ABOUT THE BOOK
Publication date: March 1, 2020
Paperback: 216 pages
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN-10: 1496220412
ISBN-13: 978-1496220417
Borderline Citizen
University of Nebraska Press, March 2020
Rushing to his seat on a plane headed to Hong Kong from Moscow, where he had minutes to spare before his visa expired, Robin Hemley put his U.S. passport on his tray table. This simple act provoked his seatmate, an energetic and disillusioned Ukrainian, to ask: “You patriot?” compelling Hemley to muse on the question for years. A travel writer drawn to obscure and intriguing places (enclaves, exclaves, and overseas territories among them), he journeyed far afield as he sought to understand what it means to belong to a nation, and what it means to go outside the borders of that nation.
In BORDERLINE CITIZEN he tells vivid, thought-provoking, deeply personal, and sometimes humorous stories of people and places on the margins. He takes us to a “British pub to outdo all British pubs” in the Falkland Islands, a cemetery in a small town in Northern Italy for WWI soldiers whose deaths were “strikingly meaningless,” to a European outpost of Russia in the former German city of Konigsberg for Russian Federation Day, and to Omaha, Nebraska to visit one of the world’s largest indoor rainforests. He introduces us to a young Afghan refugee barely hanging on in Australia, an outspoken black nationalist living in exile in Cuba with 32 FBI warrants against her, and a Chinese billionaire whose ornate mansion in his impoverished ancestral village boasts among many classical Chinese statues a “statue of an American soldier, machine gun in hand,” just to cover all the bases. We meet many whose sense of patriotism or nationalism has been strengthened or cut adrift by circumstance and history and who help him make a case for his own multiple sense of belonging.
Part memoir, part travelogue, part reportage, and part meditation on the borders that divide us and bring us together, BORDERLINE CITIZEN, in the words of author Ira Sukrungruang, “brings to light the power of place, the echoes of hope even in desolation, and reminds us that in every land there are people living and surviving and loving.”
Praise for Borderline Citizen
"In these days of ultra-nationalism comes a surprising antidote in Robin Hemley's cabinet of curiosities, Borderline Citizen, his account of his journeys to the "bits and bobs" of national territories stranded by accidents of geography, history, and stubbornness. Hemley is a delightful guide, but there are serious questions for him to explore here as well--and lessons for all the mainlands and mother countries about the meaning and price of national identity. Quite possibly the most original travel book published in years."
– Jeff Sharlet, author of This Brilliant Darkness and The Family
“In Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood, Robin Hemley explodes the very idea of nationhood, and in so doing, re-defines it, offering a more thoughtful and humane notion of how to be a citizen of our world today. These essays traverse the world’s “exclaves” and “enclaves” — politically curious locations which belong to more than one nation, or are far flung from their sovereign nation, or are borderline existential spaces of cultures, religions, languages. His writing bridges the deeply personal across histories and political realities. These “dispatches” are travel writing at its best, where the writer delves into the intimacies of foreign places, seeing beyond their exotic surfaces, in search of a global humanity. Brilliantly comic, darkly but poignantly introspective, Borderline Citizen should be required reading for the 21st century and beyond.”
– Xu Xi, author of This Fish is Fowl, Essays of Being
“Someone draws a line and you must not cross it. Someone draws a line and what over here is theirs and what over there is ours. Someone draws a line--on one side freedom, the other tyranny, and sometimes you can't tell the difference. Someone draws a line. In Robin Hemley's newest creation, Borderline Citizen, he traverses the globe interrogating ideas of home and (inter)national identity. Hemley brings to light the power of place, the echoes of hope even in desolation, and reminds us that in whatever land there is people living and surviving and loving. This is not a "grass is always greener" book, but rather one that paints the world as always green, should always be green, no matter what shadows that try to dim it.”
– Ira Sukrungruang, author of Buddha’s Dog and Other Meditations