Of Boundaries, Borders and the In(scription) of the Invisible

Abstract

Of Boundaries, Borders and the In(scription) of the Invisible Boundaries and the discourses of boundaries are, to theorise the least, vast, versatile and taxonomic. In almost all human scientific thoughts, disputations and actions, the inventions and actualities of boundaries are almost, always certain, intended and proliferating. The more attempt to challenge, dismantle or undo boundaries has led to inadvertent erections of other invisible limits and limitations which are themselves absolute agencies of boundaries. My presentation will extend on received understanding of the nature of boundaries and, in that process, engage with categories and implications of boundaries as geographies of containment. I also imagine the Manichean intimations of the term, as extremity and liminality, and its dialectic possibility as the definition of marks and as marker of identity. In literary productions - narrative, dramatic and poetic - the performances of characters, and the compositions of transformations always involve reactions against and responses to features of boundaries and containment. Kinetic readings of the plot of characterisations point at the ubiquity of boundaries which the archetypal man (protagonist/voice) must encounter or manipulate within the structure of the text. Invariably, I posit that boundaries, once erected, are made to be broken, transcended and subverted,just as the discourse of that transcendence is as crucial as the imagination and the artificiality or physicality of the bounded space. As coda, I offer some visible or tangible impressions of the "boundary" as illustrations of its agency in recent inter/national politics and cultural productions. The attempt here is to evoke (a) the event of corporate imperialism (i.e. the South African Marikana memory), (b) the eventuality of internal imperialism (the Nigerian herdsmen outbreak), and (c) the phenomenality of a transgressive speech act (postproverbials), itselfa pointer to the liminal linguistic space between one conventional imagination and its radical other in African culture.