Roundtable: Monstrosity and the 'refugee/migrant crises'
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Free event, booking is required via Eventbrite
This roundtable will feature the following speakers: Roger Luckhrust and Agnes Woolley (English and Humanities, Birkbeck), Ben Gidley (Psychosocial Studies), Calogero Giametta (ERC Researcher at LAMES Aix-Marseille University. Visiting Scholar, CERI Sciences Po, Paris).
The event will be chaired by Birkbeck Institute of Humanities Fellow, Gaia Giuliani (CES - University of Coimbra).
In her introduction to this roundtable, Gaia Giuliani will consider monstrosity as a useful category for a critical reading of borders and colour lines. She will argue for the strategic use of the concept of monstrosity as both a discourse and a practice both connecting the internal abject (the terrorist) and the external threat (the migrant/refugee that lands in Lampedusa or crosses the Eastern frontiers of Europe), conflating them in the unstable figure of the absolute Other, and identifying by contrast the unsaid, unspeakable feature of Europe as a profoundly racialised 'imagined community'. Giuliani will then introduce participants' contributions to a multidisciplinary and critical readings of this concept and its current representations in a number of visual and written text, ranging from law, political essays and popular culture.
Agnes Woolley's paper, "Docu/Fiction and the aesthetics of the border during the refugee 'crisis'" examines the relationship between arts and activism in the context of the 'refugee crisis'. Drawing on examples of contemporary border art concerning current refugee movement, the discussion focuses on the film project On the Bride's Side (2014), in which a group of refugees and Italian citizens embark on a journey across Europe from Italy to Sweden disguised as a wedding party. Aesthetically as well as politically subversive, the film undermines prevalent assumptions about refugee movement and succeeds in performing the act of solidarity it documents. Woolley's discussion of the film sets it in the context of a flourishing of documentary over the last twenty years in which the genre has engaged in formal innovations that push at its own borders in ways that are both aesthetically exciting and actively engaged with the subjects they depict.
Ben Gidley's speculative paper, "Jews and Muslims in the European archive of monstrosity: from the blood libel to the new war on terror" looks at the long history of tropes connecting Jews and Muslims (as European Christendom's two primary onstitutive others) to the idea of bloodthirstiness, and suggests that this archive has been re-animated in the current (post-2011) period of the 'war on terror', to deny the humanity of Sunni Muslim Syrians (including refugees) through association with the figure of the extremist and through a narrative of secret malignant Jewish power behind terrorism.
Roger Luckhurst 's "'Border as Volume': The Instance of Gareth Edwards' *Monsters* (2010)" will examine Edwards' famous horror film as a reflection on the discourse of monstrosity generated at the US/Mexico border since the first emergence of systematic border fence building in the early 1990s, and accelerated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and Trump's recent experiments in new border fences. The multiplication of systems at the border, and the invocation on the American right of what Greg Eghighian calls the 'homo munitus' (the Walled or Sheltered Man), makes the borderline as something haunted by its secret other: the border as volume.
Finally, Calogero Giametta's presentation will discuss "Moral panic, anthropological alterity and control in sex trafficking discourse," looking at the ways in which moral panics about the extent of trafficking in the global sex industry produce alarm-based forms of affective governance . Here, Giametta argues, the borders between the categories of 'victim' and 'perpetrator' are imagined as fixed and are erected to separate migrants between absolute victims or opportunistic monsters (Giuliani 2018). Through this contribution, Giametta will examine this 'teratological' understanding of certain migrant figures by focusing on migrants' own understanding of agency and exploitation'"and contextualise these within current neoliberal socio-economic transformations.
Gaia Giuliani is a Birkbeck Institute of Humanities Fellow for 2018. She is an Associate professor in Political philosophy (ASN 2017, Italy), an investigadora/researcher at CES - Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra (Portugal), the Principal Investigator of the FCT 3 years project "(De)OTHERING: Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on migrants/refugees and 'internal Others' in Portuguese and European mediascapes" (2018-2021).
Dr. Giuliani has organised this event as part of a three-event programme.
Contact name:
Lou Miller
Contact phone:
2076316612