International Relations
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.
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.
This chapter combines disparate discursive spaces of breathlessness (e.g., from industrial pollution, colonialism, and nuclear radiation) that have us emphasizing the precarities and struggles for breath that exist within a planetary, phenomenological, and historical respirationscape whose immensity evokes notions of the sublime as it mounts a challenge to comprehension. To illustrate these convergences, the chapter begins with a reading of the link between breathing and vitality in Clarice Lispector’s novel A Breath of Life, Philip K. Dick’s 1969 science fiction novel Ubik and Indra Sinha’s environmental picaresque novel Animal’s People (2007) so as to illustrate how corporate power, and racialized spaces of breathlessness, are evidence of both spectacular and the more spectral forms of slow violence.
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.
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 and the images that accompany it pays special attention to the workings of ‘mimetic violence’ and emphasizes what we can learn by examining the COVID-19 pandemic’s transversality by comparing, combining, and contrasting it with other sublimes. Ultimately, the chapter examines the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic’s transversality by comparing, combining, and contrasting it with the racial, nuclear, and apocalyptic sublimes.
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.