Where on Earth are you?
 Frances Stonor Saunders

  • Detail from Needle Detail from ‘Needle Series’ No 3 © Stephen Rothschild
Globalisation promised a borderless world, but it has delivered an age of neurotically policed zones and cubicles. To cross a border legally now involves an unprecedented level of scrutiny: fingerprint and iris scans, chips embedded in your passport, hidden sensors to detect your heartbeat and carbon dioxide emissions from thirty feet away, the tick-box confessional of ‘Are you now or have you ever been . . .' Frances Stonor Saunders inspects the complex apparatus of today’s border regimes and their obsession with the verified self.
Source: London Review of Books (LRB)

"The one border we all cross, so often and with such well-rehearsed reflexes that we barely notice it, is the threshold of our own home. We open the front door, we close the front door: it’s the most basic geographical habit, and yet one lifetime is not enough to recount all our comings and goings across this boundary. What threshold rites do you perform before you leave home? Do you appease household deities, or leave a lamp burning in your tabernacle? Do you quickly pat down pockets or bag to check you have the necessary equipment for the journey? Or take a final check in the hall mirror, ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’? ..."
 
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AUTHOR
Sanders Portrait Photo: © Sophia Spring Frances Stonor Saunders is a historian whose work includes Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, which has been translated into 14 languages since it was first published in 1999. She writes for several publications, including the London Review of Books, and earlier this year she gave the LRB Winter Lecture at the British Museum on the subject of borders. This was followed by a three-part series for BBC Radio 4, Borders: An Odyssey. She is currently writing a book on how borders impact our lives.