North America

This collection of essays pays attention to the biopolitical intricacies surrounding borders, with a particular focus on the Global North, encompassing North America and Europe. It dwells on the growing importance of biopolitical perspectives in Cultural Border Studies and aims at re-thinking Europe and the Americas through the crises and challenges they pose. By scrutinizing biopolitics, the negotiation of crises, and the state of exception in literature, the arts, and political discourse, this thematic issue probes the multifaceted dimensions of biopolitical control, highlighting the interplay between state authority and the lives of those impacted by these regulations. Border biopolitics then emerges as a complex nexus of authority, surveillance, control, and management of human lives on, at, and across borders.