The Border Wall Imaginary at the End of the World

Jenny Stümer

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2025, vol. 40, issue 3, 523-542

Abstract: What can the border wall tell us about the end of the world? As anthropogenic violence fastens its grip, border walls have been increasingly flaunted as a way to mitigate fears about viral, ecological, and human invasion in the name of climate security. The paper suggests that border walls help stage investments in the end of the world that are steeped in a kind of anthropogenic “impasse of the present,” (Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press) while framing collective imaginaries about the future. Such walls visually perform an erroneous form of sovereignty that rescripts biopolitical continuity through the fantasy of hegemonic death and simultaneously shield their proprietors from the violent conditions of their own susceptible safety. The paper unpacks these tensions in terms of the entanglement between world ending fantasies, the affective modalities of walling and the continuation of colonial violence. Articulating precisely those defenses and openings that project what kinds of “worlds” and “ends” are imaginable in the first place, the wall as a material and symbolic medium gives form to apocalyptic anxieties as they leak into dominant cultural imaginaries and thereby helps to think through the links between crisis, security, and visual culture.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2023.2301082

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