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American Lives
Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood
In Borderline Citizen Robin Hemley wrestles with what it means to be a citizen of the world, taking readers on a singular journey through the hinterlands of national identity. As a polygamist of place, Hemley celebrates Guy Fawkes Day in the contested Falkland Islands; Canada Day and the Fourth of July in the tiny U.S. exclave of Point Roberts, Washington; Russian Federation Day in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad; Handover Day among protesters in Hong Kong; and India Day along the most complicated border in the world.
Forgoing the exotic descriptions of faraway lands common in traditional travel writing, Borderline Citizen upends the genre with darkly humorous and deeply compassionate glimpses into the lives of exiles, nationalists, refugees, and others. Hemley’s superbly rendered narratives detail these individuals, including a Chinese billionaire who could live anywhere but has chosen to situate his ornate mansion in the middle of his impoverished ancestral village, a black nationalist wanted on thirty-two outstanding FBI warrants exiled in Cuba, and an Afghan refugee whose intentionally altered birth date makes him more easy to deport despite his harrowing past.
Part travelogue, part memoir, part reportage, Borderline Citizen redefines notions of nationhood through an exploration of the arbitrariness of boundaries and what it means to belong.
Forgoing the exotic descriptions of faraway lands common in traditional travel writing, Borderline Citizen upends the genre with darkly humorous and deeply compassionate glimpses into the lives of exiles, nationalists, refugees, and others. Hemley’s superbly rendered narratives detail these individuals, including a Chinese billionaire who could live anywhere but has chosen to situate his ornate mansion in the middle of his impoverished ancestral village, a black nationalist wanted on thirty-two outstanding FBI warrants exiled in Cuba, and an Afghan refugee whose intentionally altered birth date makes him more easy to deport despite his harrowing past.
Part travelogue, part memoir, part reportage, Borderline Citizen redefines notions of nationhood through an exploration of the arbitrariness of boundaries and what it means to belong.
- GenresNonfiction
216 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2020
4 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
About the author
Robin Hemley
35 books34 followersRobin Hemley has published seven books of nonfiction and fiction. His latest book, Invented Eden, The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday deals with a purported anthropological hoax in the Philippines. James Hamilton Paterson, writing in the London Review of Books, call Invented Eden, "brave and wholly convincing." John Leonard writes in Harpers, "Besides a terrific story, Invented Eden is a savvy caution." Invented Eden was an American Library Association's Editor's Choice book for 2003.
Robin Hemley co-edited the anthology Extreme Fiction:Fabulists and formalists with Michael Martone, and is the author of the memoir, Nola: A Memoir Of Faith, Art And Madness, which won an Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction. His popular craft book Turning Life Into Fiction, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection as well as a Quality Paperback Book Club Selection has sold over 40,000 copies and will soon be reissued by Graywolf Press. He is also the author of the novel, The Last Studebaker and the story collections, The Big Ear and All You Can Eat.
His awards for his fiction include, The Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune, The George Garrett Award for Fiction from Willow Springs, the Hugh J. Luke Award from Prairie Schooner, two Pushcart Prizes, and many others. He has published his work in many of the best literary magazines in the country, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Willow Springs, Boulevard, Witness, ACM, North American Review, and many others. His fiction has been widely anthologized, translated, and heard on NPR's "Selected Shorts" and others. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Western Washington Univeristy, St. Lawrence University, Vermont College, and the University of Utah, and in many Summer writing conferences. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review for five years.
Robin Hemley co-edited the anthology Extreme Fiction:Fabulists and formalists with Michael Martone, and is the author of the memoir, Nola: A Memoir Of Faith, Art And Madness, which won an Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction. His popular craft book Turning Life Into Fiction, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection as well as a Quality Paperback Book Club Selection has sold over 40,000 copies and will soon be reissued by Graywolf Press. He is also the author of the novel, The Last Studebaker and the story collections, The Big Ear and All You Can Eat.
His awards for his fiction include, The Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune, The George Garrett Award for Fiction from Willow Springs, the Hugh J. Luke Award from Prairie Schooner, two Pushcart Prizes, and many others. He has published his work in many of the best literary magazines in the country, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Willow Springs, Boulevard, Witness, ACM, North American Review, and many others. His fiction has been widely anthologized, translated, and heard on NPR's "Selected Shorts" and others. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Western Washington Univeristy, St. Lawrence University, Vermont College, and the University of Utah, and in many Summer writing conferences. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review for five years.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 10, 2020
We live in an age where for many of us travel is considered a right. Given the environmental cost of travel and the way that much of it is merely to provide diversion from everyday lives, it was refreshing and reassuring to read Robin Hemley’s introduction to Borderline Citizens, in which he expressed the desire for his travel to have a purpose. Before we even approach the fascinating work that Hemley has put together, this is an important issue for me.
I find myself increasingly caught in a tension of beliefs between a radical localism and a global outlook and I see good writing as a crucial balance to that tension. Humans are having a devastating impact on the world around us and this is the main driver for my desire to live a local life that reduces my negative impact on the planet and (hopefully) ultimately can make it a positive, regenerative impact. At the same time, however, I have grown up in an age where technology has made the whole world more accessible to me and I have seen the benefits of shared journeys and experience and of understanding my place in that broader context.
It is important that we have connectors who can bring back stories and link our local communities to the bigger picture, without the need for all of us to jump on a plane. Robin Hemley fits this role perfectly, aware of the importance of what he is doing and the obligation he owes to the earth to ensure that his travel adds value far beyond him as an individual. In doing so, he presents in Borderline Citizens a series of insights from a range of settings that sit precariously on the edges of nationhood and lead us to question the meaning and value of the nation state.
The stories are diverse. A refugee exiled to an island off Australia to prevent him making a new life for himself and simply trying to do as many good things as he can before being sent back to Afghanistan where he expects to be killed. The Union Jacks that fly across the Falkland Islands clinging to a culture 8,000 miles away that bears little resemblance to the reality of life in the South Atlantic and stifles its own emerging identity. The confused identity of being India surrounded by Bangladesh and vice versa. The people of Manila remembering the horrors of Japanese destruction during WW2 with a strange mix of brutality and humour.
Each of the stories is enlightening, but taken together they leave the reader with a deep recognition that people are people and our national identities, especially when feeding a sense of nationalism, drive us apart and seek to separate us, rather than bring us together. That is not to say that humanity should be homogenised, our local cultures are hugely important as they are forged from life in that place and hold the handed down wisdom of generations adapting to climate, soil and the local environment. When that culture develops into nationalism, however, and seeks to build up one at the expense of an “other” it turns from an inclusive positive to a divisive negative.
Borderline Citizens is part of a proud heritage of travel writing that helps us to understand each other in a way that allows us to be different but united. We are able to celebrate the different experiences and environments that have shaped our distinct cultures while accepting each other as fundamentally the same. We can share, empathise and learn from each other without any need or desire to compete or feel superior, knowing that our differences are not judgments to be decided better or worse, but journeys to be shared and enjoyed.
As we transition into a new decade it feels like this is a message we need more than ever as we see Western democracies turning increasingly to populist voices of national identity. The winning messages in recent years have been about building walls and separating from our neighbours, when the crises we face as a species need us to collaborate rather than compete. We need to hear more stories like those Robin Hemley is sharing, but we also need to find a way of telling them that can be absorbed into our collective conscience as effectively as the snappy soundbites of populist nationalism. That is an enormous challenge, but somewhere in the solution is a place for good writing such as this and I commend it to you.
I find myself increasingly caught in a tension of beliefs between a radical localism and a global outlook and I see good writing as a crucial balance to that tension. Humans are having a devastating impact on the world around us and this is the main driver for my desire to live a local life that reduces my negative impact on the planet and (hopefully) ultimately can make it a positive, regenerative impact. At the same time, however, I have grown up in an age where technology has made the whole world more accessible to me and I have seen the benefits of shared journeys and experience and of understanding my place in that broader context.
It is important that we have connectors who can bring back stories and link our local communities to the bigger picture, without the need for all of us to jump on a plane. Robin Hemley fits this role perfectly, aware of the importance of what he is doing and the obligation he owes to the earth to ensure that his travel adds value far beyond him as an individual. In doing so, he presents in Borderline Citizens a series of insights from a range of settings that sit precariously on the edges of nationhood and lead us to question the meaning and value of the nation state.
The stories are diverse. A refugee exiled to an island off Australia to prevent him making a new life for himself and simply trying to do as many good things as he can before being sent back to Afghanistan where he expects to be killed. The Union Jacks that fly across the Falkland Islands clinging to a culture 8,000 miles away that bears little resemblance to the reality of life in the South Atlantic and stifles its own emerging identity. The confused identity of being India surrounded by Bangladesh and vice versa. The people of Manila remembering the horrors of Japanese destruction during WW2 with a strange mix of brutality and humour.
Each of the stories is enlightening, but taken together they leave the reader with a deep recognition that people are people and our national identities, especially when feeding a sense of nationalism, drive us apart and seek to separate us, rather than bring us together. That is not to say that humanity should be homogenised, our local cultures are hugely important as they are forged from life in that place and hold the handed down wisdom of generations adapting to climate, soil and the local environment. When that culture develops into nationalism, however, and seeks to build up one at the expense of an “other” it turns from an inclusive positive to a divisive negative.
Borderline Citizens is part of a proud heritage of travel writing that helps us to understand each other in a way that allows us to be different but united. We are able to celebrate the different experiences and environments that have shaped our distinct cultures while accepting each other as fundamentally the same. We can share, empathise and learn from each other without any need or desire to compete or feel superior, knowing that our differences are not judgments to be decided better or worse, but journeys to be shared and enjoyed.
As we transition into a new decade it feels like this is a message we need more than ever as we see Western democracies turning increasingly to populist voices of national identity. The winning messages in recent years have been about building walls and separating from our neighbours, when the crises we face as a species need us to collaborate rather than compete. We need to hear more stories like those Robin Hemley is sharing, but we also need to find a way of telling them that can be absorbed into our collective conscience as effectively as the snappy soundbites of populist nationalism. That is an enormous challenge, but somewhere in the solution is a place for good writing such as this and I commend it to you.
January 7, 2020
It's the 1st of January and I just stumbled home from a rather exciting NYE with former neighbours turned friends. Many of us are expatriates who've made London home.
One of the conversations we, have after countdown and singing "Auld Lang Syne", is how we identify more with being Londoners than wherever we moved from.
That conversation made me curious about books written about this complex feeling of identity we have when we move cities or countries.
When I picked up Robin's book, I was expecting he'd express the conundrums of being a nomad (voluntary or involuntary).
I was not disappointed.
He told stories of people who were forced to flee their countries due to wars or persecutions. I learned about the "World Passport", which I found so fascinating that I applied for it.
The conversations in the book provoked emotions ranging from heart wrenching to empathy.
One of the conversations we, have after countdown and singing "Auld Lang Syne", is how we identify more with being Londoners than wherever we moved from.
That conversation made me curious about books written about this complex feeling of identity we have when we move cities or countries.
When I picked up Robin's book, I was expecting he'd express the conundrums of being a nomad (voluntary or involuntary).
I was not disappointed.
He told stories of people who were forced to flee their countries due to wars or persecutions. I learned about the "World Passport", which I found so fascinating that I applied for it.
The conversations in the book provoked emotions ranging from heart wrenching to empathy.
April 13, 2020
I was expecting more content on the current migration issues. Mostly, what Hemley tells us is how he likes to visit enclaves and exclaves and stray bits of nations, including some people who have changed nationality without leaving home. (No mention of embassies: I have often gone abroad to work without leaving Ireland.)
The British Raj didn't have problems over who was which citizen; when they left, India divided into India and two portions of Pakistan, and somehow a lot of stray villages and farms were on either side according to which mughal lord used to own them. Then Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan and that confused matters more. Finally as the writer visits, the drawn out court issues have been concluded with territory swaps, offers to rehome people, passport changes, and massive fence building projects. Foreseeably, some of the impecunious villagers say they were badly treated by neighbours because they lived in another country's farm; some chose to stay put and hope they would now be accepted while most chose to move to India since they already had Indian passports. Few wanted to move in the other direction. (A revisit found the newcomers hadn't prospered.)
A more cheerful look at the craziness of Netherlands and Belgium, in which a village's streets are bisected, is just begging to be compared and contrasted with Northern Ireland, in my opinion, but this doesn't occur.
Kaliningrad and a bitter, war-torn past; a political refugee of sorts in Cuba; the rudeness of the Chinese and Filipinas and others on race issues; a not-seeming to fit section on small segments of rainforest available to the tourist; a Chinese merchant who prospered beyond the local imagining and buys up everything expensive from pangolins for eating to endangered rainforest wood for ornament. There's more, but perhaps the most memorable interview is with a young man migrant to Australia from Afghanistan, who can't be a citizen and can't work, and can't go home because his family have been killed.
Hemley himself wonders if travel writers should do their job when greenhouse gases are flooding the planet. I would tend to wonder that too, but if they base themselves in one area and write about that area, travelling as the locals do, they are minimising their footprint and save the rest of us from doing all that travel to find out what's in those places. Upon being challenged - is he a journalist - Hemley describes himself as a professor. I believe a journalist would have gone further in finding and reporting conflicts of today, but Hemley does at times relate more than is comfortable about the past.
This book will be of interest to armchair travellers, anthropologists, international business students, world geopolitics students and environmentalists. Between the South American locals felling rare trees to sell to Asia and the Chinese squatting among their cracking trunks, we can piece together a picture of the destruction caused by too many humans, who are often, we see, no kinder to humans.
I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
The British Raj didn't have problems over who was which citizen; when they left, India divided into India and two portions of Pakistan, and somehow a lot of stray villages and farms were on either side according to which mughal lord used to own them. Then Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan and that confused matters more. Finally as the writer visits, the drawn out court issues have been concluded with territory swaps, offers to rehome people, passport changes, and massive fence building projects. Foreseeably, some of the impecunious villagers say they were badly treated by neighbours because they lived in another country's farm; some chose to stay put and hope they would now be accepted while most chose to move to India since they already had Indian passports. Few wanted to move in the other direction. (A revisit found the newcomers hadn't prospered.)
A more cheerful look at the craziness of Netherlands and Belgium, in which a village's streets are bisected, is just begging to be compared and contrasted with Northern Ireland, in my opinion, but this doesn't occur.
Kaliningrad and a bitter, war-torn past; a political refugee of sorts in Cuba; the rudeness of the Chinese and Filipinas and others on race issues; a not-seeming to fit section on small segments of rainforest available to the tourist; a Chinese merchant who prospered beyond the local imagining and buys up everything expensive from pangolins for eating to endangered rainforest wood for ornament. There's more, but perhaps the most memorable interview is with a young man migrant to Australia from Afghanistan, who can't be a citizen and can't work, and can't go home because his family have been killed.
Hemley himself wonders if travel writers should do their job when greenhouse gases are flooding the planet. I would tend to wonder that too, but if they base themselves in one area and write about that area, travelling as the locals do, they are minimising their footprint and save the rest of us from doing all that travel to find out what's in those places. Upon being challenged - is he a journalist - Hemley describes himself as a professor. I believe a journalist would have gone further in finding and reporting conflicts of today, but Hemley does at times relate more than is comfortable about the past.
This book will be of interest to armchair travellers, anthropologists, international business students, world geopolitics students and environmentalists. Between the South American locals felling rare trees to sell to Asia and the Chinese squatting among their cracking trunks, we can piece together a picture of the destruction caused by too many humans, who are often, we see, no kinder to humans.
I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
February 3, 2020
Thank you to the University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This book is a series of travel essays that looks at issues that have become ever more prescient in our times, such as national identity, belonging and patriotism in times of migration, shifting borders and refugee crises - and appeal to me personally on a visceral level, as I spent a lot of my younger years searching for answers to questions like these in my own life. Up to about the halfway point of the book, I found it interesting and well-written, but in the second half of the book I got increasingly annoyed at the author's tendency to go off on a tangent and lose a lot of the power of his storytelling because he got lost in the thickets rather than continuing on the path he had forged.
This book is a series of travel essays that looks at issues that have become ever more prescient in our times, such as national identity, belonging and patriotism in times of migration, shifting borders and refugee crises - and appeal to me personally on a visceral level, as I spent a lot of my younger years searching for answers to questions like these in my own life. Up to about the halfway point of the book, I found it interesting and well-written, but in the second half of the book I got increasingly annoyed at the author's tendency to go off on a tangent and lose a lot of the power of his storytelling because he got lost in the thickets rather than continuing on the path he had forged.
May 20, 2020
“Borderline Citizens: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood” by Robin Hemley, (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
Robin Hemley's "Borderline Citizen" is a wide-ranging, engrossing collection of essays that combines memoir, travel, history, political analysis, and personal meditation. Throughout these thirteen essays, Hemley considers questions of national identity, patriotism (and its ugly relative: jingoism), the love of place that persists even within histories of evil, and the confusions that arise when boundaries align according to the most arbitrary of motives and understandings. It describes visits to exclaves, enclaves, land swaps, refugee camps, far-flung possessions, graveyards, and dizzyingly complex (and sometimes tense) borders. It provides a description of the Russian city of Kaliningrad, which was once the Prussian city of Königsberg, whose most enduring son remains the philosopher Immanual Kant. (His afternoon perambulations were reputedly regular enough for the housewives of that city to set their clocks upon seeing him.) It describes a visit to Cuba, and a meeting of American college students with an African-American activist living in exile because of accusations of various crimes.
Let me distill several essays. The Netherlands and Belgium share what Hemley calls “the most unusual border in the world”, known as ‘the Baarles’: there twenty-pieces of Belgian territory can be found within the Netherlands, and seven pieces of Dutch jurisdiction nestle snugly within Belgian arms. The result is mostly comedic. (I say ‘mostly’ because one tragedy is recounted that lends a somber note to an otherwise charming chord.) Another excursion finds Hemley traveling to the border between India and Bangladesh, where people from exclaves of both countries were brought home by an elaborate land swap. The return of citizens to their home countries sounds like it should produce an unmitigated positive end. Alas, like most well-intentioned endeavors there are bumps in the road: refugee camps that continue as of the publication of this book.
The trip to the Falkland Islands (Isla Malvinas) is an encounter with colonial overreach. An archipelago off the southern coast of Argentina, the Falkland Islands persist to this day as hard, desolate lands that stake an almost ghostly connection to the motherland. Here Britishness seems ossified, a strange 19th century remnant that bears little resemblance to contemporary Britain. The majority of Falklanders are island born and that is where their real allegiance lies, though they might not know it. And it is here, too, that Hemley encounters a menace present just below the surface of civil encounter. One breathes a sigh of relief when he leaves those antiquated prides and furies behind.
Finally, Hemley provides a wonderful meditation on graveyards, which he enjoys visiting. Perhaps graveyards are the ultimate exclaves, or maybe enclaves. It’s hard to determine how we should classify the individual plots one finds there. A catalog of graveyards is presented and the distinctions made bring to my mind both Borges and Benjamin. The meditation leaves us with those gardens where the dead are everywhere in beauty – in the best examples – and in strifeless communion.
****
Recommended for: travelers, memoirists, history buff; those interested in unusual locales, politics, international affairs, global studies; readers of creative-non-fiction, and professors preparing syllabi for a wide range of college courses.
Robin Hemley's "Borderline Citizen" is a wide-ranging, engrossing collection of essays that combines memoir, travel, history, political analysis, and personal meditation. Throughout these thirteen essays, Hemley considers questions of national identity, patriotism (and its ugly relative: jingoism), the love of place that persists even within histories of evil, and the confusions that arise when boundaries align according to the most arbitrary of motives and understandings. It describes visits to exclaves, enclaves, land swaps, refugee camps, far-flung possessions, graveyards, and dizzyingly complex (and sometimes tense) borders. It provides a description of the Russian city of Kaliningrad, which was once the Prussian city of Königsberg, whose most enduring son remains the philosopher Immanual Kant. (His afternoon perambulations were reputedly regular enough for the housewives of that city to set their clocks upon seeing him.) It describes a visit to Cuba, and a meeting of American college students with an African-American activist living in exile because of accusations of various crimes.
Let me distill several essays. The Netherlands and Belgium share what Hemley calls “the most unusual border in the world”, known as ‘the Baarles’: there twenty-pieces of Belgian territory can be found within the Netherlands, and seven pieces of Dutch jurisdiction nestle snugly within Belgian arms. The result is mostly comedic. (I say ‘mostly’ because one tragedy is recounted that lends a somber note to an otherwise charming chord.) Another excursion finds Hemley traveling to the border between India and Bangladesh, where people from exclaves of both countries were brought home by an elaborate land swap. The return of citizens to their home countries sounds like it should produce an unmitigated positive end. Alas, like most well-intentioned endeavors there are bumps in the road: refugee camps that continue as of the publication of this book.
The trip to the Falkland Islands (Isla Malvinas) is an encounter with colonial overreach. An archipelago off the southern coast of Argentina, the Falkland Islands persist to this day as hard, desolate lands that stake an almost ghostly connection to the motherland. Here Britishness seems ossified, a strange 19th century remnant that bears little resemblance to contemporary Britain. The majority of Falklanders are island born and that is where their real allegiance lies, though they might not know it. And it is here, too, that Hemley encounters a menace present just below the surface of civil encounter. One breathes a sigh of relief when he leaves those antiquated prides and furies behind.
Finally, Hemley provides a wonderful meditation on graveyards, which he enjoys visiting. Perhaps graveyards are the ultimate exclaves, or maybe enclaves. It’s hard to determine how we should classify the individual plots one finds there. A catalog of graveyards is presented and the distinctions made bring to my mind both Borges and Benjamin. The meditation leaves us with those gardens where the dead are everywhere in beauty – in the best examples – and in strifeless communion.
****
Recommended for: travelers, memoirists, history buff; those interested in unusual locales, politics, international affairs, global studies; readers of creative-non-fiction, and professors preparing syllabi for a wide range of college courses.
December 20, 2019
This book contains elements of travel writing, autobiography and philosophical and political thought as Robin Hemley examines some pretty deep and fundamental issues. Sudjects such as belonging, identity and authencity are covered in a readable and thought provoking way. From around the globe, we enter the world of enclaves, exclaves and overseas terrorities, looking at borders that are benign and practacally non existent where a hybrid form of nationality exists, to others where being the wrong type of person behind a border can have deadly consequences.
He visits such places as The Falkland Islands where the inhabitants cling to a form of Britishness that now seems antiquated and strange, and Kaliningrad where the ethnicity of the area has changed. Meeting exiles, refugess, nationalists and colonial settlers, this is a fascinating book that poses some pretty fundamental questions in a world where borders seem to be becoming more defined both physically and metaphysically. Well worth a read.
He visits such places as The Falkland Islands where the inhabitants cling to a form of Britishness that now seems antiquated and strange, and Kaliningrad where the ethnicity of the area has changed. Meeting exiles, refugess, nationalists and colonial settlers, this is a fascinating book that poses some pretty fundamental questions in a world where borders seem to be becoming more defined both physically and metaphysically. Well worth a read.
April 3, 2020
The travel essays in Borderline Citizen by Robin Hemley are educational, entertaining, and extremely relevant in this era of history. Hemley is an American who has been traveling the globe for decades and he has a wealth of information to share. I had previously read "Mr. Chen's Mountain" online, which I enjoyed very much. I think my next favorite from the book is "Don't be too Difficult". I had zero prior knowledge of the Baarles so it was very interesting to learn more about them.
August 9, 2020
Many thanks to Netgalley and University of Nebraska Press for my copy. This was a very interesting and thought provoking read, mostly about little known country borders but also about the consequences of war, and the terrible damage humans have done to perceived foreigners. Tolerance and kindness are the very least we should do to everyone we are privileged to share this planet with. A recommended read for all world travellers.
August 10, 2020
Purchased out of loyalty to Robin, a very nice person and thoughtful writer with whom I walked at length during a summer writing program in Prague in 2010, chatting on literary topics. A series of essays examining people and places defined by such circumstances as enclaves and exclaves and graveyards and beyond. Meditative. Quiet. Refreshing distraction from more serious summer reading.
February 16, 2020
If you love to travel and are curious about the world, you will love this book. Beautifully written, it offers some fascinating insights into places I had never heard of. I read it in a single sitting. Highly recommended!
June 29, 2020
I very much enjoyed this collection of essays on the theme of borders and enclaves/exclaves. As someone who has traveled a fair amount myself, these glimpses into many places I have not visited was extraordinary.
June 2, 2020
Not bad but also not something I will remember. I just finished it and could not tell anyone what it was about. Random essays quasi tied to countries???
February 18, 2020
Borderline Citizen by Robin Hemley is a series of travel essays that tackles contemporary issues such as patriotism and national identity in an age of shifting borders, migrations, and refugee crises. The American now living and working in Singapore himself holds no allegiance to any country and travels the globe to speak to people in borderline areas – exclaves, enclaves, and overseas territories such as Baarles, the Falklands, Kaliningrad, Point Roberts, and the chitmahals along the Indian/Bangladeshi border.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews