Toward a New Art of Border Crossing

“We humans have trouble with borders and border crossing—psychologically, socially, culturally, intellectually, artistically, economically, and politically as well as ecologically and geopolitically. This is the case in particular in twenty-first-century society faced, as it is, with multiple intertwined crises impacting every level. In this collection, 24 authors of diverse nationalities and disciplinary backgrounds probe this knotty problem relative to a variety of regions of the globe. Overall, their varied explorations amount to nothing less than a journey across borders, opening paths toward sustainable and humane survival. One comes away with an acute sense that the ideas of borders and border crossing matter—to us and the society in which we live right now.” —Piet Strydom, University College Cork, Ireland.

“The study of boundaries—and how they are defined, negotiated, and maintained—has been a key focus of the humanities and social sciences from the very earliest of times. Towards a New Art of Crossing Borders elegantly combines past and present scholarship with case studies from across the world to shed new light and inject new urgency into a topic that has never been more important to understand than it is today.” —Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and Warden, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

“I’ve been reading Ananta Kumar Giri’s works for over 20 years, and I have always been impressed both with the theoretical acumen and the breadth of contributors whom Giri has been able to draw to his works. Here again, Giri with the help of his co-editors David Blake Willis and Arnab Roy Chowdhury has pulled together what might seem like a motley crew of contributors from all over the disciplinary spectrum. Still, this collection of thinkers has found new and exciting ways to play with and within the ideas of borders—between disciplines, between cultural and philosophical traditions, and even with the notion that borders are supposed to separate people. Anyone interested in understanding the theoretical and ethical possibilities normally hidden in the border must read this collection voraciously.” —Scott Schaer, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

 “I found all kinds of interesting and surprising insights in this text. All are grounded in the theory of the chapter authors. The innovation is how well many chapters weave in traditional thinkers with more thinkers from other traditions and even world views. This is a strength of the book. It is inter-civilizational in spirit. The result is a deeper engagement with border crossing itself as the inter-civilizational is an enactment of border crossing.” —Marcus Bussey, University of Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Ananta Kumar Giri is a professor (sociology and anthropology) at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

Arnab Roy Chowdhury is an assistant professor (sociology) at the Higher School of Economics Moscow (HSE) University, Moscow, Russian Federation.

David Blake Willis is a professor of anthropology and education at Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, California, USA.