Interweaving rich ethnographic descriptions with an innovative theoretical approach, this book explores and unsettles conventional maps and understandings of Europe and the Americas. Through an examination of the recently inaugurated cross-border bridge between France’s overseas department of French Guiana and Brazil’s northern state of Amapá, which effectively acts as a one-way street and serves to perpetuate inequalities in a historically deeply entangled region, it foregrounds the ways in which borderland inhabitants such as indigenous women, illegalised migrants, and local politicians deal with these inequalities and the increasingly closed Amazonian border in everyday life. A study that challenges the coloniality of memory, this volume shows how the borderland along and across the Oyapock River, far from being the hinterland of France and Brazil, in fact illuminates entangled histories and their concomitant inequalities on a large scale. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and border studies with interests in postcolonialism, memory, and inequality.

'By tracing particular, personal stories of social actors in the area and their different trajectories, Santos demonstrates the larger entanglements that specific histories can uncover about complex social and political dynamics across borders … not only useful for those working in geographical vicinities, but also to other authors dealing with the complex dynamics of social actors in borderland studies in similar contexts elsewhere.' - Karlijn Korpershoek, Ethnos

Fabio Santos is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.