ABSTRACT

This chapter explores a series of border dynamics in order to delve into this transversal perspective, and concludes with Steven Spielberg’s 2004 movie The Terminal. The terminal can be envisioned as another city in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The encounters we analyze exhibit what we term “the logic of detention,” a logic implicit to border crossing. It seems, therefore, that talking about a narrative of location automatically implies talking about a narrative of dislocation. And there is hardly any site where this dialectics of location and dislocation is more explicit than at the thresholds of nations, especially if these thresholds intersect with non-places, rest areas, detention areas, and airport terminals. In order to unfold these spatial, cultural, and linguistic intersections, we start with a general vision of the line, what could be called an anatomy of the border, and continue with a few instances of border crossings and their ensuing thresholds.