The crossing of borders constantly saturates the news. Their situation on the contours on countries contributes to creating the image of borders as static spatial arrangements, and as marginal to our way of thinking. This talk reassesses the nature and the power of borders as epistemic tools. Borders and boundaries move, contract, and expand as they reconfigure both the outside and the inside. Thus the talk relocates the violence of exclusion to the inside, to a middle territory that we can term insideoutness. As a consequence, the production and reproduction of alterity does not stop at the geopolitical border but spreads to the inside, as the exterior border refracts into interior borders.

The analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Boundary” illustrates all these processes as the inside transforms into different outsides. Through an example of the hospitality industry, the writer examines how an unnamed country protects itself from alterity, and how difference is rerouted and silenced. It is Lahiri’s way of tracing the wide spectrum of borders that create and perpetuate what Bauman calls “the outsider incarnate”.