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Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere
University of Northampton
Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere. By Richard Robinson. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007. ISBN 978140398720. £45
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THE BORDER topos has been subjected to a variety of critical readings in the past decade or so, signalling the poststructuralist preference for unstable signifiers and its postcolonial offshoots of displacement and the interstice. It is a favoured trope in discussions of those ghostly terrains of history, European or otherwise, where empires and nations collided and changed shape; it articulates the fear of contamination with the other's values (language, habits, etc.), but also celebrates the fluidity of cultures and the mixed nature of national-ethnic identities. The ‘border condition’ is thus simultaneously a signifier of terror and liberation, a political enactment of psychological unease and an aesthetic expression of cultural commonality. Given its plurivalent meaning, it is hardly surprising that it should have acquired a central theoretical status in contemporary discussions of colonisation, nationhood, and cultural memory.
Within this critical context, Richard Robinson's study of shifting European borders in twentieth-century