From Borderlands to Borderworlds

Abstract

The literature on postcolonial borderlands often portrays a two-way dynamic between postcolonial statebuilding and resistance, documenting the violent impositions of colonial and postcolonial states, as well as how local actors evade or oppose these processes. This dynamic does not fully capture everyday life in these interstitial spaces. This article expands on the idea of postcolonial borderworlds to conceptualize these spaces as constituted through webs of multi-scalar and more-than-human relations, within which the (post)colonial state plays an important but not exhaustive role. It makes two contributions. First, it connects border studies—especially Sadan’s work on borderworlds—and two strands in emerging literature on world-making: one focuses on constructing multi-scalar political communities beyond the nation state, the other on convivial entanglements between human and non-human life in the wake of violence. Second, this article reflects on the value of patchworked approaches to everyday life in postcolonial borderworlds, considering specifically the role of memoirs and biographies as sources of knowledge that highlight the feminized and invisible labour that sustains borderworld world-making. In evoking the Thai–Myanmar borderworld, this article thus traces connections between Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma: The Soldier and the Teacher, a memoir of a Karen couple’s decades spent in the Thai–Myanmar borderworld, with interviews and ethnographic vignettes.