In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Afterword Border optics John Louis Lucaites As i drive from my home near indianapolis to my office in Bloomington, i cross three county lines, all duly marked with official signs. As i approach the university i pass the gates that separate the campus from the town that surrounds it on all sides.Traffic markers declare a “school zone” (when children are present). once in my private office i open a three-day-old newspaper and come across two stories on the same page: the one below the fold tells the story of Japanese internment on Bainbridge island, Washington, in 1942 under the title “A Wall to Remember”; the one above the fold reports on Texas governor Rick Perry’s Houston prayer rally with the headline “Rally Raises questions Anew of the Boundaries of Perry’s faith.” Logging in to my computer, i am informed that my firewall needs to be updated. Several hours later i sit in a conference room with deans and colleagues from other departments where the sometimes rigid disciplinary differences that purport to distinguish and legitimize our expertise as professors of communication, English, history, sociology, and political science come into tension with one another as we deliberate the propriety of inviting a politically controversial speaker to campus. At lunch a friend and i debate the possibility that local congressional districts will be gerrymandered to produce favorable election outcomes for one party or another. Back in my car on the way home i find myself somewhat disoriented by detour signs that have me driving on what would otherwise be the wrong side of the road. As i enter the suburban subdivision in which i reside, i notice a surveyor marking the line between the lot on which my house sits and the plot of land immediately to the north.When i ask him what he is doing, he tells me that my neighbor is preparing to install a “privacy barrier” (aka a fence). We live our civic lives amidst all manner of borders and boundaries. Some are obvious and announce themselves as such; others are spoken or otherwise symbolized but generally unremarked upon, hidden behind layers of metaphors and formal conventions that imply a degree of normalcy that betokens the natural or the ordinary. Most tend to be seen but go unnoticed , observed only in the breach as we become habituated to—and, truth to tell, rely upon—their presence. Some are benign, and others more 228 / Lucaites intrusive. But, and here is the key point, they all indicate some degree of human volition and, as such, mark a power dynamic central to, if not characteristic of, modern liberal societies. There is something ironic about this power dynamic, for modern liberal societies are underwritten by notions of individual and civic freedom and liberty, but borders and boundaries are, by definition and in practice, designed to limit and constrain. They rely upon and thus demonstrate a sense of sovereignty, but only as they manifest the hubris of absolute control which, of course, we know to be a fantasy: indeed, a very condition of their existence appears to be the inevitability of their failure (Wendy Brown). And yet, it seems, we can’t live without them, a troubled and troubling nod to their allegedly social and political normality. And the question is, how might we constructively and creatively acknowledge and manage this conundrum? The chapters in this volume invite consideration of the notion of “border rhetorics” as what i will call an optic for how we might proceed. As the OED reminds us, in the sixteenth century an “optic” was understood to be an “instrument or device; constructed to assist vision” (“optic,” def. A4), but in contemporary times it has also taken on the meaning of a “particular way of interpreting or experiencing something” (“optic,” def. B2c). i mean to conflate these two definitions here so as to suggest the sense in which “border rhetorics” operate as a theory (derived from the Greek theorein, “a way of seeing”) that coaches our ability to observe and evaluate the borders and boundaries that constitute our civic life and that might otherwise remain invisible or go unnoticed, treated as altogether natural, ordinary, and apolitical. The key is in noting that the emphasis is on the act of seeing as a primary mode of civic behavior. Understood as an optic, in other words, border rhetorics offer one avenue for engaging the question, what might it mean “to see” or “to be seen” as a...

Share