Borderlands

Abstract

[EN] This chapter contributes a set of locations where the borderlands are made manifest, a particular geography of incarceration that actualizes the violence of the thin border, be it at a variety of deten‐ tion centres or inside a car pulled up for speeding. Instead of viewing the border as an unbroken line with clear coordinates, the chapter mobilises what José David Saldívar calls ‘pensamiento fronterizo’ away from the US‐Mexico border and resituates it in a variety of different intersticios (Saldívar 2012, 1, 59) or shifting zones inside the country. The analysis of Julia Álvarez’s Afterlife and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive illustrates how contemporary writers engage with these rerouted borderlands by making them visible and documenting them, by identifying their power as epistemic tools, and by creating a language that identifies them. Their critical look at the inside allows them to resist cartographies of domination and to defamiliarise the immediate as they create their alternative mappings of the here and now.