A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands

A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly friendly border is devaluation―of agrarian land and crops of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands of regional infrastructures now disconnected and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering migration and citizenship and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.