Multiple Border Crossings Research Articles

Border Crossing and Self-Placement of Characters with a Migratory Background in Contemporary German Novels

The existence of a “Migrant literature” is heavily debated in German studies, especially when it comes to authors like those of the third voice, who are socialized in Germany and speak German as their mother tongue. Nonetheless, novels that deal with migration and living with migrant backgrounds have similar characteristics. This article is primarily about the topic of crossing borders in such migrant novels by Olga Grjasnowa, Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Dimitrij Kapitelman. Which effects does border crossing have on characters with a migration background? The novels examined are not only characterized by a border crossing of migration from east to west, but actually even by multiple border crossings on different levels, that are always linked to each other. The literature of the third voice unites aspects of migration, but equally also aspects of adolescent literature and family sagas. That is shown, among other things, in the presentation and meaning of boundaries and their crossings as identity-creating moments and as coping strategies. Therefore, these border crosser stories enable new perspectives compared to conventional family sagas and adolescent literature.

Footloose Global Value Chains: How Trade Costs Make a Difference

The geography of global value chains (GVCs) depends crucially on trade costs between countries that host the various stages of production, and some stages might be more sensitive to trade costs than are other stages. In this paper, we exploit a value-added decomposition of bilateral trade flows to distinguish the low value-added GVC trade that is typically associated with production stages such as assembly, from the high value-added GVC trade that is associated with stages such as R&D and design. We test the hypothesis that low value-added stages are more easily rerouted—given changes in trade costs between importing and exporting countries—than are high value-added stages. The intuition for this hypothesis is that trade costs accumulate with multiple border crossings and are larger relative to the profit margins in low value-added stages. Furthermore, high value-added stages often require larger fixed cost investments that are often highly relationship-specific and knowledge-intensive, making them harder to relocate. We find strong empirical support for this hypothesis. This observation has important implications for development policies and bilateral trade policies that are aimed at reducing imbalances by repatriating offshored production stages.

East Asian Gothic: a definition

This paper offers a definition of East Asian Gothic cinema in which a shared cultural mythology, based upon cultural proximity and intra-regional homologies, provides a cinematic template of ghosts and ghouls together with a grotesque menagerie of shapeshifting animals, imagined as either deities or demons. East Asian Gothic is an umbrella term which encompasses the cinemas of PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, acknowledging the difficult histories and conflicts between the nations, as well as film making practices and industries. This is in opposition to critical work which views East Asian gothic and horror films as extensions of Japanese horror, and therefore J-Horror as a meta-genre; for example David Kalat in J-Horror (2007) and Axelle Carolyn in It Lives Again! Horror Films in the New Millennium (2008), or focus almost solely on the relationship between contemporary Western and East Asian Horror cinema through an analysis of the remake. In order to demonstrate the transnational and regional flows that form East Asian gothic cinema, this paper focuses in on one of the oldest and most enduring gothic figures found in literature and mythology across East Asia, the nine-tailed fox: known as the huli jin in China, gumiho in Korea and kitsune in Japan. While much has been written about the vengeful ghost, little attention has been paid to that of the fox-spirit even though ‘she’ is ubiquitous in East Asian popular culture. On screen, the fox-spirit (also known as the fox fairy) is either represented as a variation of the femme fatale or the sacrificial woman—or indeed both in some cases—creating a parallel between existing gender relation and the gothic imaginary. This paper explores the representation of the fox-spirit in contemporary Chinese cinema, at two ends of the spectrum in terms of budget and ambition, the big budget, CGI spectacular, Painted Skin (Hua Pi; dir. Gordon Chan, China/Hong Kong/Singapore, 2008) and the low-budget, low fi, The Extreme Fox (dir. Wellson Chin, Hong Kong, 2014) in order to map out the multiple border crossings which are constitutive of East Asian Gothic: while Painted Skin is representative of a global, or globalising trend, in East Asian Gothic Cinema, The Extreme Fox can be understood as resistant to globalisation through the emphasis on the local and the regional.

Trade costs and borders in global value chains

The effects of trade cost magnification due to multiple border crossings along global value chains are known from the scholarly literature and the reports of international organizations. However, evidence supporting or challenging this view has been limited. This article proposes two new measures of cumulative resistance to exports in global value chains and a measure of the average number of border crossings that build on the inter-country input–output framework. Data from the World Input–Output Database are supplemented with estimates derived from the UN Comtrade and UN TRAINS, allowing for an experimental computation of the accumulated import tariffs faced by exporters in 2001, 2005 and 2010. The average number of border crossings exhibits a slow upward trend, but the accumulated tariffs decline quickly. Trade liberalization therefore neutralizes the risk of higher cumulative protection associated with the international fragmentation of production. The benefits of liberalization or facilitation of trade within free trade agreements accrue to non-members, and this effect can now be estimated.

Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’: 2. Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy ed. by Sarah Barboar, Thomas Lacroix, and Judith Misrahi-Barak

Barboar, Sarah, Thomas Lacroix, and Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds. Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, 'Race: 2. Memory and Intimacy. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Mediterranee, 2015. Pp 258. 21.00 [euro] In this second collection of essays under the topic of Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy, Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, 'Race': 2 addresses transnational migration in a global context. In examining the intersections of race, class, gender, and geography, the essays in this collection explore the issue of who migrates where, how they make these journeys, and what is at stake in these migrations. The editors, Sarah Barboar, Thomas Lacroix, and Judith Misrahi-Barak, observe that the essays collected here will unravel the subjective perceptions of the self through its interplay with the Other once it is affected by the experience of de-territorialization (10). They divide interdisciplinary collection into three segments: Questions of Theory, History and Memory, Intersecting Identities, and Bodies in Motion. An interdisciplinary framework is apt for exploring the various conversations pertinent to migration and diaspora. In the first chapter, Diaspora Theory: Here, There and Everywhere, Maggi Morehouse uses both a literary and a sociological framework to conceptualize African diaspora. Using Henry Louis Gates' seminal book Classic Slave Narratives as a starting point, Morehouse expands on the layered intricacies of the African diaspora creole identity forged under slavery. Analyzing the autobiographies of Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince and novels such as Bruce Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah, the chapter allows us to understand what these African diasporic subjects were narrating about their place in the global world order (22). Morehouse contends that while Equiano and Price reflect on the multiple disruptions caused by the institution of slavery in understanding own displaced and diasporic subjectivity, Chatwin's novel pushes the limits of national identity and citizenship for subjects who occupy a liminal space. Morehouse ends the chapter with an interrogation of hybrid positionalities (AfroGermans, Black Russians, AfroBrazilians, and Black Irish) to further the process of de-territorialization. After a strong chapter on Vietnamese-American literary works about Vietnamese subjects fight[ing] status as subalterns in an American neo-colonized Vietnam by Deborah Stefani (51), the collection shifts to a sociological reading of memory construction. In this section, simple mechanisms of remembering are both layered and superimposed for Vietnamese subjects as a result of multiple border crossings, ruptures in social ties, adaptations to languages, and attempts to integrate into new migrated societies. In Between Silences and Rewritings: Two Approaches to Memory Construction by Spanish Refugees and Economic Immigrants in France, Evelyne Ribert compares two Spanish migrant populations: the Spanish refugees in France after the Spanish Civil War (1936--39) and the Spanish immigrants who arrived in France in the 1950s and 60s. Her interviews reveal important variations in the knowledge and memory of family migration and exile (65) and hence a wide variety of transmitted memories. Her essay highlights people's inability to access memory as a result of war and trauma. Ripert shows that memory's discontinuity, marked by gaps of forgetting and remembering, is essential to explore. The text's second segment, Intersecting Identities, explores the vexed question of intersectionalities in the construction of diasporic identities. Adriana Capuano De Oliveira's chapter A Question of Identity: Being Japanese in Brazil and Brazillian in Japan brings the politics of national belonging and exclusion to the forefront. …

Chinatowns and Borderlands: Inter-Asian encounters in the diaspora

AbstractThis paper explores two dynamic places and spaces in the Americas, destination of several Asian diasporas—the Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian—as contact and exchange zones. One would be the ethnic enclaves commonly called ‘Chinatowns’, which stretch over time from the early sixteenth century to the present, and over space from Manila in the Spanish empire across the Pacific to all over the Americas. These Chinatowns, imagined and real and riddled with stereotypes, are well-known tropes on the American landscapes, and need no further preliminary introduction; they are also firmly located within fixed national (or colonial) entities.The second space has not been historically associated with Asian diasporas in the Americas, although well known for different reasons. Here I refer to ‘borderlands’, the overlapping space between, over, and above two political national boundaries or borders, in particular the US-Mexican and US-Canadian borderlands, both, coincidentally, clearly marked and delineated by the mid-nineteenth century (1848 and 1846 respectively). Furthermore, as these two transnational/transborder regions are also trans-Pacific, their recognition as an integral part of Asian diasporas is belated and overdue. To make the case further, the study of Asians in the Americas has revealed that Asian migrants, labour, and capital have been historically drawn to these borderlands because they represent dynamic zones of economic development, first in the heyday of maturing American capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, and again in the glaring eye of current late-capitalist globalization. In other words, Asians have amassed on both sides of these borders for over 100 years, where they have become adept at multiple border crossings, both trans-Pacific and transnational.

Liminal Masculinity in Richard Selzer’s Knife Song Korea

The doctor in a foreign country is a recurring theme in physician writer Richard Selzer's stories. In his 2009 novel, Knife Song Korea, Selzer returns to this theme, examining it in depth through the lens of gender. Selzer features the American military surgeon Sloane's multiple border-crossings, namely, from America to Korea, from health to patienthood, and from sex-exploitation to love. Crossing those visible or invisible borders in the gender and race conscious contexts of medical profession and military in wartime Korea, Sloane finds himself liminally located among various masculine stereotypes. The mixed-race situation in the novel further pushes Sloane to realize the unbearability of the baggage of American manhood as represented in his profession. Selzer's punishment of Sloane's border-crossings seems to suggest that physicians, together with patients, are equally likely to be victimized by the macho norms in medicine.

Home as Postcolonial Trope in the Fiction of V.S. Naipaul

Summary JanMohamed (1992), in his work on the postcolonial literature of migrants, argues that their “positionality [as] specular border intellectuals” is not merely the combination of initial dislocation, together with a Western education that rules out the possibility of “gregarious acceptance” of any new home culture, but that “homelessness cannot be achieved without multiple border crossings or without a constant, keen awareness of the politics of borders” (1992: 112). Through their migration as specular border intellectuals, a new form of community becomes possible, a community of individuals Bhabha terms the “unhomely”; a new internationalism, a gathering of people in the Diaspora: “To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity” (1992: 18). This article offers an analysis of the house (of fiction) and home as a postcolonial trope characteristically problematised by Naipaul, who shows that while offering some intellectual and cultural possibilities, finds that these are nevertheless endangered and delimited by the possibilities afforded in a globalised world.

Multiple Border Crossings: Technology-Mediated Cross-Cultural: Immersion Learning Experiences

Multiple Border Crossings: Technology-Mediated Cross-Cultural: Immersion Learning Experiences

Sellers’ local currency pricing or buyers’ local currency pricing: does it matter for international welfare analysis?

We study international transmissions and welfare implications of monetary shocks in a two-country world with multiple stages of production and multiple border-crossings of intermediate goods. This empirically relevant feature is important, as it has opposite implications for two external spillover effects of a unilateral monetary expansion. If all production and trade are assumed to occur in a single stage, the conflict-of-interest terms-of-trade effect tends to dominate the common-interest efficiency-improvement effect for reasonable parameter values, so that the international welfare effects would depend in general on the underlying assumptions about the currencies of price setting. The stretch of production and trade across multiple stages of processing magnifies the efficiency-improvement effect and dampens the terms-of-trade effect. Thus, a monetary expansion can be mutually beneficial regardless of its source or the pricing assumptions.

Vertical Production and Trade Interdependence and Welfare

The authors study international transmissions and welfare implications of monetary shocks in a two-country world with multiple stages of production and multiple border-crossings of intermediate goods. This empirically relevant feature is important, as it has opposite implications for two external spillover effects of a unilateral monetary expansion. If all production and trade are assumed to occur in a single stage, the conflict-of-interest terms-of-trade effect tends to dominate the common-interest efficiency-improvement effect for reasonable parameter values, so that the international welfare effects would depend in general on the underlying assumptions about the currencies of price setting. The stretch of production and trade across multiple stages of processing magnifies the efficiency-improvement effect and dampens the terms-of-trade effect. Thus, a monetary expansion can be mutually beneficial regardless of its source or the pricing assumptions.

"Living is for everyone": border crossings for community, environment, and health.

This article examine the transnational networking practices fo Teresa Leal, an environmental justice activist living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border. It shows, through the method of engaged ethnography, how she and other community activists respond to the effects of global economic restructuring policies such as NAFTA. Grounded in an ecological epistemology, Lead blends "local" and "scientific" knowledges about the deteriorating health, economic, and environmental conditions at the border and constructs a "global sense of place" that brings into focus the everyday realities of neoliberal globalization. The article documents a daylong "toxic tour" of the Ambos Nogales region and highlights the multiple border crossings (epistemic, geographic, political, cultural) undertaken by Leal, other activists, and the author, a visitor to the region, to narrate a history of community health and environmental action in a transnational context.

Residential unhomes in short stories by Julio Cortázar and Ilse Aichinger

Julio Cortazar and Ilse Aichinger's short stories question the significance of home in two postwar cities – Buenos Aires and Vienna – by using the concept of the unheimlich or the unhomely to evoke uneasy private settings. This essay considers the ambiguous liminal spaces in the texts through a study of the respective urban architectural contexts, an interpretation of the relationships between personhood and home, and finally through an analysis of the multiple border crossings in the stories.