Interior Frontier Research Articles

Interior frontiers and highly skilled migrants' work-related challenges in Japan.

In this opinion article, the author argues that highly skilled migrants in Japan face many challenges and are ineffectively used due to the existence of interior frontiers. Although interior frontiers are more subtle than the external boundaries these migrants have had to cross to enter the country, they have tremendous power over their everyday lives. Ethnocentric attitudes, influenced by Nihonjinron, have contributed to the existence of these frontiers. They emphasise homogeneity instead of flexibility and accommodation, and exist in the workplace. Employers want a homogeneous workplace and highly skilled migrants face strong pressures to assimilate. There is also an insistence on Japanese human resource practices such as seniority-based pay and promotion. An interior frontier also exists in the hiring process, and migrants are less likely to progress beyond the first round of interviews. With Japan's rapidly aging and declining population and acute labour shortages, there is urgency in addressing these frontiers.

Speaking Racism – Raciolinguistic Frontiers, Worth and Belonging in the Governing of Refugees in Norway

ABSTRACT This article explores the role that language requirements for residence and citizenship play in delineations of worth and belonging in the governing of refugees in Western Europe after 2015. In the past two decades residence and citizenship rights for migrants have increasingly become conditional on formalised language requirements. While language requirements embed promises of inclusion and opportunity, this framing skirts the ways in which they legitimate and reproduce racially charged inequalities. Based on rich ethnographic data from Norway, this article investigates how refugees encounter, perceive, and contest language requirements. By mobilising Kamran Khan’s notion of ‘raciolinguistic borders’ alongside Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of ‘interior frontiers’, I explore how language requirements are heard to ‘speak racism’. I argue that a political geography of language provides a timely and needed contribution to the geopolitical toolbox, and more specifically, to geographical explorations of the racial taxonomies of contemporary European border regimes.

Negotiating Interior Frontiers: Lara Haddad’s A Question of History (2015–16)

Bringing together insights originating in law studies and art analysis, this article approaches the work of the US-based Syrian artist Lara Haddad through the figuration of “interior frontiers,” exposing how both “interior bonds” and “internal borders” tended to shape legal regulations introduced in the US in the aftermath of 9/11 for the purpose of conducting “the global war on terror.” Referring to the concept of “plasticity,” the article examines the intimate (dis)identifications experienced by the artist in the context of the politically saturated cultural discourses on violence which emerged from the post-9/11 spatialities of (inter)national law. The article argues that politically engaged art offers a means to affectively connect with the personal ways of coping with the persistent visceral presence of structural violence, shedding light on how political protocols and cultural representations impinge upon the individual experiences of many Muslims residing inside and outside the US territory. Opening established meanings to new interpretations, such art contributes to the process of revising dominant oppressive significations, creating room for critical contestation and increased transcultural understanding.

Interior Frontiers and Highly-Skilled Migrants’ Work-Related Challenges in Japan

Interior Frontiers and Highly-Skilled Migrants’ Work-Related Challenges in Japan

Interior Frontiers in Japanese Blue-Collar Workplaces

Interior Frontiers in Japanese Blue-Collar Workplaces

The Interior Frontiers of Germany

Abstract In 2012, the regional court of the city of Cologne ruled that ritual male circumcision constituted unjustified bodily harm. This prompted a nationwide debate culminating in the enactment of legislation guaranteeing male circumcision without medical justification under certain preconditions. This article proposes to approach the ‘circumcision debate’ as a discursive strand of the systematic problematisation of Muslims as ‘Muslims’, which I analyse through the analytic of the ‘Muslim Question’. In addition, I refer to the concepts of recursive history and of the interior frontier to contextualise the 2012 circumcision debate and the political purpose it has served, namely, to establish racial distinctions and interior frontiers between Germans, Jews and Muslims.

(Anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of racial governance

ABSTRACT This article sets out to discuss the emergence of (anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of governance, and particularly as a field of racial governance. Romeyn’s interest is not so much in the ‘facts’ of antisemitism or ‘new’ antisemitism, but in the ways in which it functions as a ‘power-knowledge’ field in which a cast of actors—global governance actors, such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the European Commission, non-governmental organizations, experts and scholars, and politicians—set out to define, invent measuring tools and technologies, analyse, formulate policy statements and programmes, and develop ‘interventions’ to address and redress (‘fight’) the ‘problem’. Embedded in the new antisemitism as a field of governance are the assumptions that, ideologically, it is imbricated in the universalist anti-racism of the liberal left, and that, culturally, it emanates to a significant extent from within ethnocultural or ethno-religious attitudes peculiar to populations originating from Northern Africa, the Maghreb or, more specifically, from majority Islamic countries. With respect to the latter groups, global governance actors concerned with the fight against the ‘new antisemitism’ instate a ‘regime’ that performatively enacts boundaries of belonging. This regime erects an interior frontier around culture/religion that effectively externalizes and racializes antisemitism.

Shaping Public Opinion and Community Mobilisation: The Role of Urdu Language Media in India

Considering the role played by Rashtria Sahara, an Urdu daily newspaper that took recourse to the democratic practice of questioning and challenging the hegemonic formation of the maligned image of Islam and the faith community vis-à-vis terrorism in the discursive arena, that is, the public sphere, this article tries to understand the role of the Urdu language media in shaping the public opinion and mobilising people from within the community. To this end, first, the article seeks to comprehend the present configuration of the Indian public sphere keeping in view its colonial origin. Moreover, the ‘othering’ of Muslims in postcolonial India that has colonial roots, too, has been understood through the idea of ‘interior frontiers’. Second, the role and practices of the Indian state towards Muslims have been taken into account. And, the final section analyses strategies that were put to use by the newspaper to contest the hegemonic formation, which paved the way for social movement to emerge.

An inverse geometry problem for a one-dimensional heat equation: advances with complex temperatures

This paper presents an inverse problem in heat conduction, namely the determination of thicknesses of three materials of known heat capacities and thermal conductivities inside a rod of given length subjected to periodic heat flows from measurements of temperatures at both ends. The unknowns are, therefore, the positions of the two interior frontiers between the three materials. Classically, they can be obtained by minimizing the least-squares, non-linear criterion, between the measured and calculated temperatures. Nevertheless, we show that the global minimum providing the solution is close to three local minima that act as traps for a descent algorithm. After providing theoretical justification of the complex temperature method, a method based in this case on the periodicity of boundary fluxes, we suggest a new criterion allowing the global characterization or not of an a priori local minimizer to be tested. It is a criterion of topological nature based on the identification of a singularity.

Principle or Pathology? Adjudicating the Right to Conscience in the Israeli Military

The Israeli military's Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I found that liberal pacifist applicants’ principled objections to violence challenged the state, and as such, applicants who articulated their refusal in such terms are rejected by the military review board. By contrast, pacifist conscientious objection based in embodied visceral revulsion to violence did not challenge the state and moral order, and such cases were granted exemption. Objections based in understanding pacifism as a physical incapacity depoliticizes it by making it incommensurable with public moral debate concerning military service. The pathologization of pacifism demonstrates a contradiction between liberalism's ideology and its practices, revealing that the limits of liberalism are not only exterior, in nonliberal alterity, but also on liberalism's own interior frontiers.

A Sentimental Journey: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea

This article explores the role of affect and sentiment in shaping cross-cultural encounters in late colonial Korea, as seen and experienced through the eyes of Japanese men and women who grew up in Seoul. By interweaving the oral and written testimonies of former settlers who came of age on the peninsula between the late 1920s and the end of colonial rule in 1945, the paper attempts to reconstruct their emotional journey into adulthood as young offspring of empire: specifically, how they apprehended colonialism, what they felt when encountering different segments of the Korean population, and in what ways their understanding of the world and themselves changed as a result of these interactions. Focusing on the intimate and everyday zones of contact in family and school life, this study more broadly offers a way to understand colonialism without reducing complex local interactions to abstract mechanisms of capital and bureaucratic rule.

Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe's empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers' prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined. Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief

Captivating EuniceMembership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Audra Simpson (bio) My youngest Daughter, aged Seven years, was carryed all the journey, & look’d after with a great deal of Tenderness. —John Williams, 17071 Whither Eunice? The famous story of Eunice Williams’s captivity and incorporation begins with tears and ends with tears, as it was a Mohawk woman’s grief that prompted her capture as a replacement child for one lost. Her inconsolability motivated Mohawk warriors from Kahnawake to venture from the southwestern part of the St. Lawrence River down to Deerfield, Massachusetts, in February 1704—during the dead of winter—to take captives.2 Little is known of the specificity of the Mohawk woman’s unrest, or of the particulars of her life, as she is referred to only as “the mother.”3 Far more is known of Eunice Williams, the white child of completely unambiguous Protestant stock that would become her child. She was originally the daughter of the Reverend John Williams and Eunice Williams, and thus was the grand niece of famed Puritan minister Increase and cousin to Cotton Mather. In their commitment to piety, anti-popishness, proper puritan conduct, and [End Page 105] writing and sermonizing on the sinister condition of Indian captivity, the Mathers have been described as “the most prominent divines of their generation.”4 Williams’s life receives its acclaim in part because of these genealogies. But her life is most famous because her captivation became thoroughly consensual and she became Mohawk through time. She steadfastly refused to return to her natal territory and family. Owing to yawning gulfs in the archives, we do not know what this conversion tale looked like within Kahnawake, but it is clear from the literature that, although originally “English,” she became a unilingual, Catholic “white Indian” who was captivated by and fully assimilated into Mohawk society. In this article, I use the story of Eunice Williams’s captivity to argue that her incorporation into Mohawk society does not belong in the past; rather, it forms part of the gendered structure and imaginary of contemporary colonial settler society of North America. This gendered structure and imaginary is instantiated through The Indian Act of 1876, which defined and recognized indigeneity in Canada through a pre-citizened wardship status.5 This wardship status, which is now co-incident with state citizenship, continues to determine rights to material and semiotic resources for Indians in Canada, and shapes the identities and identifications of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada today.6 This article offers a speculative history regarding the Act and the captivity narratives surrounding Williams’s life in order to point to the possibility of their relatedness but also to stimulate further, deeper work on the role of historical narrative in stimulating political and social possibility in colonial, or settler, contexts through time. The story of Eunice Williams, then, is more than a story of thrilling, dramatic, and violent eighteenth-century captivation. It is a story about the transformation of membership or incorporation into a rights-bearing unit of political status, with an attendant form of recognition—a recognition that was later conferred through The Indian Act. This is also a story of colonial alchemy, of recognition of political subject-formation, which moved race and gender to the forefront of deliberations over the meting out of those rights (only to efface them) and which was an evidentiary moment of deep identification that had occurred within Eunice Williams’s interior frontiers, within her mind. Her identifications and recognitions and the celebration of her story do not come without consequences, consequences that have not been considered in the literature on captivation. This is a literature that largely considers captivation to be a case of force, adoption, and/or kinning in an effort to re-historicize the past in deeply connected ways. These important contributions to literary and historical studies have significantly problemetized the notion of settler and Indigenous experiences as isolated from each other and [End Page 106] have given us a sense, especially in literary studies, of the importance of Indigenous “savagery” to the construction and maintenance of a “civilized” colonial self. However, in colonial “situations”—historical...

“Settlers” and Zimbabwe: Politics, Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms During a Time of Crisis

This article examines the contested politics surrounding the participation of white farmers in the national public sphere in Zimbabwe. It examines how farm workers have acted as an “interior frontier” to white farmers and how this has helped to shape the public identification of white farmers in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. In so doing, the differential use of the term settlers and the memory of colonialism within the current violence surrounding land reform and democratization are analyzed. Through addressing some of the engagements with this ambiguous identification of white farmers, the politics of analysing “settlers” within anthropology and postcolonial studies is raised.

Ridge-Top Storage and Defensive Sites: New Evidence of Conflict in Northern British Columbia

Regional settlement survey at Kitwancool Lake in northern British Columbia has indicated that food storage features (cache pits) tend to be situated in steep ridge-top locations, as are a lookout site and small pithouse settlement. The positioning of these sites provides evidence of perceived threats and fits a pattern of regional conflict emerging from other ethnohistoric and archaeological data. The motives for conflict are briefly considered in terms of the lake's rich salmon resources and its position near the interior frontier of the Northwest Coast culture area, but the main focus is upon contextualizing a ubiquitous but under-emphasized site type—cache pits.

The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764

My reading of The People with No Name was haunted by another book published forty years ago. During the 1960s, Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (1963) led a revolution in historical scholarship. Powell's exquisite reconstruction of Sudbury, Massachusetts, at its founding in the 1630s and his illumination of its English origins fed prominently into a powerful current of scholarship swelling under the influences of the Annales school, the Cambridge group, new computer technologies, and a realization amid the political upheavals of the 1960s that ordinary people can change history. Patrick Griffin's book has something of the air of that earlier volume. Both Powell and Griffin examine colonial migrations. Both treat the transferral and transformation of cultural institutions in New World environments. Both mine social conflicts for insights into how people adapted to unfamiliar surroundings. Powell's book and its stepchild, the new social history, led to a revi-sioning of seventeenth-century historiography that barely touched the eighteenth century. That, however, is Griffin's century, and his people were variously Irish, Irish Protestants, Scotch Irish, Scots Irish, and Ulster Scots. In the 1700s mass migrations from the north of Ireland, central Europe, and West Africa transformed the largely English world of eastern North America. Slave-based plantation agriculture also redefined the southern colonies, secularization overwhelmed the New England landscape, Middle Atlantic colonies became the “best poor man's country” in the thinking of James T. Lemon (1972), the southern back-country delineated the first interior frontier of Anglo-America, and imperial conflict reshaped both Native American worlds and the colonial societies of New France, New Spain, and New England writ large. That list could go on, but Griffin makes the point well that his “generation of migrants had a profound influence on the great transformations of the age.”

Philosophy and historical archaeology

This article addresses the application of a series of key concepts of Foucault’s thought, as developed in Discipline and Punish and other works, in the context of interior frontiers with Indians in nineteenth-century Argentina. It tests the premise that a particular technology of power existed in this historical context that operated on every social level, impacting strongly on the lower classes that inhabited the incorrectly named ‘desert’. Its implementation in the military field enabled the existence of an array of micro-powers that surrounded the gaucho-soldiers and their women’s lives. This schema was adopted in different areas: in the enrollment and discipline of the gauchos, in life in the fortlet-prisons and in the ritualism of power. The alternative chosen by soldiers to evade this technology of power and the fortlet-panopticons was escape through desertion. The utility of these observations is demonstrated with reference to the archaeology of the border regions in Argentina, and their wider applicability noted for other contexts with similar problems.

In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project.

List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Arranging and Rearranging the Interior Frontiers of Society 3. Boys, Amahs, and Girls: Domestic Workers of the Past and Present 4. The Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian Maid Trade 5. Infrapolitics of Domestic Service: Strategies of, and Resistances to, Control 6. Modernity Via Consumption: Domestic Service and the Making of the Modern Malaysian Middle Classes 7. Conclusion Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

Regiões fronteira no Brasil

Four aspects of Brazilian Frontier Regions are emphasized: - their size, being part of a country of continental dimensions; - their tropical character; - their historical role as a valve for social tensions, in a country which for long presents very strong social inequalities.different modalities of frontier-regions, those which represent the technological development, the ones which represent the advance of the ecumene, the "interior frontier regions", and the regions located on the limitis of the country. The size of the country permited for decades the movement of the frontier line to the West, the advance of the ecumene. But inside the more developed Eastern parts of the country, some enclaves of less settled territories, appear recently as "interior frontier regions". During the 19th and part of the 20th century, tropical and subtropical forested areas of the frontier were the targets for timber and crops production, while the savannas and grasslands were dedicated to cattle rising. Later an inversion occured, production of cereals, like soya beens, developed in the savannas and grasslands, while cattle occupied deforested areas of the Amazon Region. The far frontier became also an important mineral producer and attracts tourism. The frontier was, in a some extent, a subsitute for an agrarian land reform, offering conditions for social vertical mobility. More recently,however, it is loosing this function, as capital investments are directed to cattle rising, mining and timber production. Political issues deal with the social relations between incomers and old populations in the frontier regions and with the environmental questions.

Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature ed. by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski

Reviews 263 All My Relations: An Anthology ofContemporary Canadian NativeFiction. Edited by Thomas King. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 236 pages, $14.95.) Thomas King’s anthology provides a welcome collection of Canadian Na­ tive fiction to those already familiar with the large and diverse body of Native American literatures. Doubtless itwill serve as a classroom companion to Craig Lesley’s TalkingLeaves: ContemporaryNativeAmerican Short Stones, An Anthology. King begins the collection with the transcription of an oral story told by Harry Robinson, thus signaling his attempt to push the traditionally-held boundaries of “fiction.”Also included are an excerpt from a Tomson Highway drama, Coyote stories by Peter Blue Cloud and King himself, and a selection from BasilJohnston’slife history/autobiography Indian SchoolDays. Inclusion of such selections goes a long way in challenging the boundaries offiction estab­ lished by the dominant culture, boundaries that have, in the past, successfully marginalized the art of oral and transitionally literate cultures. The stories which have obvious roots in oral tradition reflect a rich body of cultural myth, but other, more consciously literary, stories also skillfully inte­ grate the mythic.Jeanette C.Armstrong’s“This IsaStory”uses a narrative frame to present her prophetic storyabout the return ofKyoti.Joan Crate’s “Welcome to the Real World” intercalates a contemporary story with the mythic story of Thunder, creating a paratacticjuxtaposition that empowers her tale. Significant additions to the anthology are several stories not bound to, as King suggests, “the expectations conjured up by the notion of ‘Indianness.’” Beth Brant, Jordan Wheeler, and Richard Green offer stories that, while they have Indian characters, are not concerned with what separates the characters from the larger, white culture, but with what connects them to the larger, human culture. With his generous sampling of mature and maturing writers, with his willingness to enlarge the idea of “fiction,” and with his inclusion of Indian writers who risk writing about subjects and characters not solely “Indian,” Thomas King givesus avaluable collection ofsome ofthe best Canadian Native fiction. KATHYWHITSON University ofMissouri-Columbia Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at theFrontier in American Literature. Edited by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, andJoanne B. Karpinski. (Madison, NewJersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. 206 pages, $33.50.) Make no mistake, the “frontier”in this book has little to do with Frederick Jackson Turner’s or, for that matter, the American West’s. For the most part, the thirteen essayists concern themselves with interior frontiers having scant 264 Western American Literature relevance to either demographyor landscape. Like Geiger counters quickening to nuclear emanations, these critics pulsate when encountering even the word frontier, which triggers their free-wheeling use of it as metaphor. The trio of editors say the book “explores frontiers in social, racial, and gender politics as well as, even more fundamentally, frontiers ofart and language.”They paytheir respects to Turner, Fiedler, Lawrence, and Slotkin but more au courant throughout are Backelard, Bakhtin, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Todorov, and Voloshin. Indeed, a generation of critics goes and a generation comes. Characterizing the “gothic”frontier is the irreconcilable disparity between the two worlds separated by it: one world ordered, pragmatic, conventional, rigid; and the other, hidden world teeming with “weedy chaos,” “misty shad­ ows,” “riotous emotion.” The icon described here is Grant Wood’s famous painting entitled “American Gothic,” which serves as the book’s governing paradigm. Accordingly, the frontier beckons internal quests beyond geography, beyond social features and distinctions, into realms where culture gives way to the unknown and primordial; to evil, terror, desolation, despair; to the “trans­ formation of consciousness.”However, the collection’s best essays retain link­ age to the exterior reality ofplace. Davis Gross on O. E. Rolvaag (“No Place to Hide”); Scott P. Sanders on the poet Richard Shelton and novelist Leslie Silko (“Southwest Gothic”); and Mark Busby on Sam Shepard (“Frontier Gothic”) affirm such localitywhile opening gothic mysteries that are not merely bizarre or grisly (conventions of an earlier gothicism) but that juxtapose our own colliding fears and ideals. As a gloss toJames Fenimore Cooper, EdwardAbbey, and others, the lateJames K. Folsom, towhom the book isdedicated, quotes the redoubtable Walt Kelly’s Pogo—“we have met the enemy and...