Drawing on scholarly and life experience on, and over, the historically posited borders between "West" and "East," the work identifies, interrogates, and challenges a particular, enduring, violent inheritance - what it means to cross over a border - from the classical origins of Western political thought. The study has two parts. The first is an effort to work within the Western tradition to demonstrate its foundational and enduring, violent conception of crossing over borders. The second is a creative effort to explore and encourage a fundamentally different outlook towards borders and what it means to be on, at, or over them. The underlying social theoretical disposition of the work is a form of post-Orientalist hermeneutics; the textual subject matter of the two parts of the study is linked using Walter Benjamin's concept of the storyteller.

Preface: Working In, On, and Beyond the Imagination of the West Today Introduction I. Synopsis II. Goals and Purposes of Part One: When Words Maintain their Meanings and The World Is An Abode of War III. Goals and Purposes of Part Two: On the Fatal Boundaries IV. A Link: Storytelling as Counsel V. Overall Aims and Conclusion: Perhaps Not Crossing At All Part One: When Words Maintain Their Meanings and The World Is An Abode of War I. Conceptual Stability in a Sea of Change II. A Hermeneutic, Participatory Approach III. "To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!" IV. Crossing for Empire, Godliness, and Glory V. Crossing as War, Part I VI. A Note on Liberation and Glory VII. Crossing for War, Part II VIII. Alternatives, Part I: Crossing in Flight IX. Alternatives, Part II: In Praise of the Medizer X. Crossing the Hellespont XI. A Tradition of Meanings Part Two: On the Fatal Boundaries I. Introduction II. The Village of Degirmenoluk III. Vayvay IV. Sakizli Conclusion: Perhaps Not Crossing At All