Porous Boundaries and Shifting Borderlands: The American Experience in a New World Order

According to the Frenchman who heads the Merrill Lynch office in Paris, “globally what is taking place is the Americanization of finance, because American films are by their nature global and local.” I am not sure I understand what he means, but his use of spatial metaphor is increasingly commonplace. Arundhati Roy also chose a spatial configuration to express her irritation with reviewers who characterized her novel as “lush and exotic.” “It suggests that the person who uses these words lives at the center of the universe and the person whose land is exotic is at the edge of the universe.” The stunning reversals of the last Supreme Court session were conflated into one word by Linda Greenhouse. “It was a term about boundaries.” ¹

The influence of transnational firms, the obtuseness of reviewers, and even the judicial reconfiguration of power relations in the United States are situated in a conceptual geography which seems to have revivified the American spatial imagination. ² The key words of an older conceptual geography of human activity—center, core, periphery—seem derived from the Copernican system. Tolerating no intrusion, they compose a hermetically sealed field that scarcely lends itself to multiple metaphor. Global and local, edges and boundaries, on the other hand, do away with rigid hierarchies and thrive on intrusions. They may be reformed at will, may represent a physical reality, or may be disembodied. They suggest chaos theory, with its focus on unpredictable dynamic systems, and fractal geometry that reveals the order in apparently erratic shapes and processes. Whether in mathematics or geography, they disorient conventional understanding.

The signs of a renewed spatial imagination in common parlance, or the increasing skill with which historians unearth social meaning in spatial organization, reflects in broadest terms a general awareness of significant transformations in the global economy. On the one hand, the so-called Third World has become a major player, not simply or even as a source of cheap and exploitable labor, but of innovative skills. One thinks, for instance, of India’s Silicon Valley. First World transnational organizations, whose location policies blur established boundaries, have formed partnerships that oblige them to come to terms with cultural differences. “Hybridity and in-betweenness, once liabilities, have become assets that facilitate the transnational operations of global corporations.” ³ Not only has any rank order of “Worlds” become a more inept characterization than ever, but also hermetic boundaries have become porous.

On the other hand, highly talented non-western (another ineptitude) people have entered “First World” institutions, whether academia or the upper reaches of business firms. Indeed, the wandering executive of whatever nationality is a prominent feature of the global economy. As Arif Dirlik notes: “Transnational diasporic populations have scrambled national allegiances and intensified ethnic and cultural encounters that cut across national boundaries, challenging earlier spatialities organized around nations with new spatialities in which encounters play a fundamental role. Their presence and their work call into question prior assumptions of homogenous national cultures in both host societies and societies of origin which deny authenticity to cultures of emigrants.” ⁴

The merit of Dirlik’s analysis is to underscore the fact that recent scholarship is neither simply a response to institutional dead ends, nor elaborate theorizing in a vacuum, but also a mirror of present experience. ⁵ Encounters across porous boundaries, multiple identities as assets in the global economy, personal allegiances redefined and contested as a result are a few of the “disorders” in a Copernican conceptual geography that a new generation of historians has begun to explore. “Disorders” though they may have been in a setting of western national industrialization, they seem to outline the “order” of eras that preceded and followed. It is, perhaps, no accident that historians of the early modern period are especially comfortable with the new conceptual geography. As Kathleen M. Brown put it, “the payoff, I hope, for colonial historians will be a greatly complicated concept of nature, power, culture and identity.” ⁶

The payoff has begun. I would like to explore that point first by tracing the spatial design of one boundary...