We Googled “Why are dates important in History,” but fear the results may not have been peer-reviewed.
For peer-reviewed sources on other matters:
In the UK, a viva voce exam – generally shortened to “viva” – is the oral “defence” of a PhD thesis.
Caleb and Gillian refer to:
Read about the Schengen Agreement here.
Read about Aztlán here.
See a map of Turtle Island here.
The United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus’ website offers a primer on the Cyprus buffer zone (or “the Green Line”) here.
The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.
Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for use of recording equipment, and to India Downton for her invaluable expertise. Thanks also to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.
Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com
We Googled “Why are dates important in History,” but fear the results may not have been peer-reviewed.
For peer-reviewed sources on other matters:
In the UK, a viva voce exam – generally shortened to “viva” – is the oral “defence” of a PhD thesis.
Caleb and Gillian refer to:
Read about the Schengen Agreement here.
Read about Aztlán here.
See a map of Turtle Island here.
The United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus’ website offers a primer on the Cyprus buffer zone (or “the Green Line”) here.
The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.
Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for use of recording equipment, and to India Downton for her invaluable expertise. Thanks also to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.
Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com
Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali
Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands, from different countries, with multiple passports. Hello and welcome to today's episode. We have two guests with us: Deborah Toner and Caleb Bailey.
Zalfa Feghali: Dr. Deborah Toner is a social and cultural historian of Mexico, the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She specializes in the history of alcohol, food, and identity, particularly in terms of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, medicine, and nationalism. That's a lot of stuff. In 2010, she co-founded with Mark Halewood, the Drinking Studies Network, an interdisciplinary organization connecting researchers of drink and drinking cultures across different societies and time periods. Deborah is both, and I know this from experience, Deborah is both an excellent cook and an excellent scholar, and a lot of her work is at this intersection. She's the author of the 2015 book Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, as well as the co-edited Stories on Our Plate: Recipes and Conversations, and that was from 2018. And in 2021, she published the edited collection Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War. With a very shady co-editor, she is working on the Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands, which is coming out next year. One hopes. Deborah has led or been part of loads of really exciting projects, including her AHRC project, Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity: the US, Mexico and the Wider World, 1845 to 1940, and the ESRC-funded project on which she was co-investigator called Mental, Neurological and Substance Use Disorders in Guyana's Jails, 1825 to the Present. Deborah's fun fact is that by the end of 2023, she will have seen the band Princess Goes in concert a total of 13 times. Hardcore. She is a hardcore listener. And so before we move on to talk about Caleb, Deborah, I wanted to ask you what got you into border studies? Why are you here?
Deborah Toner: Oh God, well it's one of those things where I got into it through teaching. So there's three modules that I've been involved in, like co-designing and then co-teaching on “Global history”, on “The American West” and “Americas Plural”, all of which to one extent or another are about encouraging students to think beyond the nation state. And it was through doing those modules that I kind of realized, okay, this is actually something that I've always been interested in because, you know, I started my kind of research career researching the history of Mexican nationalism and its relationship to questions to do with alcohol. So from the start, I've been thinking about, like, nationalism and nationhood as constructed entities, which brings us right back to border thinking.
Zalfa Feghali: Constructed entities. I think that's going to come up a lot today. I'm looking at Caleb.
Gillian Roberts: Our second guest is Dr. Caleb Bailey, who is a Teaching Associate in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he received his PhD in 2016 and where he teaches literature and cultural studies. He is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on borders and the development of hemispheric approaches to studies of North America. He's published work in the European Journal of American Studies, the Journal of Borderland Studies, and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands. Fun fact about Caleb: he is a big fan of Bruce Springsteen, but not of dynamic pricing.
Zalfa Feghali: I think that's fair enough to say, and we can probably put some editorializing in our show notes.
Caleb Bailey: Yeah, absolutely.
Zalfa Feghali: Get the message out there. I think Caleb would be very happy to give us some reading material on both dynamic ticket pricing and Bruce Springsteen.
Deborah Toner: Can I just say Princess Goes' concert tickets are very affordable.
Caleb Bailey: Noted. Okay.
Gillian Roberts: Thanks for that advice to our listeners. Caleb, tell us what got you interested in border studies.
Caleb Bailey: I'll try not to make this too convoluted, but I think it starts with the work I undertook in my Master's. So there I was dealing with ideas around regionalism and particularly about how Alaska exists in the U.S. national and cultural imagination. So this is a territory that is known as the frontier state. And so I was looking at it in terms of how it articulates in today's times the frontier thesis and how it is somewhere where America goes to revisit its past. What that led me to kind of realizing is that the Alaska Purchase kind of hastens Canadian Confederation in some respects. So that got me interested in how those borders kind of came into being. And so when I started my PhD, and I was very much interested in Canadian culture, I got frustrated by lots of fellow PhD candidates and by staff within the department that they didn't have any interest in Canadian stuff. And so I was trying to use borders to kind of correct what's famously been called a “rhetorical malpractice” in terms of American studies not being truly American in the sense that it refuses to engage with Canadian or Mexican culture, history, texts, etc. And so that's where my interest in border studies kind of stems from.
Gillian Roberts: I “love”, in inverted commas, those maps of the US where you've got like Alaska kind of floating independently of any body of land.
Zalfa Feghali: Oh, the ones that completely erase.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah. And then there's like Hawaii, which is suspiciously close to the rest of the United States, you know, and it's just like, oh yeah, here's our like satellite sort of nation states.
Caleb Bailey: And they fly in the face of kind of that denial of colonialism on the US's part, you know, especially those weather maps where they bring them kind of closer together, but also suggest that there isn't anything in between.
Gillian Roberts: Yes. Unless, of course, there's bad weather coming from Canada, in which case, “Blame Canada,” famously. So one of the things we're here to talk about today is the forthcoming volume, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands, which is being co-edited by Deborah and Zalfa. Please, will you tell us what got you interested in this project, this very large project?
Deborah Toner: Well and we should say as well that both Gillian and Caleb are contributing to this book as well, so we are a big happy family here today for our Gender and Borderlands handbook.
Gillian Roberts: I'm just feigning ignorance.
Deborah Toner: Zalfa is really the one who brought the idea of co-editing this to me, so I think you should explain the origins of this book.
Gillian Roberts: So, it’s her fault.
Zalfa Feghali: I did say I was shady. It started, as a lot of these things do, with an email, and I'm now sort of traumatized by emails in general, but this one was a nice one to get. It was from one of the editors at Routledge asking me to peer review a proposal for another book in the Routledge gender and something companion series. And she asked me if there was anything in the series that seemed that there was a gap that I thought I could fill. And I said, well, borderlands, obviously. And I immediately thought of you, Deborah, in part because of some of the teaching that we were doing together on a module called The West as part of the American Studies program here at Leicester, sadly no longer running. But because we had been teaching on that and because, well, we get on quite well, and I thought, well, you know, you should try and work with people you don't mind. And if we end up
Gillian Roberts: Resounding endorsement.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, I mean, and if we end up hating each other, that's okay. But we haven't yet, although of course the book hasn't come out. So there's still time.
Deborah Toner: No, I mean, I think this was, for context, this was back in, I mean, I think late 2018, actually.
Zalfa Feghali: End of 2018.
Deborah Toner: Yeah, when we started talking about it. And that was, I think, I think it was the first year that we co-taught the West module.
Zalfa Feghali: That's right.
Deborah Toner: Because we redesigned it over the previous year. And we'd kind of redesigned it around, interestingly, actually, from what you were saying, Caleb, around the idea of the frontier as a central part of American mythology. I've always been a little bit of a kind of weird addition to the American Studies team at Leicester because I work on Latin America and Mexico, but from the outset that was welcomed. And so we'd been doing this teaching together, thinking all about how that border was constructed, how it was built over time, how it's changed over time, and the different ways that scholarship has responded to that as well. And we're, what, five years on from that point now? We're getting close to five years on from that point now, and we haven't fallen out yet, so it's fine.
Zalfa Feghali: I think we're okay. I think we're okay. But I mean, in the same way that we used our different border studies interests to shape that module, we've done the same thing, I think, with this book, trying to think through different sets of borderlands and moving beyond the ones that we would expect to talk about, which I think we'll come to when we chat a bit with Caleb about how he has come to contribute to the Companion. But I've always been a comparative border studies scholar. I think I've always said that it's easier for me to think in those terms because there's just more material for me to deal with. And I really enjoy having more stuff to read rather than just being limited to one area. So it made sense. Of course, Deborah helpfully is a historian and I, shall we say, not a historian. So it was useful to have that spread as well.
Gillian Roberts: So what is it like working across those disciplines together as a literature scholar and a historian? How, how does it affect, you know, the editing of this book?
Zalfa Feghali: Well, it's been great because we have totally different ways of doing it.
Deborah Toner: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I always want more dates and things.
Zalfa Feghali: And I have no problem with no dates and it's, it's actually, I found myself introducing dates as much as I can now, which is, Debbie, you've definitely influenced me usefully.
Deborah Toner: You know, because we are, I mean, we're dealing with people who are contributing to the book are coming from a lot of different disciplines. So I think it's actually been really useful that we both come from different disciplinary backgrounds, because at least that's a start that we're not coming to everybody's work when we're reviewing it from the same disciplinary approach. And so it means I think there are parts of the reviewing process that we approach differently. I think it's fair to say, actually, in most cases, we've been broadly in agreement overall about how we sort of see what revisions we should be asking for. But we do also pick up on different things as well. So my date-based obsession is an example of that. But I mean, I think more broadly, it might be evident from the introduction that Zalfa gave to me that as a historian, I'm also quite promiscuous, in terms of the range of things that I look at. And part of that does include disciplinary promiscuousness as well. So my PhD was actually based on a historical analysis of literature. The drinking studies network that I've been involved in, we get scholars from all sorts of different social sciences and science-y backgrounds as well as the humanities. That kind of interdisciplinary working is always something that I've been both comfortable with, but also just find so much more interesting and kind of rewarding than sticking to one lane. So this project has been fantastic. I mean, I've learned so much from different people's contributions.
Zalfa Feghali: Oh, our contributors are amazing. We've got, well, we can talk about some examples later maybe, but I do remember this reading through one chapter after you had had your first pass at it. And your first comment was, wheeee! There are archives in this one! And I actually, I heard that comment. I heard you say that comment in my head. And I remember thinking, Huh, she's really happy about this. I can't remember whose it was, but it must've been an early chapter. In almost every case, we have been entirely in agreement, maybe in slight, you know, approaching a restructure in slightly different ways or different suggestions. And Deborah, you are in some ways more interventionist than I am. And in other ways, the advice I give can sometimes be a little bit nebulous. So it's been really useful to think through how another person reads and how best to present feedback to a scholar who's often in a discipline that is different from both of ours.
Deborah Toner: Yeah.
Gillian Roberts: So in terms of this interdisciplinarity across the volume, how important was that to you in envisioning the volume and who you invited to contribute? Can you say more about the remit of the book in terms of geographical spread as well? What were your principles of selection?
Deborah Toner: So from the outset, the overarching, I think, most important decision was we want this to be global in scope. So we were both North Americanist scholars in different formulations of that, and of course the US-Mexico border has a very special place in border studies scholarship. But from the outset we wanted it to be truly global and not just across the book as a whole but to as much as it was possible for each section of the book that looks at a different sort of thematic aspect or kind of conceptual approach I suppose. We wanted each of those to deal with at least five or six different sort of geographical areas of the world. So that was kind of principle number one. Principle number two, I think, was that we wanted to make sure that the contributors, so the authors who were contributing to the book, were similarly diverse in terms of where they're based geographically, the disciplines that they work within, different career stages as well, and different kind of conceptual approaches. I think in terms of we want someone to work on literature here or history there, I think that was a little bit further down the list in terms of priorities. But we wanted it to be very multidisciplinary and focused from the outset as well. And I think after we'd kind of mapped out the kind of geographical and contributor kind of range in each section, we then had to think about what disciplinary approach is missing and kind of made further then selections on that basis.
Zalfa Feghali: I think it was a really interesting process of curation, I guess, because we were trying to make sure that we were being as inclusive as possible when talking about these places and kind of experiences that were always at risk of being exclusive and contained in different ways. So we were trying to both contain them and open them up. But I mean, it is a great, even if I do say so myself, it is a great spread of people, and the feedback that we've had from everyone who's contributed and everyone who kind of has had a look at the table of contents has been very positive so far.
Gillian Roberts: So what are the sections that the volume is divided into?
Deborah Toner: So we have an introductory section, as books often do, with an overall kind of introduction to the volume. I think we are going to spend quite a bit of time explaining that process of selection and those decisions in that introduction, and particularly in terms of the global dimensions. And then two separate essays introducing different approaches, conceptual approaches to gender studies and border studies. So Caleb will tell us all about that later. And then we have sections that kind of thematic is sort of the wrong word. They kind of proceed in different levels. So we start at the level of kind of individual and family with a section called Intimate Borders, and then broaden out in a variety of different ways into a section on Cultural and Civic Borders, looking at different cultural expressions of borders or their defiance, and then state institutions and processes, but also police borders. Then the next two sections are about the structural violence of borders both in an embodied sense, so there's the third section called Embodied and Violent Borders, the next section after that is then Economic Borders, so looking at the structural aspects of economic violence, and then there's a final section on we've called it Changing, Challenging, Resisting. That's the one, that's about different, obviously, ways that borders can be resisted and challenged. I think those essays are mainly based on the different cultural ways that that can happen as well. So that's the general organization of the book.
Gillian Roberts: You've really stressed, rightly, the global scope of this project. Are there particular additional gaps in existing literature that the book fills or conversations that it furthers?
Zalfa Feghali: I mean, this is a very specific answer to a broader question, but there is a lot of material here on women. And a lot of the time, gender and women are conflated in a way that we don't necessarily agree with and shouldn't. What I like is that there are a few essays in which that boundary is really productively and generatively blurred and erased.
Deborah Toner: Yeah, I mean I think there are a lot of essays that focus on women, and I think probably an unsurprising finding of the book when you kind of look at these issues comparatively is that in many cases and in many ways, the structural violence on borders falls disproportionately on women for a variety of different reasons.
Zalfa Feghali: And there's nothing wrong with focusing on that, absolutely.
Deborah Toner: But we have also tried to incorporate, there are essays that are specifically on masculinity and men's issues in that sense. There are essays that concentrate on the LGBTQ+ communities in different parts of the world. And there are some essays that are kind of ostensibly focused on women's experience, but the way they've approached that is in a very inclusive way, including considerations of trans issues and things like that, for instance. But I think it is fair to say that there probably could have been more essays that explored trans issues and LGBTQ issues more broadly.
Gillian Roberts: Am I hearing volume 2?
Zalfa Feghali: I think one of the things we haven't talked about yet, and this is by no means justification or defense, but the version of the collection that we started out with is not the collection that we've ended up with. And, you know, this is perfect as it is for what it is. But as Deborah said, we started in sort of late 2018, 2019, we sent this off to the publisher as a proposal. And then in 2020, like this thing happened that across borders that disproportionately affected women and other gender minorities.
Gillian Roberts: I have no idea what you're talking about.
Zalfa Feghali: No, nobody does. It's just one of my...
Gillian Roberts: Zalfa Feghali: It's very obscure. Yeah. One of my niche interests. And that has disproportionately again, for its part, affected the way that this book has played out. And what we have tried to do over the last few years has been to be as, well, not just as flexible as we could, but as flexible as we needed to be for ourselves as editors and as scholars who want to inhabit a position of not necessarily slow scholarship, but ethical engagement with the work that we're asking people to do. And that meant that lots of things shifted, lots of experiences that we were hoping could be foregrounded or made present in the book may not be there in the same way that we wanted. So, whether it's volume two or whether it opens the conversation up for other people to fill the gap. A lot of the amazing early career researchers who we do showcase in the collection may want to take this forward. And those are conversations that we want to have.
Deborah Toner: Right, exactly. And I just have to mention the gap of the GAB.
Zalfa Feghali: The gap of the GAB!
Deborah Toner: Which this brought me great amusement in the process of, you know, acronyms are wonderful things. But yeah, probably about 18 months ago, I suppose, when, you know, we had reached a stage that, okay, we need to start bringing this to completion. Some people have submitted their essays a long time ago, but some people are very understandably, because of all those mysterious things that we forget what happened in 2020, had to withdraw and, you know, different priorities change. So we went through this process that became known as the gap of the GAB. So gap assessment process of the Gender and Borderlands book. So we kind of figured out, okay, so because that chapter is no longer going to be part of it, which geographical area is missing from this section now? Or which kind of thematic approach is missing from this section? Which disciplinary approach is missing? And so in the process of commissioning new chapters to fill those gaps, the gap of the GAB was designed basically to make sure that we were retaining the integrity of the global ambitions of the book as the kind of principle number one, basically. And I think by and large, we've managed to achieve that. So there might be a little bit of like, there might be one section that is a little bit maybe North American-heavy, just because so much scholarship on borders happens in the North American context.
Zalfa Feghali: But it's also not the sort of North American-heavy that you would expect.
Deborah Toner: No, exactly.
Zalfa Feghali: There are some incredibly exciting essays on non-creatural relations and...
Deborah Toner: Should I read out the title of the one that I think you're referring to?
Zalfa Feghali: Go for it.
Gillian Roberts: This is going to be a great test.
Deborah Toner: “Border Women, Queer Mestizos and Nagualas: Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands Ontologies.” Is that the one you were thinking of?
Zalfa Feghali: That's certainly one of them. And I was also thinking about the...
Deborah Toner: That's by Suzanne Bost, by the way.
Zalfa Feghali: And it's a great essay! I'm thinking about the one in the final section.
Deborah Toner: Oh, “Relational Ecologies in Contemporary Chicana Border Art” by Stephanie Lewthwaite.
Zalfa Feghali: Yes, well done.
Gillian Roberts: Who's she? Just kidding. She's my colleague.
Zalfa Feghali: Yes. And a future guest.
Gillian Roberts: Promise of a future guest.
Zalfa Feghali: The promise of a future guest is always already there.
Deborah Toner: To quickly come back to your question that started off this diversion in the gap of the GAB, in terms of like sort of bringing together or like filling gaps in existing literature, I think with that global dimension of the book, we are putting together, comparatively, scholarships that don't really speak to one another. For example, there are two essays that explore the impact of borders on access to reproductive health care and abortion in particular. One of those is written about the US-Mexico borderlands or the Texas borderlands, and one is on the borders of Ireland, so both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And both of those essays have been grappling with the fact that the situation in those different locations has changed dramatically, actually during the course of producing this book. But I think it would be very rare for scholars working on abortion in Northern Ireland to be speaking to scholars who are working on similar issues in Texas.
Gillian Roberts: But that's an amazing thing about this volume is to demonstrate that, you know, that there's some overlap in those different locations. I did want to ask you a final question. I mean, you've given some really exciting and enticing examples of new and innovative approaches to the Mexico-US border. But I wondered about borderlands that are addressed in this book that we associate less commonly with dominant border studies scholarship. If you have examples of borderlands that you were really excited to be able to include here.
Zalfa Feghali: I've paired these two essays, even though I don't even think they're currently in the same section. We have two essays on shuttle trade, one in Eastern Europe and the other in Africa, and different ways in which women are using shuttle trade to subvert colonial and post-colonial borders. And it's that sort of comparative approach that, as editors, we get to read this before everyone else does. And we've sort of been building these relationships between these chapters in our minds for months and years. But what's going to be really satisfying is bringing them all together, both in our introduction, but in the way that we compare them and talk about them, we're going to be developing, hopefully, some educational materials, linking them up, so thinking through different modes of resistance. It isn't a volume that focuses on how terrible borders are for gender or how amazing gender is for borders. It's one that sort of acknowledges that both borders and gender are differently embodied and differently culturally signified in different contexts. And I think it's really exciting. And it's one that's, for me, quite joyful.
Deborah Toner: Yes, the two that I kind of conceptually paired together, and they are in different sections of the book, are Roonaq's essay on the female family members of political prisoners in Kashmir on the kind of India-Pakistan borderlands. And then the essay that's on colonial carceral borderlands in Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar. So looking at how the British Empire basically used incarcerated people's labour in penal colonies in different locations.
Gillian Roberts: In islands.
Deborah Toner: Exactly and so those two essays kind of explore the impact of different practices of incarceration in really conceptually interesting ways in obviously very different locations and in different time periods as well, because the one based in Kashmir is based on the present day, that's based on ethnographic field research. The one on colonial carceral borderlands is obviously historical and focusing on the kind of mid- to late 19th century. So it's in those kinds of conversations between chapters I think that the book is most exciting, but also I think in terms of specific geographies, weirdly, I think, because of the concentration on the US-Mexico border, you don't see a lot of South America, Latin America borderland scholarship.
Zalfa Feghali: Which we have a decent amount of representation.
Deborah Toner: And we have a couple of essays that are exploring different aspects of the Chilean, Peruvian, and Bolivian borderlands. So that for me is really exciting because as a Latin Americanist, Latin America so often gets left out of the conversation. And I'm really pleased that that hasn't happened here.
Gillian Roberts: I'm so excited for this book to come out. Late 2024. Is that right?
Deborah Toner: We think so. I mean, we're on track for getting it to the publisher in a few months time, let's say. So that will be, oh, well, it depends when this is broadcast. That’s not a helpful timeline!
Gillian Roberts: Maybe it's come out already.
Zalfa Feghali: You mean, we’re going out live, don't you?
Deborah Toner: In the last quarter of 2023, a book of this size has a long production time, so we're looking at it being published in the second half of 2024.
Gillian Roberts: Fantastic.
One of the pieces in the introductory section of this collection is Caleb's introduction to border studies, which I've had the great privilege to have a sneak preview of. So I have a few questions for Caleb, and full disclosure, I was one of Caleb's PhD supervisors. So I'm hoping this doesn't feel too much like a supervision for him.
Zalfa Feghali: I'm sure it does.
Caleb Bailey: It’s a little nerve-wracking, to be honest.
Gillian Roberts: We're all friends here.
Zalfa Feghali: We've got your back, Caleb. We've got your back.
Deborah Toner: We’re one big happy borderlands family.
Gillian Roberts: We haven't done the other full disclosure, which is that I was Zafa's PhD examiner.
Zalfa Feghali: That's true. For your sins.
Gillian Roberts: But I hope you've recovered from that experience.
Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I mean, we're apparently doing a podcast together.
Gillian Roberts: Right, so we've overcome. We've overcome. Actually, famously, a former colleague said that Zalfa's viva was very uncharacteristic of vivas because there was lots of laughter coming out of my office during...
Zalfa Feghali: I do remember that. And that particular colleague met me outside during the viva break and said, you're all laughing. This is a really good sign.
Gillian Roberts: It was a really good sign. So, you know, the viva was good. It was all good. Anyway, let's talk about Caleb's excellent piece. So I loved reading this introduction to Border Studies, kind of along the themes of the book as a whole, just the scope of it was really wonderful, but it also felt really fluid at the same time. It didn't feel like borders that shouldn't be discussed together were being discussed together. Lots of care and attention has gone into this remarkable piece. So I just wanted to pick up on a few things that spiked my interest. We've sort of alluded to this already, the place that Mexico-US border, the place that that border has in border studies scholarship and we often see it referred to as the “birthplace” of the field. I've even quoted things to that event. But you begin with the Berlin Wall, actually. I mean, you then mentioned the Mexico-US border. But I wonder, Caleb, if this was a conscious choice to start not with the Mexico-US border, and if in looking to the Berlin Wall, this was an active attempt to expand the lens of the field and how we tend to talk about it in more dominant terms.
Caleb Bailey: I mean, it was a deliberate choice, yeah. In an earlier draft of the introduction, I did begin by talking about that event in 2020 that we, you know, we're not mentioning.
Gillian Roberts: The event that does not speak its name.
Caleb Bailey: We want to forget. No one wants to forget it more than the government, it would appear. So, you know, my first draft was about all these fiat borders, which suddenly started appearing in our lives. And then when I came to redraft it, I thought, well, I can't do that.
Gillian Roberts: ‘Cause the government will come after you.
Caleb Bailey: It’s gonna date.
Zalfa Feghali: It will date. It will age it.
Caleb Bailey: And so I thought, where do I start? And I thought, well, let's start with the Berlin Wall. And this is where my favourite editorial comment came from, you know, because I'd said, you know, “as recently as the 1990s,” and Deborah kindly pointed out that I'm not sure we can think about the 1990s as recent anymore.
Zalfa Feghali: I beg to differ. But anyway…
Deborah Toner: I mean, trust me, I’ve only just come to terms with the fact myself.
Zalfa Feghali: This is the danger of being obsessed with dates.
Deborah Toner: Yeah, I know. But I have now come to terms with the fact that the 1990s weren't a few years ago.
Zalfa Feghali: We're now waylaying Caleb's conversation. Sorry. Sorry, Caleb.
Caleb Bailey: That's all right. As you've said a few times already, the US-Mexico border just stands so large in people's understanding of border studies. And I thought it was important to begin with a European border, I suppose. And to make the point that, yes, the US-Mexico border is important, but each border is unique, and you cannot take theory that derives from the US-Mexico border and transplant it wholesale into other contexts. We have to make particular adaptations. So focusing on a border in Europe seemed like a good place to start. And people might dispute this kind of listing, but there's some suggestion, and I refer to it in the introduction, that there were three borders that really kind of occupy the popular global consciousness following the Second World War, and that would be the border between North and South Vietnam, the kind of unofficial border between the North and South of the U.S. in terms of segregation and unofficial segregation, and then the Iron Curtain. And so I figured, well, you know, North and South Vietnam, that has been, you know, is anything ever truly resolved when it comes to borders? But that's resolved.
Gillian Roberts: Discuss.
Caleb Bailey: Similarly, you know, is the race issue in the US done with? No, but in terms of legislation, it has been “resolved,” in inverted commas. So the Berlin Wall is the final one of those to kind of play out to, if not resolve itself, then, you know, I think that the collapse of the Berlin Wall leads us into a new kind of phase of thinking about borders.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Now, to stay with Europe for a minute, you write in your piece about “the — almost complete — complicity of European nations in the construction of the bordered world we inhabit today,” which I think is such a crucial point, such an important point. And later on, you mentioned the notion of a borderless world that was touted by political leaders around the ratification of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, as an example. This made me wonder about the EU and the Schengen area, partly because I've heard some people try to argue that in previous years that NAFTA should be more like the EU, and everyone should use a single currency, etc. But I wonder how the EU might relate to your point about European countries being responsible for most of the world's borders today.
Caleb Bailey: Okay. I think the Schengen area and NAFTA have a lot in common. There might be calls for NAFTA to be a bit more like the EU, but I think actually NAFTA and what we see in the Schengen area in terms of no border controls, no passports, et cetera, et cetera, amongst member states, has a very similar kind of impulse to NAFTA. Those borders kind of dissolve for economic reasons. You know, it gets sold to us possibly as something to do with friendship and cultural commonality, but actually the bottom line is that these borders disappear. I mean, obviously they reappear at certain points as well, but they disappear purely for economic reasons. So it's presented to us as a kind of liberalization of our daily lives in Europe, but actually it's a kind of, it's a neo-liberalization of the market that is driving this. And so whilst those borders disappear for intra-EU economic migration, at the same time it means that the external borders are much more heavily policed. And so it is Europe again being kind of arrogant and dictating to the rest of the world, you know, we'll remove our borders, but the borders, you know, which invariably we probably drew in your countries in Africa and in the Middle East, they're going to have to remain, I'm afraid, just as difficult for people to cross. So I think that reveals the kind of hypocrisy and contradiction that you can see, you know, in terms of Europe's drawing of colonial boundaries in the past, but also how it kind of reinforces those boundaries in the present.
Gillian Roberts: I want to pick up on this element of colonialism and Europe. I mean, we often refer in border studies scholarship to nation-state borders in North America as colonial borders, but of course, they are also settler-colonial borders. So I wondered how you see settler colonialism and borders operating in relation to each other in a way that might be different from colonialism and borders.
Caleb Bailey: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a fundamental difference. So with colonialism, what you're doing essentially is extending a nation's borders, extending its boundaries, so, you know the North American colonies: this is now British territory. So you're just, you know, kind of extending the border of the imperial centre. What happens then when colonialism is replaced by settler colonialism is that that one single border suddenly becomes multiple. There are borders kind of emerging everywhere. So as the US or as Canada takes on more and more territory and extends its own borders, it comes into contact with more and more “impediments,” in inverted commas, in terms of encounters with Indigenous people. And the first impulse is to kind of eradicate them because they're standing in the way of the creation of a holistic, kind of, homogenous state. And then eventually when that doesn't happen, you very generously “invite” them into the body politic. Yeah.
Gillian Roberts: Such a gift.
Caleb Bailey: Yes. Yeah, so generous. But that involves a whole series of other bordering practices. So we have reserves and reservations. So we have internal borders that start to build up. And then land is kind of parcelled off and allotted and becomes private property. And inevitably, once you have the idea of private property amongst Indigenous groups, then that private property, you know, gets whittled down further and so more and more borders stack up there. And then I think the most insidious kind of border that emerges in settler-colonial situations would be the way in which the very act of being Indigenous, of being able to proclaim being an Indigenous person, is also bordered and boundaried and patrolled by the state. So I think that's the key difference, really, between colonialism and settler colonialism. I think colonialism treats Indigenous people as a resource. And then settler colonialism treats them as an impediment. And in order to get rid of that impediment, you need more and more borders to kind of control the narrative of the nation.
Zalfa Feghali: Expansion and then containment.
Caleb Bailey: Yeah, exactly that.
Zalfa Feghali: I don't think I've ever heard a better response to that question when having to generate it on the fly. So well done.
Gillian Roberts: Yes, well done.
Deborah Toner: We're all nodding vigorously.
Gillian Roberts: It’s the invisible nod.
Zalfa Feghali: We all have repetitive strain injuries from having nodded so much. Can I jump in and ask a question about maps and thinking about, so one of the, I'm going to spoil the first sentence for our readers of your chapter, which is, the first sentence reads, “Despite their apparent cartographic fixity, borders are rarely — if at all— inert in their forms or functions.” And you've just sort of enumerated one or two of their forms and functions. What role do you think cartographic practices and maps, which are now sort of being called into question, right? We try not to think about maps as actual representations of reality, but maybe they are more usefully described as routes or itineraries or becomings. I know you sort of draw on this a little bit in the chapter, so I wondered if you could just expand on it a little.
Caleb Bailey: I think maps are tools, aren't they? Not only for navigating, but tools for assimilating and controlling and laying claim to particular territories. And so, therefore, there is no one complete map of the globe. We can look at that political map, and that shows us where the borders are. But, you know, those borders are subject to change either at a kind of international or national level or at an individual level. So I think that maps are always provisional. They're always processive. They're always in the process of being made and in the process of becoming. And so in work that I've done in the past, a lot of it is focused on how maps are palimpsests in terms of, you know, you can overlay alternative territories on top of these, you know, supposedly fully realized nation-states. So, I mean, you can look at a map of North America and see Mexico, the US, and Canada. Or you can look at a map of North America and see Aztlán and Turtle Island and other imagined regions like Cascadia and those kind of places. So I think maps, they're part of the trick. They're part of how you sell the idea of sovereignty and the nation state. So they're tied up in that deception, I think.
Gillian Roberts: I guess this leads to the language of striation, which you mention a few times in your essay. This echoes, of course, the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which you don't really explicitly reference in this piece, but you have written about elsewhere. I just wondered if you could say more about what their work brings to your thinking about borders.
Caleb Bailey: I think what Deleuze and Guattari do is show us how borders can be put into motion and made to do work that perhaps they're not designed to do, if that makes sense?
Gillian Roberts: I think so, but say more.
Caleb Bailey: Okay. So I mean, actually, so Saldívar, in one of the kind of foundational texts of border studies, uses one of their concepts and he refers to the border as a desiring machine. So in that sense, I'm not breaking new ground by invoking Deleuze, but I think If we are to understand what the border does, we need to set it in motion. We need it to articulate. And I think a lot of the ideas that Deleuze and Guattari put forward kind of help in doing that. So, you know, they have the idea of smooth and striated spaces. So the striations are the borders that are constructed for us, whereas the smooth space in between those borders is where interesting things can happen where experimentation can take place. And they talk about how we can envisage smooth and striated spaces in terms of two different games. So chess, which they call a game of state, and then Go, which they call, I forget what they call it a game of. But what that reveals to us is the way in which things like borders are hierarchical, and they expect us to move and behave in particular ways, whereas what their work is about is finding different ways to kind of circumvent those rules and those regulations. So I think some of those ideas are quite useful to thinking about borders and how we can reconfigure them. Whilst at the same time, I must say, not kind of valorizing the potential of the de-centred subject. So a lot of kind of Euro-American philosophy of Deleuze's type gets criticized for kind of celebrating de-centred subjectivity. Whereas, you know, obviously one of the main concerns of border studies is to not celebrate that, but to actually highlight it and point at it and show that that kind of exists rather than using it as something to celebrate.
Gillian Roberts: And we're using it in more of a metaphorical...
Caleb Bailey: Exactly, yeah.
Gillian Roberts: ...capacity for resistance. That does bring me to another question, which is about metaphor, because you talk about borders and metaphor in this piece. And I wonder if you find some border metaphors more useful or more fitting than others?
Caleb Bailey: I think they're all useful in different ways. But again, just going back to my previous answer, to make sure that they're not celebrating that kind of postmodern, de-centred subject, which you always have to be kind of mindful about. I think my favourite metaphor would be threshold, because it implies an inside and an outside. It implies something that can be straddled, but it also gives people a sense that a threshold is something that you encounter on a daily basis. So it brings the border and things that a border can do to you as a subject, much more into everyday life. So I think that's really important, and particularly when we're considering, as this volume does, gender and borderlands. So I think those metaphors are useful, and Deleuze and Guattari give us a lot of them, but I think also maybe a better one to kind of look at when it comes to gender would be to look at de Certeau and his notion of strategies and tactics and the way in which strategies are those things imposed on us in a top-down kind of approach, whereas the tactics are those things that we can do to kind of fight against those impositions.
Zalfa Feghali: Everyday things.
Caleb Bailey: Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. So I think the metaphors that are most useful are those ones that bring home and ground the experience of the border in our everyday kind of lived experience.
Gillian Roberts: Amazing, thank you.
Deborah Toner: The strategies and tactics distinction that you just mentioned, that is explicitly drawn on in I think at least one of the chapters on shuttle trade. I can't remember which one at the moment, but yeah, it's about that actually. So there are all of these reasons why the border kind of creates economic difficulties for different categories of people, but in building around that, then many people are also able to make opportunities out of that process.
Zalfa Feghali: And negotiate those sort of imposed systems. And I think across the book, which is why having an introductory chapter like this is such a thrill, really. Across the book, we see almost every single image and metaphor that you present being drawn out in all of the chapters. And as a result of this chapter, you do a lot of work to tie the other chapters together. And it wasn't deliberate, but it is incredibly effective.
Caleb Bailey: That's quite fortuitous.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, it’s great!
Deborah Toner: Caleb has not read the other chapters!
Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, it’s worth saying that you’ve written a great piece of work—
Deborah Toner: As if by magic. No, it’s perfect.
Zalfa Feghali: For which we are incredibly grateful and excited to share with the rest of the world.
Gillian Roberts: We would like to hear about borders that you have known. Deborah, what border have you known?
Deborah Toner: Okay, so the borders that I know best are based on growing up in Northern Ireland. So on one level, you have the kind of territorial borders between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which we did travel across many times as a family, because my mum was from the Republic of Ireland, and my dad was from Northern Ireland. But then there's also the more, I guess, on one level psychological borders within Northern Ireland between Catholic slash Republican slash nationalist communities on the one hand and Protestant slash Loyalist slash Unionist communities on the other hand, that also kind of manifest in spatial ways, sometimes at a very, very micro level. And I've actually been back to Northern Ireland and Belfast in particular quite a few times over the last month or so. I've been thinking about it quite a lot. And one kind of memory or experience of this that really jumps out at me is remembering the absolute visceral shock I remember when I discovered how close together the Falls Road and the Shankill Road get at particular, but I think like I spent a lot of time in Belfast growing up because my grandparents lived there but didn't spend a lot of time in the city, and it was only like as a student really kind of going out and about in the town, and I was like but they almost meet and like the way they've been talked about as these entirely, like they could almost be part of two different worlds. And at one point you can walk between the Shankill Road and the Falls Road in like three minutes. I thought they can't be this close, this is crazy. But yeah, those kinds of borders, the borders of Northern Ireland basically are the ones that I know best.
Gillian Roberts: It's an amazing example of what borders do, what they are capable of doing, is creating these two other worlds that are adjacent to each other in really palpable ways. Caleb?
Caleb Bailey: So I've twisted the question. So this is a border that I've abstractly known, but is important to me in terms of what it has led me to know. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about the Green Line in Cyprus that divides the island. So…
Gillian Roberts: I've not heard of that one. Just kidding.
Zalfa Feghali: Big black line on the map, Gillian. Big black line.
Gillian Roberts: The Sharpie!
Zalfa Feghali: The Sharpie, my line.
Caleb Bailey: So yeah, I mean, growing up, I had quite a few family holidays in Cyprus, spent my honeymoon there, and it never occurred to me that this was a territory that was divided at any point, and divided quite so recently. And of course, who divided it? Oh, it was the British. And we go back to the idea of maps. One night, a British general just drew a green line. That's why it's called Green Line, because he had a green pencil across the island, and that was it. It was partitioned. So this is a border that isn't a border. It's a ceasefire line. But we kind of treat it like a border. So on the northern side of this line is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. But only Turkey recognizes it as a sovereign nation. But the UN kind of recognizes it because they patrol the Green Line. So we've got this really weird contradictory space that exists. And so I never came into contact with that line, but certainly as we were driving from Larnaca to Paphos, we would pass Akrotiri, we'd pass Dhekalia, which are these sovereign British territories. And so it just kind of brings home again the way in which Europe, and Britain in particular in this instance, are still kind of engaged in colonial practices, still engaged in processes of border making and bordering. You know, I was talking earlier about how colonialism is about the extension of a border. You know, it just really strikes me that, you know, Akrotiri is the closest Britain's border gets to the Middle East.
Zalfa Feghali: It's an enclave.
Caleb Bailey: Yes, yeah, and it completely complicates Cyprus's entry into the Schengen Agreement. You know, they've wanted to get involved in that agreement, but we're kind of stopping it in a way because of our claim to sovereignty over these two areas of the island. And, you know, kind of preparing to say all this, it led me to come across some interesting stuff that chimes with some of the other work I'm doing in terms of looking at how the Occupy movement has been theorized, and how that theorizing doesn't extend to Indigenous people and their kind of protest movements. But there was an Occupy the Green Line movement in Cyprus that I wasn't aware of at all. So they occupied that no-man's land. And of course, once you're in that land between the two nations, you're not a Greek Cypriot or a Turkish Cypriot. You are a Cypriot. So it means that borderlines and borderlands can sometimes be kind of zones of exception where we can take on a different identity than the one that is supposedly, you know, ours, based on the borders which usually surround us.
Gillian Roberts: It kind of suggests that this line of division is also then becoming a space of at least conceptual unity, right? This is the place where everyone then is just Cypriot, but it only exists in this conceptual way and space.
Caleb Bailey: Exactly, exactly. In this kind of hinterland that the British created, but no one seems to officially recognize.
Zalfa Feghali: While at the same time existing as a historical artifact that separates people from going back to where they're from.
Caleb Bailey: Exactly.
Zalfa Feghali: On both sides, right? And that's really interesting. And I wanted to pick up on something you said, because not only is Cyprus experiencing difficulties joining Schengen as a result of the British bases, but also the division of the island, and it's not worth necessarily going into the longer history of that, is the reason that the borders of the European Union are not expanding. So Turkey can't join for the same reason. So it's always used as an excuse to exclude, even when, you know, the border with one hand gives and the other hand takes away. So it's a really good example, one that I'm personally invested in. A really good example
Caleb Bailey: Yes, yeah. And, you know, it just kind of... there's so many interesting histories, you know, the way in which Limassol, which is now a Greek Cypriot centre, was a Turkish Cypriot centre. Absolutely. And obviously, you know, we have to think they have a kind of diaspora on an island the size of Cyprus.
Zalfa Feghali: I mean, what's really interesting is that there are Turkish enclaves in Cyprus, and there are, in theory, Greek enclaves in the north. And it's sort of frozen in time, that conception of the island, where actually the world keeps moving and borders, they're trying to be expanded. And yet, there are different sets of accountability that aren't being spotlighted, I guess.
Caleb Bailey: Exactly that, yeah.
Gillian Roberts: Thanks so much to Deborah and to Caleb for being our guests and for sharing your border stories with us.
Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.
Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.