Introduction: Pushing Boundaries

“We didn’t cross the line; the line crossed us” is at once a recognition and a refusal: a statement of fact that the drawing of settler-colonial boundary lines tried to erase and rewrite existing relationships to land and territory and a rejection of the authority and claims symbolized by those lines. It is both a geographic argument and an expression of struggles over land, belonging, and identity. The phrase is most often attributed to Mexican communities crossed by the boundary line when the United States pushed its boundary south in the 1840s and 1850s. Whatever its origins, however, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us” has become a rallying cry of Indigenous nations and migrant justice organizers across North America and around the world.1

“The Line Crossed Us” was also the name of the 2019 conference where the chapters collected here were first presented. The gathering sparked conversations between some of the academic disciplines that ask questions about borders and between academics and the artists and activists who are contesting and reimagining borders and their meanings. The wider field of critical border studies has always encompassed a variety of disciplines and approaches, but the academic scholarship has tended to remain within disciplinary silos while academics, artists, and activists rarely see one another’s work. The conference brought Indigenous and migration politics into conversation while also historicizing contemporary border issues and “crises,” and the chapters here challenge the sense of permanence that often characterizes how borders and nationalism have been built and framed, politically and historically. Rather than accept the inevitability of how nation-states and their borders are understood in material reality, these authors unsettle those teleological assumptions to explore new and different ways of understanding competing and overlapping sovereignties, jurisdictions, and authorities. They invite us to think across disciplines about what it means to “do” border studies.

Fostering an ability to see and make connections across these traditional divides is increasingly important because borders remain unshakably central to the identities, functions, and policies of modern nation-states and the international refugee regime. The chapters here are grouped thematically rather than by discipline, geography, or chronology, already refusing some of the rigid binaries that North American and European borders try to produce. The authors include activists, artists, and filmmakers, as well as scholars from fields as diverse as geography, history, Indigenous studies, migration and refugee studies, and political science, creating a multivocal conversation across and between disciplines. In these eight chapters, we can see the push and pull of nationhood versus migration, freedom of movement versus restrictions of travel, contested claims of sovereignty replete with contradictions and compromises of multiple peoples claiming the same spaces as their own, and the inherent disjunction of borders being both a source of hope for those seeking sanctuary and a method of protection against those same people.

Part 1, “Visualizing Borders,” includes four chapters that invite us to see, think about, and produce knowledge about borders and their consequences in different ways. In the first two chapters, two very different creative and political projects invite us to see borderlines and borderlands differently. In “Toward a Decolonial Archive: A Reflection on the Operationalization Process of Critical Transborder Documentary Production Practice,” Ramón Resendiz and Rosalva Resendiz discuss their collaborations with key partners as they developed the archival documentary film El Muro | The Wall (2017). The film explores the contested space and history of South Texas / Northern Mexico and foregrounds how Indigenous resistance to colonial, imperial, and postcolonial dispossessions continues to shape the landscape of this region. The collaborators engaged in a critical documentary filmmaking process and envisioned the end product as a decolonial didactic tool that would refuse the erasures foundational to settler-colonial mythologies of place and consider the generative potentialities of such work. In “Working the Border: Interdisciplinary Encounters Across Intellectual, Material, and Political Boundaries,” political geographer Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen and visual artist Heather Parrish situate themselves in the forests of the Spanish-Moroccan borderlands to demonstrate that art can trouble perceptions of borders as fixed and settled, exposing instead their dynamism and permeability. A crucial element of their contribution is the way it invites viewers of the art installation and readers of the chapter to engage in discussions of the multiplicity, contingency, and contradiction inherent in conceptualizations and practices of boundaries, borders, and barriers. Their collaboration also offers insights into the possibilities and limitations of collaborative and multidisciplinary encounters that seek to bridge theoretical, methodological, and political boundaries.

The next two chapters in the first part push the metaphor of seeing borders differently in other thought-provoking directions, exploring in one instance the links between a nation’s borders and the “national body” and asking us in the other to move beyond what have become stale binaries in traditional perceptions of borders as fixed and settled. In “Remapping the Geo-body of a Nation: How Young People in Finland Understand Shifting Borders,” geographer Chloe Wells explores how teenagers in Finland imagine and give meaning to their nation’s borderlines in the context of the country’s loss of roughly 10 percent of its territory during World War II. Growing up some seven decades later, at a time when the Finland-Russia border was relatively open and cross-border traffic had increased, her young respondents had internalized the postwar map of Finland and were remote from both the events and the emotions of the war. Yet they still mentally referenced the prewar “geo-body” to make sense of prevailing national discourses that continue to reflect inherited narratives of loss and pain. In the final chapter of this part, “From Lines in the Sand to the Wave/Particle Duality: A Quantum Imaginary for Critical Border Studies,” political scientist Michael Murphy embraces the models provided by the groundbreaking work of scholars ranging from Gloria Anzaldúa to Karen Barad to propose a way out of what he sees as a common impasse in the field of border studies, where researchers are engaged in either macroscopic analyses that focus on overarching concepts like sovereignty and territory or microscopic studies of localized, lived experiences of borders. He suggests instead a “quantum imaginary,” applying the wave/particle duality in quantum theory to argue that if we see borders as dual rather than binary, we can better capture the nature of borders as multiple, complex, and paradoxical.

By linking chapters about a film, an art installation, young people’s drawings, and theoretical physics, part 1 generates conversations about creative and theoretical perspectives on borderlines beyond lines on a map or a specific location. The mobility and multiplicity set out in Murphy’s quantum imaginary, for example, finds an immediate case study in Gross-Wyrtzen and Parrish’s disassembled, layered images, while the ways a borderline leads to grief and disconnection are embodied in both El Muro | The Wall and the way Finnish youth come to terms with a national discourse of “losing a limb.” There is a resonance here with Anzaldúa’s characterization of the US-Mexico border as “una herida abierta”—an open wound—and Salter’s theorization of the border as “suture” to describe the “world-creating function” of borders. Reading these chapters in connection to one another offers a nuanced visualization of the violences enacted through bordering practices while also opening different ways of engaging with the work that borders do, in ways that are both mundane and brutal.2

The complexity of North America’s border regimes, new and old, is explored in part 2, “Cuttings and Crossings.” The act of crossing any border is fraught with hope and uncertainty, ambition and fear, and these authors examine the ways in which border crossings—and the manner of those crossings—have different meanings and consequences depending on the identities of those crossing the border. The first two chapters in this part focus on the Indigenous borderlands of the western Canada-US boundary line. In “Border Crossed: Sinixt Identity, Place, and Belonging in the Canada-US Borderlands,” anthropologist Lori Barkley, matriarch Marilyn James, and activist Lou Stone trace some of the effects that the 1846 decision to run the border west of the Rockies along the forty-ninth parallel had on the Sinixt. After 1846 roughly two-thirds of their traditional territory (təmxʷúlaʔxʷ) was now north of the line in British Columbia, and the remaining third was south of the line in Washington State, dividing people between the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington in 1872 and a small reserve in British Columbia in 1902. After the Canadian government declared the Sinixt “extinct” in 1956, their təmxʷúlaʔxʷ began to disappear from maps, and other Indigenous nations began to extend their territorial claims in the area. The Sinixt thus “exist in” and have to make space for themselves in “multiple borderlands.” Historian Ryan Hall argues in “Last Refuge: Indigenous Refugees and the Making of Canada’s Numbered Treaties” (chap. 6 of this volume) that we must understand the political motivations of Canada’s Numbered Treaties, especially Treaty 7 in southern Alberta, within a framework of Indigenous peoples being displaced within their own homelands and forced to cross a settler-imposed border within them. Rather than the popular framing of the United States and Canada as intrinsically different nations in their societal and political makeup—even in the ways they self-represent their relationships with Indigenous peoples—these two chapters reinforce that the two nations are forever entwined rather than separated by their border because of the ways they have used it to restrict and police Indigenous movements and bisect Indigenous homelands.

The last two chapters in this part examine the deliberate dehumanization that underpins present-day US border control practices. Interdisciplinary feminist scholar Claudia Donoso’s “Keeping Them Vulnerable: Female Applicants and the Biopolitics of Asylum in Texas” discusses how biopower operates within border policies that regulate, criminalize, and dehumanize the bodies of female asylum seekers from Central America. Marking the distinction between refugees and asylum seekers, Donoso shows how crossing the border prior to seeking asylum, as is the right of the asylum seeker, has been turned into a criminal act by the flexing of biopower within US border policy. In the last chapter of this part, “Experiences at the New Canadian-American Frontier: ‘I just assume that no laws exist . . . ,’” Evan Light, a scholar of communications and surveillance, political scientist Sarah Naumes, and sociologist Aliya Amarshi note that the policing of immigrants has entered the digital era, as the United States’ border-crossing norms now include insisting on the right to investigate travellers’ social media. The chapter discusses one research project that uses personal experiences of border crossers to better understand Canadian border policies and a second project that exposes the myriad ways in which the border is now a complex system of surveillance and documentation that informs decisions on who can and cannot cross. Ultimately, the authors argue that the border needs to be rehumanized and processes of dehumanization dismantled.

Grouping analyses of how Indigenous nations have had to confront and resist settler-colonial boundaries with contemporary policies used to constrain and surveil some border crossers while allowing others to move more freely exposes some of the commonalities between the strategies North America’s nation-states have used for centuries to dehumanize anyone who challenged their border regimes. By focusing on a common thread of displacement in the past and present, this part also refutes the presumed gap between studies of Indigenous histories of border encounters and present-day migration and refugees.

Anne McNevin’s afterword, “On Being Unsettled: Discomfort and Noninnocence in Border Studies,” is informed by her plenary talk at the conference. She notes that this collection, an anthology that represents a particular kind of Western academic enterprise, is “the outcome of a conference that was uncomfortable” and needed to be so. Every effort to disrupt disciplinary boundaries and conventions inevitably also reinscribed certain kinds of borders and certain kinds of knowledge about borders. Each presenter shared their knowledge while speaking in a place they were not from and to an audience that did not necessarily share their disciplinary or cultural perspective. The academics outnumbered the artists and community activists, generating rich conversations that, nevertheless, were not and never can be “innocent endeavors” and did not move as far as we might have hoped away from academic perspectives. As McNevin observes, this anthology then came together against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which “focused the attention of those slow to acknowledge all manner of global interdependencies” at the same time as it “precipitated a defensive mobilization of national borders, both materially and symbolically, almost as a reflex response.” Borders rarely matter so little, and so much, as during a global crisis, staying “stuck on enduring cuts of difference hiding in plain sight” like the “global colour line.” McNevin concludes that what this collection can add to the broader field of critical border studies are “helpful orientations for critical inquiry” and a model for inter- and cross-disciplinary conversations.

This collection thus sits at the intersection of, and speaks back to, several broad areas of border studies scholarship that are themselves usually conversations held in isolation. For example, there is an enormous amount of scholarship about the histories of Indigenous peoples in what became North America’s borderlands and the many different ways those nations encountered and resisted the imposition of those lines.3 Similarly, historians, geographers, political scientists, and others have spent a great deal of time and attention on the histories of migrants and refugees encountering those borderlines for the first time. The chapters by Barkley, James, and Stone; Hall; Donoso; and Light, Naumes, and Amarshi are therefore valuable contributions to the existing scholarship but also push it in useful new directions by challenging the ways the border is too often reified by scholarly disciplines that still use settler-colonial nation-states to organize their research and blurring the too-common scholarly divide in which studies of Indigenous peoples in what are now borderlands regions are often written as if they are completely disconnected from the experiences of migrants and refugees.4 There are a few exceptions to that pattern, and the chapters here will contribute to bridging that gap.5 More broadly, the chapters by Wells and Murphy speak to a deliberate fluidity of identity and duality within borderlands that de-emphasizes and challenges their static nature within assertions of nationhood and border management.

However rich these existing fields of scholarship are, their isolation from one another and from the artists and activists doing their own work to challenge border regimes does more than just impoverish each field; it limits our ability to challenge the power of borders. A question that reappears throughout this collection is whether it is possible to “decolonize” border studies in the context of settler-colonial states and whether “decolonization” is an appropriate lens, since it can tend to recentre the settler-colonial nation-state.6 At the same time, however, decolonization can be a useful lens when examining immigration and refugee policies in those same settler states. North America’s borders both are a legacy of and contribute to the ongoing patterns of settler colonialism; as such, they are regularly resisted, ignored, and refused by Indigenous communities and nations as well as by migrants and residents of border communities.7 For Indigenous communities in what is now referred to as North America, the imposition of settler borders over traditional territories means that displacement is not only a foundational event but an ongoing experience.

Questions of displacement and borders, therefore, remain intensely salient in the current North American context and beyond, but to build on McNevin’s intervention, efforts to “decolonize” border studies risk reinscribing the power of normative views of what borders are and what they do. In a country like Canada, which claims an identity as a nation of immigrants, the colonial context and inescapability of settler-colonial assumptions bear closer analysis in the fields of migration, refugee, and critical border studies. There have been nascent attempts to link struggles for migrants’ rights with Indigenous organizing as noted, but very little scholarship and academic networking have been carried out in this area in recent years. The chapters here by Resendiz and Resendiz, Gross-Wyrtzen and Parrish, and Barkley et al. demonstrate how collaborative and creative work can challenge border regimes more directly and rethink border studies in the context of Canada and settler-colonial states.

The broader field of critical border studies is ready for more transnational and multidisciplinary comparisons and collaborations where artists, activists, and academics work together to challenge border regimes. This collection is a step in that direction by choosing to cross the lines that have separated our disciplines, fields of inquiry, and multiple strategies of resistance and refusal. The authors here connect thematically and contradict the ways that examinations of borders have too often highlighted processes of separation, distinction, and even isolation. Taken together, we challenge our colleagues in the wider field of border studies to look at similar issues from different angles and create a more composite picture of borders, migration, and Indigenous belonging across borderlands than has previously been offered elsewhere. These chapters ask us to think about borders differently, and in this way “doing” border studies can move us closer to undoing the harm that border regimes have caused and continue to cause.