UNDESIRABLE AND PLACELESS

Abstract

It has been claimed that migration was the quintessential experience of the twentieth century. Since the end of the Cold War, conflicts produced by the ‘new wars’, ecological disasters and deepening global inequalities have generated an ever-increasing number of refugees, people who have been thrown into a condition of ‘liminal drift’, without voice or place, on the margins of the world. In the past decade or so, a range of filmic cultural texts have attempted to give definition and articulation to the displaced and their experience of being undesirable and placeless, a cinema of destitution. The destitute – including refugees, exiles, migrant workers, refused asylum seekers and undocumented aliens – are those who are not only impoverished but also abandoned by the narrative monopolies, inclusions and exclusions of the sovereign nation-state, lacking social or political mediation, outside of thought even, except as part of an ‘immigration crisis’. However, what for the sovereign nation-state is a moment of crisis – ‘fortress Europe’ – is also for the displaced a moment or space of encounter which raises the hypothetical possibility of becoming a political subject. The films offer the basis for a political critique of ‘exceptionalism’ – the placing of the abandoned outside the realm of the juridical and civil polity – by developing challenging narratives which seek to anchor the destitute and excluded through cultural recognition and symbolic spaces, both local and global, which help to reconstitute them, potentially, as politically qualified subjects: their stories are voiced as more than suffering victims, those who are always already narrated. Deleuze's concept of a ‘minor cinema’ will be used as one theoretical basis for the argument that, speculatively, the destitute are ‘the people who are missing’, or ‘not yet’, and that the films do not represent them as such but help bring them into existence, produce a set of enabling images that summon them into meaning.