Borders without Borderlands

Abstract

Before entering the lift, check whether lift is present or not -Sign in a multistory building in New DelhiThe Idea of the Borderland Since the latter half of the nineteenth century 'borderlands' have been a popular subject in writings ranging from geographical, ethnological, and travel to spiritualist, horror, and occult.1 Adopted from its original geographical usage as a descriptor of frontiers of ecosystems or countries, the term has persisted across disciplines, genres, and time.Over the past century and a half noman's-lands on moors and marshlands, frontiers of empires and civilizations, psychic realms between spirit and matter, and occult spheres dividing this world from the next have each been referred to as 'borderlands.'In all these genres they have been conceived as territorially and socially distinct regions surprisingly like the ecosystems, psychic states, or nation-states at the fringes of which they are found.Both Maud's (1904) Abyssinian borderlands and the ghostly borderlands of Hodgson's (1908) The House on the Borderland are spatially and socially separate lands, whether populated by barbarians or by ghouls.In the course of the twentieth century, the concept of the borderland obtained a new lease on life in the historiography of frontiers, particularly in the study of the American Anglo-Spanish, and more recently the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.

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