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Introduction Encounters between border-crossing migrants and their hosts take place in borderscapes, locations that both challenge established identities and transform familiar spaces into locations of difference, generating confusion and conflicts, but also promise what Bhabha ( 1994 ) has referred to as ‘newness’ and transformation. This chapter examines the literary representation of forced migrants in one newly emerged border space, the originally temporary and notorious refugee camp known as the ‘Jungle’, on the
The representation strategies and discursive practices enacted by a wide range of state and non-state actors present the Mediterranean Sea as the setting of a perpetual emergency. European and national political agencies, military authorities, humanitarian organisations and activists have been representing migrants crossing borders as a significant problem to be managed in terms of a wider social, cultural and political ‘crisis’. This chapter focuses on the ambiguities and contradictions that bedevil discourses and practices around control and care of human mobility in the Mediterranean. It addresses the role of ‘crisis’ narratives and the hyper-visibility of the ‘military-humanitarian spectacle of the border’ in obscuring the political stakes surrounding European borders.
This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and representation in different borderscapes. It provides fresh insight into the ways in which borders, borderscapes and migration are imagined and narrated by offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border. The case studies in the volume contribute to the methodological renewal of border studies and present ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. The case studies address the role of borders in narrative and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, video art and survivor testimonies in a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from northern Europe, via Mediterranean and Mexican–US borderlands to Chinese borderlands. The disciplinary approaches include critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies and political geography. The volume argues that borderlands and border-crossings (such as those by migrants) are present in public discourse and more private, everyday experience. This volume addresses their mediation through various stories, photographs, films and other forms. It suggests that narratives and images are part of the borderscapes in which border-crossings and bordering processes take place, contributing to the negotiation of borders in the public sphere. As the case studies show, narratives and images enable identifying various top-down and bottom-up discourses to be heard and make visible different minority groups and constituencies.
of contemporary borderscapes is reduced to simple narratives and images. Complexity is made invisible: ‘objects and subjectivities are given an aesthetic surface, which conceals b/orderings and the workings of power’ (Schimanski and Wolfe, 2017 : 157; see also Johan Schimanski, Chapter 10 below). The entangled tensions between visibility and invisibility take on a key role in the functioning of b/ordering regimes, and analysis of such regimes should thus include a wider focus on the multiple and shifting intersections of ‘in/visibility and in/security in today
directions (174). He thus evokes a narrative of border-crossing. This book explores both images and narratives as integral parts of bordering processes and border-crossings as they impact on our world. Borderlands – experienced by their inhabitants amongst others – and border-crossings – such as those carried out by migrants – are present both in public discourse and in more private, everyday experience. As they are mediated through various stories, photographs, films and other forms, narratives and images are part of the borderscapes in which
. Taylor's artwork hence connected two iconic sites – the Houses of Parliament and the cliffs of Dover – to pose important questions about British identity at a time of political turmoil. The borderscape of Kent Standing proud over the English Channel, the cliffs of Dover figured prominently in media coverage as the UK withdrew, sometimes painfully, from the EU. More than a mere icon of Englishness, the cliffs became a symbol of ‘islandness’ and the rupture with mainland Europe. In this book I extend this line of argument, showing
Kent borderscape changed as the county became more integrated within a European spatial imaginary. This imaginary rejected the insular exceptionalism of the island-nation in favour of a road and rail network promoting European integration. According to Ole Jensen and Tim Richardson, the idea that spatial integration would achieve European political harmonisation emerged in the 1980s, becoming an EU priority in the 1990s as a monotopic vision of Europe as a frictionless society gained policy traction. Central to this was the idea of a Trans-European Transport
Answering our three questions about border images and narratives In our Introduction we framed the work in this book in terms of three questions: First, how does the choice of form, medium, genre and aesthetical strategies help form and potentially transform the borderscape? Second, how do these different forms, discourses and genres cross the borders into the public sphere? Third, what paradoxes can make problematic simple perceptions of making visible and giving voice? We accompanied each of these questions with a series of
strategies in ‘borderscapes’ (geopolitical and epistemic multidimensionality of the border enabling understanding of borders in globalisation (Brambilla, 2015 )) transformation, how these forms, genres and discourses cross into the public sphere, and what making visible and giving voice to border perceptions does to empower both national interests and local minority constituencies. A prominent illustration is found in the ‘Tea Road’ narrative that speaks of ancient, well-worn trading routes for tea and other commodities originating in the heart of
transition to issues of states, borders, power and territory, before, finally, directing attention to artistic responses to new forms of political management and control. This way, the chapter explores a particular component of a global borderscape that is investigated at a more local level by Chiara Brambilla in Chapter 4 below. Where is the Internet? The political geographies of capturing clouds I wish to begin this chapter with an anecdote from the early days of the Internet. The 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence and