History and the Border

The article seeks to supplant the idea of the "border" with that of "historical catachresis." The metaphor of the border intimates that space is a given, and that our job as historians is to step beyond prior marked places and reveal the existence of previously undisclosed or better ones. This concept of the border, proposed and discussed at the Berkshire Conference under the title "Sin Fronteras: Women's Histories, Global Conversations" in June 2005, places conceptual limits on thinking. This is most obvious in the case of ambiguous historical entities like colonialism, gender, or specific sign-systems. The concept of the historical catachresis, on the other hand, opens ways to read everyday evidence for experiences of incremental economic change, or commercial revolution, or new categories of sexuality, to name a few. Using the optic of the historical catachresis, and reading anachronistic images like a beautiful Bu'nei'men fertilizer woman image or the Nakayama Taiyodo colonial cosmetics company "girl," historians can enter into a contemporaneous moment. The article finally clarifies why older work on Chinese semicolonialism has been primarily reactive. It suggests that reading banal, ephemeral evidence for the emergence of new singularities or radically unprecedented experiences has the capacity to recast our conventional historians' questions of context, subjectivity, experience, and representation.