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Tracing and theorizing the concept of the boundaries through literary works, visual objects and cultural phenomena, this book argues against the reification of boundaries as fixed and empty non-spaces that simply divide the world. Expanding on her previous work on gender and Orientalism, Inge Boer takes us into uncertain territories of fashion and art, tourism and travel, skilfully engaging the ambivalence of boundaries, as both protecting and confining, as bringing distinction while existing by virtue of their ability to be transgressed. In her close readings of that boundaries as desert, as frame, as home (or lack of it), Boer shows that boundaries are spaces within, through, and in the name of which negotiations take place. They are not lines but spaces ; neither fixed nor empty but flexible and inhabited.With the publication of this book, Boer's intellectual legacy stretches beyond her untimely passing. The writings that she left behind can be said to have inaugurated the future of her work, presented in the latter part by several of Boer's intellectual companions. In their original essays, the contributors elaborate on Boer's theme of boundaries as spaces where opposition yields to negotiation. Committed to the artefact as cultural stimulant, as the embodiment of thought, their analyses span a multitude of artefacts and media, ranging from literature to photography, to art installation and presentation, to film and song. Fanning out from Boer 's central focus - Orientalism - to other places of contestation, boundaries are shown to mediate the relationship between self and other ; they are, ultimately, spaces of encounter. Intro -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Editors' Preface -- Introduction -- Boundaries in the Age of Globalization -- Boundaries as Confrontations, Lines and Obstacles -- Travelling Theory -- Spaces for Negotiation -- Part I: The Function of Boundaries -- 1. The World Beyond my Window: Nomads, Travelling Theories and the Function of Boundaries -- Feminism's Travels -- More Metaphors of Travel -- Urban Desert -- Feminism as Tourism -- 2. Public Violence Hits Home: Civil War and the Destruction of Privacy -- When Home and the World Melt Together -- Writing for Life -- The Newness that Remains -- 3. Uncertain Territories: Travel as Exchange -- Imagining Boundaries -- The Difficulty of "Writing About -- The Traveller's Eye -- The Ambiguous Act of Unveiling -- Conclusion -- Part II: Matter In and Out of Space -- 4. No-Man's-Land? Deserts and the Politics of Place -- Desert as a Platitude -- Deserts and the Oriental Other -- How Empty Spaces Get Their Name -- An Exploded Sense of Desert -- Inhabited Tracks -- 5. Just a Fashion? Cultural Cross-Dressing -- On Sexiness Today -- Contemporary Odalisks -- Turqueries and Masquerades -- Exchanging Information, Negotiating Power -- Cross-Dressing the In-Between -- Revisiting Boundaries -- 6. Border Fetishism: Negotiable Authenticity -- Authenticity and Framing -- Contested Presence -- Rituals of Imitation -- Death Wish to Cult Value -- Touring Absences -- Intertextuality and Frameworks -- A Final Tour d'Horizon -- Part III: Placing Inge E. Boer -- 7. Impressions Of Character: Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist -- Impressionism -- Hybridity -- Travesty -- Mimicry -- Nomadism -- The Portrait Peels (Off) -- 8. From Travelogue to Ethnography and Back Again? Hilma Granqvist's Writings and Photographs -- Out of History I -- Out of History II -- On Dressing Styles and Women's Subordination -- Karen Seger.
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