Can Migrants Be Seen?

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter considers the preponderance of treatments of the current “migration crisis” in contemporary Western literature, art, and film. Surveying a wide range of works in different media, it identifies recurrent themes and approaches, and considers the ways in which the saturation of the aesthetic sphere by works of “migration art” has shaped contemporary aesthetic practices. Paradoxically, one of the recurrent themes of these works is to note the relative invisibility of migrants in everyday life, and attempts to redress this sidelining in some cases (e.g., Haneke’s Happy End (2017)) result in a complex interrogation of the limits of contemporary representational practices. This self-reflexivity is evident in a number of works of “migration art.” While these works are examples of what Rancière refers to as the “ethical turn,” occupying an “indistinct sphere where .?.?. the specificity of political and artistic practices [are] dissolved,” nevertheless there are examples of works (e.g., Bouchra Khalili’s installation, The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11)) in which the tension between their ethical intentionality and their actualization as a formal work of art is productively explored. The final section of the chapter situates the contemporary trend of migration art in a longer history of representations of shipwrecks in Western art and literature, and suggests that contemporary artists, writers, and film makers draw on a received aesthetic language of individual risk and danger in the face of the elements (the sublime) in which to cast the fate of present day migrants. A reading of two contrasting works of poetry, Caroline Smith’s The Immigration Handbook (2016) and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (2014), suggests where we might see both the limits and efficaciousness of these techniques.