Migrating Borders and Moving Times

Book excerpt: Migrating borders and moving timesanalyses migrant border crossings in relation to their everyday experiences of time and connects these to wider social and political structures. Sometimes border crossing takes no more than a moment; sometimes hours; some crossers find themselves in the limbo of detention; for others, the crossing lasts a lifetime to be interrupted only by death. Borders not only define separate spaces, but different temporalities. This book provides both a single interpretative frame and a novel approach to border crossing: an analysis of the reconfiguration of memory, personal and group time that follows the migrants' renegotiation of cross-border space and recalibrations of temporality.