Inverting the Telescope on Borders that Matter: Conversations in Café Europa

Abstract

Proposing an ‘inverted telescope’ for border studies, we problematized existing calls to ‘see like a border’, arguing that such moves miss an opportunity to define what is properly political about b/ordering space. Inverting the telescope on borders that matter reveals an ontologically grounded politics of bordering, one that illuminates an inherent multiplicity to borders that can best be captured in those contact zones that resist our conventional understanding of where European borders lie. Focusing on localized bordering practices that contest demarcation and re-appropriation within the logics of global, European and state-centered geopolitical designs, we canvas the ontological politics emerging from the furnace of three spatio-temporal European horizons: the Istrian peninsula connecting Slovenia and Croatia; the historical, path-dependent trajectory of a seasonal labor force crossing Polish and Danish borders; and a ‘European’ border located deep in Amazonía. We name the space produced by the tensions in each of these theaters Café Europa, designating both a material location of border praxis as well as a collective intellectual project in which the authors are themselves self-reflexively implicated.

Keywords::

• critical border studies
• inverted telescope
• ontological politics
• multiplicity
• Café Europa

Acknowledgments

This essay emerged from a book launch seminar for Andersen, D. J., Martin Klatt and Marie Sandberg (eds.) (2012) The border multiple: the practicing of borders between public policy and everyday life in a re-scaling Europe, Ashgate, Aldershot, held at the Nijmegen Center for Border Research (NCBR), Radboud University, the Netherlands May 2012. The authors wish to thank all participants at the Nijmegen gathering for stimulating the thought-processes that contributed to this piece of scholarship, as well as the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers. A lively shout goes out to the Radboud Universiteit Postcolonial Reading Group (RUPRG), whose members, loving, sharp and suffering no fools, kept one of the authors sane during the revisions of this dossier contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ To be fair, Rumford does devote some attention to the status of borders as sites for ‘cultural encounters,’ thus gesturing toward their ‘connective potential’ (2012, 895 and 896; citing the work of Rovisco 2010). But this theme remains a minor riff in his overall argument. For a more detailed treatment of this ‘potential,’ drawn from the arc of a mid-20th century Continental European intellectual legacy, see Kramsch 2010a.

² In using the term Café Europa we pay tribute to Slavenka Drakulic's seminal collection by that name (1997). Drakulic's essays read as reports from everyday life in ‘the other Europe,’ that is, life in and just after European Communist rule.

³ The very term ‘café,’ of course, is a historically loaded term, invoking strong bourgeois traditions linked to the rise of urban public spheres across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its extra-European provenance, however, notably North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and present day Latin America, underscores the trans-national impetus and border-crossing aim of our project (Pendergrast 2010).

⁴ Some deliberation over this text took place within the convivial confines of an Indian restaurant in Berlin.

⁵ Such spatial sentience is buried in the etymology of the Greek word, whereby telescope incorporates Tele =  far, and skopein =  to see.

⁶ The section rely on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of 5 years from 2008 to –2013.

⁷ Extract from interview conducted in Umag, Istria, 17 July 2009.

⁸ The example derives from an ongoing research project on Polish circular migration in the Copenhagen area, Denmark, conducted by Marie Sandberg and Niels J. Nielsen.

⁹ The concept of ‘nursing’ was elaborated by MA-students in Ethnology Sigrid M. Larsen, Birgitte L. Pedersen, Stine Polke-Pedersen, who took part in the above-mentioned research project, Fall 2011, University of Copenhagen.