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Salzburg Global Fellow Astrid Fellner discusses the social and cultural dimensions of borders

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This op-ed was written by Astrid Fellner, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023.

Borders and culture: the two cannot live without each other. Firstly, borders are necessary perceptual categories without which we cannot make sense of the world. In fact, we could say that any form of identity formation hinges upon the act of bordering; borders have constitutive functions and thus engender culture. At the same time, as Schimanski and Wolfe have suggested in "The Aesthetics of Borders", “[a] border that is not sensed by someone or something is not a border”. We have to perceive and recognize the border as such in order to consider it a border. In other words, borders are enmeshed in culture and are not meaningful without being inserted into the cultural process of signification, or representation.

Much traditional thinking about borders and culture has been driven by conceptions of cultural coherence that rely on some sort of trait list, such as values, languages, material practices, and the like. Area studies (like American Studies) or any other type of traditional “culture study” tend to “represent places as if they were coherent, bounded, and settled, as if identities were always constituted through identifications with or against such fixed places”. Scholars have criticized this reifying operation at work in a range of area studies disciplines inaugurated after World War II. Harry Harootunian, for example, has argued that among the founding assumptions that continue to impact the "afterlife" of area studies was the aim to “provide an understanding of the totality of a culture” and a concomitant “holistic approach” to the respective area that was to be the object of study. The assumption that geographical territories and their borders are co-extensive with specific “cultures” was, however, the result of the approaches and methods chosen, not what made these choices necessary. To put it differently, the reifying operation that gave the cultures to be studied an ontological status resulted from the way area studies fit squarely within the dominant modern discourses about “culture”. As Lawrence Grossberg points out, the construction of a cultural identity via spatial differences that are regarded as having ontological status is a subset of a general logic of difference, a logic of b/ordering, so to speak, that is at the heart of Western modernity. This taken-for-granted conflation of culture and bounded area can therefore be regarded as symptomatic of the modern notion of “culture”.

Border art and border writings can help us unlearn this often taken-for-granted idea of “culture” as something contained within a bordered area, often a nation or region. Culture is not something that is; it is something. that we do. No matter if we understand it as a “way of life – encompassing ideas, attitudes, languages, practices, institutions and structures of power – and a whole range of cultural practices: forms, texts, canons, architecture, mass-produced commodities, and so forth,” we need to change our vocabulary - we do not have culture, but we engage in culture; we do culture. And this performance of “culture” does not stop at borders. In fact, there is a hyperperformance of “culture” in border areas, and the border can be seen as a privileged place of representation in which something new arises through the meeting of multiple cultures and the act of cultural translation. As Johnson and Michaelsen state in "Border Secrets", borderlands represent places of “politically exciting hybridity, intellectual creativity, and moral possibility” and are areas in which border culture emerges. Especially in our times, borders are increasingly moving to the center of aesthetic negotiations with narratives of border crossings gaining prominence beyond the classic bodies of border literatures, such as Chicanx literature. The border has especially become important in narratives of (im)migration, diaspora, and flight. In fact, because of the increased attention that questions of mobility and migration have received, one can say that there has been a “border turn” in literary and cultural studies.

Recently, an understanding of border practices which suggest that borders are densely interwoven fabrics of various discursive and material practices has taken hold. Borders, therefore, should not only be grasped in the sense of a geopolitical line but as cultural doings that mark specific modes and histories of being, thinking, doing, making sense, and sensing. Theorizations like “borderscapes” or “bordertextures” have championed approaches which do not examine spatial, material, temporal, or cultural aspects in isolation but investigate their intersectional and performative interactions. Borders are thereby unmasked as contingent social and cultural productions and as instruments of power, which determine and often also substantiate our perception of the world.

Astrid Fellner is chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University in Germany, where she currently also serves as dean of studies of the Faculty of Humanities. She is head of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland University and co-editor of a trilingual Border Glossary, a handbook of key terms in Border Studies.

Astrid attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023. The 2023 Salzburg Global American Studies Program focused on the contestations and renegotiations of boundaries beyond the nation-state, and how they are changing the representation of democratic pluralism.