Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations.
Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining.
[from publisher’s site]
Debarati Sanyal is Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and Professor of French (affiliated with Critical Theory, The Center for Race and Gender, and European Studies). Debarati’s research and teaching interests range from 19th-century French literature to contemporary critical refugee studies. Her first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaimed Baudelaire’s aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), addressed the transnational circulations of memory and complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah, from post-WWII to the present. It was translated in French as Mémoire et complicité: Au Prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2018) with a preface by Éric Fassin. A Guggenheim Fellow (2021-2022), she is completing a book on migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe’s current refugee “crisis.”