Border countervisuality: smartphone videos of border crossing and migration

Abstract

This article explores how smartphone videos produced by migrants during border crossings challenge Eurocentric visualizations of borders. Implementing video analysis and iconographic interpretation, I explore three interrelated aspects of the smartphone videos: (1) By circulating videos via digital platforms, migrants create a countervisuality of border crossing that destabilizes the visual politics that shape current border regimes. (2) Unlike journalistic, humanitarian, or surveillance-oriented visual images produced from above, from a safe distance, from rescue or patrol ships, migrants’ smartphone footage puts their own narratives at the center of visualization. (3) Whereas Eurocentric visualizations of migration and borders aim to elicit affects and emotions such as pity, empathy, fear, or panic, migrants’ smartphone videos depict emotions such as joy and happiness after successful border crossings. These affective visualizations of individual migration stories confound binary representations of migrants as either victims or invaders. I argue that the shaky smartphone videos with their wandering focus and disordered mode of vision create a productive vantage point for seeing and sensing a world that is unimaginable for the normative, focused lens that structures views projected by journalism, humanitarian appeals, political mobilization, and surveillance technologies.