ABSTRACT
Using Reviel Netz’s Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (2004) as a starting point, this chapter focuses specifically on one object, barbed wire, and on the ways in which this object has shaped and continues to shape the flow (the freedom of movement) of people and ideas. Barbed wire, “twisted wires armed with barbs or sharp points – also called barbwire” according to Merriam Webster has been digging into soil and skin, and ensuring that there is always (always will be) an inside and outside. Barbed wire was invented in 1874 in the American Great Plains, and its original purpose was to prevent the movement of animals (of cows) and not of people. Yet the fact that this period also coincides with several colonial wars across the world soon led to new applications for this extremely convenient and affordable tool. Barbed wire, writes Reviel Netz, “opened the way for a new kind of control over colonial space” (59). Moreover, when the razor wire fences were set up at the US-Mexico border in 2018 to stop the so-called caravan, the fences in Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco immediately came to mind. The use of razor wire at the border fences across the world today often leads journalists to evoke the Berlin Wall. Barbed wire fences anywhere are where technological sophistication mixes with cruelty (Boyero, Atencia, Tirandafyllidou). Recent texts about border crossings do not focus so much on the ways in which barbed wire frames the landscapes, but rather on the moments when the barbed wire or the razors cut through skin. Invented to stop the movement of animals, barbed wire may obstruct the movement of people as it inflicts unbearable pain on the bodies of migrants. But it will not stop their movement. There may always be a fence, but there will also always be people crossing the fence. As people cross borders, borders, barbed wire, and razor wire fences quite literally cross them.
