Fifteen pieces that reimagine border and migration
September 12, 2022
This list is part of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of The Margins, which highlights portions of the magazine’s archive organized around a theme.
The border is more than just a line on a map, or the edge of a place. National borders shape a person’s relationship to others, to how and when one can move, and what rights one holds. While migration is a means to survive, the border is a form of violence. Over the past ten years, our writers have touched upon immigration politics, legacies of war and colonialism, and belonging. They have reminded us that borders exist in many more places than we might realize. The threat the border imposes can become metaphor, in the body, in our experience of grief, in the way we shape identities, and in how we move across these boundaries and work to obliterate them as well.
Read the full list below.
Pieces from top to bottom, left to right:
- “We Are Not Illegal”
by Sukong Hong (2012) - “Being Watched”
by Adnan Khan (2014) - “All This Paper”
by Joseph Han (2016) - “Immigration in A”
by K-Ming Chang (2017) - “The Paperless ‘Palestinian’ and the Russian P’liceman”
by Philip Metres (2017) - “JFK Airport”
by Celina Su (2017) - “AAWW TV: The Body and Migration”
featuring Vi Khi Nao, Brandon Shimoda, and Celina Su (2018) - “Nepalis Fight for TPS”
by Pearl Bhatnagar (2018) - “This Is Not the Dawn: Poetry of Partition”
by Adeeba Talukder, Momina Mela, Zia Ather, Sreshtha Sen, Tanzila Ahmed, Faisal Mohyuddin, and Fatimah Asghar (2018) - “The Border Against Belonging”
by Asa Drake (2018) - “Thresholds: A Story of Family Across Indigenous and Settler Histories in Northeast India”
by Xewali (2020) - “Broken Ghazal, Before Balfour: Two Poems by George Abraham”
by George Abraham (2020) - “Taking Up Each Other’s Cause: The War in Tigray and India’s State Violence in Kashmir”
by Simi Kadirgamar (2021) - “Queering Time // Queering Tense”
by AMA (2021) - “Zuihitsu for the New Diaspora”
by Sahar Muradi (2022)
