Montage-based poetics and archival hauntology are mobilized to expose how postwar border-making, US empire, and neocolonial governance fracture nation, family, and subjectivity into migratory “orphan memories,” where grief becomes both historical method and political resistance. Minor-language practices (Deleuze/Guattari), Glissantian opacity, and anti-assimilationist translation/nontranslation dismantle the “naturally convincing” authority of documentary and official narrative, reconfiguring witness and solidarity across time’s traumatic loops toward the fragile proposition that peace remains thinkable.

Maps a convergence between contemporary art and anthropology around the production, transgression, and modulation of borders, arguing that modern dichotomies (self/other, rational/irrational) are sustained by a mythic “rationalist veil” that makes power appear as necessity while hiding its founding paradox of inclusive exclusion. Through primitivism debates, colonial frontier histories (Congo/Putumayo), and theorists like Taussig, Fabian, and Latour, it critiques dialectical/representational models of political art for reproducing the frontier’s projection economy, calling instead for aesthetic strategies that “think-through-terror” to grasp how images operationalize modernity’s upside-down continuities.