ABSTRACT
In his short essay, “The Wall and the Books,” Jorge Luis Borges puzzles out the significance of the fact that the emperor who ordered the construction of the Great Wall of China was the same ruler who ordered the burning of the books. What does it mean that the same person commanded that the empire be bounded by a huge barrier and that all prior history be destroyed? What common mentality (if any) anchors these two attempts to control space and the record of time? The answer to these questions is for Borges only imminent, not yet arrived. That imminence describes as well the as yet unsettled sense we have of our “postborder” condition; it is an imminence hinted at by the artwork displayed in Mixed Feelings (see the portfolio following the Introduction).
