MARKERS OF MOVEMENT: POSTCOLONIALITY, BORDERS, AND MIGRATION
EDITED BY NINA GARY AND AMANDA TOVAR
Makers of Movement: Postcoloniality, Borders, and Migration by and large reveals the ephemerality of physical and social movement of concrete and abstract borders. This section comprises reviews of literature that portray the ways in which bodies, space, temporality, literature and art, language, motherhood, clothing, and religion may be manipulated for the sake of colonization to act as borders. Most notably, this section concedes that borders are neither new concepts nor unique to the US-Mexico border, cementing a legacy of postcoloniality that reverberates through time and space.
Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz’s review of Musab Younis’s On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought serves as evidence that Black theoretical literature is the nexus of anticolonial thought as they underline Younis’s emphasis on interwar Black Atlantic scholars who were already rejecting globality in the 1920’s and 1930’s, transcending established anticolonial theoretical thoughts that act as borders. Conceptually, anticolonial thought provides us the space needed to build on and move forward to analyze the past to understand the present which is visible in Reyna M. Flores’s review of Sonia Hernández and John Morán’s Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border. This review brings us into a reality in which borders, rather than homelands, are the moveable pieces. Highlighting the invisible border that moves depending on the colonizing force, Flores’s review complements Erin N. Wheeler’s of Joyce N. Bennett’s Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala in which the focus lies firmly on the cultural divides through which Guatemala’s Indigenous Maya women navigate. The particular effects of these societal borders on immigrant women, children, and the disabled are made physical in Amanda Tovar’s review of Elizabeth Farfán-Santos’s Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing. Represented as both physical and societal, the borders throughout these texts marginalize those attempting to cross them.
Shania Montufar’s review of Christine Ross’s Art for Coexistence: Unlearning the Way We See Migration brings the conversation into the world of contemporary art and, subsequently with Angela Villamizar’s review of Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black & Latinx Literatures by Jose O. Fernandez, literature. In encouraging an unlearning of the way migration and border crossing are visually imagined, Ross’s piece echoes that which we must all work towards–an overhauled view of borders, their legitimacy, and the very real colonialism that inhabits what we call borderlands. Fernandez conversely recalls the literary conversations between Black and Latinx writers throughout the twentieth century in their quest for Black and Brown liberation from marginalization to the borders of society.
Nina Gary’s review of Miriamne Ara Krummel The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time unveils how Christian ‘annus domini’ functions as a temporal border. Her review establishes how Christianity violently suppressed colonized Jewish temporality out of the common vernacular. Despite this, Gary argues, Krummel is not calling for a replacement of Christian for Jewish temporality with good reason. To us, this offers hope for a cathartic existence. This brings us to our concluding review–Nanjun Zhou’s review of Adom Getachew, Deborah Chasman, and Joshua Cohen’s anthology Imagining Global Futures delivers a sense of hope for a borderless future. According to Zhou, Global Future’s urges us to imagine communities that practice reciprocal care and solidarity to move beyond resistance and survival, but to live in community together. This anthology calls for relentless actions of care to bridge small communities to the global for a world without any kind of borders.
Not only does this section command a reexamination of borders, but it offers a sense of hope for a future in which borders fail to rule us.
