Walls, barriers, barricades, borders are lines (real and imaginary) reified to divide, define, and contain, but there are also borderlands and border crossings which necessarily blur and defy arbitrary lines and lead to rethinking notions of belonging and belongings. Crossing borders is not simply the hot button issue of neo-nationalists, but also as Édouard Glissant has suggested in The Poetics of Relation, a fundamental aspect of identity in the West. The papers here allow for a lively sub-disciplinary crossing--how the border crossings of the past might inform our thinking about territory, citizenship, and exile today, and in turn how today's debates about borders, refugees, and belonging might inform how we read the past. As esoteric as early modern studies can be, this panel speaks simultaneously of the past and the present and resonates with other vital fields represented by the MLA: LatinX and ChicanX studies, diasporic studies, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, and so forth.

This panel may be viewed as a complement to the guaranteed session, "Border Crossings in Early Modern England." At the same time this panel differs from "Border Crossings" in significant ways. Whereas "Border Crossings" focuses on Shakespeare and Shakespearean afterlives, "Crossing Borders" is non-Shakespearean, and in that sense less canonical, in nature. Moreover, the papers in this proposed panel aim at interrogating concepts of citizenship and belonging in the context of early modern migrations even as our own historical juncture examines concepts like birthright citizenship and the status of refugees.

Tonhi Lee’s paper provides a novel reading of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia while also considering the way “migration constitutes an alternative and largely unexplored category of political action.” Examining the boy actor in Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, Casey Caldwell notes the way the boy is framed as a “stranger,” thus opening up a vital discussion of crossing generes and geopolitical borders. James Sutton rounds out this discussion with reflections on exile as a way of being in the early modern and modern world.

While distinct, this session complements and deepen the discussion in the guaranteed session. And these two sessions together importantly bring together scholars at different stages in their careers: Chamberlain is recently retired; Espinosa is a full professor; Vomero Santos and Sutton are associate professors; Lee is an assistant professor; Caldwell and Kello are contingent faculty. It seems important to traverse these hierarchical boundaries to foster connections across ranks.