The Politics of Bordering: Literature, Theory, and the Political
Special issue of Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought.
Guest Editors: Prof. Mark Devenney and Dr. German Primera (Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton)
Submissions deadline: 15 September, 2025
The demarcation of borders is central to the configuration of political life. Borders delineate not only territory but also legal status, access to rights alongside racialised and gendered regimes of mobility. In the European context, bordering practices have been instrumental to the constitution of the EU’s internal coherence, its geopolitical ambitions, and its imperial legacy. As Balibar famously argued, borders are no longer confined to the edges of nation-states but are “dispersed a little everywhere” across the social body. Alongside legal and technological mechanisms, literary and cultural industries play a vital role in mediating, imagining, and sometimes contesting these borders, rendering visible the affective, racialised, and epistemic violences they enact.
Today, bordering practices are increasingly fragmented, virtualised, and diffused, at once technological, affective, and material. This special issue invites contributions that interrogate the multifaceted politics of borders and bordering from decolonial, critical, literary, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Building on a growing body of scholarship, such as Border as Method (Mezzadra & Neilson), Undoing Border Imperialism (Walia), The Figure of the Migrant (Nail), and Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), we seek to examine how borders operate as technologies of racialisation, labour control, dispossession, and epistemic violence, as well as how they are contested, refused, or subverted in the name of justice, solidarity, and radical democracy.
The special issue is particularly interested in contributions that move beyond seeing borders as fixed or territorial lines, and instead approaches them as dynamic sites of political struggle, biopolitical governance, literary expression, and affective regulation. Borders, in this expanded sense, are implicated in shaping not only international regimes of control and exclusion, but also categories of personhood, species difference, and the very grammar of citizenship and sovereignty.
We especially welcome submissions that engage with one or more of the following themes:
- Border Aesthetics and Literature: How are bordering practices represented, contested, or imagined otherwise in literature, film, visual culture, and performance? What literary forms or narrative techniques register the violence, precarity, or refusal of the border? How do novels, poems, and speculative fiction intervene in the grammar of sovereignty, mobility, and citizenship? We particularly welcome readings that explore how literary and aesthetic practices (e.g. satire, allegory, fragmentation, multilingualism) offer new vocabularies for thinking borders beyond state-centric logics.
- Coloniality and Bordering: How do contemporary European border regimes reproduce colonial logics of race, sovereignty, and discipline? What does it mean to decolonise borders?
- Border Spectacle and Necropolitics: How do bordering practices make visible (or invisible) certain populations and geographies through surveillance, humanitarianism, and violence?
- Technologies of Bordering: What roles do digital infrastructures, algorithmic governance, biometric data, and logistical capitalism play in remaking the border today?
- The Border and the Body: How do borders articulate and police the boundaries of the body, including through medical screening, reproductive control, and carceral architectures?
- Climate and Ecological Borders: How is climate change reshaping border enforcement, environmental migration, and the politics of resource access?
- Borders of Financial Capitalism: How does the movement of capital—often frictionless—contrast with the regulated mobility of people, especially across the Global South and North divide?
- Animality, Species, and Posthuman Borders: What borders are drawn between the human and nonhuman, and how are these entangled with extractive and colonialhistories
- Transgender and Queer Borderings: How are gendered and sexual borders policed or transgressed within national and transnational regimes of recognition and exclusion?
- Resistance and Border Abolition: What strategies of resistance—legal, activist, cultural, theoretical—have emerged to contest bordering practices? What might it mean to imagine or enact border abolition?
In keeping with Theory Now’s commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, we are especially interested in contributions that foreground the role of narrative, metaphor, poetics, and genre in shaping, or unsettling, the politics of bordering. We invite literary scholars, philosophers, and political theorists to think with and through literature as a method, a site of struggle, and a mode of theorisation.
Those interested in publishing their work in this special issue should submit their work by registering on the journal’s website and following the publication guidelines before September 15, 2025 (see details at the following link https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/TNJ/about/submissions#authorGuidelines ). All articles received will undergo a peer review process, and their publication will be conditional upon a positive evaluation in that review process.
Articles should be between 5,000 and 11,000 words, including notes and references. They must adhere to the journal’s style guidelines and may be written in English, Spanish, or French.
You can find the full Call for Papers with further details here: https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/TNJ/announcement/view/290 (If the link directs you to the Spanish or French version of the Call for Papers, you can switch to English using the menu on the right-hand side of the page, halfway down)
