Stephen Wolfe

Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders: Introduction to the Dossier

Abstract The cultural production of borders can be as read as referring to part of the economy, as an aesthetic site of creativity and border negotiation, and a cultural factor in the bordering process. The need to understand these cultural dimensions of borders and borderlands has lead to interdisciplinary interest in narratives, aesthetic forms, and cultural memory. Border poetics and related forms of spatial poetics can provide fruitful approaches to specific literary texts, films and other artworks, as well as to bordering in general. This special dossier for the Journal of Borderlands Studies presents papers from the 2008 ABS European conference in Kirkenes, which had “Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders” as its theme and which brought together a wide range of researchers from both the social sciences and the humanities, raising questions about the role of culture in borderlands and also focusing on borders in Sub‐Arctic Europe. The following selection of papers addresses films, poetry, novels and cultural heritage connected to specific topographical borderlands.

A Happy English Colonial Family in 1950s London?: Immigration, Containment and Transgression in The Lonely Londoners

Abstract The essay uses The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon to investigate the experience of migration from the Caribbean to London in the 1950s. The argument centres on the hegemonic ideology of the ‘English Colonial Family’, both as a Commonwealth of Nations and as a domestic national family. Three forms of disorientation from this family are examined: disorientation based on racial prejudice, disorientation based upon the migrants’ outsider position within the colonial policing structures of the State and the media, and the disorientation of the characters’ excursions throughout London. The final section of the essay examines the migrant communitys response as they negotiate places within London and within new forms of creative action.

Introduction: Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders

The essays in this issue of Nordlit focus on how historical and contemporary border discourses, expressive and aesthetic representations, are generated, circulated, and interpreted in both local and global contexts.