Seeing like a routier: routiers’ borderscapes between Sou

Routier is the self-designation employed by Senegalese men driving decades-old vehicles overloaded with mostly second-hand items from Southern Europe to be sold in West Africa. This activity involves navigating a constellation of overlapping politico-administrative, socio-economic, cultural and geographical borders. Building on the concept of borderscapes, whose plasticity and aesthetic qualities allows us to interrogate diverse border universes, this essay visually explores routiers border(ing) enactments and contingent meanings. By seeing like a routier, the piece seeks to feed an on-going debate not only on how to depict borders writ large but also on how certain groups of people embody, see and are seen by contemporary borders.