Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis(7 GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture)

Tracing and theorizing the concept of the boundaries through literary works, visual objects and cultural phenomena, this book argues against the reification of boundaries as fixed and empty non-spaces that simply divide the world. Expanding on her previous work on gender and Orientalism, Inge Boer takes us into uncertain territories of fashion and art, tourism and travel, skilfully engaging the ambivalence of boundaries, as both protecting and confining, as bringing distinction while existing by virtue of their ability to be transgressed. In her close readings of that boundaries as desert, as frame, as home (or lack of it), Boer shows that boundaries are spaces within, through, and in the name of which negotiations take place. They are not lines but spaces ; neither fixed nor empty but flexible and inhabited. With the publication of this book, Boer’s intellectual legacy stretches beyond her untimely passing. The writings that she left behind can be said to have inaugurated the future of her work, presented in the latter part by several of Boer’s intellectual companions. In their original essays, the contributors elaborate on Boer’s theme of boundaries as spaces where opposition yields to negotiation. Committed to the artefact as cultural stimulant, as the embodiment of thought, their analyses span a multitude of artefacts and media, ranging from literature to photography, to art installation and presentation, to film and song. Fanning out from Boer ‘s central focus – Orientalism – to other places of contestation, boundaries are shown to mediate the relationship between self and other ; they are, ultimately, spaces of encounter.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Editors’ Preface Introduction Part I: The Function of Boundaries 1. The World Beyond my Window: Nomads, Travelling Theories and the Function of Boundaries 2. Public Violence Hits Home: Civil War and the Destruction of Privacy 3. Uncertain Territories: Travel as Exchange Part II: Matter In and Out of Space 4. No-Man’s-Land? Deserts and the Politics of Place 5. Just a Fashion? Cultural Cross-Dressing 6. Border Fetishism: Negotiable Authenticity Part III: Placing Inge E. Boer Murat Aydemir: 7. Impressions Of Character: Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist Annelies Moors: 8. From Travelogue to Ethnography and Back Again? Hilma Granqvist’s Writings and Photographs Maria Boletsi: 9. Between Hospitality and Hostility: Crossing Balkan Borders in Adela Peeva’s Whose is this Song? Begüm Özden Firat: 10.Borders of the Art World, Boundaries of the Artwork: On “Contemporary Art from the Islamic World” Isabel Hoving: 11.Giving Life: Inge Boer’s Postcolonial Theory Bibliography List of Contributors Index of Names and Places Index of Terms and Concepts