Jayjit Sarkar, Auritra Munshi

Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness focuses on the idea of border and its various geopolitical, sociocultural, and cognitive incarnations. In recent times, border has emerged as a common trope in contemporary language with phenomena such as ‘bordering’, ‘borderless’, ‘building borders’, ‘breaking borders’, ‘crossing borders’, ‘porous borders’, and ‘shifting borders’. Whether concrete or shadow, borders are omnipresent. The volume contains sixteen essays on various aspects of thinking border as well as border-thinking in literature, philosophy, historiography, strategic studies, films, and TV series. Such a collection is symptomatic of the very interdisciplinarity of border and the varied experiences of bordering as manifested in different modes of expression. This study of the multiplicity of experiences is intrinsic to our understanding of border, so much so that borders can only be read through an interdisciplinary approach. This interdisciplinarity is immanent to the concept of border and imminent (“to come”) to the phenomenon of bordering. Also, the volume quite explicitly deals with the metaphors of border(s): as border(s) may not necessarily be always visible and tangible but also cognitive and metaphysical.  This volume intends to attract not only academics but all readers, and that is precisely the reason why it has been designed in such a way. This book, therefore, is not yet-another volume on critical border studies and area studies. In doing border, the book enables us to go beyond the boundaries of border studies and area studies—as its authors believe that ‘studies’ of border studies and area studies have become as regimented as the borders of the nation-state. 

Jayjit Sarkar teaches in the Department of English at Raiganj University, India. His publications include Illness as Method: Beckett, Kafka, Mann, Woolf and Eliot (Delaware: Vernon Press, 2019).



Auritra Munshi teaches in the Department of English at Raiganj University, India. His research areas include Diaspora studies and migration.

“Never before in human history did the issues of border and border crossing figure so prominently as they do at the present time. Large-scale migrations, forced or voluntary, in the age of transnationalism have foregrounded debates about the relevance of national borders. Recent surveys conducted by social scientists demonstrate how economic and social transactions continue across borders despite stringent surveillance of border areas. At the same time, citizenship and statelessness have become a raging issue. In the context of such a situation the publication of the edited volume entitled Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness which includes articles on actual and metaphorical dimensions of border studies is very timely.”—Himadri Lahiri, NSOU, Author of Diaspora Theory and Transnationalism (Literary/Cultural Theory)

“There are very few theoretical works on the concept of border coming out of India. This book is a very sensible intervention. The different chapters use film, literature, and ethnography to bring out different aspects of the border—physical, political, symbolic, and mental. The editors deserve praise for compiling this important and interesting book. I am sure it will attract many readers across disciplines.”—Swargajyoti Gohain, Ashoka University, Author of Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Place

“This engaging new volume of essays on the politics, poetics, and precarity of borders in several fields proves how important the notion continues to be in our thinking about the world as it changes around us. Even as a pandemic confuses our ideas of neatly demarcated national spaces, a volume like this is a small but important step in helping us to engage once again with the challenges presented by the idea and the reality of borders.”—Nandana Dutta, Gauhati University, Author of Questions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity

“A good book needs no introduction, bad ones need none. This book certainly belongs to the
former category in its meticulous way of unfolding the idea of border(s) through
each chapter of the collective.”—Swatahsiddha Sarkar, Centre for Himalayan Studies, University of North Bengal, Author of Gorkhaland Movement: Ethnic Conflict and State Response

“As our claims of being ‘Globizens’, populating the porous world of a network-ed society is fading away under the shrill demands of ethnic and territorial closures and we gravitate more towards a bordered society, this volume contributes significantly to understand the political and cultural ramifications of this succumbing shift. This is indeed an apt intervention, analyzing varied traces of bordering within aesthetic, cultural, and theoretic representations of insularity, ghettoization, and boundedness.”—Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, Kazi Nazrul University, Co-Editor of Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives