Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes & the Stories They Tell

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David mentioned "pretendians," a term used to refer to individuals who falsely claim Indigenous heritage.

David mentioned work by Eric Gansworth (Onondaga). Read more about Gansworth’s work here.

Find a map of Anishinaabe territory here.

Find a map of Mohawk territory here.

The Jay Treaty (1794), a treaty between the United States and Great Britain (and now Canada) signed after the Revolutionary War, guarantees the rights of Indigenous people to cross the border "without hindrance." Read the Treaty here.

Find a map of Tohono O'odham territory here. 

Maquiladoras are assembly plants for international corporations that proliferate at the US-Mexico border, especially after the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994).

Unsurprisingly, we talked about a lot of artwork:

• Alberto Caro's Border Coffins (1994): see it and read more about US-Mexico border art here.
• Ursula Biemann’s Performing the Border (1999).
• Zalfa mentioned art on billboards in Texas; they were actually in New Mexico. A series of ten billboards erected along Interstate 10 in southern New Mexico by the art organization Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND).
• Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence (2015) can be seen here.
• David mentioned Christo, who with his late wife Jeanne-Claude wrapped landmarks.
• Ana Teresa Fernández’s 2011 (and ongoing) project Borrando La Frontera (Erasing the Sky). Hear the artist speak about the project here.
• Javier Tellez’s One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) from 2005. You can watch it here.
• Richard Lou’s The Border Door (1988). See it and read more about it here. 
• David continues to be inspired by Alan Michelson’s Third Bank of the River (2009).
• Read more about the Two Row Wampum Belt here
• David mentioned Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' work Copper from the Hood (2011).

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

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Liv is the translator of The Fig Tree by Goran Vojnović, which you can order directly from the publisher Istros Books, or via our friendly local Five Leaves Bookshop. She mentions Vojnović’s (untranslated into English) first novel, Čefuli Raus.
Liv wanted to share the following excerpt from The Fig Tree, connected to our conversation:

"You're on the other side of the border, you two, were her first words as she came through the door.
It's like someone's drawn a border through me. They've drawn borders through us, through all of us. They've drawn borders between me, my mother and my father. It's now up to someone else to decide if I can see my parents." (2020, 289)

Liv has also shared Boyd Tonkin’s review of the Fig Tree for Arts Desk (December 15, 2020), which gives quite a good bit of context about the history and the language.

Alex has been working with Impacd CIC.

You can read about Easy Language in Christiane Maaß’s open-access book, Easy Language – Plain Language – Easy Language Plus: Balancing Comprehensibility and Acceptability.

Alex discussed the politics and practice of subtitling Mathieu Kassovitz’s iconic film La Haine (1995). Apparently La Haine is 30 years old next year (eek!) – but since time is a patriarchal construct, we’re not worried about this.

Hardcore listeners may be interested in reading Alex’s work on subtitling La Haine – they can sate that appetite here.

Gillian shared the etymology of 'translation'  from the Oxford English Dictionary.

For photographic evidence of the “Thinkmetric” sign, see this photo by Matthew Redrich.

Joual is a version of Québécois French, with roots in working-class Montreal.

Find out more about the film Bye Bye Tiberias here.

Zalfa quoted from an article by Francesca Leveridge and Alex in which they argue that “subtitled films constitute hybrid spaces where languages come into contact.”

The winery Liv visited in “Borders I Have Known” was Radikon winery.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

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Listeners who did not share Gillian’s TV viewing habits in the 1980s and ‘90s can find the Pace salsa ad here.

We make reference to not only Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza but also Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro, edited by AnaLouise Keating.

For more on Anzaldúa’s “doodles,” see Suzanne Bost’s “Messy Archives and Materials that Matter: Making Knowledge with the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers.”

Read an interview between Gloria Anzaldúa and Patti Blanco here.

Read Paula M.L. Moya’s “Postmodernism, Realism, and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism” here.

Steph refers to Melissa Castillo Planas’s book A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies” (paywall), and to the artists Delilah Montoya, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, and Scherezade García.

We reference the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

For more on the Chicano Movement, see Valerie Mendoza’s “Chicano! A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement” and Jessie Kratz’s “El Movimiento: The Chicano Movement and Hispanic Identity in the United States.”

For a discussion of Trump’s border wall, see Alex Guillén’s article on Politico.

For a discussion of corridos, see Celestino Fernández’s “Corridos: (Mostly) True Stories in Verse with Music.”

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

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Gillian saw Arrival at Broadway in Nottingham. Support your local independent cinema!

Arrival was adapted from Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life," which appeared in his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others (Tor Books). Support your local library or independent bookseller!

For more on runaway film production, see Camille Johnson-Yale’s ”’So-Called Runaway Film Production’: Countering Hollywood's Outsourcing Narrative in the Canadian Press” (paywall)

Some of our favourite pieces on Arrival are:

• Tijana Mamula’s “Denis Villeneuve, Film Theorist; or, Cinema’s Arrival in a Multilingual World” (paywall)
• John Engle’s “Of Hopis and Heptapods: The Return of Sapir-Whorf” (paywall)
• Brett J. Esaki’s “Ted Chiang’s Asian American Amusement at Alien Arrival” (open access)
• Bran Nicol’s “Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s ‘The Story of Your Life’ and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival” (open access)
• and the incomparable late Maureen Kincaid Speller’s “‘Recordings Alone Aren’t Sufficient—Speaking Arrival” (open access)

For a little more detail on how Arabic is written and correctly rendered on a page (or screen!), see this short primer from Northwestern University’s MENA Languages Program. 

On the passage of the Rwanda Bill:

• Zalfa quoted from Refugee Action’s article, “Rwanda Bill: We are No Longer a Safe Haven, Here’s What Everyone Needs to Know,” Refugee Action, 24 April 2024. 
• Read the Refugee and Asylum Seeker Voice (RAS Voice) response to the passage of the Safety of Rwanda Act. 
• A(n incomplete) list of things you can do to support refugees, if you are safely and securely able to do so.
• In Leicester, check out One Roof Leicester. 
• In Nottingham, check out Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

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We Googled “Why are dates important in History,” but fear the results may not have been peer-reviewed. 

For peer-reviewed sources on other matters:

• Information about the publication of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Gender-and-Borderlands/Feghali-Toner/p/book/9780367439590
• For more on Belfast, see David Coyles, Brandon Hamber, and Adrian Grant’s “Hidden Barriers and Divisive Architecture: The Role of ‘Everyday Space’ in Conflict and Peacebuilding in Belfast” (open access).
• For more on Berlin, see Matthew Gandy’s “Ghosts and Monsters: Reconstructing Nature on the Site of the Berlin Wall” (open access).
• For more on the Mexico-US border, see Samantha Sabo et al.’s “Everyday Violence, Structural Racism and Mistreatment at the US-Mexico Border” (open access).
• For more on Cyprus, see Amy Reid’s “A Qualitative Investigation into the Emotional Geographies of Border Politics in ‘Post-Conflict’ Cyprus” (paywall).

In the UK, a viva voce exam – generally shortened to “viva” – is the oral “defence” of a PhD thesis.

Caleb and Gillian refer to: 

• Caleb Bailey’s “An Alternative Border Metaphor: On Rhizomes and Disciplinary Boundaries” (paywall).
• Bell Chevigny and Gari Laguardia’s (eds.) preface in Reinventing the Americas, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986, p.viii (on “rhetorical malpractice” in American Studies)
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) 
• Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1974/1984)

Read about the Schengen Agreement here.

Read about Aztlán here.

See a map of Turtle Island here.

The United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus’ website offers a primer on the Cyprus buffer zone (or “the Green Line”) here.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

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Gillian would like to state for the record that Zalfa is also the real deal.

In other matters:

What is the plural of “impetus”?
The answer, improbably, is impetuses!
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199661350.001.0001/acref-9780199661350-e-2776 (We note that this tracks, given one acceptable plural for “ignoramus” is “ignoramuses” – a word we use Very Often Indeed these days)

Find out more about David W. McFadden’s border-crossing travels in Great Lakes Suite: https://talonbooks.com/books/?great-lakes-suite

Here’s a very basic primer on British colonialism (in Ireland and Canada, but also elsewhere): https://daily.jstor.org/britains-blueprint-for-colonialism-made-in-ireland/

What is a Safe Third Country?
https://www.unhcr.org/uk/media/safe-third-country-concept-international-agreements-refugee-protection-assessing-state

What is the “Rwanda Bill” or “Rwanda Plan”?
https://www.unhcr.org/uk/what-we-do/uk-asylum-policy-and-illegal-migration-act/uk-rwanda-asylum-partnership

Here’s the full text of the High Court Judgement:
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AAA-v-SSHD-judgment-290623.pdf 

We will be revisiting the “Rwanda Bill” in light of more recent updates in Episode 3. Stay tuned!

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Send us a Message

Hosted by Border Studies academics Zalfa Feghali and Gillian Roberts, this podcast will explore border depictions and encounters in our contemporary world.
 
Zalfa, Gillian, and their guests will discuss borders, their cultural manifestations, and their implications. In their aim to make the academic field of border studies accessible to non-specialist audiences, they will ask questions like: “What do borders look like?”, “How are borders used and mobilised in our everyday lives?”, and “What different borders can be known?”
 
To answer these questions, they will consider current events, personal stories, and specialist academic texts, as well as exploring and reflecting on “classic” texts of Border Studies.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com