At Frontiers
Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversation, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities.
For us, the frontier is a threshold waiting to be crossed, a space rife with the seductive aura of transgression. We are not talking only of actual, physical borders (though of course we are interested in literal and political borders) that are usually the residues of war, but also of the borders between different temporal registers, between languages, between different modes of action, between different bodies of thought and conviction, between the exception and the rule. Looked at this way, a border is more than a constellation of fixed markers circumscribing a domain.
We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as hospitable to new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half-forgotten agendas. We hope our text this year sets the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the boundaries, parameters and verges of our times.
Production
Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Ravi Sundaram
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra
Translations: Shveta Sarda
Design and Cover: Mrityunjay Chatterjee
Back Cover Images: Mogas Station
Read
The entire book can be accessed and downloaded from the Sarai archive.
Contents
At Frontiers – Editorial Collective
FRONTIER SCOUTS AND BORDER CROSSERS
Narrating the Frontier: Perspectives from Kachchh – Farhana Ibrahim
Chromatic Boundaries – Paolo Novak
A Politics of Sensitivity: Ambiguity and Exceptionality along the India-Bangladesh Border – Jason Cons
At that Insurmountable Border – Sucharita Sengupta
Wagah/Wagha: India Meets Pakistan – Amar Kanwar
Transit Visa: An Essay on Code – A.J. Sood
A Strange Feeling of Familiarity – Lamia Joreige
Abkhazia: A Broken Paradise – Georgi Derluguian
Desire, Fear and Death… – Samir Chakrabarti
UP CLOSE AND IMPERSONAL
Counterfeit Consciousness and the Joy of Abandonment – U. Kalpagam
… And Nothing but the Truth, So Help Me Science – Lawrence Liang
Unofficial Secrets Act: The Administration of Certainty and Ambiguity – Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Dead Man Walking: Sovereignty and the Supreme Court in the Age of Terror – Mayur Suresh
The ‘Law’ of the Police – Anuj Bhuwania
The Fuzzy Logic of National Frontiers or a Frontier Nation: Reflections on the Multi-Purpose National Identity Card Scheme in India – Taha Mehmood
SCALING WALLS, BREAKING FENCES, CROSSING GATES
All in All, It’s Just Another Hole in the Wall… – Jiti Nichani + Aarti Mundkur
An Interview in the Emergency Room: A Cure in Three Stages – Aman Sethi
El Siluetazo (The Silhouette): On the Border between Art and Politics – Ana Longoni
Locating Torture in Jammu and Kashmir – Warisha Farasat
Borderless Bodies – Pramod K. Nayar
NEW CARTOGRAPHIES / OLD BOUNDARIES
From Music to Painting: The Strange Yet Not-So-Strange Tales of Pardhaans – Udayan Vajpeyi
Ancient Geographies – New Frontiers – Anthony Acciavatti
The Folly of Maps – Jeremy Hight
Smart Borders – Guido Cimadomo and Pilar Martínez Ponce
Glamour as a Form of Culture in Post-Soviet Russia – Keti Chukhrov
One Biennial, Two Triennials, Three Interventions and Research for a Retrospective – Ruth Sacks
THE EDGE OF THE FRAME
Betrayed Borders: Double Agents and the Crisscrossing of Conflicts – Manuel Ramos Martínez
Framing Frontiers: The Suspended Step towards Visual Construction of Geopolitical Borders – Saayan Chattopadhyay
Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice – Pooja Rangan
Art without Frontiers? Satyajit Ray and the Constraints of Universality – Chandak Sengoopta
Miss Frontier Mail : The Film That Mistook Its Star for a Train – Rosie Thomas
TEXTS AND MARGINS
The “Frontier” Revisited – Cédric Vincent Reads Lawrence Alloway
Up for Auction: A Devoted Communist’s Labour of Love – Abhishek Hazra
Frontier’s Virgule/Virgule’s Frontier – K. Narayana Chandran
The Mahimandala Gita , Chapter 66, by Arakkhita Das: Notes towards a Translation – Sailen Routray
Bhudev’s Uchronia: The Temporal Exile of the Colonised – Ritwik Bhattacharjo
“It’s Raining Aliens!” Coloured Rain in Kerala and the Fuzzy Frontiers of Science – Shiju Sam Varughese
“We Want No Flats…!” Bauwagen Culture and the ‘Desired’ Urban – Stefan Canham
BETWEEN, ACROSS, BELOW, WITHIN, OUTSIDE
Notes on the Frontiers and Borders of the Postcolony – Angela Mitropoulos
Across (B)order and Back: The Everyday Reality of Kolkata’s “Flyings” – Swati Ghosh
Between Queer Ethics and Sexual Morality – Naisargi N. Dave
South Asian “Adda ” in Barcelona – Sameer Rawal
Long-Distance Nationalism: Constructing ‘Indianness’ in American Kitchens – Ekta Ohri
Following the Black Block: Pragmatic Depression, Action and Aftermath – Sam Gould
Walking for Nandigram – Moinak Biswas
The Logbook – Sreejata Roy
THE URBAN FRONTIER
Ghevra Diaries – Cybermohalla Practitioners
Photographs – Ravi Agarwal
At the Frontier of the Urban Periphery – AbdouMaliq Simone
Harmless Fraud: Pyramid Schemes in Andhra Pradesh – S. Ananth
Tophane: The Closing In of an Istanbul Neighbourhood – Pelin Tan
Moscow: Fortress City – Irina Aristarkhova
A 21st-Century Urban Landscape: The Emergence of New Socio-Spatial Formations in Gurgaon – Seth Schindler
Looking Outwards, and Outwards – Gauri Gill
Frontier Town: Marking Boundaries in a Delhi Resettlement Colony 30 Years On – Cressida Jervis-Read
Moving Cities: Life on the New Frontier – Bert de Muynck
ALT/OPTION
Occupancy Urbanism: Ten Theses – Solomon Benjamin
No One Is Illegal! – Steve Cohen, Harriet Grimsditch, Teresa Hayter, Bob Hughes, Dave Landau
Contributors, Acknowledgements and Image Credits
Images: New Categories/Old Boundaries – Monica Narula and Shveta Sharda
Rokovoko – Mogas Station inside back cover