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Tagged: Borders

Displaced from the Future: Crossing the Sea Back to Syria in Nesrine Khoury’s Speculative Novel Wadi Qandil

By Annamaria Bianco. In the late 1990s, the establishment of the border-free Schengen Area within the newly formed European Union was counterbalanced by sudden restrictions on the granting of visas to citizens of third countries. The novel Wadi Qandil (Wādī Qandīl), published in 2023 by the Spain-based writer and poet Nesrine Khoury, falls into the subcategory of “refugee futurism”. It contributes to the rewriting of the contemporary Mediterranean imaginary, proposing a heterotopic vision of this dual space at the time of the so-called migratory crisis.

Enduring Through Liminality: Across and Beyond the Borders of Eastern Europe in the Wartime

By Julia Buyskykh. For decades, anthropologists have been studying borders and borderlands, concentrating on marginalised groups (whether minorities, migrants, or refugees), cross-border state relations, border shadow economies, and the multiple identities of populations settling along borders, whose silenced voices often contradict official state narratives of history, identities, and religion. In this article, the author reflects upon her own experience, entangling it with current anthropological scholarship, exploring the tragic semantics of being displaced and misplaced.

Avtoportreti Zghvarze: A Film Essay on Memory, Hope and the Search for One’s Identity

Anna Dziapshipa’s essay film “Self-Portrait Along the Borderline” (2023) was screened as part of the Georgian Film Series at the Ukrainian Film Festival (UFF) in Berlin. In the film, Dziapshipa uses her family archive to reconstruct an intimate portrait of her Georgian-Abkhazian family and to reflect on broader issues of identity and memory in the context of war. A review by Ekaterina Grineva.

Notes from Another Exodus: The Four-Month Struggle to Evacuate Afghan Poets and Scholars

By Fatemeh Shams. On 15 August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, after twenty years of US-led military occupation. As the situation escalated over the following days and weeks, harrowing footage of airport stampedes, Taliban violence, protestors, chaos, and panic dominated the news. Four months later, the news cycle may have quietened, but the crisis in Afghanistan intensifies every day.

Ottoman Roads to the Present: Infrastructure Development in Southeast Europe

By Florian Riedler and Nenad Stefanov. Public discourse and official historiography in Southeast Europe still understand the Ottoman period as ‘backward’. This backwardness is particularly associated with social and cultural immobility. According to this perspective, the Ottoman state dominated the Balkan Peninsula and prevented it from ‘moving forward’ and ‘progressing’ like the rest of Europe.