Migration Editorial

Art and Migration: Editorial Introduction

Erling Björgvinsson, Nicholas De Genova, Mahmoud Keshavarz and Tintin Wulia

In recent years, there has been a remarkable proliferation and diversification of border-crossing formations and trajectories of human mobility. From Rohingya Muslims fleeing genocide in Myanmar, to Syrians escaping the devastating civil war in their country, traversing numerous borders from Lebanon and Turkey to Germany and Sweden, to the heterogeneous mobilities of people variously categorised as refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, nomads, etc. across much of the globe—diverse border crossers enact their autonomous aspirations and desires, often at the risk of their lives. On a global scale, we have seen these social formations branded as border transgressions, officially labelled as “unauthorised” and therefore illegalised. Consequently, a multitude of reaction formations dedicated to enforcing and reinforcing borders have arisen, organised by states as well as supra-state governmental coordinations and private businesses. These, in turn, incite extra-legal infrastructures devoted to facilitating the illegalised trans-border mobilities, widely criminalised as “smuggling” networks.

Contemporary bordering practices involve radical experiments with materials, technologies, space, time and power: Australia’s notorious Pacific Solution, for instance, coercively and indefinitely detains people seeking asylum in detention camps on islands such as Nauru and in Papua New Guinea; border crossers across Africa presumed to be “illegal immigrants” to Europe are arrested, detained and deported without ever having set foot on European territory; the extended migratory corridor from the US-Mexico border across Central America and into South America is layered with diffuse forms of violence; everyday life in the urban spaces of the Global North and other migrant destinations is subjected to extraordinary and punitive policing. These extended border zones predictably include not only an escalation in physical barricades, militarised policing, detention camps, and deportation dragnets, but also the increasing implementation of new tactics and technologies of securitisation and surveillance. At times, these border securitisation measures involve an extraordinary blurring of militarised border policing with humanitarian mandates for “rescue”, as border crossers are driven into ever riskier and more lethal forms and pathways of mobility. In these increasingly complex, transnational, and geographically extended border zones, many regimes of bordering are now externalised, outsourced to multiple nation-states, and routinely incorporate privatised security contractors, technology firms and think tanks.

Hence, as migration is re-making our world, all these diffuse zones of bordering have become key sites of struggle, where the conflicts between human mobility, state power and global capital are abundantly manifest. At the same time, they are often overdue for investigation and exposure as a result of their dissimulation or concealment. Knowledge, practices and products related to border enforcement have become a global marketplace, and academic and artistic research and representations of these phenomena are challenged anew to take account of their own possible complicities with this larger marketisation of borders. Therefore, despite alarmist and over-simplified discourses regarding a “crisis” of borders, migration and refugee movements, these poignant sociopolitical transformations indisputably signal what can genuinely be understood as a crisis of representation.

Crisis of Representation

The crisis of representation surrounding migration and borders is as pertinent for artistic practice and research as it is for migration studies in the social sciences. The two respective fields have significant genealogical differences, however, as Anne Ring Petersen notes.^[1] On the one hand, social questions, including questions of race, ethnicity and identity—so important to the social sciences, and not least for ethnography—were not generally an explicit concern for Western modern art until the late 1980s. Neither were migration, displacement or transculturation. On the other hand, the cultural dimensions of migration had not received much attention in academic studies, with a few notable exceptions, such as some of the work by Stuart Hall,^[2] Abdelmalek Sayad,^[3] Arjun Appadurai^[4] and Nikos Papastergiadis.^[5] Furthermore, the materialities and performative aspects of migratory movements have largely only in recent years been taken into account in migration studies. Meanwhile, we have witnessed a burgeoning of artistic funds, exhibitions and biennales that focus on migration over the last five years, alongside a parallel impulse in the social sciences to communicate the “results” of research to the wider public through “creative” endeavours. This special issue surely counts as yet another of such initiatives.

This PARSE Journal issue on Migration is a meeting place that stages an encounter between artists, arts researchers and migration scholars as they tackle a crisis of representation in different forms, media and scales. As editors, we have tried to variously invite, incite, commission and curate a wide range of interventions, to show the diverse ways in which migration scholars and artists engage with some of these questions. We, like our contributors, believe that both artistic and scholarly practices are crucial in counter-narrating dominant discourses and forms of representation of migration and border transgression. They have a vital role to play, not only in honing our critical faculties and sensibilities to the conceptual and affective work of engaging with the injustices of a world that is being constantly re-made by human mobility, but also in providing other ways of thinking and imagining the perplexities of mobility in a world of increasingly militarised, lethal borders.

Contributions to this issue have emerged through two principal channels. First, we the editors, with the support of our reviewers, have selected a range of works that were submitted through an open call in 2018. Second, a variety of additional pieces were commissioned from our partners who participated in three intensive PARSE workshops on “Art and Migration” in 2018 and 2019. While these workshops, events and submissions address different topics, times and spaces, referring to distinct historical moments and geographies, our attempt here is to share some of the common threads, questions and concerns that have emerged from these encounters between critical scholarship and artistic practices on migration and borders, which may help to frame how all of the different pieces have come to share this space together.

We are interested in interrogating how concepts and terms such as migration, migrant, refugee and nomad can be recuperated and recharged with political significance. Performative acts of grieving that give testimony to atrocities and other forms of suffering are, in effect, a withdrawal from the political: how can art depart from this dominant configuration of migration in artistic practices? And how might artists and migration scholars alike effectively counter the humanitarian gaze and rationality that consume border crossers’ suffering? How can both fields provide a more complex understanding beyond those that relegate border crossers to the role of either passive victims or unsettling foreigners engaged in unauthorised, illegalised, and criminalised activities? How might scholars and artists engage in acts of representation that do not unwittingly serve to objectify and (re)fetishise the otherness of migrants and refugees whose material and practical circumstances already render them objects of the power of the systems and apparatuses of bordering? Central to these questions lies another fundamental question: while accounting for their potential complicity, how might the arts and migration studies productively address the Euro-American ethnocentrism that dominates representations of these issues, which reproduce the violence of colonial modalities of representation that persistently and perniciously shape our understandings of racially stigmatised and marginalised bodies on the move?

Essays and artistic works in this issue—from our contributors Elyas Alavi, Peter Kærgaard Andersen, Behrouz Boochani, Bridge Radio, Beppe Caccia, CAMP, Tony de los Reyes, Nora El Qadim, Nermin Duraković, Robert Glas, Charles Heller, Nuraini Juliastuti, Eszter Katalin, Shahram Khosravi, Lois Klassen, Tammy Law, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Natasha Marie Llorens, MAP Office, Federica Mazzara, Sandro Mezzadra, Madeleine Kate McGowan, Aleksander Motturi, Alison Mountz, Lasse Mouritzen, Kristine Samson, Arash Sarvenstani, Sumugan Sivanesan, Martina Tazzioli, Paula Urbano, Marelys Valencia, William Walters, Monika Winarnita and Dagmawi Yimer—address all these questions from variegated perspectives in manifold constellations: arguing against the figuration of the (essentialised) migrant or refugee as “the universal Other”, complicating artists’ and researchers’ positionalities in collaboration, recognition and potentialities of disagreements, negotiating absence, time and access in relation to the future of mobility and migration.

The Universal Other

The crisis of representation provoked by artistic and academic engagements with the drama, violence and real suffering of human mobility and the divisive partitioning of people enacted by borders has led to countless sites of profound irresolution and conflict. The problem of resuscitating humanism by reinvigorating its universalistic gestures of morality lies in the generation of easy and lazy equivalences. By figuring the migrant or the refugee as a stand-in for some presumptive universal figure of humanity, artists and scholars alike risk insinuating false equivalences that short-circuit the sociopolitical fact of glaring and cruel inequalities. A mere showcasing of such inequalities and all the attendant violence that upholds them is simply not sufficient to critically address the stakes of our global postcolonial condition, and evades a more searching engagement with our own implicatedness within these relations of domination and subordination. The relative privilege and comfort of our various positionalities as artists, critics and scholars cannot—and ought not—be so casually and superficially wished away through gestures of representational “inclusion” and identification.

In art, the “mobility turn” has gone through three genealogical shifts that to some degree overlap, according to T.J. Demos.^[6] While the 1980s saw a shift from exile as the main focus to what Demos characterises as diaspora and postcolonial art, in the 1990s artistic nomadism became prominent, emphasising the boundless movement of transcultural art, which Demos sees as a form of “neoprimitivism” and “false universality”. Refugees became a topic of increasing concern from 2000 onwards, with various forms of displacement supplying examples of what Demos calls “crisis globalization”. While refugees and migrants have been widely identified as exemplars of this crisis globalisation, Demos nevertheless imbues them with hope and redemption. He also highlights documentary and ethnographic practices that expose the political and economic conditions under which migrants and refugees are forced to live as an important strategy for getting away from false universality. He argues—via Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life^[7]—for “universalizing the migrant as the condition of being human, and determining a politics of equality on that basis.”^[8] However, Emma Chubb argues that such “new humanism or universalism” is problematic, because the contemporary art world, while globalised, tends to focus on “south-to-north and east-to-west migration”, not infrequently foregrounding non-Western clandestine migration to Fortress Europe.^[9] In other words, the objective situatedness of the contemporary art world and its whole economy remain inextricably positioned within “the West”, and the sensibilities that it lionises tend to be posited from a methodologically Eurocentric standpoint. Chubb asks: “Who and where does this focus on specifically non-Western, illegal migrants in contemporary artworks and critical analysis privilege, and subsequently if unintentionally, who does it marginalise? And what problems does the migrant solve, or is the migrant asked to solve, for modern and contemporary art and its institutions?”^[10] Unfortunately, it all too often ends up recapitulating what Chubb characterises as “migratory orientalism”, whereby “the human or the universal relies on the construction of a visibly marked yet ahistorical and interchangeable Other from the global South.”^[11] Furthermore, by embracing works of art by non-Western artists who are nonetheless commonly based in Europe or North America, Western art institutions appear to be inclusive while they risk “re-inscribing the very Euro-American-centrism and colonial center/periphery model that [this strategy] purports to disrupt.” This “new universalism” therefore perpetuates the division between “us” and “them” in Western public debates on migration that are fixated on race, ethnicity or cultural difference. This division, particularly between persons and bodies that occupy and share the same spaces, is relentlessly represented through dichotomous spatialised oppositions. Being of a racialised alterity to those who are seen to “belong” to a particular place is construed to be irrevocably “out of place”.

Those who are presumed to be “out of place”, however, are never out of frame. W.J.T Mitchell claims that the politics of migration is fundamentally connected to how images move around^[12]—not least the images that come before the migrants even arrive—in the form of “stereotypes, search templates, tables of classification and patterns of recognition.”^[13] The migrant thus commonly associated with the well-known but paradoxical figure of the “stranger” has been enduringly required for the ambivalent, equivocal and contested self-construction and self-definition of a “Western” or “national” community. Consequently, the stranger (or alien), in practice, is not alien at all: rather, as Sara Ahmed points out, the alien is a highly recognisable figure that crystalises into a monolithic, abstract and universalised fetish that “cuts ‘the stranger’ off from the histories of its determination”.^[14] In the context of Arab-American and Arab-British literature, Waïl S. Hassan argues that the marginal status of a “minority” literature or art in relation to the majority culture is commonly presumed to be inherently political,^[15] such “that there is little distance between individual concerns and the political status of the minority group.”^[16] Hence, certain people are always already at greater risk of being treated as interchangeable Others, more valued for their abstract and homogenised Otherness than engaged with for the real difference they make. Even in more sympathetic modes of representation, then, the objectification of migrants and refugees tends to serve a legitimating function that uncritically revivifies the presumptive moral integrity of the dominant sociopolitical order.

Constructing a universal human Other imbued with hope and potentiality is a continuation of Western modernity’s colonial project. The Western subject—as “human”—was profoundly shaped through acts that explicitly relegated colonised subjects, and people of colour more generally, to a position outside of history and civilisation, out of time and out of place, thus producing the crucial bare Other that reemphasises the human figure as one that was, and remains, presumptively civilised, Western, and white.^[17] For their own part, however, the vast majority of humanity subjected to these colonising and racialising strategies never ceased to provide audacious ripostes that formulated counter-narratives and discrepant discourses on the human in their repudiations of the colonial humanism that we, still, have not succeeded to put to rest.

Participation, Recognition, Disagreement

When and how art and migration researchers engage with migrants by deliberately working with them, embracing their Otherness, taking their side or identifying with them, is consequently not at all straightforward. Such acts are always entangled in the contentious politics of representation and positionality. Identification with the Other has become commonplace in art related to migration, often resorting to quasi-ethnography and identity politics evident in the arts over the last four decades.

Discussing ethnographically oriented and often socially engaged artists, Hal Foster early on pointed out that such projects tend towards either an external (outsider’s) position—where artists/researchers work alongside the groups with which they empathise, which typically renders the Other into a passive subject and receptacle of their support and ideological patronage—or alternately, a collaborative position, whereby various material manifestations of representation are reciprocally transformed.^[18] The latter position, he argues, nevertheless risks taking on the “realist assumption” that reifies the Otherness of the Other. This can lead to a false and even disingenuous erasure of the distinction between artist/researcher and the (“non-artist” or “non-researcher”) collaborators or participants, whereby the artist/researcher is seen to (institutionally) represent, and even stand in for, that which is represented. Even further, the artist/researcher can come to be seen as embodying the Other’s authentic and “native” identity. By not acknowledging such differences and inequalities in positionality, artists and researchers run the risk of masking the ideological production at work.

When the distance between the producer/artist and participant is confounded and their respective identities are conflated, the participation and the work produced also tends to lack substantive critical reflection on the distance (and mediation) between the two parties. Through such ethical, political, and representational negligence or conceit, the artist comes, in effect, to be “anthropologised”. Miwon Kwon similarly argues that site-specificity and contextually sensitive creative practices have led to intensely “nomadic” artistic practices, as artists engage in “one site after another” as pseudo-ethnographers, temporary in-house critics who ostensibly deliver resources in the form of criticality, legitimation and the valorisation of the uniqueness of people and places through the objectification and circulation of their putative difference.^[19] Such forms of artistic and cultural management are in turn “measured by the proximity of the artist’s personal association (converted to expertise) with a particular place, history, discourse, identity”, which “leads to a hermetic implosion of (auto)biographical and subjectivist indulgences, and myopic narcissism […] misrepresented as self-reflexivity.”^[20] Hence, various artistic and other representational strategies devised through tactics of collaboration and participation continue to be challenged with navigating dominant discursive practices and economies of unequal or disingenuous recognition.

The distance between the artist/researcher and the Other, fundamentally expressed through corporeal gestures of exchange that produce sense perceptions, are unavoidably moral and political inasmuch as any gesture reveals its own performative perceptions and presuppositions about truth and justice. As George Didi-Huberman argues, any visual artwork, not least photographs and moving images, may be understood to be image gestures that signal the aesthetic and ethical positionality of the artist in relation to “the Other”.^[21] What needs to be further examined is how such image gestures are supposed to give something back “to the person whose image is being shaped”, and to what degree the vulnerable, imperiled, exploited, or oppressed might somehow maintain their dignity, integrity and autonomy. For example, Didi-Huberman argues convincingly that Ai Weiwei’s celebrated film Human Flow (2017), which represents refugees in diverse circumstances across the world, ultimately fails insofar as the distance produced through its image gestures means that the film finally does not “see” the refugees at all. Moral and political seeing requires that there is an exchange. Instead, the film views/observes (and objectifies) refugees at a great distance, through beautiful and sleek drone footage, as “anonymous moving masses” that resemble a termite mound, or through more close-up images generated through a downward angle of superior power, or by foregrounding the artist’s gaze at the refugees in their splendid Otherness.^[22] Likewise, it is the artist and other experts who do most of the speaking, not the refugees themselves. Such a gesture of patronage assigns the refugees a passive role and is therefore, as Rancière argues, a form of art that effectively withdraws from the political: its role becomes a self-satisfied grieving through “witnessing either yesterday’s genocide, the never-ending catastrophe of the present, or the immemorial trauma of civilization.”^[23] Consequently, as Didi-Huberman states, while appearing on the surface to be an exercise of ethical humanitarian art, fighting for the cause of refugees, these gestures in fact objectify the refugees through “dehumanizing images” culminating in “an abstract act of charity.”^[24]

Any form of representation (with or without participation), any form of participation (with or without recognition) and any form of recognition (with or without disagreement) could never fill the gap between those who see the need or feel the urge to conduct research or make artistic interventions and those who are subjected to such work. As such, the ethical and political responsibility to establish a more egalitarian interrelationship always rests squarely on the shoulders of those who initiate such interventions. This means that “giving an account of oneself” is not simply a matter of reflection on how one’s positionality influences one’s opinion and practices of image generation and artistic or intellectual communication.^[25] “It is also the act of offering that analysis to others for them to scrutinize”, which means “being willing to engage in dialogue and being willing to be judged and confronted by those with whom one speaks.”^[26] It must be a veritably open-ended dialogical invitation to disagreement and critique.

Time, Absence, Access

The sediments of history are often utilised to demarcate particular boundaries and are highly noticeable in the production and enforcement of borders today. Heritage and historical documents are frequently called upon to claim ownership and rights in determining the understanding of a particular place, defining its meaning in the present so as to shape its many paths into the future. Time and again, this is done through falsely claiming that particular geographies are bounded rather than in constant flux, with overlapping parallel spatial practices that crisscross each other’s routes and itineraries. Meanwhile, many oppressed and marginalised people, such as those who are the descendants of transatlantic slavery or colonial domination, have had to rely heavily on oral tradition as they commonly have little or no access to archives other than those that were produced historically by the Westerners who politically, economically, scientifically and philosophically oppressed them.

Considering these differences in methodologies of recording the past, the claims to land, history and culture through a limited range of historical archives risk producing highly unequal access to the past, perpetuating these inequalities in the present and thus impacting the construction of a correspondingly unequal future. With regards to refugees and migrants, Appadurai challenges us to rethink the identity narratives of citizenship—whose present currencies commonly derived from jus soli and jus sanguinis, both historical and grounded in the past—to include aspirations for the future as a common ground on which to establish novel belongings.^[27] Appadurai calls for a renewed deliberation on migrants’ archives that are formed in diasporic public spheres, and for ways to see these archives as not only records of history, memory and the past, but more importantly as “maps for the future”.

Inequality is also made evident in how migrants’ time, as a valuable possession—to follow Shahram Khosravi^[28]—is stolen through conditions of confinement and often boundless waiting, curbing opportunities for sustained education and work as well as the development of enduring social relationships. Such delays, detours, deferrals and outright detention are likewise not uncommonly followed by deportations that send migrants, sometimes repeatedly, back to point zero. As Saloni Mathur, via Ranajit Guha,^[29] points out, belonging is also a temporal issue, not only a spatial issue, which commonly leads to “temporal maladjustment”.^[30] However, as Mathur writes: “The creative overcoming of such complexity requires obtaining a ‘toehold in the living present,’ or finding a place of ‘matching coordinates’ within the great disparities of the social field that may finally be claimed as ‘our time.’”^[31] Such creative acts of overcoming absence and temporal displacement are also exhibited by some of the contributions to this thematic issue whereof some which explicitly take cues from the important work of Christina Sharpe,^[32] Saidiya V. Hartman,^[33] and M. NourbeSe´s^[34] efforts of linking the present to the past through imaginative rethinkings of how the past itself can be reworked by avoiding colonial ways of producing knowledge.

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As artists, art critics, curators, academic scholars or intellectuals, we need to attend to the specificities of who can speak, produce and listen, and when and where this happens, as well as where it cannot happen, where access is denied or curfewed, and where and how particular acts are either silenced or made invisible. This pertains to the culturally and historically specific contexts of everyday life as well as the larger cultural economy of how artworks partition and distribute the sensory domain through various material and/or performative expressions. It entails paying attention to how, as Stuart Hall argues, identities—be they the identities of a migrant/refugee, or an artist or a scholar—are in constant production and negotiation, but also conditioned by an unequal world of established and sedimented discourses and practices that produce and perpetuate boundaries and borders.^[35]