Imagined Borders/Lived Ambiguity: Intersections of Repression and Resistance

This edited volume examines the theoretical versatility of the concept of “borders.” The impulse to categorize, while present from antiquity in Western culture, has increased in intensity since the advent of the modern age with its corresponding political rise in the ideology of the sovereign nation-state. While the concept of immigration is the common mental image Westerners have when discussing borders, immigration is only the tip of the iceberg for this book. The belief in mutually exclusive, clear, and concrete categories, a necessary ideology in the age of the nation-state, creates large swathes of exceptions where people live ambiguous lives nationally, racially, sexually, ethnically, and in terms of gender. National identity, race, sexuality, gender, and the intersections between are the main categories discussed in the book through the lens of borders and ambiguity. The fervor over categorization, best embodied in recent political history by the Trump administration in the U.S., is both a desire to identify and thus control various “dangerous” populations, as well as creating the very ambiguity categorization is intended to alleviate. The volume weaves together discussions on the subjective meaning-making in ambiguity, policies that create ambiguity, historical creations of ambiguity that persist to the present, and theoretical considerations on the relationship between borders and ambiguity.

Table of Contents:
Introduction B. Garrick Harden Chapter 1: A Note on How Historical Patterns of American Ideology Led to President Icarus B. Garrick Harden Chapter 2: Alie(N)ation: A Qualitative Multi-Method Approach to Language, Domination, and Unauthorized Migration Hilario Molina II and Robert F. Carley Chapter 3: Incest Rhetorics and Queerphobic Sex Panics Ian Barnard Chapter 4: A Queer Marxian Analysis of the Construction of Race in the US G. Dillon Nicholson and B. Garrick Harden Chapter 5: THE KEYS FOR LOCKS: Border Queers/Queer Borders or Community and Possibilities for Identity Ryan Ashley Caldwell Chapter 6: Refusing to Decompose: How Cyber-ojo Makes Indigenous Rituals Palatable to Modern Society Hilario Molina II Chapter 7: U.S.-Mexico Border Control: The Use of Deportation Threats as a Method of Enforcing Control on Residents in South Texas Eric Gamino Chapter 8: U.S. Immigration Enforcement by Proxy: The Making of a New South-to-South Border between Mexico and Central America Juan José Bustamante Chapter 9: Unauthorized Latino/a Migration in an Era of Global Displacement: A Mixed Methods and World-Systems Perspective Hilario Molina II Chapter 10: Assessing Assimilation in the Borderlands: How Rapidly Do Mexican Americans Assimilate? Jesús A. Garcia, Chad Richardson, Rogelio Saenz, and Dejun Su References

About the Author :
B. Garrick Hardenis associate professor of sociology at Lamar University.

Review :
What I especially appreciate about this timely assemblage is that it brings together various and varied cross-disciplinary approaches/perspectives to bear on the effects of borders, categories, categorizations—material and imaginary. These are thought-provoking, critical, not predictable interventions. We live in a world in which not adhering to dominant ideas, identities, and politics have real, often severe, and in many instances deadly consequences. This volume offers an array of articles, synergistically aligned to challenge us to think about both the absurdity of borders and how they affect everyday people, especially those who do not fit neatly into prescribed boxes. Here is a timely and provocative book that goes where few academic books dare, but should. It is a book we should all have on our shelves, if only to offer alternative rigorous scholarship that re-centers itself on scholars (and scholarship) denied, ignored, or minimized. This is one book we should all be reading.