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When we first proposed this issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality in Fall 2018, the world was gripped with impending changes and challenges to border regions. The United Kingdom was grappling with the long-term implications of the 2016 Brexit vote. Mass migration continued to flow between North African and Middle Eastern nations and Europe, placing new strains on the European Union amidst a tide of populist politics. In the United States, the Trump administration had turned the North American Free Trade Agreement upside down and was simultaneously demanding completion of a 3,145-kilometer physical wall along the US-Mexican border. The US-Mexico border became one of President Donald Trump’s first and favoured targets. Leveraging the publicity around the migrant caravan through Central America and Mexico, Trump renewed an ongoing campaign to further fortify an already securitized landscape in latching onto the symbolic prospect of fortress America. This blustery proposal served as a political football for much of 2018 while the Trump administration steadily and quietly increased the number of immigrant detainees indefinitely, separating children from their families. At the same time, new anti-immigrant policies sent shockwaves through American immigrant communities as bans on immigration and related measures led to a temporary refugee crisis on America’s other (northern) border. As US visas expired for Syrians, Somalis, Haitians, and others, many traveled north to claim refugee status at rural, makeshift locations on the Canada-US border in a series of surreal scenes at Roxham Road on the Quebec-New York border as well as in the small community of Emmerson, Manitoba.

At the time of publication, the world is now gripped with the rapid spread of COVID-19 as many of the world’s major borders have been closed or reduced to an extent not seen since the mid-twentieth century. These political anxieties and unprecedented world events not only call into question how borders operate, but also impact how we collectively imagine border infrastructures and regulations of the future. There is renewed urgency in terms of holding open the complexity of these situations against the tide of neo-nationalism worldwide. In these increasingly polarized times, how do we consider the affective and emotional dimensions of borders and bordering practices?[1] How might we reflect on the temporal and spatial registers of indigeneity and colonization that are thrown into relief when governments enact states of emergency? How are media and material conditions implicated in absorbing and circulating narratives of human experience in borderlands regions? How, where, and when do we sense borders during these periods of rapid change?

This issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality was proposed to revisit important shifts in cultural theory from the 1990s stemming from theoretical ideas around borders, liminality, and alterity expressed by a range of scholars, from Homi Bhabha[2] and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak[3] to Edward Said[4] and Walter Mignolo. These theoretical paradigms were introduced in the context of fantasies and dreams of a post-1989 “borderless world,” which were circulating in the popular imagination. At the same moment, media philosopher Vilém Flusser’s writings on technology, migration, and cities imagined an emergent planetary urbanism as a borderless social space that is networked, non-site-specific, dynamic, and dialogic; a planetary urbanism represented by new systems of thought grounded in topologies rather than geographies of urban space.[5] In retrospect, the political climate of the 1990s seems to have been more open and tolerant than our current cultural moment. This issue is specifically geared to the affective register of borders across a range of spatial scales. Described in terms of “sensing (borders)/ressentir (les frontières),” the issue draws inspiration from the work of scholars such as Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion[6] and Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez’ Decolonial AestheSis.[7] We are interested in revisiting the theoretical insights of the 1990s as a moment that acts as a hinge between Cold War geopolitical relations and those emerging more recently. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s influential book Border as Method[8] argues that the proliferation of borders in the post-1989 world was not a contradiction in terms, but rather a means of holding ideas of citizenship and sovereignty in crisis. Following from this important work, this issue aims to reconsider the limits and possibilities of border as metaphor in light of the shifting theoretical insights offered by the European border experiment (from the 1993 Schengen agreement to Brexit), the continual and/or resurgent instability of border spaces in authoritarian contexts and war zones, as well as hemispheric perspectives from across the Americas.[9] Beyond the official and legal boundaries that mark divides between Canada and the United States, for instance, borders/boundaries can be thought of as encompassing historical divides, political shifts and ruptures, and racialized experiences of nation and space.

The “deep heterogeneity” of the semantic field of borders around the globe[10] has thus generated a range of approaches to symbolic, linguistic, cultural, and urban boundaries that overlap or disconnect in unpredictable ways. Arts collectives and creative, collaborative media networks have responded to the shifting and oversimplified discourses about transborder zones and cultures, exploring questions of belonging, movement, and displacement in and around national boundaries in global contexts. Over the last decade, borderlands have become “sites of dissensus” that have been activated to question both the authority of the nation-state and the exclusionary paradigms of Western aesthetics. This in turn has led to a radical and widespread reconsideration of geographic convention in art, media, and visual culture.[11] The theme of “sensing (borders)/ressentir (les frontières)” in this issue is rooted in the notion that contemporary borders are often sites of erasure that map over complicated histories and relations, masking the liminal qualities that defy categorization. The essays collected here explore the ways in which these qualities can be detected or articulated, sensed or traced.

A number of contributions in this issue work to complicate the picture of the Canada-US border, unsettling mainstream Canadian narratives of multiculturalism and reconciliation by questioning the connections between settler logic, bordering practices, and technologies. The return to “critical border thinking,” starting with Walter Mignolo’s call to de-link from the modern/colonial project, is an important thread that is activated in a number of essays and artist contributions. In Jane Ku’s essay, “Intentional Solidarity as a Decolonizing Practice,” narratives of multiculturalism and reconciliation are engaged head-on. Asking “What does it mean to be ‘Chinese Canadian’?’” Ku frames her exploration through an investigation of various borders. For Ku, borders can be conceived multiply: as physical barriers or boundaries; as temporal divisions between history and the present (and possible futures); and also as demarcations between the intelligible and the occluded or erased. Building on the transformative scholarship of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rey Chow, Chandra Mohanty, and others during this burgeoning of writing about cosmopolitics and transnationalism in the 1990s, Ku engages much more recent questions about reconciliation, settler colonialism, and the various intimacies and agencies of the migrant figure. She brings the immigrant’s quest to find a sense of belonging into conversation with Canada’s own history of colonialism and genocide. Re-reading Sky Lee’s novel Disappearing Moon Café, Ku situates her analysis squarely in the personal-political realm: she aims her critical lens on her own earlier analysis of the novel as a graduate student, noting in particular her glossing over its structural erasure of indigeneity, as well as its representation of diasporic identities considered less “authentically Chinese-Canadian” than a Hong-Kong or mainland-born immigrant. Ku’s act of self-critique is designed as an opening on to an alternative present, and future, in which reconciliation involves a constant traversal of temporal boundaries—a re-visiting of history—in order to acknowledge intimacies and relations previously discounted or occluded.

Spivak’s influence returns in Avishek Ganguly’s “Border Ethics: Translation and Planetarity in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” In Ganguly’s re-reading of Spivak, the concept of “planetarity” is put forward as a potential enactment of a Levinasian ethical response to otherness.[12] Tracing Spivak’s use of the term “planetarity” in conjunction with her pivotal work on translation, Ganguly maps the impossible necessity of translating the words of an other on to the impossibility and necessity of thinking the planetary. Using examples from sci-fi cinema, literature, and contemporary art, Ganguly asks: “If the so-called North endeavoured to imagine its others—migrants, refugees, asylum seekers—within the mode of planetarity, how might this impact the visualization and operationalization of borders and security?”

The return to the border as a motif of neo-nationalist agendas is a rising concern as quarantine measures and disinformation overlap in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The border-security nexus developed at the outset of the twenty-first century, a relationship that has been robustly debated in critical border studies, seems in danger of becoming deeply ensconced in the public imagination. Erin Goheen Glanville’s contribution asks how we might shift “popular senses of the border” towards a more widespread understanding of the interconnectedness of precarity and insecurity that we are all imbricated in as border sites multiply. Her essay “Do Borders Make Us Safer? An Intermedial Pedagogy for Sensing Communities of Shared Fate,” engages Melissa William’s work on “communities of shared fate” to reconsider the ways that refugee cultures have been conventionally framed within humanitarian discourse and diaspora studies. Goheen Glanville revisits these two key discourses that started in the 1990s, examining their possibilities as well as their shortcomings, as an “uncertain borderline between the idealisms of diaspora theory and of humanitarian communication.” Diaspora epistemologies, Goheen Glanville argues, are “not sufficient in this moment” as public dialogue about refugee migration remains mired in the “falsehoods contained in the border security conflation” furthering the symbolic role of the border in producing subjects as foreign. Rather, Goheen Glanville engages the “structure of feeling shaping asylum dialogue” in posing the questions “Do you feel safe at the border?” and “How do you know?” as a key heuristic shift in her ongoing digital storytelling project Worn Words.[13] Goheen Glanville engages these questions as a form of experimental pedagogy that opens up storytelling about border crossing as an embodied experience of insecurity, where borders are often sensed as unsafe and uncertain both by those with citizenship and those without. Through storytelling as a narrative form, the project attempts to unpack the citizen-refugee opposition in “asking people to critically inhabit their own positionality rather than try to understand another person’s.” The project thereby circumvents the potential shortcomings of humanitarianism’s reliance on the operational principle of empathy that tends to maintain an opposition between citizen and refugee.

Bringing the question of security and precarity into the site of the airport, Sydney Hart considers the predominant use of media art in Canadian international airports in terms of an “aesthetics of mobility,” one that serves as a form of what Michel Foucault has called “pastoral power” to bolster place-making and way-finding, reinforcing desired state norms of transnational mobility. Hart’s article, “Between Security and Spectatorship: The Media of Transnational Mobility at Canadian Airports,” explores how these works often serve as important modes of visuality and distraction that work to conceal the clandestine and differential bordering practices that airports facilitate as international ports of entry, where security operations “obscure migratory patterns, as these relate to racialized groups, and processes of deportation and detention.” As an alternative, Hart discusses the intermedial strategies of two collectives that offer a counterpoint to the “aesthetics of mobility” in the ways that each work serves to map relations of power. Passage oublié (Maroussia Lévesque, Jason Lewis, Yannick Assogba, and Raed Mousa) at Toronto’s Pearson airport in 2007 visualized rendition flights across the world in a touch screen in the public waiting area. In Hart’s estimation, this project both exposed “opaque” mobilities while bringing into relief opposing “patterns of mobility at airports.” Borders are Bonkers, an action by the collective Solidiarité sans frontières / Solidarity Across Borders at Montreal’s Dorval airport in 2016, protested Canada’s systemic migrant detentions and deportations. Hart’s attentiveness to these critical interventions suggests a growing awareness and concern about the dissembling architectures of surveillance in these transnational spaces. His essay challenges the image of the airport as a seamless non-place where bordering practices are easily sequestered or concealed.

In Gwen Cressman’s article, readers are asked to consider the ethics—as opposed to the aesthetics—of spectatorship as they pertain to the witnessing of migrants crossing from the United States into Canada at Roxham Road, Quebec. Borders are rendered as both concrete and intangible, dematerialized and irrefutable. Using the virtual reality installation Roxham (2017), created by Canadian photographer Michael Huneault as her example, Cressman explores what it means to look at migrants as they attempt to enter Canada at an unofficial crossing location. The immersiveness of Roxham’s hypermediacy generates a paradoxical opacity to the experience of border crossing; while spectators are able to see, hear, and move through the image-space, the bodies of all migrants are obscured by the layering of textiles using photo-collage. Although the colourful migrant bodies stand out from the surrounding landscape, they are thoroughly anonymized in the photo-collage process. In Cressman’s view, this tension between hypervisibility and unknowability “underscores the evanescent character of the migrant” while drawing attention to conventions of picturing migrants in contemporary journalism. For Cressman, Huneault’s project asks the spectators to become aware of both the border as representation (in addition to its material reality as concrete physical place) and their own mental images of migrants formed in large measure by mediatized depictions of asylum seekers.

The division between ethics and aesthetics is also present in the thoughtful reflections on contemporary theatre by Emmanuel Béhague who explores the intermedial creations of two theatremakers, Europa Trilogie by Swiss director Milo Rau (2014-2016) and Le présent qui déborde. Our Odyssey II by Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy (2019). These works combine large-screen projection with stage performances to treat borders as violent political delimitations where forced migration, exile, and the sense of being uprooted are shared with the public as collective phenomena and common experiences. In each performance, borders have themselves shaped the lives of the actors who share their life experiences as witnesses. As borders generate intimate experiences of suffering, these political acts are inscribed in the identities of those who have lived through border restrictions and forced migration. Béhague’s contribution thus draws out our collective sense of empathy for those who have experienced border conditions on various scales.

Questions of embodiment, virtuality, and materiality are central to Eszter Zimanyi and Emma Ben Ayoun, as they inquire into experiences of borders and the conditions of bodily absence in multisensory virtual reality film installations with humanitarian themes. They conduct a comparative analysis of two VR works: Hero (2018), a piece developed by iNKStories studios led by Navid and Vassiliki Khonsari, in which participants navigate an unnamed Syrian village during an air raid, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (2017), which leads participants through an attempted crossing of the Mexico and United States border. To examine how “borders are conjured, sensed, and/or evaporated within virtual environments,” their contribution asks “How are borders—whether material, visual, bodily, or psychic—felt by participants when they are tasked with mastering virtual spaces through a mastery of their own bodies?” In keeping with this issue’s core themes, these projects reframe national borders not simply as places or things, but in a metaphorical sense as a “way of thinking, as a kind of ongoing performance, and as the producer of an embodied knowledge that is never fixed or whole.” Their investigation locates the intermedial character of VR in the simultaneous presence and absence of the participant’s body and the tension between the participant’s sense of self and the virtual others she encounters, which, they believe, gives rise to a profound ambivalence. By reading this ambivalence through Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of anguish, they invite us to reconsider VR as a technology of encounter rather than empathy, which challenges us to rethink the ethics and politics of rendering crisis visible for public consumption and humanitarian action.

Borders are often seen to be a-historical, and for the last three decades, as sites of emergency or crisis. This tendency to impose crisis narratives on the Canada-US border has been noted by critical geographer Julie Young who counters it through the idea of “border as archive” rather than as a fixed geographical line.[14] Yet border histories leave archival traces, scattered references to histories that often undermine or transgress the nationalist work of the borderline.

In her artist project Unnatural, This Step (2019) Windsor-based artist Talysha Bujold-Abu responds to such archival traces along the Windsor/Detroit riverfront where the International Freedom Festival took place until 2007. Reflecting on archival photographs from the International Miss Sepia pageants (1930s–1950s) Bujold-Abu’s contribution materializes history by activating its absence. The “Miss Sepia” pageants were held annually in concert with emancipation celebrations as women of colour were historically barred from beauty pageants across the United States. However anachronistic the title may seem, these pageants were originally established to give visibility to Black women who were otherwise absent from mainstream advertisement. Notably, Windsor was the only Canadian city to host this pageant along with Detroit. Through this series, Bujold-Abu’s Polaroid manipulations and paper cut-outs speak to the ambiguities and unresolved tensions evident in the presentation of the pageant in the local newspaper. The work asks us to recognize the disappearance and erasure of this particular racialized history of the transborder Freedom Festival, paying attention to embodiment and mobility as they pertain to these all but forgotten women.

In her examination of the relationship between counter-mapping and critical border thinking, Taien Ng-Chan explores alternatives to the binary logic of Western cartography that can be activated through the practice of “strata-walking” or “strata-mapping.” Developed by the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU), an artist collective with which Ng-Chan is actively involved, strata-mapping is an intermedial form of experimental cartography that focuses on “mapping-as-process.” Tracing the varied strata of a site, from the subjective, phenomenological, auto-ethnographic, and cultural layers to the networked, social, or digitally mediated representations of a site, Ng-Chan reflects upon a strata-mapping workshop held in 2018 on Peche Island in the middle of the Detroit River. As a newly formed municipal park owned by the Canadian city of Windsor, Ontario, Peche Island sits within meters of the international boundary line between Canada and the United States. As urban parkland the island is represented as a “naturalized” area with a settler history informed by the prohibition era, but little else. In her essay, Ng-Chan considers the ways in which the site has the potential to offer an alternative spatial imaginary to those imposed through the city’s public parks. In attending to the fractured narratives that are absent from the city’s official historical site markers, as well as the relational and social elements that informed the strata-mapping workshop, Ng-Chan demonstrates the ways in which places “are not coherent,” but rather “the meeting-point of potentially discordant or concordant trajectories.” As a performative engagement, the workshop presented the island as a potentially contested space. In reading between the lines of folklore and urban legend, and the layers of colonial and capitalist control, HPU’s workshop pointed to the “fissures in the colonial narrative that could be revised to state that Peche Island is unceded territory […] and therefore stolen land.” Participants were invited to sense, observe, and map the various ways in which official narratives reduce “[i]ndigeneity to the past, to folklore and legend, or complete non-existence.” The workshop highlighted the island’s shifting status as a borderland on multiple levels.

Complex historical networks of colonization link to contemporary bordering practices in ways that are not immediately apparent, though they can easily be traced. Colonial practices of displacement and settlement, from property parcels to enclosure grids, are equally part of a “geo-epistemology” of colonialism through which border thinking and bordering practices are constituted.[15] Many of the sites considered in this issue are still relatively undertheorized in terms of border studies. The range of sites and practices discussed in many contributions reveals the ubiquitous nature of bordering practices that have been developed through colonial histories, refined through nation-states, and perfected in surveillance cultures. The essays and artists’ projects collected here extend and multiply the sites of borders and bordering practices, pulling them away from their immediate geopolitical roles by probing how and where they are felt and sensed.

The Great Lakes figure prominently in Indigenous cosmology as well as in both Canadian and American national imagination.[16] Yet, with the exception of Lake Michigan, the system also serves to divide Canada and the United States through the international boundary line drawn across the middle of Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. Visual artist and cultural geographer Gwen MacGregor considers the ways in which the Great Lakes resist territorial paradigms, focusing on Lake Ontario and its watershed through the work of Nicole Clouston (A Portrait of Lake Ontario, 2017) and Anishinaabe/Ojibwa artist Bonnie Devine. While borderlands historians have often considered the Great Lakes region in terms of its hybridized cultures, MacGregor notes that this framework tends to “reaffirm the border as central.” Instead, she looks to the work of Clouston and Devine to affirm the efficacy and physicality of Lake Ontario as a “resistant space and place in relation to the colonial nation-state of Canada with its arbitrary borders.” MacGregor’s essay reorients the borderlands perspective through considering how each artist enacts a “subtle refusal to acknowledge the bounded nation-state,” particularly in Devine’s Battle of the Woodlands (2014-2015) as a vital, decolonial act and in Clouston’s “celebration of the resilience of the watershed of Lake Ontario as an animate cultural entity and a physical space.”

Theories of hybridity receive focused review in Olivier Bissonnette’s essay, which examines bordering practices in relation to both settler/colonial history and anti-Black racism in Quebec. Beginning with an interrogation of influential theories of hybridity and métissage, Bissonnette suggests that these approaches have proved insufficient for understanding the historical and contemporary complexity of bordering within the province. The goal of his essay is not to argue for the dissolution of all borders, or to celebrate all forms of “border-jamming.” Bissonnette instead asks us to consider how conventional binary structures for imagining borders (settler/colonial, us/them) are unable to account for the knotted histories of colonization and racism within Quebec.

In her contribution, Cynthia Amanguéné Ambiana also explores theories of cultural hybridity as they intersect with current realities and risks of border crossing. Amanguéné Ambiana examines the world of avant-garde francophone Cameroonian slam-poetry as an intermedial space that embraces the country’s linguistic intermixing and cultural hybridity and frequently engages with themes of migration. Indeed, her contribution serves as a reminder that forms of cultural hybridity celebrated by 1990s cultural theorists remain the norm for most regions of the world, even as border zones have hardened and the pressures and risks of migration mount. Drawing on Camfranglais as “a composite language born from the contact between French, English, Cameroonian identity languages and other African languages,” Cameroonian slam-poetry champions border crossing across a range of scales. As a principally urban youth sociolect, Camfranglais acknowledges the region’s colonial history and the mixed heritage of much of the nation’s marginalized population. Cameroonian slam’s intermedial character is evident in its capacity to transgress linguistic boundaries as it borrows from distinct media forms (oratorical, scenic, musical, literary). Amanguéné Ambiana’s study of specific Cameroonian slammers explores both their concern for urban youth who so often desire to undertake dangerous migrations to European destinations in the hope for greater liberty, and their shared worldview that promotes the peaceful coexistence of African and Western cultures.

We conclude our Introduction with artist Sahar Te’s contribution to this issue, Tales of an Ancient Whisperer (2018). Te’s meditation on the history of the date palm draws out its relation to Middle Eastern hospitality and the material traces of its export as a means to consider the relational potential of the fruit. With her first image in this series, a photograph she took of a lone date pit on the side of a road in Windsor, Canada, Te connects this moment of discovery with the image of the date palm as it travels and changes. For Te, this date pit transports her immediately back to memories of her home country of Iran, and then further back into the deep cultural history of the tree, its fruit, and its varying significance for people from diverse faiths, epochs, and geographic regions. It is a beautiful, many-layered reflection on how the memory of an object can transport us across time and space; how imagination and remembrance comprise their own mobility, enabling the traversal of thousands of kilometres in an instant.