Crossing Borders in the 21st Century

Catalog description

This course offers an ethnographic perspective on the ongoing movement of bodies, technologies, and commodities throughout the Americas in the 21st Century. Over the last two decades, anthropologists have offered a series of theoretical and ethnographic interventions on what was originally characterized as transnational processes. Students will examine various frameworks for understanding what is emerging as a "post/911" model for understanding the regimes of power, formal and informal, that organize border crossings as "transborder," "extraterritorial," transnational, global, and so on, in what can be broadly defined as a political and economic context of neoliberalism. In doing so, we will interrogate the place of the nation-state, and the ways in which territorial, ethnic, racial, gendered, postcolonial borders are crossed or not. While clearly U.S. hegemony is at the core of this discussion, significant attention will be placed on decentering the U.S. as the axis of interpretation. Through ethnographic case studies, students will be introduced to topics such as the links between structural, gendered, and everyday violence, the politics of clandestinity, to questions on the privileging of mobility as a problematic trope of the 21st Century.