Introduction: Do we really want a return to normal?

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Professor David Theo Goldberg reminds us to comprehend race as the paradox of modernity whereby prolific racial identities come into existence through exclusions that engender, justify, operationalise and encourage them. In the past two decades we have witnessed the emergence of new racial identities whereby white people are self-identifying as non-white. This article argues that Goldberg’s work on ‘conceptual primitives’ within racialized and gendered discourse provides an important way to understand how these epistemic drivers enable the appropriation of Indigenous and Black identities. One of the conceptual primitives – ‘identity’ – manifests in the exercise of white race privilege, entitlement and possessiveness with discursive regularity as will be demonstrated through examining three cases of identity appropriation: Joseph Boyden in Canada, Rachel Dolezal in the USA, and Elizabeth Durack in Australia.
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The White Possessive: Identity matters in becoming Native, Black and Aboriginal

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While critical scholarship on listening as a political practice has flourished in recent years, there remains much work to do on theorising listening as a situated practice in specific contexts, including as a practice that might unsettle settler-colonial relations. In this paper, we extend <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-012_ref_018">Bickford’s (1996)</xref> work on political listening and our own theorisation of situated listening to offer provisional thoughts on the generative potential of refusal, discomfort, attunement and yielding – prompted by the 2017 <italic>Uluru Statement from the Heart</italic> and the broader conditions of listening and being heard in settler colonial Australia. We locate listening within a decolonial framework to extend and unsettle conventional liberal democratic and deliberative modes of listening. First, we argue it is vital to listen to First Nations histories and practices of refusal. Next, we offer attunement to register our differently situated listening positions within colonial networks of privilege and power. Third, we explore the transformative potential of yielding to First Nations’ authority to set the terms, frames and limits of being heard – within, against, and beyond liberal democratic frameworks. Finally, we offer dwelling in discomfort as a location from which to build more just futures, with the sovereignty of First Nations people placed at its heart.
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Dwelling in Discomfort: On the conditions of listening in settler colonial Australia

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This article explores the function of a visitation area of a detention facility and the ways this visitation space affected the detainees’ well-being. This visiting area had a transformative socio-spatial impact through the relationships that developed and the experiences that occurred there. The place of visits provided hope for future permanency for asylum seekers during the liminality of detention and the spatial unsettling of seeking asylum. The focus of this research is on a geography of spaces within the field of carceral geography and the effect of these spaces on people in detention. Of interest is the ways asylum seekers have shown a level of resistance to some of the adverse effects of detention through utilising a visits venue to build a level of resilience.
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A Visits Venue as a Transformative Space for Asylum Seekers in a Detention Facility

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The UK continues to see increasingly restrictive and repressive immigration policies aiming to secure the imagined nation and its citizens, who can claim a genuine right to belong. Underpinning these policies and modes of bordering is a statist framework of governance where relational encounters underpinning belonging and home are ordered hierarchically. The presumption is that legal, temporal and spatial forms of belonging take priority over other emotional and intimate forms of attachment. This article presents findings from a photovoice project carried out in collaboration with people from the asylum seeker and refugee population in the North West of England, and focuses on two themes drawn out of the photographs: bordering and home. The visual methodology was valuable because the photographs made visible often invisible borders such as racism. It was also valuable because participants represented their subjective experiences of the border and relationships with home and belonging, which highlighted the fluid, messy, multiple and contested nature of these relationships. Moreover, it was not possible to order their relationships with different ‘homes’/places hierarchically. Therefore, participants’ self-representations undermine the limited way statist approaches to bordering understand belonging and home.
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Photovoice accounts of borders and home: Asylum seeker and refugee perspectives

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In recent years postcolonialism has shifted from exploring the occidental construction of the orient to exploring the role of the occident’s colonial other, the orient, in these constructions through the act of hybridity; that is, the influence that real colonial others have on Orientalizing discourse. But what if the literal existence of the other being analyzed cannot be substantiated. Through an analysis of various scientific constructions of extraterrestrials, such as the inhabitants of the moon described by Johannes Kepler or the description of faraway alien races by Ronald Bracewell, this essay examines how the methods of otherizing practiced on creatural populations whose existence is believed but unsubstantiated, others for whom hybridity is impossible, are then applied to real colonial subjects. Mirroring the role of the medieval Plinian races of India and Africa in providing a mythical structure for the construction of race during early capitalist expansion in South America, modern extraterrestrials have provided a mythical structure for the construction and maintenance of racialized others.
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Heavenly Bodies: Scientific racism and the taxonomy of extraterrestrial life

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Francis Fukuyama’s work on contemporary problems of identity and recognition portrays liberalism as under threat from the global rise of a reactionary and exclusionary identity politics. For Fukuyama contemporary identity politics, taking place as struggles for recognition and manifestations of resentment, are dangerous, illiberal forms of right-wing populist nationalism. I demonstrate how he appropriates the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ and puts these to use to sustain a version of neoliberal rationality and neoliberal politics. Such an appropriation denies the transformative and radical potential of intersubjective recognition and depoliticises and delegitimises any non-liberal claims and struggles of identity politics that might threaten to disrupt neoliberal political order, security and capitalist accumulation. Fukuyama’s account of identity is dangerous in the way that it legitimises a right-wing nationalist discourse of blame targeted at the mischaracterisation of minority and left-wing ‘identity’ politics, and in the way he detaches a contemporary extremist and right-wing nationalist discourse from the history of a less extreme, but similar, neoliberal nationalist discourse which, since the 1980s, has mobilised the language of identity politics as a political strategy and weapon against progressive political movements and against the welfare state.
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A Dangerous Text: Francis Fukuyama’s Mischaracterisation of Identity, Recognition and Right-Wing Nationalism

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<italic>Interspecies Politics</italic> seeks to reveal how nonhuman actors and agents participate in and generate forms of global political life. Offering a compelling political view of international relations as “already interspecies relations,” it delivers on its central ambition of showing how sovereignty, borders, power, and security—the very core of global politics—can be understood in terms of multispecies practices. An astute challenge to the assumption that “species should be a central barrier to who can be part of global politics,” Interspecies Politics considers—in distinctly political terms—the interspecies complexity of global relations. Appearing within a context of increasing scholarly attention to nonhuman aspects of political life, Youatt’s book provides timely and urgent theoretical innovations rooted in concrete forms of interspecies interaction.
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Toward an Interspecies Politics

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Conceptually, <italic>Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan</italic> is an impressive text, offering both a comparative analysis of Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which are generally considered to be incommensurable, and presenting a dialogue between the two authors, one strongly based in Lacanian theory, the other much closer to Kleinian psychoanalysis. Its ambition is to trace the influence these two psychoanalysts had for the broadly conceptualized critical theory, as well as to suggest some ways in which this encounter can and should be more productive.
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Gains and Risks of Bridging the Seemingly Unbridgeable

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 2 (October 2021)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 2 (January 2019)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Borderlands Journal

Borderlands is a transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences that was founded in Australia in 2001. Since then, it has fostered radical thinking across the borders between disciplines, nations, sexualities, economies, identities, peoples and species, and fostered interplay between rigorous scholarship in philosophy, law, cultural studies, politics, sociology, geography, international relations and the environment. Borderlands' profile in areas such as refugees, indigenous politics, post-and de-colonial theory, biopolitics, post-Marxism, queer theory, race and gender, is especially strong, but the journal remains open to a range of concerns and disciplines.  As the complex discourse and reality of the Anthropocene evolves, Borderlands is opening its pages to work in the environmental humanities, posthumanism, STS, and environmental politics, theory and law. It aims to foster new conjunctions of justice, power, theory and bodies; to connect theory, event and structure in compelling and thoughtful ways.  You can read the Borderlands' manifesto to get a sense of the vision with which we began.  Writing for Borderlands  Borderlands has a global reputation for first-class theorising and innovative conjunctions of theory, event and situated analysis. Borderlands' editorial board includes some of the world's most important social theorists including Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Claire Colebrook, Michael Hardt, Donna Haraway, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Adi Ophir, RBJ Walker and McKenzie Wark. Our rigorous standards and double-blind peer-review process ensures that only the highest-quality work is published. Your work will be published with an open access license - for free - ensuring global and equitable access to your work from readers around the world. And, by publishing with Borderlands, you help support a radical publishing space untainted by big corporate profitmaking and neoliberal elitism.  Past issues of Borderlands  Borderlands issues from 2002-2019 were published under the ISSN 1447-0810 and can be viewed in the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive.  Open Access Policy  This journal provides immediate open access to its content under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and all users are free to share the work (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format), if the contribution is properly attributed and used for non-commercial purposes. The material published in the journal may not be altered or built upon.  All authors who wish to publish in Borderlands must agree to the licensing terms stated above.  ABOUT SOCIETY  The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Environment and Governance Research Group brings together leading international researchers in environmental politics, law and policy, biodiversity, climate security, food systems, and environmental ethics. Our work has a common focus on improving law, public policy and international cooperation in protecting ecosystems and managing the impact of human-induced environmental change. With planet Earth having entered the Anthropocene - the epoch of dramatic human impacts on the Earth’s ecology and systems - our work crosses disciplines and charts paths for improved governance that can support ecological sustainability, and key human interests in health, justice and security, into the long-term future.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.