Introduction

Ecology, Imaginary, Invisibility, Palimpsests, Sovereignty, Waiting: what
do all these concepts have in common? We present them to our readers as
the conceptual tools that have helped us approach borders from a perhaps
counterintuitive angle: that of aesthetics.
Our book is a contribution to border studies, a vast and thriving field that
makes sense of the widely different, sometimes incompatible and constantly
changing definitions of the border. Our six concepts intend to highlight the
constantly evolving state of this research area which reaches into many disciplines.
We know that no single discourse of mastery will exhaust our understanding
of borders: they belong to the topographer, to the geographer, to the
lawyer, to the philosopher, or to the mathematician, and it is clear that we
do not intend to cover all these fields of expertise. Our specific point of entry
is based in the disciplines currently recognized as the humanities and social
sciences (philosophy, film studies, literature studies, narratology, history and
geography). Yet our challenge was to find an interdisciplinary approach that
would both acknowledge the existence and validity of those discourses and
interrogate what those disciplinary borders do to the different types of borders
that we have chosen to analyse. In short, we treat borders as methodologies
(Boer 2006) and objects of study.