[colombiamigra] CONVOCATORIA PARA PUBLICACION: Journal Rosa dos Ventos - The Dialectic of Borders, Empires and Limens [1 Anexo]
- From: william mejia <wmejia8a@xxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 09:35:54 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [NIEM] cfp: Journal Rosa dos Ventos - The Dialectic of Borders,
Empires and Limens [1 Anexo]
From: Malene Freudendal-Pedersen<malenef@xxxxxx>
Dear Scholars
The journal Rosa Dos ventos is in the process of forming its next special
issue dedicated to the role of mobility in Western Imperialism. I am pleased
to invite you to take part of this issue sending to us your potential
manuscripts. For further details see the enclosed file. Max
THE DIALECTICS OF BORDERS, EMPIRES, AND
LIMENS
GUEST
EDITORS
SKOLL,
GEOFFREY
CRIMINAL
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
BUFFALOSTATE COLLEGE, UNITED STATES
&
MAXIMILIANO
E. KORSTANJE
DEPARTMENT
OF ECONOMICS
UNIVERSITY OF PALERMOARGENTINA
SPECIAL ISSUE FOR ROSA
DOS VENTOS JOURNAL.
ROSA DOS
VENTOS, the journal of Post-graduate Programs in tourism and hospitality hosted
by the University Caxias do Sul in Brazil invite researchers,
scholars, practitioners and readers to send your advances, research and
contributions for the next special issue 2012/2013. This special issue explores
the pervasive nature of tourism, opening a new view on the existent academic
literature. In doing so, the question of mobilities and rationality have paved
the way for the advent of a new spirit of supremacy of some groups over others.
The hot debate seems to be related to the role played by tourism in such a
process.
Particularly, oppressive or alienable for ones, emancipator for others, the
fact is that tourism & hospitality contributed notably to the surfacing of
nation-states.
Borders are
central to empires. Empires make borders, ignore, enforce and transgress them.
None of this is new. What is new is a new kind of empire, an empire of
globalization, to use the current euphemism. More honestly descriptive, capital
comprises the empire of the early twenty-first century. Metaphorically, its
borders form a Great Wall of Capital as Mike Davis (2005) dubbed it. The great
wall of capital transcribes the globe in a vaguely north-south orientation. The
empire has several centers; among them are Wall Street in New York City,
Washington DC, the City of London, Tokyo, and maybe a few
others. Capital’s borders are ever shifting as the needs of capital are
dynamic. This bordering wall permits empirical observation only on the local
level, because its expanse requires abstraction for comprehension. Therefore to
write of the borders of the empire of capital and its liminality means
continually shifting between the concrete, empirically accessible micro-level
to its
Victor W. Turner started what became a small industry in liminality when he
recouped and elaborated Arnold Van Gennep’s (1960) concept developed as
part of the latter’s study of rites of passage. Turner noted that during
rites of passage, “the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’)
are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the
attributes of the past or coming state” (Turner 1969:94). The same
applies to travelers who cross the borders of empire. Limens and borders both
separate and tie together disparate sectors of society. This dialectical
function of borders and limens applies to structural social positions and to
classes. In fact it makes the positions relational. They function in this way
to create a “human bond, without which there could be no society. Liminality
implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed” (97). Those on
the threshold can observe the function from a perspective unavailable to those
on either
side. Turner argued that because of its dialectical function, liminality
was anti-structural and a manifestation of communitas—a sense of togetherness
and equality in the human condition. Turner’s association of liminality with
communitas and anti-structure, however, grasps only one part of the dialectic.
Turner’s limen is the aspect of liminality that ties together. He neglects its
separating function.
Take, for instance, the borders in Palestine.
This is Derek Gregory’s characterization of them in and around the occupied
territories, and arguably all of Palestine
is an occupied territory.
The occupied territories have been turned into twilight zones, caught in a
frenzied cartography of mobile frontiers rather than fixed boundaries. These
enforce a violent fragmentation and recombination of time and space, which is
nothing less than a concerted attempt to disturb and derange the normal rhythms
of everyday Palestinian life (Gregory 2004:131-2).
Gregory then continues by comparing these limens that crisscross Palestine to
Giorgio Agamben’s (1995) philosophical essay, grounded in the Nazi
concentration camps and their containment of Homo sacer—bare life. “As the
splinters of Palestine form the shattered space of the exception, punctuated by
the power-topologies of a colonial necropolitics, it seems clear that ‘third
spaces’ and paradoxical spaces are not necessarily sites of emancipation (Soja
1996)” (Gregory 2004:134).
Travelers, tourists and others, enter liminal space-time upon crossing borders.
In some cases, the borders are subtle, with little or no physical presence to
act as guides and reminders of the liminal state. In other times and places—the
Wall in Palestine, the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, the killing zone
between the fences in Nazi concentration camps, and the anti-immigration wall
between Mexico and the United States (Nevins 2002)—the limen operates as a
sieve, a semi-permeable membrane that allows free passage for some but not
others. The borders that are less visible still appear clear to socially
perceptive travelers when they traverse neighborhood boundaries in cities such
as Chicago. In
these latter, subtler border crossings, there are no physical walls, armed
border guards, or other paraphernalia of what Gregory aptly called
necropolitics. Such neighborhood boundaries remain no less real. Moreover, they
replicate at a micro level the same globalized politics as those of a
grimmer visage.
Tourists are the privileged border crossers. Their privilege arises from their
position in the world capitalist system (Wallerstein 2004), the empire of
capital. They move at will, regulated, but still able to cross borders so long
as they have two commodities—passports from appropriate authorities and money.
Those two commodities make tourists the ritual passengers, as Turner put it.
They participate in the rituals of passport control and customs when the cross
national boundaries. Mouth the appropriate perfunctories about their visit
being for pleasure. Nevertheless, their roles in the drama are not under their
control. They are controlled by the things, the objects, the commodities that
they carry, but do not possess. They carry but do not possess them, because it
is more accurate to say that the tourists are possessed by them. Their role
depends on them. Their identities depend on them. This relationship between
carriers and possessor is made possible, indeed required by the
empire of capital. Capital sorts out humanity according to its own needs.
That is how the empire of capital works.
The present
call for papers is aimed at receiving full length contributions, book reviews
and short manuscripts respecting to the connection between tourism, capitalism
and imperialism. Manuscripts should contain no more than 8.000 words and
formatted in APA style. For further references authors should visit the
following URL http://www.ucs.br/etc/revistas/index.php/rosadosventos
Studies should be sent to attention of
Maximiliano E. Korstanje at maxikorstanje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx by copy to Skoll
Geoffrey skollgr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx no later than October 2012.
Kind Regards.
Geoffrey and Maximiliano
[cosmobilitis list]
__._,_.___
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