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- Author: Michael J. Shapiro x
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Passages: On Geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity assembles a series of political interventions and ruminations that are as much about ethics as they are about aesthetics. It consists of a series of interconnected essays and images that intervene to create an image–text montage that reveals the shadow worlds that intensify precarity as well as the complex event and discursive spaces that offer alternative approaches to knowledge, politics, and encounters. In our dialogically created composition, the chapters treat themes such as colonialism, apocalyptic imaginaries, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow worlds of the African soccerscape, and various immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an aesthetically attuned form of geo-analysis that offers aesthetic breaks from capitalist exploitation and the nation-statist regime, this book invites inquiry into today’s apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, immunitary apparatuses, and international criminal justice regimes.
Through an analysis of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's film La Promesse' (1996) and Diego Quemada-Díez’s The Golden Dream (2013), this chapter explores how undocumented migrants are ruthlessly exploited and exposed to death in cities–London and Antwerp–and on the road, traveling from Guatemala through Mexico in an attempt to make it into the U.S. Engaged in critical commentaries on the contemporary migratory condition articulated in global cinema, the chapter composes diverse migratory scenarios to render visible the national, urban, and racial frontiers of human encounter in which racialized migrant bodies experience the precarities dealt by the protective and predatory practices of official national formations and opportunistic criminal enterprises, respectively.
This chapter turns to the very culture of middle-class households to illustrate how the contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labor, among which are young women working in homes abroad. With a focus on subaltern characters, investigations in this chapter treat the way their articulation of their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembène’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, “The Embassy of Cambodia”). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and Mahasweta Devi’s short story “The Breast-giver”, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard-cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyze raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical and domestic life, while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.
By charting the tension between reasons of state and justice, as well as the way the global justice dispositif involves a wide variety of protagonists, some of whose practices seem to be heterogeneous to the international justice regime, this chapter examines the valuation practices, overlapping cartographies, regimes of calculability, secrecy, and colonial specters that emerge as one investigates the subplots and shadow worlds behind the prosecution of crimes against humanity. Through a reading of Mathias Énard’s novel Zone, where the author stages a drama about justice that effectively engages grammatical and theatrical framing of how to approach the “idea” (in this case) of justice, the chapter maps truth-seeking and truth-concealing practices that move and traverse the “earth.” Our analysis then turns to the protagonists and challenging relations of intimacy exposed in Hugo Blick’s Black Earth Rising (2018), a Netflix series in which the main protagonist, the legal investigator and Rwanda genocide survivor Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel), runs into a world of secrecy, colonial specters, talionic laws (an eye for an eye), and manhunting. These encounters interrupt her sense of self, truth, family, justice, and even her “idea of Africa,” thus leading her on a quest that involves burrowing for justice in ways that involve unburying memories, the dead, and a spectral past.
This chapter turns to the varied passages of the sporting body in the first season of Matthieu Donck’s Netflix series The Break (La Trêve) and the routes, connections, and shadow-worlds it reveals. To situate the implications of the migratory flow of bodies and knowledges, we turn to cinematic texts that supply an imagery of the flow of African bodies and the forces that set them in motion, subjecting them to various forms of valuation, speculation, and pain. This is primarily achieved through a reading of African soccerscapes and ethnoscapes in Gerardo Olivares 2007 film, 14 Kilómetros and Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu (2014). The chapter illustrates how different investigative apparatuses enable a series of epistemological and aesthetic breaks that reveal, conceal, or facilitate the trans-continental speculation and recruitment of the ‘superfluous’ Black sporting body and the precarity and desire that accompanies the dynamics of their subsequent use, abuse, and ‘retirement.’
With a focus on Hugo Blick’s Black Earth Rising (2018), this chapter maps how a larger justice story develops around conflicting interpersonal relations, while at the same time attending to the larger geopolitical story and a darkness-based colonial imaginary. Attentive to the cartographic and subjective repositioning made possible by Kate Ashby’s locus of enunciation, we illustrate how the international criminal justice regime and humanitarian reason is entangled with violent shadow worlds that are revealed when she confronts the fraught exchanges within which values are occulted, institutions created, and personal relationships built. Ultimately, these violent shadow worlds are brought to the fore when one attends to the violence-laundering and implicit practices of exchange along with what we call “the burying, burrowing, and blinding” practices that Black Earth Rising depicts. Through an investigative montage, the series provides insights into shadow worlds behind and beneath the large geopolitical theater as well as the maps of justice, atrocity, and intimacy that connect Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Hague, France, London, and the U.S.
Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s pensée du tremblement (a quakeful, or tremulous, thinking) and Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World, the brief Coda to the book present a series of refrains on aesthetics, precarity, and the numerous problems that precariousness poses for ethico-political comprehension.
The Introduction illustrates our commitment to aesthetics-as-method, which enables us to bring together diverse concepts, bodies, passages, and images. The chapters map the political stakes of our commitment to aesthetics-as-method. In addition to outlining the methods, chapters, and key concepts, the Introduction raises critical questions regarding how everyday and historical political apparatuses and processes distribute bodies, affects, death, and senses in ways that challenge or sustain the immanence of sovereignty, while provoking readers to experiment with affective intimacies that enable them apprehend the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.