Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Theories of International Relations
- 2 National security
- 3 Corporatism: from the new era to the age of development
- 4 Explaining political economy
- 5 Diplomatic history after the big bang: using computational methods to explore the infinite archive
- 6 Development and technopolitics
- 7 Nonstate actors
- 8 Legal history as foreign relations history
- 9 Domestic politics
- 10 The global frontier: comparative history and the frontier-borderlands approach
- 11 Considering borders
- 12 The privilege of acting upon others: the middle eastern exception to anti-exceptionalist histories of the US and the world
- 13 Nationalism as an umbrella ideology
- 14 Nation Branding
- 15 Shades of sovereignty: racialized power, the United States and the world
- 16 Gendering American foreign relations
- 17 The religious turn in diplomatic history
- 18 Memory and the study of US foreign relations
- 19 The senses
- 20 Psychology
- 21 Reading for emotion
- Index
11 - Considering borders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Theories of International Relations
- 2 National security
- 3 Corporatism: from the new era to the age of development
- 4 Explaining political economy
- 5 Diplomatic history after the big bang: using computational methods to explore the infinite archive
- 6 Development and technopolitics
- 7 Nonstate actors
- 8 Legal history as foreign relations history
- 9 Domestic politics
- 10 The global frontier: comparative history and the frontier-borderlands approach
- 11 Considering borders
- 12 The privilege of acting upon others: the middle eastern exception to anti-exceptionalist histories of the US and the world
- 13 Nationalism as an umbrella ideology
- 14 Nation Branding
- 15 Shades of sovereignty: racialized power, the United States and the world
- 16 Gendering American foreign relations
- 17 The religious turn in diplomatic history
- 18 Memory and the study of US foreign relations
- 19 The senses
- 20 Psychology
- 21 Reading for emotion
- Index
Summary
This chapter beckons historians of US international and transnational relations to borders – those spaces at which different systems of meaning and organization intersect.
Borders – both territorial and symbolic – can be messy places. They may produce conflict, demoralization, fear, and oppression. They may generate attraction, hybridization, creativity, and liberation. Borders are not one way or they would not be borders. The Berlin Wall marked a border. The metropolitan area of San Diego and Tijuana straddles a border. The journal Diplomatic History has been most controversial, and most successful, when it has pushed the borders of its field of study. All of these provide apt, but different, metaphors of the dangers and opportunities represented at borders. As conflicted zones, borders may be unsettled and postmodern in fostering juxtapositions, and – for that reason – they often raise concerns over control and become sites for oppression and policing as well as for resistance, imagination, and even emancipation.
Writing histories of US foreign relations is involved with – and complicated by – borders. Traditional scholarship in diplomatic history dealt largely with bounded states in a fairly defined international system. More recently, scholarship shifted toward a revised nomenclature called “America and the World” and toward transnational themes in which economic and cultural interactions, especially among nonstate actors, have become more visible. In addition, historians of America and the World now work within a larger universe of scholarly discourse that blurs disciplinary borders and debates the saliency of modernist categories and assumptions about the writing of history. Interrogating the borders of politics and power, of culture and knowledge, has been transformative. This chapter, in encouraging readers to think about borders of all kinds, considers some influential theoretical frames and reflects upon various directions suggested by recent scholarship.
MAKING MEANING ALONG BORDERS: OTHERING AND CONTACT ZONES
The border between “West” and “East,” “Occident” and “Orient,” is surely one of the most structuring, and also contentious, frameworks in global politics. Edward Said's Orientalism, a seminal work that has framed academic conversations for over three decades, is an appropriate place to begin a discussion of border-creation. Although Orientalism deals with Western representations of the Middle East, the implications of Said's work – and the debates generated by its many critics – extend far more broadly.
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- Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations , pp. 188 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016
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