CFP for MESA 2023 in Montreal — Frontier Effects: Borders, Peripheries, and the Territorial Limits of States and Empires in Northern Africa and Southwest Asia
What are the institutional arrangements and organizational forms of human life that create the effect of frontiers? Frontiers are paradoxically geographical zones that imaginatively and materially embody social, economic, and political liminality while otherwise generating immense levels of state and imperial anxiety. Frontiers — the frontier effect — must be produced by ideas, by bodies, by material infrastructures, and by new configurations of human and non-human relations; and yet frontiers are essential spaces of production, making livelihoods and (in)securities possible.
