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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
- Articles
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Balancing on shifting ground: Migratory aesthetics and recuperation of presence in Ori Gersht’s video installation On Reflection
By Hava AldoubyThis article looks at On Reflection, a video installation by the London-based artist Ori Gersht, in light of the artist’s transcultural or ‘travelling’ position between the United Kingdom, where Gersht has been residing and practising art since 1989, and his native country of Israel. Through close analysis of a single video installation by a British/Israeli ‘radicant’, to adopt Nicolas Bourriaud’s suggestive nomenclature, the article asks how the global migratory condition is affecting contemporary art and aesthetic experience. Focusing on sensory and motor aspects of viewers’ engagement with the installation, the article proposes an approach to the political through the prism of aisthêsis, or sensory engagement. It further suggests that On Reflection evinces a cautious effort to augment observers’ sense of bodily presence, which, however, does not outlast the brief duration of the gallery visit. The multidisciplinary approach offered here combines close attention to aesthetics, in Jill Bennett’s sense of ‘what art does’, with insights from phenomenological film theory and from cognitive neuroscience. It is argued that this is a productive critical gateway through which to investigate the migratory turn in global art.
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Representations of exile in Afghan oral poetry and songs
Authors: Belgheis Alavi Jafari and Liza SchusterIn our examination of the representations of exile in Afghan popular culture, we focus in particular on popular poetry and song lyrics in Farsi, one of the national languages of Afghanistan. This article concentrates on the voices of exiles, their self-representation and their descriptions of life far from their homeland. We argue that, in addition to offering catharsis and expressing collective suffering, the verses are also used to urge return and, more recently, to voice complaints to and about host societies, as well as to critique the Afghan government for its failures.
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Gender and social control in negotiations over filial obligations: Adult children and their ageing parents in Iranian refugee families
Authors: Zeinab Karimi and Johanna HiitolaThis article investigates gendered meanings attached to filial obligations when they are negotiated between Iranian refugee parents and their children. We investigate gender in intergenerational relationships by using the frame of social control, understanding it as a form of institutional, normative and internalized control. This research is based on an ethnographic study of Iranian families living in Finland. The data consists of observations and interviews with adult children and their parents. The results show that the daughters were able to negotiate their filial obligations with their parents in strategic ways. They actively spoke against their parents’ normative control to make independent choices. However, following their parents’ wishes was also a way for the daughters to actively maintain their own cultural values. The sons were often expected to take care of their ageing parents and had little agency when negotiating the intensity of these demands for support. So rather than making decisions about maintaining their cultural values like the daughters, the sons were often automatically expected to offer support and guidance. However, the sons experienced less normative control when interacting with their parents.
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Rwandan diaspora online: Social connections and identity narratives
More LessThis article explores how Rwandan diaspora living in North America and Europe use social media platforms to establish networked connections and express a range of identity narratives related to their forced displacement and resettlement experiences. Facebook posts (and cross-posted tweets), including status updates and linked artefacts, posted by members of the Rwandan diaspora were analysed using thematic analysis, borrowing concepts from virtual ethnography. Results reveal that Rwandan diaspora active on social media used Facebook and Twitter extensively to connect with homeland compatriots and to express a range of identity narratives with strong historic and cultural connections. Trauma related to their displacement and resettlement experiences was prevalent throughout the data and was strongly integrated into diaspora members’ collective identity. Contributions to migration policy and service providers working with trauma-exposed migrants are explored.
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Breath on the windowpane: Precarious aesthetics and diegetic noise in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts
By Niall MartinThis article explores the various ways in which noise acts as an aesthetic marker of precarity in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts, a documentary account of the death of 23 undocumented Chinese nationals in the United Kingdom in 2004. Taking its cue from recent work on aesthetics and the temporalities of precarity, it considers the ways in which the different forms of noise – medial and informational – index the ways in which the figure of the undocumented migrant labourer disturbs dominant western accounts of the aesthetic predicated on a division between production and consumption. Noise, in the form of Michel Serres’ conceptual figure of the parasite, it argues, registers the ways in which precarious labour has revealed the dependence of aesthetic categories on models of production rendered incoherent by the representation of undocumented migrant labour.
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Musical borderness: Contesting spaces through cultural engagement
More LessAcross European nations, the binary distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has been reinforced by right-wing populists seeking to frame global mass migration waves as the backdrop against which increased social fragmentation can be explained. While persisting resentments and continuing ethnicization of different social groups amplify hatred towards migrants, refugees and people of colour, many artistic and cultural institutions have taken a stand against such discriminatory rhetoric, trying to use their programmes as gateways to imagine new forms of solidarity and possibilities of organizing living with difference. This account focuses on developments in the city of Dresden, Germany, one of the hotspots for understanding the impact of racist and right-wing extremist legacies on contemporary responses to migration into Europe. Following the influx of refugees in 2015, Dresden became the centre of right-wing extremist protest, but also a focal point of its resistance in the arts and cultural institutions. In theatre and music, people have organized protests, founded community groups and established recurring programmes that focus on pivotal issues of belonging, citizenship, gender and home to reframe the social imaginary of what life with people of different backgrounds would look like in the city. This article draws on ethnographic work with three music initiatives in the city whose work centres on issues of ‘borders’ to show how ‘borderness’, a term used by social anthropologist Sarah Green to describe the sense of border, is experienced through and lived in music, educational practice and political activism. Findings show that collaborations between resident and refugee musicians resulted in narrations of border-experiences and transformed music repertoire. Spaces of music-making could become cultural borderlands themselves. Projects engaged in dismantling ‘the everyday construction of borders through ideology, cultural mediation, discourses, political institutions, attitudes and everyday forms of transnationalism […] that create and recreate new social-cultural boundaries and borders’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018: 229) in music education, which yielded a transcultural dialogue in the classroom in politically heated neighbourhoods. Theatre projects addressed gender-specific needs that provided women with opportunities to participate.
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Of nomadology: A requiem for India(n-ness)1
By Avishek RayDespite the statist imagination of the ‘nomad’ pitted against an overtly instrumental understanding of space, ‘modern’ techniques of statist demographic control, and increasing surveillance on mobility, the trope of nomadology in the context of India often characterizes ‘the return of the repressed’. The Buddhists in the Ancient, the Bhakti–Sufi practitioners in the Medieval, and certain anti-imperialist ideologues in the Modern have perpetually latched on to the trope to articulate political dissidence. Thinking in these terms, the invocation of nomadology in Critical Theory – by Deleuze and Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Michel de Certeau and Edward Said, among others – alluding to non-conformity, non-linearity and political subversion, has an intellectual history that is often purportedly grounded onto ‘India’. My article will explore how the dichotomy between the ‘good’ wanderer and the ‘bad’ wanderer in the ‘Indian tradition’ was premised upon a highly contingent process of religio-political partisanship and struggles over territorialization. Using the nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse on the Romani community and the Beats’ obsession with ‘India’ (cf. the Beat Movement) as case studies, this article, from the postcolonial vantage point, demonstrates how the impulse to assume nomadology as characteristic of ‘India(n-ness)’ – to have perpetually existed in the ‘Indian’ cultural repertoire – is symbolic of an ahistorical and essentialist notion of ‘India’.
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Travelling origins: Migrant belonging in times of post-migration mobilities
More LessThis article builds on the recent discussion about migrants’ post-migration mobilities. Although existing studies show the types and patterns of movement that migrants undertake, less attention has been paid to the question of how these movements influence their sense of belonging, their self-understanding and their perception of their origins. On the basis of 47 autobiographical interviews with young adults of Polish heritage in Germany and Canada, this article argues that belonging in times of post-migration mobilities can be grasped through the concepts of contextual self-understanding, accumulating and travelling origins. It thus extends conceptual frameworks by endeavouring to understand the effects of mobility on migrants’ lives.
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(Im)Mobilities in a postmigrant age: Narratives of forced migration in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone and Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges (The Supplicants)
More LessPostmigrant conditions do not translate into easy access for migrants who arrive outside of the parameters of orderly migration. While European nations acknowledge the principle of asylum, massive efforts are made to prevent refugees from reaching the territory of the state where they could receive its protection. Even as their physical proximity to Europe increases, their legal proximity typically decreases. The novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone) by German writer Jenny Erpenbeck depicts the experiences of non-privileged migrants whose tales of exile and displacement indicate that most of them will not be recognized as refugees. The play Die Schutzbefohlenen (Charges [The Supplicants]) by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek contrasts the treatment of asylum seekers with real-life cases of two ‘VIP foreigners’ who were granted naturalization by the Austrian government. Both texts convey a blunt message: The narratives of those who do (and those who do not) arrive in Europe’s ‘postmigrant societies’ without legal status confirm that the gap between privileged and non-privileged migration is almost impossible to bridge.
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On digital crossings in Europe
Authors: Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs
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