“Borderlands”

Abstract The burnt reality of displaced people, gathering at the gate powerful nation-states, trying to gain admittance and to gain acceptance, has kindled a defining public debate of this century. It is also a debate in which public relations language practices by government and business, and more broadly in society, play a powerful role in narrowing cultural dispositions in ways that passively tolerate or accept prescribed neoliberalist policy settings. To understand the “borderland” as a third space and field of ideas—namely, immigration, refugees, and statelessness—this chapter explores how public relations language practices combine to represent them as “categories.” Connoting certain words, woven into a plot that pushes meaning within set routes, this neonarrative works in both obvious and less obvious ways, to diminish the public’s expectations in human rights matters, to harden stances, and to build consent, while at the same time promoting a particular relationship between culture and politics. And in this, it has been extraordinarily successful.