The sites of Vindolanda in Great Britain and Jianshui Jinguan, present-day Gansu, have produced exciting paleographic evidence pertaining to the borders of the Roman and the Han Chinese empires, respectively. Archaeological excavations at both sites have brought to light many written sources, on inscribed thin tablets and strips of locally available woods, that cast a spotlight on what their authors associated with their assignment in the fringes of empire. Imperfect analogues as these two locations are, rich in cultural idiosyncrasy, Charles Sanft undertakes a comparative analysis that brings both data sets into close conceptual conversation. He begins his discussion with observations on the abstract nature of ancient borders: neither tangible nor “real,” borders were, Sanft argues, a projection of culturally encoded imaginaries. Following this investigative vein, he then explores the spatial essence of Roman and Han Chinese borders. Before turning to the actual sites and documents, Sanft reminds his audience of the convoluted relation between space and place; the latter is understood as a local environment that can be experienced by individuals who are, in turn, aware of the distinct experience of place. The examination of the Vindolanda tablets and Jianshui Jinguan reveals an absence of this type of experience from the written records; hence, the imagination of border postings does not find articulation in terms of experience. Sanft translates this discovery into extensive and indeed paramount conclusions on the Roman and the Han Chinese understanding of borderlands, which was subject to imaginations of far-flung imperial spaces rather than actual engagements with place.

This chapter explores the relationship between natives and migrants in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945 using contemporaries’ memoirs. It shows that migration status and region of origin served as salient identity markers, structuring interpersonal relations and shaping collective action in the newly formed communities. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that indigenous villages and villages populated by a more homogeneous migrant population were more successful in organizing volunteer fire brigades than villages populated by migrants from different regions.

This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

Identifying a predominant focus in spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetries, this chapter suggests that diasporic self-mapping is often ambivalent as poets navigate shifting or liminal spaces. The chapter argues that geopolitical differences distinguish Asian Australian experiences from those of their Asian American counterparts. It examines the mediation of migration and understanding of past and present in the work of Ee Tiang Hong, and how transnational mobility informs the hybrid and spliced practice of Ouyang Yu and Merlinda Bobis. The chapter analyses an intergenerational feminist interest in borders and journeys in the work of Bobis and Eunice Andrada. It then examines how later-generation poets may face quite different challenges in navigating ancestral homeland and the search for connections, or, alternatively, find a freedom in travelling and uncertainty. The chapter also considers transcultural and translational strategies, and discusses Omar Sakr’s mapping of “unbelonging.” The chapter concludes by asserting that the rich heterogeneity of poetries cannot be reduced to a single term, even in such a disruptor term as “Asian Australian.”

Although Spanish colonizers expected horses to enforce social order, new environments for breeding and keeping horses and colonial interdependence on Indigenous populations also subverted these expectations. Licenses to ride horses offers a widespread example of this new political ecology. Across New Spain and Peru, Indigenous allies gained access to horses according to Spanish customs that rewarded military service to the crown, cases that emphasize the powerful imprint of the horse in Spanish governance. More broadly, the development of Indigenous equestrianisms both within and outside of Spanish spheres of influence demonstrate the complex boundary work involved in navigating a new interspecies landscape and producing new forms of knowledge.

This chapter examines complex interplays of utopia/dystopia in the context of European colonization through two works: Alberto Yáñez’s postcolonial zombie narrative, “Burn the Ships,” and Yuri Herrera’s dystopian Signs Preceding the End of the World. These works grapple with biopolitical dialectics between utopia and dystopia, belonging and exclusion, and competing identities and epistemologies of mestizaje hybridity. Using as a starting point codices produced by mestiz@ scribes in the dystopian post-Conquest society of sixteenth-century New Spain, analysis draws from Damián Baca’s Mestiz@ rhetoric to demonstrate how these texts exemplify what he defines as a “powerful Mestiz@ rhetorical strategy” of nepantlism – “a strategy of thinking from a border space.” By self-reflexively engaging this Mestiz@ rhetoric through diegetic elements, these texts subvert hegemonic narratives of assimilation in the context of imperialism and the border.

The forced migration of French-speaking Acadians, Wabanaki tribes, and Loyalist refugees have rarely been considered in relationship with one another. Yet their principal movements centered on the Northeastern Borderlands of North America (bounded by Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec), and their interconnected movements spiked from the 1750s to the 1830s. This comparative assessment shows that while each of these coerced mobilities had distinctive qualities, large-scale population movement was the most basic foundation of colonialismss. Acadian, Loyalist, and Wabanaki movements shaped one another and were often associated with violence and trauma. At the same time, mobility offered opportunities and could nurture resilience. The legacies of forced migration in the Northeastern Borderlands during an early period of sustained warfare persist today, especially in the legal cases, artwork, and collective memory of Wabanaki people, who still live in their traditional homeland.

The entwinement of Attica and Boiotia brought with it challenges and opportunities. This geographical entanglement will be analysed to understand how the geological situation influenced neighbourly relations. The entwinement ensured considerations of proximity were always at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds. It also created a distinct relationship between the Athenians and Boiotians. Scholarship previously focused on border disputes as the governing mode of interaction in the borderlands, yet the lived experience was different, as this investigation shows. Analysis of the Mazi and Skourt plains, and the adjacent lands of Plataia and Oropos, demonstrates that these contested lands were not the cause of hostilities, but often a consequence of a pre-existing war; that is, territorial disputes were the result rather than the cause of enmity. Boiotia’s maritime connectivity through its harbours provided another strategic consideration for the Athenians, whose interest in the region was partially predicated on the function of these harbours as strategic hubs in the Corinthian Gulf. Finally, Boiotia’s role as a buffer is investigated and how that influenced neighbourly relations. The security it provided Athens meant that the latter consistently aimed to obtain Boiotia as a shield for its hinterland, whether through force or willingly.

Japan is ringed by a number of remote oceanic islands whose economic, strategic and symbolic significance is entirely disproportionate to their tiny size. Yet today they are uninhabited, populated primarily by birds. Historically, these islands and the oceans that surround them have formed a borderland between Japan, Hawai‘i, the United States, Britain and China. First targetted for their supplies of plumage and guano, they later became launchpads for empire and landing strips for bombers. Many have now been transformed into nature reserves.

What chain of events led people to set foot on such remote spots in the first place? How did they go about claiming the islands and the birds that nested on them? What kind of human settlements once existed there, and what happened after they were abandoned? What does the history of bird islands say about Japanese imperial and post-imperial power, and about the web of political, economic and ecological connections between insular and oceanic space? And what does all this say about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and environment in the modern world?

Medieval romance, from the perspective of critical race studies (CRS), justifies medieval imperial expansion. Medieval romances frame themselves as celebrating the culture of elite knights and ladies by imagining their borders as inhabited by dangerous people who must be defeated and eliminated, with the result that enemy territories are subsumed into the territories of the elite knight. From this viewpoint, medieval romance uses chivalry to define who is accepted within the boundaries and who is left out of that formation. By studying differing patters of dehumanization in medieval romance with a focus on Old French and Middle Welsh texts, the chapter shows some examples of the ways that the genre of romance makes race and of how the repercussions of making race further systems of oppression. The chapter’s aims, then, are to use CRS to show a possible form of analyzing race in medieval romance.

The Conclusion turns to the end of the seventeenth century, when Mexico and the Caribbean underwent a political realignment. In the Caribbean, ascendant European empires began to construct the monocultures that have come to dominate the study of Caribbean history. Meanwhile, in the mainland, renewed interest in New Spain’s northern frontier initiated a new series of cultural encounters and violent contests that signal the origin of borderlands history. While it is tempting to see in these two developments the disintegration of the Mexican-Caribbean world, I argue that the end of the seventeenth century was not an unmaking but a remaking. As Spanish power in the Caribbean declined, bonds between remaining Spanish island and mainland settlements strengthened. At the same time, Veracruz and the Caribbean both played an important role in the construction of Mexico’s northern border and the Caribbean’s new economic and political relationships. In this, the study points forward to the development of new material relationships that informed the social and cultural possibilities of people in Mexico’s Gulf Coast and the Caribbean Islands into the eighteenth century.