly important to the Polish state as its foreign-denominated debt grew in the 1970s, but Polish sailors posed challenges to the state’s control of space. Polish sailors travelled across political and ideological borders bringing goods – both declared and smuggled – into the ports of Poland from the outside. They provided key spatial connections and networks for the flow of goods and information into Poland. Polish sailors brought the open, connected and transgressive qualities of the ports into their cities. In doing so, sailors re-shaped the authorities’ notion of fixed and controllable urban spaces of Gdańsk and Gdynia into a dynamic movement of goods and peoples, a series of networks and relationships, and points linked to a broader, global web that was increasingly connecting the world.

"Only Your Labels Split Me": Epistemic Privilege, Boundaries, and Pretexts of 'Religion'

"Only Your Labels Split Me"Epistemic Privilege, Boundaries, and Pretexts of 'Religion' Lilith Acadia (bio) "Only your labels split me." —gloria anzaldúa1 "[W]ords create worlds, especially those categories that order dominant discourses." —timothy fitzgerald2 "[T]here's an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty." —barack obama3 "I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection." —frederick douglass4 Like the unmapped globe, the individual has no borders until identity categories delineate political lines, dividing what was previously a unique, unified whole. Gloria Anzaldúa describes this imposition of borders on an intact "me," whom "[o]nly your labels split." The labels are imprecise, ill-fitting identity categories of gender, race, class, and politics that belong to someone else. She rejects the suggestion that such an identity assemblage makes her "confused" or "[a]mbivalent," because the borders are foreign to her otherwise unbroken self: label confusion does not imply identity confusion. Identity categories are the kinds of concepts that those with political and epistemic power use to draw borders on individuals and maps, to impose distinctions and hierarchies suiting [End Page 1] their objectives, to "create worlds" with words to "order dominant discourses," as Timothy Fitzgerald explains. The powerful can then apply those concepts and the worlds they create to discursively justify their beliefs: repeated enough, the words and their worlds begin to sound natural, and then epistemically powerful, so that audiences trust the speakers who invoke those words and believe the knowledge from those conceptual worlds. 'Religion' is one powerful example of such a word that creates a naturalized category whose epistemic privilege makes it, as Barack Obama and Frederick Douglass observe in the epigraphs, a dangerous weapon. 'Religion' here is not the synonym for spirituality or faith regularly assumed in common discourse; rather it describes an epistemic category. Treating religion as an epistemic category recognizes the concept's genealogy as an Enlightenment construct based on a Christian prototype, with discursively particular characteristics such as universality, plurality, cosmological explanation, and (sui generis) uniqueness. The concept we recognize today arises in the European Enlightenment from the combination of two seemingly contradictory logics: an imperialism seeking to dissolve borders by extending empires to new lands, and an epistemology dualistically drawing borders to justify such expansion. Religion, in turn, contributes to defining the epistemic borders of Enlightenment thought, and serves as a pretext for transcending borders to extend empires. The conceptual borders helped dissolve political ones by delineating institutions or practices Europeans find resemble their prototype of Christianity sufficiently to be called religions. Distinctions between conceptual and political realms are products of this epistemology, which pursues knowledge by erecting borders that often dualistically define one concept in contradistinction to the other, such as civilization against barbarity or religion against the secular. Drawing and Dissolving Borders "With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings—solos todos un paíz." —gloria anzaldúa5 [End Page 2] Calling for a "spiritual activism," Anzaldúa envisions a universality that dissolves borders and engrains difference as part of an interwoven whole in ways that disclose the possibility of what she terms Borderlands. The positive action she envisions occurring across cultures, transcending political borders, is premised on a mystical unity of all humans (and perhaps non-humans) bound together by a divine sanctity of belonging to one Earth. Unlike the unified and borderless universal spirituality Anzaldúa envisions, the universality of religion in modern discourse posits religion as an institution with many manifestations (religions) around the world and across time: a plurality divided by ideological borders. The prevalent—and historically misinterpretive—narrative of Islam emerging as a religion in contradistinction to its prequel religion Christianity, which in turn arose from and defined itself against an originary Abrahamic...

Nobility of the Sword, Nobility of the Robe: Social Spaces and Ideological Borders

“Nobility of the Robe” and “Nobility of the Sword,” two expressions commonly repeated in historiography of the nobility of the modern era, are not simple social descriptions. Their chronologically staggered appearance, and the development of their usage in the seventeenth century are the result of the transformations of the Second Estate, transformations which themselves stemmed from monarchical policy (development of the venality of offices, desire to control the definition of nobility) and from struggles for power among the elites of the realm. A social history of their uses should be confronted with an analysis of the social careers of Second Estate families. This would show to what extent these expressions are above all ascriptions referring to ideological confrontations, to value judgments about what the nobility should be, and, finally, to a desire to separate social spaces that were, nevertheless, porous. Such a history clearly shows how terms designating conditions become categories designating groups based on classification. These were changes that brought about great consequences as much for the future of noble families as for the concept of the nobility itself.

A family affair? Post-imperial Estonian Orthodoxy and its relationship with the Russian Mother Church, 1917–23

ABSTRACT As the First World War shattered the old empires, Orthodox Christians in former imperial territories faced a dilemma. Should they remain loyal to their Russian “Mother Church,” from which they were separated by physical and ideological borders, or should they pursue autonomy and break away from their former canonical centre? This article deals with the evolution of the Estonian part of Riga diocese into an autonomous Orthodox Church, focusing on the negotiations, compromises, pluralism, and realpolitik that characterized this process. The reconfiguration of Riga diocese in 1917–23 and the emergence of the autonomous Estonian Orthodox Church under the patriarch of Constantinople occurred under the influence of three factors: first, the political formation of Estonian statehood; second, the violence of the Bolshevik takeover and the Civil War; and, third, the temporary decentralization of the Russian Church. Pointing out that Patriarch Tikhon was willing to negotiate various forms of church autonomy in the Baltic and there was support for remaining under the jurisdiction of Moscow, the article argues that the change of jurisdiction was in itself a sign of the Estonian Church’s agency when it came to fulfilling its desire for ecclesiastical autonomy.

Bilanguaging Love: Latina/o/x Bilingual Students’ Subjectivities and Sensitivities in Dual Language Immersion Contexts

Dual language immersion (DLI) education opens possibilities to leverage Latina/o/x bilingual students’ borderlands subjectivities and sensitivities. Yet persistent hegemonic discourses and the instantiation of linguistic and ideological borders in schools denigrate these sensibilities. By drawing on the concepts of bilanguaging and bilanguaging love (Mignolo, 2012), in this study the researchers examine the embodied epistemologies and knowledges a group of Latina/o/x students made visible as they participated in elementary two‐way DLI classrooms. Their analysis reveals first that bilingual students were aware of the linguistic, cultural, and racial and ethnic borders that shaped their Mexicana and Latina identities, but in reifying these borders these Latinas also embodied Spanish, English, and bilingualism in ways that their White peers did not. Second, the researchers analyze relationships, ways of being, and knowledges Latina/o/x bilingual students employed as they supported their peers through the challenges and discomfort around being between languages. These findings challenge views of bilingual students as Other, particularly those of Mexican and Latina/o/x backgrounds whose subjectivities are shaped by modern and colonial projects seeking to manage linguistic difference. Drawing on bilanguaging love as an equity‐oriented guiding principle, the authors argue that DLI can counter these oppressive conditions by elevating these students’ borderlands epistemologies and knowledges in schools.

Fundamental British Values

In 2014, the United Kingdom Coalition Government, after the now infamous Trojan Horse incident, insisted that all children learn Fundamental British Values. Cameron, as Prime Minister, argued that such values, coupled with “muscular liberalism” would “challenge extremist ideology, exposing it for the lie that it is.” This article exists at the place of the apostrophe—as the scare mark (‘ ’) becomes an enclosure, enclosing a manufactured possession. “Is Britishness just a made up concept? Who determines what is or is not fundamental? I want to problematize what they include and exclude in their concept of “British Values.” What is this “British” they talk about and why do they feel a need for this “Britain” to exist? Within the enclosures provided by ‘ten scare marks’, I present research into historical and contemporary formulations of Britishness taken from academic texts, school textbooks, and websites. In addition, by invoking the work of Serres, Bhabba, and Billig, I seek to confront Cameron’s challenging discourse. Within this article, I do not though attempt to detail an authentic Britishness but rather from the outset argue that there is, and This analysis is disturbing. It disturbs my thoughts but also my personal history- it is troubling. never was any authenticity in this concept. What I seek to argue here is that their “British-ness” is nothing more than a portable, lean-to concept of violence. A “manufactured concept” (Nationalism and the origins of prejudice, International Journal of Historical Teaching, Learning and Research) which locates an inclusion but by default formulates an exclusion whose antecedents lie more in the government counter terrorists’ strategies than any substantial historical fact If it is manufactured where does this leave my schooling – which told me Britain was great? (Britishness from a linguistic perspective in school textbooks). The paper concludes by suggesting that their “Britain” is a rhetorical trope. It is itself a Trojan horse—which through flagging and banal nationalism (Banal nationalism) indoctrinates and radicalizes our children into an invented—pererted nationalism that the political elite employs to deal with a perceived/conceived/contrived threat of an internal other to our geographical, historical, and ideological borders.

Seeing Is Believing: Perception and Liminality in China Miéville’s The City & The City

ABSTRACT The hybrid genre of China Miéville’s The City & The City creates a level of liminality in the text (the novel combines elements of detective fiction, science fiction and fantasy), but this is even more true of its setting in a place governed by a system of indistinct, but rigidly enforced, borders that are both political and perceptual. The novel’s pair of city-states exist in a shared physical space, but their respective inhabitants are separated by the mutual, and at first seemingly fantastical, practice of “unseeing” elements and inhabitants of the other city. These borders allow two fictional city-states with different laws and national identities (Besźel and Ul Qoma) to exist in the same space. This article scrutinizes the way ideas of the fantastic complicate interpretation of this text along strictly genre-bound lines. The thinking behind the novel’s system of unseeing is then expanded to consider the categorization of genre fiction (specifically science fiction and fantasy) as a system of perceptual and ideological borders that functions in a similar way to that found in the novel, bound by perception and enforced by authority.

Beyond borders: trans-local critical pedagogy for inter-Asian cultural studies

This paper challenges the apparatus of knowledge in the reproduction of the nationalist narrative of historical trauma that leads to the making of exclusive nationalism and unequal citizenship, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. I take the case of the 1965-66 genocide in Indonesia as an example to illustrate how the cultural trauma that took place in the Cold War Era had marked the turning point for follow-up nation-building and the cooperative distortion of the past through the politics of denial. This phenomenon does not happen only in Indonesia but also in other countries in the Northeast and Southeast Asia. The post-event juridical reform after these historical traumas established the foundation of national constitutions and planted the seeds of unequal citizenship in these countries. The legal practices of the post-colonial modern states repeat colonial strategies, and technique of governmentality reproduces itself through the education system at all levels. I want to suggest that to go beyond ideological borders and avoid the vicious circles of knowledge reproduction requires an innovative educational model of trans-local and critical pedagogy in the form of curricular decolonization. It aspires for a type of the university beyond the borders, beyond the walls. Through a trans-local, interdisciplinary, and cross-referencing critical studies, we then can attend to both the local but also the regional and global contexts. I also want to argue that such a model should bridge university and society to assist us in practicing epistemic decolonization to challenge the current cultural consensus.

Cultural (re)translation: the case of Yohanan Simon

ABSTRACT This paper applies the concept of retranslation within the context of cultural translation. The revised conceptualisation of retranslation is used as a point of departure for examining the representations of Yohanan (Hans) Simon’s evolving biography. Simon, an Israeli artist, translated and retranslated himself, metaphorically, both as an individual and an artist, throughout his life. By combining cultural translation with self-translation, which produces the metaphor ‘cultural self-translation,’ we demonstrate how ‘translation’ turns into ‘retranslation’ when the process is repeated. In continuation of previous research on cultural translation, we show how the broad concept can be used to address issues such as migration and cultural hybridity, with an emphasis on the obvious conflicts that the artist experienced as a translated and retranslated man. Thus, we see how the biographical landmarks of Simon’s life are reflected in changes of artistic style and genres, which at the same time mirror his inner conflicts and ideological transformations. To demonstrate the experience of living within the framework of ever-changing geographical and ideological borders, we used Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ as the virtual site where opposing values clash and interact, and the act of retranslating is continuously being performed and experienced.

“This Is How We Travel”: Sex, Love, Intimacy and the Border

ABSTRACT “Movements back and forth […] between cities, between continents, and across oceans and rivers have made travellers of us all,” posits Ruth Behar, “even Cubans who only dream of going places.” In Cuba since the dawn of the twenty-first century, socio-economic change is rapid, continuous, and uncertain, but one constant is the near-absolute spectre of the border. The idea of intimate liaisons with foreigners as a kind of “travel” serves as a jumping-off point in this article, where the stories of locals and foreigners who pursue romance, love, and sex across borders of all kinds serve to make visible the connections between the intimate and the international. The Cuban setting makes everyday emotional, affective, and sexual practices – and the body itself – a particularly fertile ground for resistance, as well as a lightning rod for disciplinary action, with the potential to enact or disrupt structures of the border through the mechanisms of sex and body – and of pleasure. Through an exploration of pleasure as powerful and political, the intimate – often sidelined as a “feminine” and apolitical sphere – can be revealed as a productive and radically relational mode, a vector of international and transnational relations, and a fertile ground for resistance. As bordering practices assert themselves in multiple and evolving ways both externally (travel restrictions) and internally (social and economic divisions between Cubans and foreigners), this article explores how bodies become a means of circumventing and reinscribing those same geopolitical, ideological, and sexual borders policed by states.

Migratory Patterns of a Fish Doodle

Border crossing, migrations, and desire are deeply interconnected. Using a Desi historiography, I trace the entanglement of migration and desire, examining both what is made possible through geopolitical, emotional, and ideological border crossings and what lies in the wreckage of certain crossings. Using the trope of fish doodles, I trace the intractability of desire and highlight how the distortions inherent in migratory experience shatter illusions and innocence, creating a sense of betrayal yet failing to mitigate desire. Drawing on a South Asian sensibility of communal and national insider and outsider positions, I explore the complicated terrain of Desi transnational existence.

The Politics and Poetics of Ethnic Bordering: Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn

ABSTRACT The vastness of politics as a subject of discourse can best be grasped in border studies because politics encompasses both spatial and imaginary borders that distinguish one nation/state from another. The existence of spatial borderlines creates territorial demarcations that differentiate geopolitical settings within which policies that establish national identity are forged. But where the disparity in policy exists, national identity tends to fall apart. This is the case with Nigeria whose national identity was built on a questionable colonial policy which neglected the diversity of interests and cultures among the various ethnic groups hastily amalgamated into a single political entity. Literature grapples with political complexity and makes it easily comprehensible through narrative performativity. Chukwuemeka Ike’s novel Sunset at Dawn delineates the intricacy of bordering and debordering that shaped (and continues to shape) the Nigerian nation. I argue here that the identity formation in Nigeria is largely a function of the tensions that characterize both spatial and ideological borders of ethnicity, highlighting the novel’s exposure of the nuances of socio-spatial negotiation which calls for ethnic inclusivity in nation-building.

Por una tradición propia: genealogías y legitimación en las escritoras transhispánicas de entresiglos

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a series of non-fiction miscellaneous texts written by Latin American and Spanish women were pub-lished. Despite their diversity in content and genre, all of them shared a special interest in the figure of the female writer, shaping a corpus saturated with names and book titles that aimed to transcend geographical, ideological and aesthetic borders and demonstrate the existence of a wide panorama of transhispanic women authors. Furthermore, through theses texts, female writers developed dif-ferent strategies to contact and legitimate each other as sisters in the literary field, creating in this process a female genealogy in which they reached back to claim their right to authorship. This paper focuses on the analysis of the main topics that constructed the figure of the transhispanic woman writer, as well as the literary map and the sociability networks that emerge from the studied corpus.