ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a productive sense of malaise, both personal and disciplinary. It discusses another way of “seeing” European and Latin American borders in their entangled relation, not as lines that mark the ends of separated worlds but rather as a series of interlinked socio-spatial horizons. The chapter suggests that re-inscribe an old geopolitical and imperial border, under whose rubric European metropolitan powers unite on the side of those who inhabit “civilized” borders, confronting together the “abyssal line” of an external, wild and gaucho-infested exterior. The possibility of an inter-border, transatlantic rhythmanalysis would appear to be excluded from contemporary English-language border studies that compare “Europe” and “America”. The normative vacillation in border studies becomes dangerous to the extent that the most cited and applauded texts reproduce the exclusionary, oppressive and deadly nature of contemporary geopolitical bordering, expressed most vividly by the European Union’s practice of migration policy in the Mediterranean.
