Migrant Bodies Research Articles

Borders for profit: transnational social exclusion and the production of the NAFTA border

The focus of this paper is the production of the 'North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)' border that defines a trans/national social field and directs the day-to-day lives of migrant women who organise their livelihoods around the Mexico-Guatemala border. We document and investigate emerging transnational spaces and practices of social exclusion and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) that boost domestic economic interests, externalise social responsibility, privatise social risk, and reinforce national boundaries. We argue that policies and practices in this transnational social field are directed by market logic and that, accordingly, trade agreements and migration management regimes organise place and space to make the most of global inequalities through the simultaneous facilitation and restriction of mobility. Crucially, the coordinated ambivalent control of borders in this transnational marketised social field produces an entrepreneurial context that makes possible a range of profits through the selective symbolic dispossession of nation-states, nationalities, and migrant bodies: economic, political, and social.

Borders for profit: transnational social exclusion and the production of the NAFTA border

The focus of this paper is the production of the 'North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)' border that defines a trans/national social field and directs the day-to-day lives of migrant women who organise their livelihoods around the Mexico-Guatemala border. We document and investigate emerging transnational spaces and practices of social exclusion and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) that boost domestic economic interests, externalise social responsibility, privatise social risk, and reinforce national boundaries. We argue that policies and practices in this transnational social field are directed by market logic and that, accordingly, trade agreements and migration management regimes organise place and space to make the most of global inequalities through the simultaneous facilitation and restriction of mobility. Crucially, the coordinated ambivalent control of borders in this transnational marketised social field produces an entrepreneurial context that makes possible a range of profits through the selective symbolic dispossession of nation-states, nationalities, and migrant bodies: economic, political, and social.

Identificação e luto: a humanização e a sobrevivência dos migrantes e refugiados

Em um contexto de políticas de fortalecimento de controle de fronteiras cada vez mais intensas, este artigo analisa como o processo de identificação dos corpos de migrantes e refugiados, trabalho reivindicado por iniciativas humanitárias em contato familiares, movidos pela empatia e na busca pela possibilidade de luto, pode ter dois resultados: permitir a humanidade a vidas que eram nuas e proporcionar a sobrevivência. Sugere-se que ambos são instrumentos de manutenção dos refugiados na consciência coletiva e pavimentam o caminho para políticas mais humanas.

A contextualisation of the 2008 and 2015 xenophobic attacks: Tracing South African necropolitics

It has been a decade since the 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Reflecting on these, this article rethinks xenophobia in the country by positioning it as an inevitable and unavoidable symptom of the nation-building project. By connecting the 2008 attacks to similar violence in 2015, it traces socially and politically embedded attitudes that contribute to an environment of hostility and intolerance. The article suggests that these perspectives and policies are fundamentally connected to the necropower that defines South Africanness. It links the violence to historical trends and decisions, and shows that discourses of denialism and exceptionalism are necropolitical in that they render certain bodies as worthy of life in the country, and relegate migrant bodies to zones of figurative and literal death. As such, the article implies that a perspective beyond the confines of nationhood is needed to effect change. In this, a necropolitical lens provides intersectional insight into the last decade of violence and works towards a critique of a simple binary of inclusion/exclusion.

‘Authoritarian neoliberalism’ and the Australian border-industrial complex

What functions do the securitization and the militarization of the border serve under ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ in Australia? Having pursued the policy of mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants since 1992, the Australian government has also increasingly sought to outsource, privatize, and offshore the construction and operation of its immigration detention facilities, whilst simultaneously engaging in increasingly authoritarian interventions via the militarization of border control. This article seeks to problematize these developments by constructing an emergent cartography of the various links between the ongoing processes of neoliberal structural adjustment, and the intensification of the policing and punitive apparatuses of the Australian border-industrial complex. Accordingly, using theoretical insights gleaned from emergent work on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ and from race critical theory as a cue, I outline in this article three functions of the border within punitive approaches to immigration control under neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia: first, as an apparatus of ongoing colonial power; second, as a technology of racial differentiation through its functioning as a ‘filter’ that privileges certain migrant bodies over others, and as an ‘insulator’ against popular dissent; third, as a site of profit and accumulation for transnational capital.

The Unsacred and the Spectacularized: Alan Kurdi and the Migrant Body

While images can provide a transformative experience, they can also become objects of virtual voyeurism, functioning within regimes of representation while possessing the power to resist dominant ideologies. This article examines this phenomenon of “claiming the dead and dispossessing them” through the case study of Alan Kurdi who became an iconic symbol representing the trauma of people fleeing conflict zones in the Middle East. As an iconic image, it raised awareness of the plight of the Syrian refugees, but the image also became locked into a “sensorium” (Rancière) where it created communion through its pathos but equally was trapped into an aesthetic regime which re-centered the migrant body as a new type of (in)humanity in Europe. The Internet as a platform for this sensorium constantly re-appropriates iconic imagery into new artistic and creative formats where images can be stripped from context, re-hashed, and endlessly circulated as cultural artifacts, bearing the burden of history yet being disenfranchised from it.

Audializing migrant bodies: Sound and security at the border

Sound represents a salient yet rarely examined counterpoint to visuality and materiality in security, international bordering, and mobility literature. Using the context of sub-Saharan African migration as grounding for empirical analysis and drawing on fieldwork conducted in Morocco in 2015 and 2016, this article lays the foundation for a research agenda that understands voice, and the sonic body more broadly, as mechanisms of political power. In examining the central roles that sound, hearing, and voice play in strategies of individual resistance at border crossings, as well as in state, private, and transnational communication and surveillance regimes, it attends to the ways in which sound and the audialized body reconfigure power relations, and structure mobility and personal identity. This analysis contributes to the growing literature addressing biometric borders and the deterritorialization of security practices, and argues that sound, along with more familiar nodes of securitization, constitutes a critical site of governmentality and therefore of ethical and moral negotiation.

After the Long Wait: Post-Migrant Agency and the Politics of Return in Tahar Ben Jelloun's A Palace in the Old Village

This essay offers a contemplation of the affinity between a post-literary idiom and the question of migrant writing through a reading of Tahar Ben Jelloun's novella A Palace in the Old Village (Arcadia Books, 2011 [2009]). Taking its cue from the novella's account of its Maghrebi protagonist, the migrant worker Mohammed, in the moment of his retirement and return to Morocco, the essay opens up the question of whether the liminal ‘Franco-Maghrebi borderland’ ( Sajed 2013 ) which he traverses, as well as the home-space itself, may be perceived as either discursively generative and liberatory spaces, or as ultimately aporetic zones of living. The essay evaluates Ben Jelloun's novella as a ‘post-migrant’ one, approaching the narrative spatial projection back into the native space as a dynamics of refraction, a quest for ‘choric’ ( Rickert 2007 ) spatiality, and a restitution of agency to and from the autochthonous. The essay finally suggests that Ben Jelloun's novella stages an amplified visualisation of post-migrant discourse as it percolates through the migrant body. As Mohammed deteriorates on his native Moroccan terrain, waiting for his children who never show up, his fading body is now indelibly marked by the labour to which post-war Europe owed much of its economic resurgence: a dynamics which is described here as a ‘refracted indigeneity’.

Staging representations: Reflections on performing activism in a visual art and theatre collaboration

This article explores sites of possibility for addressing the current refugee crisis through artistic collaborations and asks how we as artists negotiate artistic mediums to foster a collective dialogue about ethics of representation concerning migrant bodies and mediatized images of violence and destruction. In winter 2018, University of Central Florida’s Schools of Visual and Performing Arts offered interdisciplinary programming that addressed issues of exile, displacement and Otherness. The gallery exhibition Finding Home: The Global Refugee Crisis brought together fourteen artists from around the world whose work addresses themes including borders as geographical and symbolic dividing lines, displacement and asylum seeking, refugee camps and detention centres, and immigration and resettlement. The theatre production of David Edgar’s Pentecost and the staged reading of The Refugee Plays interweaved the past with the present to challenge how society responds to a refugee crisis and treats ‘precarious bodies’ of the displaced and wounded. This article considers the ways in which this collaboration united the visual and performing arts, decolonized the institution, adapted, transformed and negotiated media, performed difference and diversity, and demonstrated the ability of the arts to act for social justice.

Subalterns ‘speak’: migrant bodies, and the performativity of the arts

ABSTRACTThe contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their precarious lives look from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The following investigation treats the way their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as it is articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembene’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern speak and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyse raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.

Beyond the bird in the cage? Translocal embodiment and trajectories of Nicaraguan female migrants in Seville, Spain

In migration scholarship, the migrant body has recently begun to gain recognition as a productive analytical scale for exploring politics of mobility: the highly differentiated ways in which migration is accessed and lived. However, a tendency to treat bodies as sites of gendered and racialized suffering can obscure migrant agency and differentiation as well as the ways in which migrant bodies can also be seen as sites of resistance and achievement. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the ways in which mobility politics shape divergent migrant trajectories by putting forward a translocal embodiment perspective. The paper argues that migrant bodies constitute key sites of struggle over mobility, and that looking at migrant embodied practice in translocal context can further unravel the differentiations that shape migrant trajectories across space and time. The paper’s argument builds on theoretical notions of intersectionality, embodied cultural capital and translocality to enrich the discussion of mobility politics. Empirically, it draws on multi-sited ethnographic research with Nicaraguan families, focusing on female Nicaraguan migrants working in informal domestic employment in Spain, to explore how bodies and embodied practices matter throughout these migrants’ trajectories. In particular, the paper intends to do justice to migrant agency by exploring how bodies that are often victimized can also be considered as stratified resources of translocal negotiation. The translocal embodiment perspective put forward in the paper shows that migrant bodies constitute a multi-faceted, non-erasable component of the unsettled yet situated mobility politics that shape divergent trajectories.

MISSING IN MIGRATION: FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE1

Abstract Persons who die or go missing in migration leave behind families with similar needs to the families of those missing in conflict and political violence. Indeed, much of what has been learned in terms of psychosocial support and forensic work in transitional contexts may be useful in such situations. However, both the political and logistical constraints of identifying the bodies of dead migrants, for example those found in the Mediterranean Sea, are extreme, with families dispersed globally and European states refusing to acknowledge that they have any obligations. Here, experience of a research project investigating the treatment of migrant bodies at the European Union's southern frontier and the needs and perceptions of families of missing migrants is discussed, with an emphasis on work with both families and practitioners.

Tracing borderscapes in three recent documentaries on Central American migration

Abstract This article looks at visual configurations of border landscapes and Central American migrant trajectories in three recent documentaries: Which Way Home (Cammisa, 2009), De Nadie/No One (Dirdamal, 2005) and Who is Dayani Cristal? (Silver and García Bernal, 2013). It examines elements pertaining to the representations of borders, space and identity to expand Shaw’s classification of the new sub-genre of migration films within the documentary. It also highlights the social configuration of space because of its relational construction and its production through practices of material engagement: ‘if time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction’. To this end, the spatial metaphor of the paratopia designates a negotiation of material and human relationality away from essentialist place/non-place thinking. This additionally leads to an examination of the migrant body as a depoliticized subject of which the visualization counters the stereotypical discourse of the migrant as a delinquent.

Exclusion Through Imperio

This article explores and unpacks the entanglements between law and geography that enable and advance the exclusion of non-citizens from entry into sovereign territory. We suggest that states manipulate jurisdiction within and beyond sovereign territory to extend enforcement. This jurisdiction applies primarily to the bodies of migrants themselves as opposed to fixed spaces. Like Elden’s (2009, 2013) imperio, or imperial power, this extension is spatially boundless, limitless in internal checks and administrative. Imperio places migrant bodies into new legal regimes with subjectivities that overlap and override existing protections, such as international refugee law. We develop our argument by considering enforcement practices in three areas: the waiting zone at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, search and rescue areas on the Central Mediterranean Sea and Australian excision zones.

‘This country, law very strong’: Securitization beyond the border in the everyday lives of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore

While work on the securitization of migration has often held borders to be the site at which state power is most keenly felt, this paper draws on static and walking interviews with Bangladeshi male migrant workers in Singapore to understand their everyday experiences of the securitization within state territory. These narratives demonstrate how the Little India district in Singapore has been scripted as an exceptionally problematic space associated with dangerous migrant bodies, within which Bangladeshi migrants encounter state power in a variety of guises, ranging from police patrols to video surveillance technologies. They also reveal how Bangladeshi migrants continually struggle against these state-led scripts of insecurity, even if their sojourn in Singaporean territory is circumscribed by a condition of permanent temporariness. Through this discussion, the securitization of migration is conceptualized as an unfinished project that is often exerted unevenly and paradoxically within state territory. The security-migration nexus should also not only be understood with recourse to bodies deemed “illegal” and “unwanted”—such as asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants—but should also account for temporary labour migrants who have been legally admitted into state territory, whose labour power is central to the host state’s economy but who are disallowed from ever belonging within the countries they work in.

Thermal Sensations—Burning the Flesh of the World

Heat is an inescapable cosmological force. This thought experiment radiates around thinking thermal sensations as elemental intensities, “beings” in themselves, always moving through bodies, objects, and things, perpetually affecting and producing effects. Using infrared thermography and embracing a critical-aesthetics approach, we ignite thermal sensations, moving through the infernal city of Phoenix and the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze are primary interlocutors in a sci-phi experiment that unfolds across two thermal imaginaries as movements in thought: (1) stranger things, and (2) desert of the real. This is our necessary passage from mysterious enchantments and curiosities felt in the thermal flesh of the world, stranger things, to the violence of thermal sensations in the desert of the real—human remains, migrant bodies, and the marginalized bearing traces of injury and injustice in the inferno where we live every day. Burning the flesh of the world helps render visible (sensate) the catastrophe of the present. There can be no resistance, no counteractualizations, and no sci-phi imaginaries of peoples and worlds to come, in the absence of thermal sensations touching, affecting, and moving all bodies of this earth.

Migrant Bodies, Flowing Rituals: The Performance Art of Violeta Luna

This article focuses on one of Violeta Luna's pieces on undocumented migration to the US (Body Parted/Cuerpo Partido 2008), as well as two works dealing with Mexico's current state of emergency: Requiem por una tierra perdida/Requiem for a Lost Land (2010-2014) and Virgenes y Diosas/Virgins and Goddesses (2014-2015). In order to explore what these works can tell us about our present, I rely mainly on contemporary expansions of the concept of biopolitics first advanced by Michel Foucault. Additionally, I find a foothold in cultural critics such as Ana Longoni, Rustom Bharucha, and others who have questioned the epistemologies on art and politics prevalent in Western art history. Since context is key for analyzing politically engaged art, I also refer to specific historical events in connection to Luna's pieces.

An Immigration Policy by Any Other Name: Semantics of Immigration to Japan

This survey examines the ways in which the Japanese government controls the flow of foreign migrants across and within its borders. It does this in practice by taking steps to admit increasing numbers of migrants from abroad, without using the term imin (immigrants). Although a diverse body of migrants resides in and contributes to the country, the taboo surrounding the use of the word imin allays public concern for increasing diversity while allowing for de facto long-term migration, including naturalization, to occur. Through analyses of key documents, news articles, an interview, as well as through the author’s experience as a participant in a government panel on immigration control policy, the survey seeks to demonstrate how important the politics of naming (Parkin, David. 1984. ‘Political Language’. Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 345–165; Poerksen, Uwe. 1995. Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press) is to the reality of immigration to Japan.

Translational Spaces: Virtual narratives of being and belonging

Abstract The concept of translation implies a dynamic motion of subjects and objects to perceive, remember and experience physical and digital elements across geographical, linguistic, physical, psychological and virtual borders. Translational Spaces is a project that consists of a series of 2D and 3D animations combined with written fictions of virtual narratives of dislocation. This project investigates processes of self-identification, social interaction and physical perception through multimedia works that emerge from digital and textual components. Through interactive and immersive gallery installations, along with participatory workshops, this project questions the notion of a homogeneous self within multiple physical and virtual realms. Dislocation, familiar to those who have experienced cultural migration, has become more apparent as subjects now live as virtual immigrants within the realm of the digital. In cyberspace, subjects and objects exist as images that are constantly moving from one screen to the next, a virtual dislocation similar to the one of a migrant body. The sense of being present and belonging to a specific place is constantly affected by today’s digital culture. As augmented digital elements merge with the physical world, a mixed reality emerges in which subjects and objects become re-presentations of themselves. Digital technologies have become an extension of both the body and its consciousness. This allows for the body to experience itself, others and the places around it as multiple and infinite entities. Translational Spaces presents a suspended state of mixed realities in which digital environments are used to trigger a sense of the immediate and the already-lived. This allows the individuals who experience it to construct their own virtual narratives through a sense of (dis)embodiment and dislocation.

The 'Funnel Effect' & Recovered Bodies of Unauthorized Migrants Processed by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 1990-2005

The Binational Migration Institute (BMI) of the University of Arizona’s Mexican American Studies and Research Center (MASRC) has undertaken a unique and scientifically rigorous study of all of the unauthorized border-crosser (UBC) deaths examined by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office (PCMEO) from 1990-2005. Because the PCMEO has handled approximately 90% of all of the UBC recovered bodies in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, an analysis of such deaths serves as both an accurate reflection of the major characteristics of all known UBC deaths that have occurred in this sector, as well as an exact, previously unavailable portrayal of the UBC bodies that have been handled by the overburdened PCMEO since 1990. BMI has also created a comprehensive and reliable set of criteria that can be used to better count and describe known UBC deaths throughout the entire U.S. A reliable analysis of known UBC deaths in the Tucson Sector is important for many reasons, but especially because, according to all available figures produced by the U.S. government and the academic community, a comparison of the totals of such deaths for each of the 9 Border Patrol sectors along the US/Mexico border, shows that the Tucson Sector in southern Arizona has been the site of the vast majority of known UBC deaths, or to use a more accurate phrase, UBC recovered bodies, in the new millennium. The results of the BMI study, which are confirmed by comparable research, show that there has been an exponential increase in the number of UBC recovered bodies handled by the PCMEO from 1990 to 2005, thereby creating a major public health and humanitarian crisis in the deserts of Arizona. Over this period of time, the PCMEO has examined 927 UBC recovered bodies, that is, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO 2006), at least 78% of the unprecedented increase in known border-crossing deaths along the entire southwest border of the U.S. from 1990-2003. The BMI study was also specifically designed to test the much-discussed causal, structural link between the “funnel effect” created by U.S. immigration control policies and the immense increase in known UBC deaths. These so-called prevention-through-deterrence measures, initially implemented in the mid- to late-1990s, that intentionally redirected hundreds-of-thousands of unauthorized migrants away from previously busy crossing points in California and Texas into Arizona’s perilous and deadly landscape. BMI’s findings unambiguously confirm previous evidence that such U.S. policies did create the “funnel effect” and that it is indeed the primary structural cause of death of thousands of North American, Central American, and South American unauthorized men, women, and children who have died while trying to enter the U.S.