“Under what conditions can the displaced fashion their own images, craft their arts of experience around the border, and find alliances in artistic representations that do not reproduce the hierarchies of humanitarianism and the coercions of care?” This key question animates CICI Director Debarati Sanyal’s Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges, which has recently been published by Fordham University Press.
Arts of the Border considers the violent border regimes that migrants and refugees have faced while attempting to cross into Europe in recent decades— and what Sanyal terms “kino-aesthetic” practices by these individuals, fleeting collectives, and artists working in solidarity with them in order to counter such violence and move towards liveable lives. To undertake this analysis, Sanyal elaborates upon post-World War II human rights critique, notably by Hannah Arendt, in order to show the limitations of advocating only for the category of human. “Borders have become battlegrounds for imagining the boundaries of the human itself,” Sanyal maintains. She tracks the echoes of concentrationary logics in contemporary border regimes while also engaging with Black studies and decolonial scholarship to demonstrate the resonances of slavery and colonialism in present-day rhetoric and tactics. Hewing neither to a “bare life” (following Giorgio Agamben) or “necropolitical” (following Achille Mbembe) approach on the one hand, nor to an idealized account of “autonomy of migration” on the other, Sanyal traces migrants’ movement arts and representations of them—often provisional, improvised, and experimental—in order to suggest alternative means to exist in statelessness.
Arts of the Border demonstrates the porousness of Europe’s securitized boundaries and the cruel hypocrisy of a so-called refugee “crisis”: “the plight of refugees is no crisis but rather the product of a deadly border regime built by histories of enslavement, predation, and extraction.” Such legacies continue: Sanyal explores artistic accounts of migrants killed at sea, detained in airport security, and wounded by razor wire. Such “crises,” then, are of Europe’s own creation—as are the subjects (or less-than- or non-subjects) they produce. The text is attentive to questions of racialization and tiered humanization at the border: Sanyal tracks how, in times of war, white Ukrainians are welcomed into Europe while Sub-Saharan and Sudanese migrants are disappeared at the Morocco-Spain border. She tracks, too, how ever-developing biometric surveillance turns airport security into a business that profits from profiling migrants and encoding race through data. Borders are produced, built, and outsourced. As such, the geographies that comprise “Europe’s edges” in Arts of the Border span such sites as Spanish enclaves in Morocco, the Calais refugee camp in northern France, airport detention centers in the middle of cities, and detention camps on Aegean islands. Sanyal connects the repressive tactics and logics of these sites to geographies beyond Europe, including Gaza and the US-Mexico border.
In the face of such border regimes, Sanyal details other aesthetic-political imaginaries and possibilities. The book’s corpus spans interdisciplinary art forms and migrant practices which together comprise what she terms “kino-aesthetic” strategies not only for countering border violence but for asserting forms of rights beyond post-Holocaust human rights law. Throughout the chapters, we see such practices as migrants mutilating their own fingers in order to circumvent biometric border fingerprinting technologies and installing screws into their shoes in order to scale border fences. These appear alongside experimental documentaries filmed by migrants like Those Who Jump and others that attempt to offer cinematic asylum like La Blessure; and alongside novels that represent migrant experiences like Trois femmes puissantes and visual art like a biometric portrait of Frantz Fanon that warns against capture by security technology. Drawing from these and other examples, Arts of the Border ultimately makes a case for the importance of lingering on a range of kino-aesthetic production in response to ongoing and differential border violence. In Sanyal’s words: “While refugees continue to be cast [...] as threats to be feared and contained or as pure victims consigned to humanitarian compassion, what these arts of the border illuminate is something different: the traces of political subjects seizing their right to exist and to move on.”
Marlena Gittleman is a Future of Higher Education Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.