The Emotional Confluence of Borders, Refugees and Visual Culture: The Case of Behrouz Boochani, Held in Australia’s Offshore Detention Regime

Abstract

This article focuses on borders as both physical and metaphysical boundaries—ones that are manifest in systems of meaning, punishment and surveillance. These systems operate on the human body as discipline and punishment in multiple ways. Drawing on a critical framework of the racialized carceral state, this article explores artistic and literary interventions by refugees against the architecture of externalized borders imposed by the Australian state. The works of the Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani and his collaborators are explored as a case study. Boochani is subject to Australia’s offshore detention regime, detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. This article asks what new concepts are needed to disrupt the hierarchy of humans that is a by-product of the national border and its systems of control, criminalization and exclusion.