Walls and Borders: The Range of Place

Palgrave Communications, 2017

Can a border wall really deter invaders and crossers alike, while defending, unifying, and maintaining the "purity" of the culture that it encircles? The first Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang (259-210 BC) and his successors in the following dynasties tried to achieve the purpose; the Great Wall of China testifies timelessly to such epic efforts. Have the Chinese rulers succeeded? The question has become increasingly daunting and unanswerable as history unfolds and evolves. Ironically, over more than two millennia, the piecemeal erection of the Great Wall has indeed sequenced a 'wall-DNA' in a cultural blueprint. Fast forwarding to the 21st century America, we find ourselves asking the same questions when President Trump vows to build a "great, great" wall, physical and impenetrable on the US-Mexico border. The Trump Wall is designed to stop Mexican illegal immigrants entering the US so that Americans' interests will be protected, English language will not be "contaminated", and American values will not be challenged. The Trump wall sets out to delineate what America is and thus attempts to "make America great again". In an intercultural engagement, this article decodes a wall-DNA in American culture, argues that the Trump wll is more of a mental construct than a physical one, and calls for a redefinition of a 21st century American cultural identity, in front of the Trump Wall.

in J. Collins and S. Sen (eds.) Collateral Language: From 9/11 to Endless Wars (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2021)

the newly constructed barrier "blocked one of the worst humanand drug-smuggling corridors in the El Paso Sector. .. [and] immediately altered the entire region's flow of illegal drugs and illegal migrants coming into the United States." 1 This enthusiasm for the (new) wall ignores the limitations of the 654-mile-long barrier that already exists on the U.S.-Mexico border. Admittedly, it does not cover the entire span of the nearly 2,000-mile border. But even in locations where there are barriers, they have done little to stop what President Trump and his supporters consider "illegal immigration." This was all the more evident in April 2016 when a Mexican news crew, filming a story along the border in Nogales, Arizona, was interrupted by two young men climbing over the barrier from Mexico with ease. Once on the American side, they were alarmed by the presence of the news crew recording their every move and were seen frantically communicating over a cell phone. Before long the two men climbed back over thirty-foot barrier, and within moments, they were in Mexico again. 2 Such shortcomings are not unique to the southern border of the United States. The wall in the occupied West Bank was built in 2002 during the Second Intifada, in response to what the Israeli government calls "Palestinian terrorism." It cuts through Palestinian communities, restricts Palestinians' access to clean water and fertile land, and limits their ability to navigate freely the occupied West Bank and

Walling In and Walling Out Why Are We Building New Barriers to Divide Us?, 2020

People have built walls for thousands of years to protect cities, to divide cities and along the borders of polities. This paper examines this process to place modern walls in a historical context and to ask in what ways is modern wall building similar and different from earlier walls. For most of human history, people primarily built walls as military technology. The European invention of cannon in the 16th century radically changed global wall construction. The further development of artillery in the late 19th century as well as tanks and aircraft in the 20th essentially made walls obsolete as military technology. Within cities, walls defined and elaborated ethnic and religious differences but this custom also declined in the 19th century to be revived in the second half of the 20th century. Many walled cites such as Carcassonne in France and long walls such as the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall in England are important parts of global heritage. Modern walls largely lack the military emphasis of earlier walls but retain the power to define, assert, protect, and ultimately polarize radical, ethnic, religious and national identities.

Antiquity, 2023

Hanscam and Buchanan (2023) give us an insightful comparative analysis of Hadrian's Wall and the US/Mexico border wall. Their analysis shows how critically to study and use these long walls in an explicitly political archaeology. I have engaged in archaeology as political action (McGuire 2008), and have researched the materiality of the US/Mexico border while doing humanitarian work along that border (McGuire 2013). Hanscam and Buchanan deftly employ archaeology as a political tool to challenge capitalist ideologies about borders. They plead for a politically relevant archaeology that engages the past to address modern issues. Without such relevance, they fear that archaeology will be made redundant. I emphatically agree with them that an activist archaeology makes our discipline more relevant. I fear, however, that these politics may be our demise rather than our salvation.

Law and Critique, 2009

After the demolition of the Berlin Wall (1989), the construction of the Palestinian Wall from 2002 and the passing of The Secure Fence Act of 2006 (governing the US–Mexico border) enact a return to mural forms of sovereignty: walls are both without and within law, ‘old solutions’ to problems newly-made. While the Berlin Wall is considered a Cold War monument, both the Palestinian Wall and the ‘Secure Fence’ concretize the paradoxical reappearance of ancient territorializing strategies in a post-Cold War New World Order. These paradoxes are related to the coincidence of intensive and extensive forms of contemporary sovereignty: the contraction of a narrowed sovereign border accompanied by the projection of an extended sovereign power. These mural structures are considered in the context of the renovation of Ground Zero, Franz Kafka’s story ‘The Great Wall of China’, and Dan Perjovschi’s mural ‘What Happened to US?’ (Museum of Modern Art 2007).

Focus, 2016

eginning as an simple utilitarian element to defend a place or one s home from e ternal threats, a wall re ects a societ s culture alls e press territorialit and are e ident s mbols of the percei ed relationship between the public and pri ate realms e i and del Rio discuss wh understanding the meaning of walls is fundamental for planners and urban designers, and for an attempt to design and regulate place

Arts and Design Studies, 2013

Is architecture an art of wall design? Why the Man had created the wall? Do we need all walls that we built? What are the urban consequences of building walls? Is safety one of major reasons for creating the walls? How mass communication can contribute to safe living environments with fewer and better walls?

Walls that divide are meant to be broken down. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legacy of the East-West division can still be seen in the city's architecture, economy and overall culture. This paper examines Berlin's spatial and political history from the wall's beginnings to the long-term repercussions still being felt today.