Crossing The Border

An off-screen narrator, Mort Golden, takes us back to winter around 1975, the year he was 21. He and his two buddies, Tim and Danny, have a fateful trip over the bridge from Detroit into Canada. The three of them are going nowhere in life, although Mort has thoughts of being a writer, while his mom wants him to go to college. He and his pals contemplate making a quick fortune transporting drugs over the border in their beat-up Buick, "the war wagon." Mort's also hopelessly in love with a girl he dated briefly a couple years before. With border inspectors, Tim's temper, and Danny's bottled up emotions, is there any way this can end well?

This book focuses on the ways in which unofficial modes of border crossings are practised by the Thai Ban, along the Mekong Thai-Lao border. In doing so, the book assesses how these border crossings can be theorised as a contribution to existing literature on borderland studies. With that, the book discusses the importance of the notion of the Third Space and its effects on the pluralities of border-crossings in the borderland by weaving together spatial negotiations, temporal negotiations, and negotiations of political subjectivity.