----- Forwarded Message ----- From: nucleo interdisciplinar de estudos migratorios NIEM <NIEM.migr@xxxxxxxxx> To: niem_rj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2012 9:12 PM 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] __._,_.___