![]() ![]() By addressing the varying role of the border in two cultural narratives addressing contemporary Europe, I will suggest that it is possible to trace a transforming discourse of borders that underlines their porosity and constructedness and points to the emergence of new identities as the results of border-crossings. This article aims to show how contemporary British narratives dealing with borders address ideas of transnational mobility and migration by emphasizing that border-crossings challenge such binary thinking. ![]() ( 2020), it is also marked by ruptures and ambiguities that problematize the maintenance of such polarized notions of identity and fixed conceptions of borders. While such a discourse of Othering has remained powerful for the nation’s self-understanding, as shown in the analysis of the Brexit discourse by Van der Zwet et al. A number of studies (Hall 1991 Goldsworthy 1998 Easthope 1999 Nyman 2000 Korte, Pirker, and Helff 2010) have claimed that there is a tendency to represent Europe and Europeans as England’s Others, marked by difference and separated from Britain by ethnic, cultural, and geopolitical borders. The borderscapes examined in the article (Bulgaria’s southern border and London) reveal diverse belongings and becomings in historical and contemporary contexts that generate new identities.īritain’s identity is conventionally imagined as residing in a contrast to Europe. The article shows a transforming discourse of borders that underlines their porosity and points to the emergence of new identities as the result of border-crossings. Examining the works in the context of the borderscape concept, the article shows how the texts’ border-crossings challenge such binary thinking and offer ways to locate alternatives to simplistic versions of national identity. ![]() Reading these texts as narratives of border in the context of contemporary discourses on Europe and Brexit, the article shows how the texts challenge the general bordering tendency to represent Europe and Europeans as Britain’s Others, marked by difference and ethnic, cultural, and geopolitical borders. This article addresses the role of border and borderscapes in two contemporary texts by writers based in Britain, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe and Ben Judah’s This Is London: Life and Death in the World City. ![]()
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