This chapter beckons historians of US international and transnational relations to borders – those spaces at which different systems of meaning and organization intersect.

Borders – both territorial and symbolic – can be messy places. They may produce conflict, demoralization, fear, and oppression. They may generate attraction, hybridization, creativity, and liberation. Borders are not one way or they would not be borders. The Berlin Wall marked a border. The metropolitan area of San Diego and Tijuana straddles a border. The journal Diplomatic History has been most controversial, and most successful, when it has pushed the borders of its field of study. All of these provide apt, but different, metaphors of the dangers and opportunities represented at borders. As conflicted zones, borders may be unsettled and postmodern in fostering juxtapositions, and – for that reason – they often raise concerns over control and become sites for oppression and policing as well as for resistance, imagination, and even emancipation.

Writing histories of US foreign relations is involved with – and complicated by – borders. Traditional scholarship in diplomatic history dealt largely with bounded states in a fairly defined international system. More recently, scholarship shifted toward a revised nomenclature called “America and the World” and toward transnational themes in which economic and cultural interactions, especially among nonstate actors, have become more visible. In addition, historians of America and the World now work within a larger universe of scholarly discourse that blurs disciplinary borders and debates the saliency of modernist categories and assumptions about the writing of history. Interrogating the borders of politics and power, of culture and knowledge, has been transformative. This chapter, in encouraging readers to think about borders of all kinds, considers some influential theoretical frames and reflects upon various directions suggested by recent scholarship.

MAKING MEANING ALONG BORDERS: OTHERING AND CONTACT ZONES

The border between “West” and “East,” “Occident” and “Orient,” is surely one of the most structuring, and also contentious, frameworks in global politics. Edward Said's Orientalism, a seminal work that has framed academic conversations for over three decades, is an appropriate place to begin a discussion of border-creation. Although Orientalism deals with Western representations of the Middle East, the implications of Said's work – and the debates generated by its many critics – extend far more broadly.