Angles

Another Break in the Wall

Audrey Robitaillié — 2026-04-16

Borders, walls, and migrant characters who challenge them feature prominently in the works of Hugo Hamilton, a transnational author whose German mother immigrated to Ireland after World War 2. This article focuses on the depiction of the Berlin Wall in four of his novels set in Germany. Interweaving personal and world histories, past and present, Hamilton explores relationships – with places as much as with people. In Surrogate City (1990), the narrative focuses on the character of Helen who has moved from Ireland to West Berlin, while the characters in The Love Test (1995) are from East Berlin and attempt to cross over to flee the Stasi. The protagonist of Disguise (2008) is in and out of Berlin in search of his own story and history. In Every Single Minute (2014), the narrator Liam takes his dying friend on a last touristic trip to the German capital. The corpus offers four different perspectives on the Berlin Wall that span a little over a decade in terms of publication, but near...

Introduction

Gwendolyne Cressman — 2026-04-16

[video:Introduction]

Welcome to this 2026 issue of Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, entitled “Borders in the English-Speaking World: Mapping and Countermapping”!

I’m Gwen Cressman, I teach at the University of Strasbourg in North-American studies and my research focuses on Canadian photography at the crossroads between past and present, documentary and fiction.

I’m Tim Heron. I work at the University of Strasbourg in the field of Irish Studies. My research explores alternative forms of culture in Ireland and I am currently working on a project at the intersection of environmental studies and Irish folklore.

I’m Marianne Hillion. I work at the University of Strasbourg in postcolonial studies. My research focuses on the representations of urban space in Indian fiction and nonfiction.

In this special issue, we are looking at borders be they actual or metaphorical and their counter-cartographic expressions. These will be taking us around the globe from the American West in...

Archiving Erasure: Countermaps from Delhi

Swati Janu — 2026-04-16

In October 2023, Swati Janu gave a talk entitled “Archiving Erasure: Countermaps from Delhi”, as part of the international conference on “Borders: Mapping and Countermapping” organised by SEARCH research unit at the University of Strasbourg. Two years later, she agreed to share her thoughts about architecture, countermaps, environmentalism in the global South, and the need to rethink the way we imagine our cities. She notably focuses on the work her team did with urban farmers living in self-built settlements on the floodplains of the Yamuna river in the heart of Delhi. With the riverfront development plan launched in the 2000s, the river floodplains are becoming gentrified, threatening both the farmers’ housing and livelihoods. Through various endeavours (participatory mapping, public walks, media dissemination, and the building of a school), Social Design Collaborative have tried to archive the farmers’ presence and to defend their rights. In the interview, conducted online, Swati...

How Donald Trump’s intentional mispronunciations of Kamala Harris’s first name support the hypothesis that loanwords exhibit distinct phonological properties

Pierre Fournier — 2026-04-16

This study shows how Donald Trump, by intentionally mispronouncing the first name of his opponent in the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris, supports the theory that the English lexicon is composed of subsystems. The words which belong to one subsystem share linguistic properties that distinguish them from the items of the other subsystems. Each subsystem arises from the interaction of specific phonetic, phonological, letter-to-sound, morphological, segmental, syntactic, semantic, and frequency-related properties, which makes it possible to distinguish the subsystems from each other. Native English speakers are sensitive to the different properties of sublexica and in particular to those of loanwords which are grouped in the §Foreign subsystem. The words of the §Foreign subsystem balance conforming to English-system principles with maintaining their own distinct features, as they often retain some properties of the source languages. This conflict gives them a specific status ...

Interruption and Solace: Medicine Lines in Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021)

Benjamin David — 2026-04-16

This paper examines North American Métis heritage from a resurgent and decolonial perspective. Erdrich’s novel is set in the Western borderland of the Red River Valley where Europeans, and Ojibwe, Cree, and Métis peoples intermingled and created enduring kinship relations that favor transcultural exchanges. Those relations are maintained thanks to the resurgence of Métis relationality. The novel offers new syncretic imaginings like the Rougarou that threatens but eventually maintains Métis traditions. Tookie eventually achieves solace despite colonial attempts at erasure and reconfigures her own perception of loss. She becomes an agent of co-resistance and questions the legitimacy of colonial power as she embraces the fight for social justice. As Minneapolis struggles against the impacts of COVID-19 and colonial violence, Tookie re-maps and rewrites Métis peoplehood across the Canada-U.S. border.

Ghost borders: Mapping the Disappearing Strasbourg-Kehl Borderlands

Donna Akrey — 2026-04-16

Fig. 1: Flag design for Strasbourg-Kehl Stratawalk, Donna Akrey

Introduction

This project takes an approach to mapping as a dynamic, collaborative and intermedial process, aiming to explore new ways of understanding the complex relations produced through bordering practices, both historical and contemporary. We embrace counter-cartography to address critical gaps in place-based knowledge that account for the complexity of historical memory. Over the last decade, our two multi-disciplinary arts research groups (IN/TERMINUS Creative Research Group and Hamilton Perambulatory Unit) have combined efforts on collaborative and participatory mapping projects in the Great Lakes region. The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU)’s strata-mapping framework is an experimental research-creation practice that focuses on how spatial meaning is created through a performative “stratigraphic” sensing and researching of a site. Strata-mapping enables us to investigate alternate possibilities for sensing and ...

Anomalous Borders, Geographical Knowledge, and the Inner Line in India

Charuta Ghadyalpatil — 2026-04-16

This article examines the Inner Line system in British India’s northeastern frontier to show how borders are historically produced and dynamic. Introduced through the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873, the Inner Line operated as an internal administrative partition that nonetheless functioned as the practical limit of sovereign authority in a region where the external border remained undefined until 1914. What existed beyond the Inner Line, therefore, was a zone where sovereignty was fragmented and where law remained mired in ambiguity.
Over time, the Inner Line was repeatedly redefined, becoming a key element of colonial governance in the region – all the while remaining indefinite, almost by design. It enabled extra-legal colonial interventions and institutionalised a civilizational distinction between the hill and valley populations. The article traces various spatial and ethnological discourses that framed the hills as an unruly frontier. This representation underpinned ...

Claiming Space: Aboriginal (Re)mappings of Contemporary Australia

Justine Seran — 2026-04-16

Contemporary Indigenous-authored texts are often read as counter-narratives seeking to redress erroneous and oppressive representations of themselves in white-authored texts. Similarly, Indigenous narratives concerned with place and reclaiming the land lost to colonisation can be read as counter-mapping exercises, insofar as they engage not only with representations of space and the territory itself, but also question the very legitimacy of colonial cartography and therefore settler presence and ways of constructing knowledge about place. This paper engages with the Australian Aboriginal notion of “country” and its relationship with language, particularly in Alexis Wright’s 2006 award-winning novel Carpentaria, set in the eponymous Gulf of Carpentaria in far-north Queensland. Carpentaria tells the story of the Aboriginal Pricklebush people and their relationship with Uptown, the white zone of the fictional town of Desperance, and the Gurrfurrit mine. I argue that Wright is concerned...

Mapping Resistance and Resilience

Jeff Thomas — 2026-04-16

Getting lost

In 2004, I had an artist residency at Oakville Galleries in Oakville, Ontario. When asked what my residency would be about, I replied, “Getting lost.” Over the following month, I made a series of day trips searching for evidence of the tribal past in the surrounding area. I used a handheld GPS to mark the locations along with a travelogue of my field notes. I began asking myself the question, “What would an Indigenous map look like?” The resulting show at Oakville Galleries was introduced with a map showing the locations I found and photographed.

Figure 1 was taken on one of the day trips to the nearby city of Mississauga. When I pulled off the highway I noticed a plaque by the side of the road. The text on the plaque explained that there had been an Indian village established on that site in 1826. The site is now occupied by the Mississauga Golf and Country Club. Figure 2 is my travelogue of field notes for that day.

I include the GPS longitude and latitude coordinates in...

A Performative Intermedial Analysis of The Willow Song

Giuseppe Pantano — 2026-04-16

This study offers a performative intermedial analysis of The Willow Song in Shakespeare’s Othello, examining how lyrics and music interact as mutually shaping media and how this multimodal relationship contributes to the play’s emotional, symbolic, and educational resonance. Building on theories of embodied cognition and multimodal learning, the article conceptualises intermedial analysis as an approach that integrates literary and musicological perspectives through the act of performing the song, thereby foregrounding aesthetic, affective, and experiential dimensions often overlooked in strictly textual readings. The Willow Song, introduced in the 1623 Folio version of Othello, emerges as a culturally stratified artefact rooted in Renaissance melancholy traditions, where the willow symbolised sorrow and abandoned love. Its appearance in Act IV, Scene 3—sung by Desdemona in an intimate domestic exchange with Emilia—functions as a lyrical and emotional counterpoint to the brutal logi...