Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
1 - Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter investigates the local actions that transgress, subvert, and ignore the imposition of sovereign authority at the borders of sovereign states. Drawing on interviews with borderland residents, it analyses how people interact with, talk about, and cross the border in their daily lives. The motives and consequences of these cross-border connections are not adequately captured by the literature on sovereign power and the state of exception, which identifies very little space for resistance, or the literature on dominance-resistance in power relations, which understands most actions as political resistance in a broad milieu of power. To reconcile these conflicting views on resistance, this chapter proposes the concept of spaces of refusal to understand a range of activities that are not overt political resistance but nevertheless refuse to abide by the binary enframing of state territorial and identity categories.
Keywords: India, Bangladesh, borders, resistance, refusal, identity
Cross-Border Movement
Moushumi, a servant in a wealthy Bangladeshi family's home, set out for India in the late afternoon to visit her son. She packed a small bag with a change of clothes and two shingara – Bengali-style samosas, more rounded than angular, with a savoury potato filling. She met her ‘uncle’, the broker, outside his house and gave him 200 Bangladeshi Taka, about US$3. Six other travellers arrived as they waited for darkness to fall. She dozed on the floor and ate a shingara. A few hours later they walked to the edge of the river, hopped in a small boat, and floated for a few minutes – definitely less than ten – until the boatman pulled the boat back to the bank of the river. The travellers got out and climbed onto the waiting flatbed rickshaw for the ride into a nearby Indian village. She rested at a relative's house that night and then continued her journey to her son's house the next morning. She stayed there for about a month, cooking for her son and playing with her grandchildren, and then made the return trip to the Indian village near the border. She paid the Indian broker, this time in Rupees, waited for nightfall, and got back in the same boat. The return trip took slightly longer because it was against the current, but she was back at the broker's house in Bangladesh by midnight.
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- Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond , pp. 31 - 58Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018
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