Migrant Bodies Research Articles

‘The Body Carries the Border’ – A Somatechnical Approach to Borderscape Violence

In bio-/necropolitical accounts, the border penetrates and insists on, that is, transforms, the bodies of people on the move, marking the constitutive violence of sovereignty-based hospitality or hostility. What is largely conceptually neglected in such accounts, however, is the subversive and risky activity of people on the move who themselves are insisting on the border by outsmarting and transgressing it. Extensions of bio-/necropolitics focusing on the debilitating aspects of state violence show how the border extends beyond a liminal status that reproduces binaries – such as exclusion/inclusion, (non-)citizenship, and (il-)legality) – thereby enabling a recentring of people on the move as agents. This paper seeks to (re-)formulate the idea of a ‘border-as-assemblage’ by offering a somatechnical reading of border transgression. The body on the move forms part of this assemblage as it challenges and reproduces the border across different technoscapes. In particular, I focus on the scene of the forensic examination room where people on the move must prove their deservingness by exposing their bodies to a medicalising-moralising gaze. This scene forms the entrance point to a consideration of the somatechnical entanglements giving shape to the assemblage of the migrant body. I reflect also on how somatechnics could be mobilised to think the body as a potential site of struggle against this (physically and epistemically) violent objectification and, in so doing, offer new perspectives on border resistance through refusal and as claim to opacity.

Bureaucratic and benign? The violent continuum of Home Office reporting in the UK

The border, the body, immigration reporting centres, and detention facilities, the violence of border regimes operates across these sites through a continuum, successively steering migrants towards subjugation, destitution and removal. Adopting a feminist framing of violence, which attends to the inherent interconnectedness between different sites and scales of violence, this paper focuses on immigration reporting to examine how its sites and practices enact various forms of violence over migrant bodies. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with asylum-seekers in Bristol and Salford, I argue that a host of spatiotemporal practices produce various forms of violence which become intimately inflicted and experienced, and yet which are inextricably tethered to the foundational logics of sovereign state politics. How reporting sites and processes function reflect the contemporary means through which violence is both imposed and concealed on those who have been categorised as ‘unwanted’ by the state.

Unveiling the Necropolitics of Oil on Migrant Bodies in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Birds

Oil played a significant role in fuelling the sociopolitical and economic development of Middle Eastern nations, attracting mass migration from South Asian nations. The article draws a nexus between the energy dynamics and labour exploitation within these petroleum-rich nations. It undertakes a close reading of the text Birds from Deepak Unnikrishnan’s novel Temporary People as it depicts the lives of migrant labourers who navigate an exploitative petro-capitalist system. The fictional text employs a narrative strategy juxtaposing elements of magic and realism, opening up a space for multilayered marginalised voices. The article engages with energy theories and interweaves Mbembe’s theory on necropolitics to grasp oil’s sovereign influence in delineating the boundaries between life and death in migrant lives. The surplus energy generated through fossil fuel extraction contributes to notions of boundless growth, coupled with technical and economic progress, which conceals the intensive manual labour underpinning these petrocultures. The magical property alluded to oil and the spectral absence of labour in the socio-cultural imagination co-constructs an exploitative and dehumanising labour regime for migrants. The migrant body is kept alive, and their existence is contingent upon the instrumental value of their labouring body, which constructs them as easily disposable and expendable as they are positioned outside the formal boundaries of citizenship.

Punishment and (In)sensitivity at the Security Border

This article expands on David Garland’s proposal that punitive practices are influenced by logics of (in)sensitivity, shaping how punishment is conceived and applied. It argues that (in)sensitivity is not a mere peripheral aspect of punishment but a central element thereof. Drawing from this premise, the article elucidates the most prominent features of Garland’s proposition, highlighting the conceptual framework it builds upon. Based on this foundation, the discussion branches into two closely related directions. Firstly, it analytically explores Garland’s contribution, explicating the depth underlying notions of meaning and sensitivity; a development that will underscore the significance of corporeality in fully understanding the imposition of punishment. Secondly, this analysis will be projected onto the context of the current discursive hegemony of security and, more specifically, in the specific manner it manifests in the regulation of migrant mobility. The undeniable preeminence of securitized borders will thus become the fundamental space of analysis to project Garland’s proposal regarding an underlying (in)sensitivity permeating the imposition of punishment. Within this context, it asserts that migrant bodies crossing the border endure punishment, yet their suffering lacks empathy within the security discourse.

Loneliness of PhD-ing: Migrant bodies of colour and Irish neo-liberal academia

This paper will look at loneliness as both an affective and a political reality, rather than simply a subjective individual feeling. Using auto-ethnography, I will look at my own PhD experience as a migrant woman of colour in a largely white male dominated Irish academia. I situate this loneliness of PhDing by looking at (a) loneliness of a migrant body of colour and (b) how this loneliness is accentuated by neo-liberal academia. Irish university spaces provide an ideal context to understand the politics of loneliness of minorities because besides being white, these spaces are also extremely neo-liberal, with the country's austerity politics changing its higher educational spaces forever. While talking about loneliness of migrant PhD students of colour as structural and institutional violence, I also illustrate moments of ‘speaking up'. Finally, the paper understands how foregrounding and weaving care and community as ethics into the everyday can one aim to contend with such loneliness of migrant woman precarious academics of colour, particularly within Irish higher educational spaces.

Queer Street Scenes: Interruption, Exception, Orientation

How might we think queerly about the politics of performance in public space? Inspired by ‘queer’ as a straying from the straight-and-narrow and by the street as a site of chance meetings and awkward run-ins, I stage in this essay an encounter between two different approaches to thinking the politics of performance in public space. The first approach follows a familiar path: Bertolt Brecht's ‘street scene’ and Walter Benjamin's account of epic theatre. The second approach follows the walking performances of two queer migrant artists – South Korean-born Jisoo Yoo, now based in France, and Mozambican-born Jupiter Child, now based in Denmark – who interrogate the disorientation of the queer migrant body in Western European public space. Exploring the surprisingly busy intersection between the Brechtian street scene and the work of these two artists reveals a politics of performance in public space that favours orientation over rupture.

Scaling the ‘Ageing Migrant Body’ in Digital era: A Case of Older Chinese Migrants in Australia During the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT Previous research on older migrants’ digital media use has primarily focused on understanding issues related to the ‘digital divide’, ‘transnational capital’, and ‘(im)mobility’. Few studies have investigated how these issues interplay and how they affect older migrants’ construction of selfhood, which informs their modalities of digital engagement. This article will address this gap, by drawing on the concept of ‘geographical scale’, to examine older Chinese migrants’ digital media use and their sense of self and belonging during COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne Australia. To achieve this, I analysed 31 interviews, which were collected from two sequential studies conducted in 2020 and 2021. The interview data revealed that older Chinese migrants’ diverse media practices and imaginaries are embedded in and informed by multiple sets of scales of the physical body, the family and domestic realm, the community sphere, and transnational network. It is found that digital media allow participants to navigate, negotiate with and even reconfigure these scales to cope with the challenges of ageing, migration and a global pandemic. However, digital media also produce new scales that differentiate older migrants from the rest of the population to sustain the structural inequality and social unevenness in Australia.

The Datafication of Migrant Bodies and the Enactment of Migrant Subjectivities: Biometric Data, Power and Resistance at the Borders of Europe

The article engages with biometric data gathering technologies as part of migration infrastructures for the monitoring and control of migration. It explores power and agency by paying attention to the complexity of readings, interpretations, and storytelling of illegalised migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps, in the Island of Lesvos in Greece, as they received their bureaucratic legal papers and discussed developments in their ‘cases’. Borrowing from feminist and feminist security studies scholarship, the article argues for an understanding of data gathering and sharing infrastructures as material. It suggests that the datafication of migrants’ bodies constitutes a manifestation of power that ‘enacts’ the migrant body as a subject of power but also produces counter self-subjectifications. The article also suggests an understanding of subject agency as the ‘capacity to act’ within contexts of power. Such a position on the agency of illegalised migrants allows us to examine the emergence of solidarities and alliances and to understand and contextualise not only actions that seem to be questioning and rejecting power, but also those that accept it and internalise it as a strategy of survival and of bettering one’s life chances.

Bodies on the Move: Central Americans’ Strategies for Coping with the Marks of Irregularity

In the current migration system, mobility in an irregular context affects the migrant body physically and mentally. This article seeks to identify the ways irregular Central American migrants in transit through Mexico continue their journey northwards despite the physical demands of the route. Through the analysis of forty-two in-depth interviews with migrants, it shows how migrants respond to this experience through a repertoire of actions developed in a context of marginalization. Two practices illustrate the strategies and resources they use to resist. The first is the mobilization of a cultural capital of migration within both local and transnational social networks in their countries of origin, transit, and destination, through economic and technological resources. The second is physical and mental resistance based on optimism underpinned by values such as the family and faith.

Religions on the fringe: places of worship in Melbourne’s greenfield developments

ABSTRACT Melbourne, like many cities of the global north, is growing rapidly through migration. Many migrants find home on the urban fringe in Master Planned Estates. This settlement is encouraged by urban policy, but there is a need to understand and respond to the needs of the multitude of religious communities. This paper traces the development of places of worship on the fringe of western Melbourne and the possibilities for expression of faith on the periphery of established settlement. It illustrates, in particular, how places of worship are often either spatially disconnected from the communities which they seek to serve, or not fit for purpose in failing to meet the requirements of religious and cultural activity. The transformation of land into commercialisable units of housing, or commerce invites an improvisational response on behalf of religious communities. Overall the study finds that the rudimentary consideration of places of worship in greenfield development is a touchstone of the difficulties that the Australian planning system faces in encompassing the diversity of the community. The ‘superdiverse’ migrant body with its transnational economic, cultural, and religious connections represents a dynamic shift and complication of the suburbs that are all too often dismissed for a supposed homogeneity.

17Visual Culture

Abstract The unauthorized movement of people across national borders, on land and sea, continues to be a matter of life and death for many migrants. In 2022, more than 2,000 people died attempting to cross the Mediterranean (Statista [2023]) and more than 800 died on the US–Mexico border (Villarreal [2022]). In both Europe and the US, migration remains a significant political issue and one that has a strong visual component: it is through visual representations of boats, bodies, and borders that most non-migrants apprehend the phenomenon. Visual surveillance from the air and at crossing points is a key part of state attempts to control migration. With the increasing availability of smartphones and social media platforms, migrants themselves are also visually documenting and sharing their experiences. This chapter focuses on six texts published within 2022 which explore aspects of visual culture in relation to migration. This has several facets: representation of migrants and associated colonial tropes; visual and ‘postvisual’ surveillance of migrant bodies; and digital self-representation and reclaiming the gaze through creative practices. In line with this, the chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Visual Policing; 2. Visual Narration; 3. Artistic Disruptions.

Backwards into the Future: Melodramatic Affect and the Vicissitudes of Time in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017)

This article interrogates the reworking of melodramatic form in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), exploring how the film’s innovative structures are founded upon—and draw us toward —familiar orientations and erasures. While Dunkirk disrupts the standard rhythms of melodrama and forgoes its full range of emotional appeals, it takes inspiration from the melodramatic development of crosscutting in the service of suspense, an affect informed by visceral and moral entanglements on the part of the spectator. Investigating these entanglements illuminates the connective tissue of melodrama as it operates through affective rather than strictly linear modes of resonance and causality. In the context of Brexit and the 2015-2016 ‘migrant crisis,’ Dunkirk taps into conservative impulses of nostalgic fantasy and the imagination of national collectivity they embody, even as it draws upon contemporary images of the migrant body at sea, suggesting the complex work of melodramatic affect in blowing us backwards into the future.

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

The Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S. México Line. Edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire

Scholarship focusing on human suffering in the North American Southwest will always find a ready audience, especially given the U.S. public’s never-ending obsession with border security and immigration controls. The Border and its Bodies is a collection of essays that focuses on the “corporality of risk on the border,” or, the negative impacts of border-crossing on the bodies of migrants, themselves (p. 4). No short review could adequately address the intellectual and moral importance of the nine essays contained in this volume. Randall H. McGuire and Ruth M. Van Dyke examine the material infrastructure of the border in Ambos Nogales, demonstrating the inescapable performances of sovereignty and citizenship for all crossers between Arizona and Sonora, most significantly for undocumented persons moving north. In “Como me duele,” anthropologist Jason de León utilizes fieldwork from southern Mexico to analyze the violent traumas experienced by Central American migrants moving north through Mexico in order to paint a more holistic picture of how migrants experience border enforcement and the clandestine nature of crossing. Another standout chapter is Shaylih Muehlmann’s “Singing Along ‘Like a Mexican,’” wherein the author examines the seemingly contradictory popularity of violent narcocorridos among working-class norteños, revealing the ways in which “local people experience corridos as markers of a joyful, subaltern nationalism amid conditions of social suffering,” implying an important connection between contemporary and historical folkways in the borderlands (p. 140). Other essays examine the biological manifestations of endemic poverty and oppression on the bodies of migrants found dead in southern Arizona, the physiological manifestations of emotional trauma on Mexican migrants, how migrant children are all too often interpreted as a security threat through anti-immigrant narratives in the United States, and the significance of migrants’ found objects in the desert borderlands of the North American Southwest.

The Residual Migrant

Through a focus on corruptive seawater, this essay restores the underwater dimensions of borders – their verticality, reaching into the maritime depths, and their biopolitical devastation of drowned migrant bodies. Intersecting Achille Mbembe’s concepts of “necropolitics” and “borderization” with recent theoretical work in critical ocean studies and feminist new materialism, I examine the kinds of readjustments a focus on water as corrosive agent imposes on readings of the biopolitical foreclosure of “illegalized” life, and on conceptions of the sea as a necropolitical space. I probe the enmeshment of seawater with the regimes of borderization enacted across the space of the sea. Reading the Mediterranean as an aqueous frontier spotlights the fraught relationship between clandestine migrants and the strictly enforced borders on which Europe’s sovereignty rests. Yet seawater represents more than the border space containing the fatal encounters between law and bodies; it is the very substance through which the deadly logic of borderization is enacted. Through seawater, irruptive migrant bodies seeking agency are drowned, dissolved and turned into residue through an amalgamating dynamic that blends them into their more-than-human, aqueous environment. Embracing the borders’ regime of negativity, they become “border-bodies” [corps-frontière] (Mbembe). By effecting the becoming-residue of drowned bodies on the site of the border, water brings to material, hyperbolic completion the logic of obliteration underpinning European sovereignty. Yet it concurrently calls into question the very notion of borderization as the residual ontologies developed in the wake of the drownings reveal sites of resistance and remanence that resist the necropolitics of borders. Through its longue durée assimilation into the geophysical, residuality thus morphs into a locus of contest, one where the power of biopolitical annihilation is interrupted.

“Let the Atrocious Images Haunt Us”

The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of documentaries and films dealing with the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the Mexico-US border, some of which portray the migrant body. This article examines three films routinely included in ethnic studies courses, anthropology courses, and Latin American studies courses: Dan DeVivo and Joseph Mathew’s Crossing Arizona (2006), Rebecca Cammisa’s Which Way Home (2009), and Marc Silver’s Who Is Dayani Cristal? (2013). Of particular interest are the films’ rhetorical devices, imagery, and affective charge—how they politically engage viewers. Guided by extant scholarship on stereotypical depictions of the migrant body, the essay’s first part critiques Which Way Home as buttressed by necroclichés, defined here as rhetorical devices that situate migrants as condemned to slaughter. The essay’s second part activates diverse theoretical interventions to show how migrant lives—even when indelibly associated with images of broken bodies—become poignant to the viewer. Notably, with Which Way Home and Who Is Dayani Cristal?, the inclusion of religious motifs renders the migrant body “grievable.” By taking to heart the profound relationship that Latinx communities have traditionally maintained with Christianity’s redemptive message, this article interrogates whether entirely secular arguments can be elaborated to confront the Borderlands’ humanitarian catastrophe.

Necropolítica y catábasis migratoria: una respuesta cosmopolita a los recorridos por el inframundo global en <i>Señales que precederán al fin del mundo</i> de Yuri Herrera

Signs Preceding the End of the World by the Mexican writer Yuri Herrera examines the emergence of a liberal cosmopolitan subjectivity based on the revision of Nahuatl katabasis. Herrera uses this mythologem to symbolize the persistence of violence and colonial inequities exerted, as a historical continuum, on the fragile migrant body. In this journey through the necropolitics of territorial, cultural and identity borders, the importance of intercultural mediation is highlighted as a mechanism of ethical repair of rituals and memories and, therefore, following Kwame A. Appiah, of practices of writing and reading of global stage.

The remembrance of dismembered bodies

For nearly three decades, the United States has pursued a border security strategy that has precipitated the deaths of thousands of migrants. Most of these deaths transpire unseen in remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where individuals are reduced to disarticulated bones. Endeavoring to overcome political indifference to these deaths, religious leaders, artists, and activists have joined in public works of mourning. These works strive to lend visibility to an otherwise invisible crisis and to grieve otherwise ungrieved lives. Thus, they usher the dead back into the polis and confound the boundaries between insiders and outsiders. However, the effort to re-present the dead runs the risk of making a spectacle out of the violence perpetrated against migrant bodies, inuring us to their witness or, worse, eliciting a perverse enjoyment. This article seeks first to offer a theological justification for political acts of mourning, before going on to articulate a strategy for resisting the dangers implicit in the remembrance of dismembered bodies.

‘When showing Hanfu to foreigners, I feel very proud’: The imagined community and affective economies of Hanfu (Chinese traditional couture) among Chinese migrant youth in the United Kingdom

This article sheds light on the intricate relationship between the revival of Hanfu, traditional couture from the Han Dynasty, and rising Chinese nationalism among Chinese youth living in the United Kingdom. Mobilizing the theoretical tool ‘affective economies’, we explore how particular feelings and values are assigned and attached to Hanfu, and thereby circulate among young Chinese migrants. We begin by examining the Hanfu movement to interrogate how Hanfu is reinvented based on a selective historicity of the past, serving as a specific cultural product for China’s rejuvenation. We then move on to analyze a series of in-depth interviews conducted between December 2019 and July 2020. We probe the lived experiences of young Hanfu supporters, who are members of the UK Han Culture Association, and the cultural events organized by the Association, in order to scrutinize the ways Hanfu conjures up an imagined community suffused with nationalism. Drawing upon on the affective economies of Hanfu, we discern the following three key findings: First, we argue that there are both positive and negative affective attachments to Hanfu, such as homesickness, loneliness, alienation, happiness, pride and beauty, which impinge on migrant bodies, assigning values to Hanfu and the Hanfu-related cultural events. Second, we show through the analysis of the fieldwork materials the paradoxical desire for chuguo (going abroad) and huiguo (returning to the nation) in the hearts of the young migrants. Finally, we argue that Hanfu circulates as a ‘mnemonic thing’ that signifies a specific imaginary of Ancient China, where young migrant’s aiguo (love of the nation) sentiments are then ‘stuck’ to this reinvented fashion.

Zines of rupture: theorising migration studies using comics by racialised migrants and refugees

ABSTRACT Much research has been carried out on the discursive dehumanization of non-Anglo Celtic migrants to Australia – especially refugees and asylum seekers. However, this discourse also has an affective dimension that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, ‘stick’, impressing upon non-white migrants at a corporeal level. Depictions of self and Other in comic zines such as Where Do I Belong? by Silent Army, Villawood: Notes from a Detention Centre by Safdar Ahmed, and The Refugee Art Project’s zine collection clearly demonstrate the ways in which the body is implicated in narratives about migration and asylum. This paper argues that the comic zine medium also allows for ‘something else’ to surface; namely, an excess with an interruptive rhythm. This excess is posited here as a type of ‘diasporic intimacy’—a dystopic and unsuspecting affective force that disrupts the temporal and spatial rhythms of everyday life. By harnessing diasporic intimacies, the comic zines discussed here redeploy sticky and toxic discourses about migration and asylum, creating space for the migrant body to resist and reassemble.