ABSTRACT
This chapter explores memorialisation along the US-Mexico border as a means of exploring the ordering and bordering mechanisms of statecraft. It first addresses bordering as a mechanism of statecraft through an analysis of the border wall along the US-Mexico border. The border wall, then, is one physical structure in a wider context of territorial enforcement by the state in a globalised age that is de-emphasising territory, amidst a variety of contested and contingent narratives of statecraft. The chapter explains the particular instances of hauntological resistances to statecraft, hauntological because they draw attention to the ontological construction of life and death by the state, and specifically the way the state intervenes in life and death in border zones. It focuses on three artists and their installations: first, Valarie James and her memorials to border crossers, secondly, Neil Bernstein's sculpture, 'Golden Gates/Bridge over Troubled Borders', and thirdly, Oaxacan artist Alejandro Santiago and his 2501 Migrants sculptures.
