Forthcoming Book: Building Walls and Dissolving Borders, Edited by Max Stephenson and Laura Zanotti

Building Walls and Dissolving Borders

The Challenges of Alterity, Community and Securitizing Space

Forthcoming book edited by Max Stephenson and Laura Zanotti, both at Virginia Tech

“This tough-minded and lucid collection offers
a tour of the barriers—both physical and immaterial— that have divided the planet into festering territories of animosity. Investigating sites both familiar and singular, these essays reveal the ironic tenacity
of the building of walls in a globalized era in which the production of the very idea of an inside and
an outside is radically destabilized.”

—Michael Sorkin, City University of New York

This book explores walls as the consequence
of a changing web of social relationships. Whether walls are physical objects on the landscape or metaphors for difference among specific groups or communities, the writers consider them as heterotopias, powerful sites around which ways
of living together are contested and transformed. They also investigate how architectural planning concerning walls may de facto become a means of waging war, as well as how demolishing walls may give way to new ways of imagining security.

Contents: Introduction: building walls, unmaking borders: the securitization of space and the making of community imagination, Max Stephenson, Jr. and Laura Zanotti. Part i: Walling sPaces, making identity: Bordering violence? Natality and alterity in Hannah Arendt’s thought, Alexander D. Barder and François Debrix; Bamboo walls and culture: military dependents’ villages of Taiwan, Tsungjuang Wang; Gates not walls as a securitization strategy: gated communities and market
rate co-operatives in New York, Setha Low, Gregory Donovan and Jennifer Gieseking; Tinkering with space: heterotopic walls and the privileged imaginary of the ‘new Belfast,’ Scott Tate.
Part ii: enclosing a PoroUs World, secUritizing the movement oF PeoPle: Inside-outside, M. Alaa Mandour; Design as defense, broken barriers and the security spectacle at the US-Mexico border, Timothy W. Luke; Peacekeeping power practices
and women’s insecurity in Haiti, Marsha Henry and Paul Higate. Part iii: Walls and the hybridization oF memory: Reading trails and inscriptions around an old bus-house in Monarga, North Cyprus, Yonca Hurol and Guita Farivarsadri; Cultural memory after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the case of Checkpoint Charlie, Carolyn Loeb and Andreas Luescher. Part iv: conclUsion: Conclusion, Max Stephenson, Jr. and Laura Zanotti; Index.

April 2013 210 pages


Hardback 978-1-4094-3835-9 $99.95 ebook PDF 978-1-4094-3836-6
ebook ePUB 978-1-4094-7345-9