Borderscapes: From Border Landscapes to Border Aesthetics

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Notes

1. N. Thrift, Non-Representational Theory. Space, Politics, Affect (New York, London: Routledge, 2008); M. Dear, J. Ketchum, S. Luria and D. Richardson (eds.), GeoHumanities. Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (London/New York: Routledge 2011)

2. There is also an article, by R. Chavez Chavez, ‘W®i(t/d)ing on the border: reading our borderscape’, Theory and Research in Social Education, 27/2 (Spring 1999), pp. 1–24. Here, no explanation of the meaning of the term is offered.

3. See J.D. Kun, ‘The Aural border’, Theatre Journal, 52/1 (March 2000), pp. 1–21, for a discussion of the script, and also J.D. Kun, ‘Multiculturalism Without People of Color: An Interview With Guillermo Gómez-Peña’, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 24/1 (Spring 1999), pp. 187–199; and J.D. Kun, ‘Audioscape 2000: The Pocha Nostra and the performance of Sound’, in R. Uno and L. Mae San Pablo Burns (eds.), The Colour of Theatre: Race, Ethnicity and Contemporary Performance (New York: Continuum 2001), pp. 375–381.

4. See A. Harbers, ‘Borderscapes, The Influence of National Borders on European Spatial Planning’, in R. Brousi, P. Jannink, W. Veldhuis and I. Nio (eds.), Euroscapes (Amsterdam: Must Publishers/Architectura et Amicitia, 2003).

5. G. Dolff-Bonekämper and M. Kuipers, ‘Boundaries in the Landscape and in the City’, in G. Dolff-Bonekämpe (ed.), Dividing Lines, Connecting Lines – Europe’s Cross-Border Heritage (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2004), pp. 53–72.

6. E. dell’Agnese, Bollywood’s Borderscapes, Paper presented at AAG Pre-Conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder, CO., April 3–5, 2005 http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/aagpreconference/papers/abstracts.html.

7. A. Strüver, Stories of the ‘Boring Border’: The Dutch-German Borderscape in People’s Minds, Forum Politische Geographie, Bd. 2 (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2005). The book is based on a PhD thesis with the same title defended in 2004 at Radboud University Nijmegen.

8. P. Kumar Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr, Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

9. http://web.unitn.it/archive/events/borderscapes/index.htm.

10. With Giulia de Spuches, Borderscapes II. Another Brick in the Wall

11. With Sergio Zilli, www2.units.it/borderscapes3.

12. http://www.euborderscapes.eu/, and V. Kolossov, Euroborderscapes: State of the Debate. Report 1, European Commission (2012).

13. “Healthscape, Medscape –this industry always works this way. For a while it was ‘object this’ and ‘object that’, then ‘net’ and even ‘net object.’ These things aren’t terribly sophisticated; it’s like fashions in children’s names. And a good name can add 200% to your valuation” – Esther Dyson, publisher of Release 1.0, a technology newsletter, on the recent spate of new companies named with the suffix scape”, New York, April 1966, p. 15. Quoted by D.L. Gold, in ‘Nouns and Verbs Ending in – scape’, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 15 (2002), pp. 72–94.

14. J.D. Kun, 2000 (see note 3).

15. H. van Houtum, M. van der Velde and J. Jacobs, Demographic and Economic Decline as Symptoms of Peripherality: Plea for the Planning and Design of a Borderscape, Nijmegen Centre of Border Research, available at https://www.academia.edu/2864686/Demographic_and_economic_decline_as_symptoms_of_peripherality_Plea_for_the_planning_and_design_of_a_Borderscape, 2010. See also J. Jacobs, ‘Borderscapes als ontwerp’, Agora 4 (2012), pp. 9–13.

16. See Harbers (note 4).

17. D. Whittlesey, ‘The Impress of Effective Central Authority upon the Landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, XXV/2 (June 1935), pp. 85–97.

18. H. Hassinger, ‘Der Staat als Landschaftsgestalter’, Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, IX (1932), pp. 117–22, 182–87.

19. J.R. Victor Prescott, who, in his celebrated Political Frontiers and Boundaries (London: Allen & Unwin 1987), outlined four areas of concern in the relation between landscape and boundaries: 1) the political boundary as an element of the cultural landscape; 2) the effect of the boundary upon the landscape and on economic activities; 3) any impact the boundary might have on the attitudes of border inhabitants; 4) the effect of the boundary upon State policy. Apart from these classic works in the field of political geography, the influence of boundaries on landscape was taken into account also on the side of landscape studies. For instance, the editor of the journal Landscape, John Brinckerhoff Jackson distinguishes in his Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, London: Yale University Press 1984) between “vernacular landscape”, that is the landscape resulting from everyday life, and “political landscape”, that is the landscape resulting from the intervention of the State (“the political landscape is deliberately created in order to make it possible for men to live in a just society, the inhabited landscape merely evolves in the course of our trying to live on harmonious terms with the natural world …”). Specifically, in the essay ‘A Pair of Ideal Landscapes’, he identifies boundaries, together with roads and monuments, as the main elements of the political landscape.

20. G. Dolff-Bonekämper and Marieke Kuipers, ‘Des frontières dans le paysage et dans la ville’, in G. Dolff-Bonekämper (ed.), Patrimoine européen des frontières – Points de rupture, espaces partagés (Strasbourg: Editions du Conseil de l’Europe 2004), pp. 53–72, see note 5.

21. Ibid.

22. J. Minghi and E. Rumley (eds.), The Geography of Border Landscapes (London, New York: Routledge 1991). The book consists of a collection of papers presented at the final meeting of the Study Group on the World Political Map, held at the 26th International Geographical Union Congress in Perth (1988). The Perth meeting was what we would today call a pre-conference, held before the main IGU Congress in Sydney. At the time, the Chair of the Commission was David Knight, who wrote in his preface: “This volume is about border landscapes, with emphasis on the varying impact that political decision-making and ideological differences can have on the environment at border locations”.

23. Again, this approach finds its origin in the history of political geography. See S. B. Jones, “The Cordilleran Section of the Canada-United States Borderland”, The Geographical Journal, 89, 5 (1937), pp. 439–50.

24. D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984).

25. T. Barnes and J. Duncan (eds.), Writing Worlds. Discourse, Texts, and Metaphors in the Representation of Landscape (London, New York: Routledge, 1992).

26. H.K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1994]); Mieke Bal, “Introduction”, in M. Bal and B. Gonzales (eds.), The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation (Stanford [CA]: Stanford UP, 1999), pp. 1–14.

27. A.-L. Amilhat Szary, ‘Border Art and the Politics of Art Display’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, vol. 27 (2) (2012), pp. 213–28.

28. J. Rancière, Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics (New York, London: Continuum, 2010).

29. D. Cosgrove, Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); K. Harmon, C. Clemans, Gayle, The Map as Art. Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

30. F. Farinelli, “L’arguzia del paesaggio”, Casabella, 575–576 (1991), pp. 10–12. On Farinelli’s ideas, see C. Minca, ‘Humboldt’s Compromise, or the Forgotten Geographies of Landscape, Prog. Hum. Geog., 31 (2) (April 2007), pp. 179–193.

31. G. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (25th anniversary - 4th edition) (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012 [1987]).