Samuel Beckett (1906–89) remains a central figure in the complex of ideas called ‘modernism’, and his still-evolving legacy continues to inform ‘contemporary’ aesthetics. How might Beckett's specific relationships to different kinds of borders, and his concomitant status as a ‘border thinker’ avant la lettre, illuminate new terms of engagement with modernism's residual cultural energy? More than just providing a spatial or geographic reading of Beckett's literature or a biographical account of his quasi-exile, this chapter zeroes in on how modernist approaches to conceptual and actual boundaries – their establishment, negotiation and modes of transgression – continue to be salient today. It will use Beckett's own life and praxis, including the contemporary remediation and renegotiation of his works and their afterlife, as a throughline that reveals border thinking as a key modernist strategy. Examples drawn from contemporary experimental practice, in both academic/pedagogical and professional contexts, bear out the boundary-crossing nature of Beckett's achievement: as a novelist and playwright in both French and English, he leaves a legacy which increasingly crosses the global landscape without much regard for political borders. Instead, in geographic, linguistic and philosophical terms, Beckett's oeuvre discloses the persistent and the porous nature of the boundary itself.

‘Border thinking’ is a term that describes the state of epistemic resistance to binary options, borrowed from decolonial theories of sociology and politics (attributed most often to Gloria Anzaldua and Walter Mignolo, both writing at the turn of the current century). That this essay connects with a range of disciplines, sources and vocabularies from outside of Beckett studies will, it is hoped, structurally and formally help to drive home the point about the provisional nature of epistemic boundaries.

The term's conceptual origins can be traced to the Bandung Conference, a gathering of Asian and African states held in Indonesia in 1955, and the 1961 Belgrade Non-Aligned Conference. In both of these locations, dozens of nation-states gathered to reject the terms of the world's political choice of either communism aligned with the Soviet Union, or capitalism aligned with the United States. These groups of nations chose to de-link from both, to sidestep the terms in which the question was asked (as opposed to answering), and to dedicate themselves to the embodiment and enactment of decolonisation.