Abstract
Borders are traces, that is to say, they are a form of writing – and thus they are also texts to be read. We often think of that which is on the other side of the border as something unknown, and the border itself also in some sense unknowable, inviting interpretation. I will here be examining some literary and cinematic narratives in which national borders are crossed for elements of an epistemology of the border. Such narratives often transform crossings into readings, suggesting that these crossings are allegories of the reading of the narrative itself – the reader crossing over into the text. If border crossings are movements of bodies in space, what do these narratives tell us of the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text? What can these narratives tell us about the figurality of community and identity? Can national affiliation be seen as an act of reading borders? I suggest that narratives of border crossing, like border crossings themselves, are structured around a double vector, sometimes transformed into a swirling confusion of directions, constituting the border zone and its associated identities.
This research was originally published in Borders and the Changing Boundaries of Knowledge, edited by Inga Brandell, Marie Carlson, and Önver A. Çetrez. The book can be found at: http://srii.bokorder.se/sv-SE/Book/2732/borders-and-the-changing-boundaries-of-knowle