Reframing Europe and the Global: Conceptualizing the Border in Cultural Encounters

In this paper I explore the inadequacy of the representation of the border, which is underpinned by Manichean distinctions of friend and foe, superior and inferior, inside and outside, to analyze the cultural encounter between Europeans and their others. I argue that a great deal of scholarship interest in this cultural encounter is trapped into a border imaginary that loses sight of those cultural phenomena, such as hybridity, transnational identities, and cosmopolitan affiliations, which challenge established political and cultural borders and foster ‘from below’ new imaginations of the European space. By analyzing a complex set of cultural productions—the creative combination of European modes of thought, texts, and styles in the visual and performative arts, with indigenous local artistic styles and mindsets—I show that, as seen as early as the 16th-century, the rise of a global imagination is the result of complex relations of connectivity between Europe and other parts of the world. I propose a new border imaginary, which is underpinned by a cosmopolitan grammar of difference, to account better for the changing nature of the European space within the dynamics of globalization.