ABSTRACT
Border Fetishisms, the title of this collection, is deliberately oxymoronic. Neither here nor there, past or future, fully absent or unambiguously present, the notion of a border fetish is meant precisely to foreground the unresolvable oscillations, the restless toing-and-froing, and the cultural, commercial, and political crossings that distinguish fetish formations. In the wake of Pietz’s illuminating genealogy of the fetish as an idea-problem in which the historic trajectory of the word itself and the fetish’s specificity to situations of encounter emerge as crucial, the present volume focuses on a variety of border fetishisms in which different economies of the object and distinct valuations of things, persons, and their relations are at play (Pietz 1985; 1987; 1988; cf. Apter & Pietz 1993). In this view the concept of the fetish is intimately linked to the history of European expansion, to the discourses and power relations developed within novel cross-cultural landscapes, as well as to the Enlightenment elaboration of fetishism to typify precisely that which was held to be irrational, misguided, founded on fancy or “caprice.” Since first described outside of Europe by Portuguese and then Dutch merchant-adventurers as the pidgin fetisso on the Gold and Slave coasts of West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fetish has been a composite, border phenomenon.
