ABSTRACT
The world we repair may not look like the world before the nation-state colonized our worldliness. Indeed, the work of repair is not to make it like it was before, as a kind of nostalgia for a lost past, but rather it is to transform the closures of national borders where refugees are interned, into the gracious opening and companionship of Borderlanders. Nomads and tribes are now regarded as ethnological curiosities to be studied as remnants of a “backward” past, but they once traversed borderlands with elaborate traditions of hospitality, for welcoming the stranger. As the multi-ethnic and multi-religious empires of the long durée came to be replaced not just by the nation-state but rather national empires, it did so by inventing and instituting a cleavage, a structural violence, between the civilized and uncivilized, colonizer and colonized, European and non-European, white and non-white, modern and traditional, progressive and backward, and so on.
