Abstract
This article narrates the politics of escape from borders and labour discipline in a post-Soviet migrant metropolis drawing on the art-activism project Nasreddin in Russia. It explores the relation between control and autonomy in urban migrations through a trans-aesthetics: a set of visual and verbal stories weaving together experiences and outcomes of the art project with academic debates on late capitalist urbanization. The encounter of artistic practices and migrants’ embodied, everyday struggles to inhabit the city, it is suggested, has potential for disrupting the disciplinary and exclusionary effects of capitalist transformations and migration enforcement. This is made visible through transient spaces of escape in which the everyday lives and social worlds of migrants, constrained by the precarization of labour and by the multiplication and diversification of bordering practices, are reclaimed through laughter, mobility and care. This point is illustrated by focusing on three such spaces and practices: trickster politics in the housing market, acts of disidentification and care work on the city ‘as a body.’ The article offers a methodologically innovative contribution to ongoing debates on aesthetic political economy, cities and borders and artistic and activist interventions in global cities.
Highlights
One of the first experiments of the project was a Jitlina et al.: Escaping a migrant metropolis set of playful joke contests around the question ‘How would Nasreddin react to everyday situations that migrants face in St Petersburg?’ Several of the stories included in this article were initially narrated in these contests
Arguments about the ubiquitous borders saturating the interior of the nationstate and shaping urban spaces of the everyday, while not new, have been the starting point of our narration
We wish to emphasize the importance of abstaining from overstating the novelty of such dynamics—especially in postimperial contexts such as Russia and the city of Saint Petersburg
Summary
T‘he Soviet Union’, poet Hassan Holov suggests in the first issue of the magazine Nasreddin in Russia, ‘was smashed into smithereens like a giant pot in which there was nothing to cook.’ Holov’s words evoke the shock-economy like disintegration (Klein 2007) through which new configurations of borders and mobility came to define the post-Soviet space.In the post-Soviet metropolis of Saint Petersburg, these re-configurations unfolded—and continue to unfold—through the transformation of property rights, resulting in unfinished privatization and ‘splintered gentrification’(Bernt 2016). One of the first experiments of the project was a Jitlina et al.: Escaping a migrant metropolis set of playful joke contests around the question ‘How would Nasreddin react to everyday situations that migrants face in St Petersburg?’ Several of the stories included in this article were initially narrated in these contests.1 But beyond such a rather instrumental use, we suggest here that the character of Nasreddin Hodja is an embodiment of postcolonial/postsocialist trickster politics.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
