Introduction. Sensing (Borders) Introduction. Ressentir (les frontières)

When we first proposed this issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality in Fall 2018, the world was gripped with impending changes and challenges to border regions. The United Kingdom was grappling with the long-term implications of the 2016 Brexit vote. Mass migration continued to flow between North African and Middle Eastern nations and Europe, placing new strains on the European Union amidst a tide of populist politics. In the United States, the Trump administration had turned the North American Free Trade Agreement upside down and was simultaneously demanding completion of a 3,145-kilometer physical wall along the US-Mexican border. The US-Mexico border became one of President Donald Trump’s first and favoured targets. Leveraging the publicity around the migrant caravan through Central America and Mexico, Trump renewed an ongoing campaign to further fortify an already securitized landscape in latching onto the symbolic prospect of fortress America. This blustery proposal served as a political football for much of 2018 while the Trump administration steadily and quietly increased the number of immigrant detainees indefinitely, separating children from their families. At the same time, new anti-immigrant policies sent shockwaves through American immigrant communities as bans on immigration and related measures led to a temporary refugee crisis on America’s other (northern) border. As US visas expired for Syrians, Somalis, Haitians, and others, many traveled north to claim refugee status at rural, makeshift locations on the Canada-US border in a series of surreal scenes at Roxham Road on the Quebec-New York border as well as in the small community of Emmerson, Manitoba. At the time of publication, the world is now gripped with the rapid spread of COVID-19 as many of the world’s major borders have been closed or reduced to an extent not seen since the mid-twentieth century. These political anxieties and unprecedented world events not only call into question how borders operate, but also impact how we collectively imagine border infrastructures and regulations of the future. There is renewed urgency in terms of holding open the complexity of these situations against the tide of neo-nationalism worldwide. In these increasingly polarized times, how do we consider the affective and emotional dimensions of borders and bordering practices? How might we reflect on the temporal and spatial registers of indigeneity and colonization that are thrown into relief when governments enact states of emergency? How are media and material conditions implicated in absorbing and circulating narratives of human experience in borderlands regions? How, where, and when do we sense borders during these periods of rapid change? This issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality was proposed to revisit important shifts in cultural theory from the 1990s stemming from theoretical ideas around borders, liminality, and alterity expressed by a range of scholars, from Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Edward Said and Walter Mignolo. These theoretical paradigms were introduced in the context of fantasies and dreams of a post-1989 “borderless world,” which were circulating in the popular imagination. At the same moment, media philosopher Vilém Flusser’s writings on technology, migration, and cities imagined an emergent planetary urbanism as a borderless social space that is networked, non-site-specific, dynamic, and dialogic; a planetary urbanism represented by new systems of thought grounded in topologies rather than geographies of urban space. In retrospect, the political climate of the 1990s seems to have been more open and tolerant than our current cultural moment. This issue is specifically geared to the affective register of borders across a range of spatial scales. Described in terms of “sensing (borders)/ressentir (les frontières),” the issue draws inspiration from the work of scholars such as Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Walter Mignolo …