Migration Outline - University of Brighton

Migra&on &
Marginali&es
10 September 2015
University of Brighton
Outline of Schedule
Keynote:
Iain Chambers (Naples)
'Mediterranean archives, migrating modernities and lessons from the sea'
Panel Presentations:
Creative Testimony
Anna Cole (Brighton)
Dora Carpenter-Latiri (Brighton) & Francesco Bellinzis (Barcelona & Brighton)
Jeni Williams (Wales)
Fascism
Eszter Kiss (Eötvös Loránd)
Jelena Timotijevic (Brighton)
Kostas Maronitis (Leeds Trinity)
Mobility
Emma Duester (Goldsmiths)
Sibyl Adam (Edinburgh)
Nations and migration
Annika Bøstein Myhr (Oslo)
Cristina Şandru (Independent)
Philip Phillis (Glasgow)
Sea-crossings
Agnes Woolley (Royal Holloway) & Mariangela Palladino (Keele)
Federica Mazzara (Westminster)
Film Screening
Maja Malus (MKC), Balkan Curtains
Organised by Liam Connell, Vedrana Velickovic, Jelena Timotijevic and Mark Dunford
C21: Centre for Research in Twenty-First Century Writings | Arts & Humanities, University of Brighton
Migra&on &
Marginali&es
10 September 2015
University of Brighton
Abstracts
Keynote
Iain Chambers (Naples)
'Mediterranean archives, migrating modernities and lessons from the sea'
This talk will seek to wrench the discussion and understanding of contemporary
migrations out of the predictable coordinates. It will insist, again prevailing
representations, that migration is neither merely a socio-economical phenomenon
nor a social ‘problem’ or political ‘emergency’. On the contrary, it will be argued that
migration is one of the constitutive processes in the making of modernity, both its
Occidental inception and subsequent planetary realisation. As a structural and
historical condition, intrinsic to the political economy of the modern world and its
violent cartographies, migration will be considered in terms of a cultural, historical
and epistemological challenge. In other words, the modern migrant with her history,
culture and life actively questions citizenship, national belonging and
understandings of the European polity in a manner that invites us to consider their
colonial fashioning and postcolonial configurations. Such considerations open up
deeper historical temporalities and altogether more extensive and unstable archives
than those associated with the homogenous time of national identities. Clearly all of
this cuts into and interrogates our very understanding of the present, forcing us to
register the limits of a certain European exercise of modernity.
I propose to render these considerations more concrete through concentrating on
the new centrality that the Mediterranean has recently acquired in the mounting
political debate on migration, and from there seek to draw upon other languages –
from the political geographies and cultural powers sustained in maritime archives
and the economies of sound and music – that might provide us with the means for a
diverse critical response.
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Panel Presentations
Creative Testimony
Anna Cole (Brighton)
‘“We are all boat people”: Immigrant stories on the borders of Europe’
“The British border is physically today in France, so it’s quite a hypocritical situation.
Lots of refugees if they’re from Sudan or Syria, cannot physically go to England to
request asylum because the border control is here in France”, (Carolyn Wiggan,
volunteer, Jules Ferry refugee centre, Calais). Jules Ferry is France’s first statesanctioned migrant centre, providing one hot meal a day, plus access to showers
and phones. Conditions are reportedly worse than in many refugee camps across
the world. Earlier in May this year a solidarity group of volunteers from the UK
travelled to the camp to provide meals using supplies of donated and unwanted
food. “One way to get around the guilt of knowing fellow humans live in squalor is to
imagine them as somehow “other” to yourself, uneducated foreigners, bad people
or if you believe Katie Hopkins, cockroaches”, says Shanna Jones, who volunteered
at the camp. “Sitting around the fire with a group of men, Dennis a mechanic from
Southern Sudan gets onto the subject of Mr Bean. We spend the next 15 minutes
laughing over Rowan Atkinson’s funniest moments”. Immigrant, post-colonial and
activist literature and discourse outside of Europe, such as the: “Australia: resettling boat people since 1788” campaign, has long recognised the social, political,
economic and cultural links between Britain and other western ‘metropoles’, and
those who seek to enter now, but are barred.
In this paper I seek to reconnect stories of contemporary refugees in Europe, from
former British and French colonies, to their colonial and postcolonial histories, partly
via a reading of Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Altantic, objects in The Gallery of the
Gifts, at Le Musee de L’Histoire de l’Immigration, France’s first museum of
immigration and Refugee Tales. What are some of the imaginative geographies and
cultural threads that connect refugees from former British and French colonies to
their imagined futures?
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Dora Carpenter-Latiri (Brighton) & Francesco Bellinzis (Barcelona/Brighton)
‘Migration narratives and art from the Mediterranean zone today:
Representations, identities, resistance'
Focusing on selected contemporary novels from the Mediterranean and following a
multidisciplinary approach we will analyse passages from Igiaba Scego, an Italian
writer originally from Somalia and El Hacmi, a Catalan writer originally from
Morocco, and show how these migrant writers transform their experience into the
construction of a literary identity that transcends ethnic and cultural boundaries.
Referring to Bourdieu’s field and capital theory and to concepts of transnationalism,
we will show that these novels are carving an intercultural Mediterranean space
transcending borders and overcoming assigned stigmatised identities. We will also
present elements of this intercultural/ trans-border Mediterranean space in other
narratives of migration in the present and in the recent past as well as in the visual
arts. Finally, we will show that these narratives and representations talk back to
contest the North/South hierarchy and to rethink the Mediterranean as a diverse and
multiple space where the migrant belongs.
Jeni Williams (Wales)
‘Framing asylum seekers and refugees: creative writing choices in a context
of disbelief, paranoia and malicious rumour’
This paper explores the impact of the context of disbelief, paranoia and malicious
rumour within which asylum seekers and refugees find themselves, on their creative
writing response. It investigates issues of choice of subject, the problems of writing
in an unfamiliar language and being confronted by unspoken assumptions about the
nature of writing and its relation to testimony on the one hand and crafted melody
on the other with different aesthetic mores; most of all it considers the impact and
marketing of narratives that mark the self according to a logic of victimisation on the
writers themselves who risk being fixed into that model of self hood, and on the
readers who may further marginalise the writers by reading them in those terms.
The paper will focus on three sets of Creative Writing workshops with women from
countries as diverse as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, China and
Nigeria. It will conclude by looking more closely at the complex narratives of
childhood and loss which haunt their writings through the lens of four poems.
An afterword will consider the legacy of these workshops on the creative practice of
the author.
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Fascism
Eszter Kiss (Eötvös Loránd)
‘In-and-Out Situation: Media Representation of Immigration and Emigration in
Hungary’
Migration is one of the most discussed issues in the European Union. The free flow
of labour is a key element in economic development and immigration to Europe
could balance the social consequences of the countries with aging populations. In
the meanwhile the number of serious conflicts has been increasing in multicultural
societies and concerns about the capacity of the welfare state become more and
more common.
In this situation it is no wonder that the perception of immigration is at least
controversial, but Hungary has a very special situation. In fact Hungary does not
belong to the most popular destinations of immigrants and refugees, it is rather a
transition country. In spite of that the media report about a constant flow of
refugees, but actually the number of irregular migrants transiting the borders is
much lower than in a lot of countries in the European Union. It has become a
common practice to label refugees and immigrants as people who are coming for
the social benefits regardless to their actual motivations. It is also a Hungarian
phenomenon that only 1,5-2% of the population have foreign citizenship and a great
part of them came from the neighbouring countries. In addition the official political
rhetoric intentionally encourages xenophobic reactions.
At the same time approximately half a million Hungarian people have left the country
in the last couple of years. A great part of them, nearly 350,000 people live in the
United Kingdom now and there are more who take jobs for only a few months (for
example as a shuttling doctor), so London is commonly mentioned as “the fifth
largest Hungarian city” by the Hungarian media. On the contrary to the immigration
to Hungary this phenomenon is absolutely accepted by the society; what is more,
the media display it many times as something to be proud of, as an achievement.
In my paper I would like to present this highly controversial Hungarian perception of
immigration and emigration (especially to the United Kingdom) by analyzing the
mainstream Hungarian media representation of several significant cases in
connection to these topics. By using qualitative media-investigation techniques and
critical discourse analysis I expect to be able to give an insight to the Hungarian
society’s really specific relations and attitudes to the migration in Europe.
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Jelena Timotijevic (Brighton)
‘The role of neoliberal project in the emergent ‘neutral’ immigration discourse’
In 1964, Smethwick, a small town in the UK’s West Midlands constituency, became
notorious for a vicious and racist general election campaign. The Conservative MP,
Griffiths, was elected on the slogan “[i]f you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote
Labour.” Both Griffiths, and later Thatcher, used a similar method of instilling fear
and anxiety in the communities over shortages of housing, for which, unsurprisingly,
the blame fell on immigrant population.
Fifty years on, the political arena that plagues the electoral landscape in the UK is an
acute reminder of the racist immigrant rhetoric and scapegoating of migrants. The
UK Independence Party’s (UKIP) anti-immigrant discourse and deepening racism are
manifested in instilling fear about lack of jobs, poor housing, low wages and an
unaccountable political elite away from the real culprits. It threatens to create the
political narrative along the lines of those we have seen gain votes in other parts of
Europe. However, the so called main-stream parties in the UK repeatedly fail to
stand up to the racist tide. To illustrate, in 2013 the government launched a pilot
campaign in the form of mobile vans circling six London boroughs telling immigrants
to “go home”. The Prime Minister exclaimed that encouraging illegal immigrants to
leave voluntarily was “cost-effective” rather than using the resources to arrest them
and remove them by force.
Using Critical Discourse Analysis as a theoretical framework, and focusing on the
complex structures and strategies of news reports and their relations to the social
context, this paper will address the consequences of the emergent picture illustrated
above. It will examine whether the now overly familiar neoliberal project has
saturated overt racist discourse so that all manner of immigration control measures
is perceived as a direct response to the socioeconomic situation (and consequently
deem the immigration discourse race/gender/religion/class/sexuality-‘neutral’). The
paper will illustrate that the dangers of the seemingly neutral ‘new wave’ of
immigration narratives pose a serious threat and must be actively challenged.
Kostas Maronitis (Leeds Trinity)
‘Immigration and the far Right in Greece: Between Dystopian Declarations
and Utopian Imaginations’
Within the context of Dublin II, which holds that asylum seekers to EU countries can
be evaluated and adjudicated in the country where they first entered, this
paper introduces the term Europia - a term that encapsulates and embodies
different theoretical positions regarding the experience of migration and its
impact on the European project. Europia shifts the debate from the binary of
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Eurosceptics and Europhiles to the capacity of immigration to create dystopian and
utopian visions. As a term it perceives and addresses the EU as a coherent yet
multifaceted political entity and contextualizes migration as a constitutive force
for the creation of exclusion regimes as well as a postnational condition. The
paper focuses on the violent activities and rhetoric of the Greek far Right
party Golden Dawn in direct response to mass immigration and waning
sovereignty. Following the theoretical elaborations of Michel Wieviorka and Alain
Touraine on the reemergence of the Subject in social theory and politics and the
subsequent rejection of instrumentality and integration processes the paper
establishes two different articulations of Europe. Whereas new theorisations of the
Subject privilege the importance of the individual over social integration and the
inherent capacity of the Subject to recognise the Other, Golden Dawn constructs
a life project against any notion of integration and formulates a Subject
whose existence is predicated on the exclusion of the immigrant. In the first
instance Golden Dawn declares the EU and Greece in particular as a dystopia of
disappearing national identities, values and racial homogeneity caused by
unregulated immigration and transnational governance. In the second instance,
Golden Dawn reimagines a utopia where the identity of the Greek subject is
determined by racial hierarchies and the principle of blood.
Mobility
Emma Duester (Goldsmiths)
‘Art and the City: The Effects of Corporeal/Virtual Mobility Patterns on the
Social Transformation of “Home”’
Artists produce work and participate in multiple host cities, send artwork home
whilst working abroad,and work in transnational communities across space. The
core argument in this presentation is that artists’ mobility patterns and mobile
methods of practice can open out the understanding of migration. Migration today is
commonly misunderstood by the press as a negative process which results in
cultural clashes, racial bullying, and as being about unskilled migrants from eastern
Europe who live in ‘migrant ghettos’. The primary rationale for this research is to
create new and updated awareness of this through the exploration of a community
of practice, and the trans-local spaces they create through their mobilities. This
exploration of mobility patterns will, ultimately, provide a reconsideration of
migration – inclusive of movements that are creative, positive, and which develop
the home countries. Rather than migration that is predominantly seen as one-way,
permanent, for economic reasons, and as going from east to west (Hesse, 2000;
Favell, 2008; Wallace and Palyanitsya, 1995), the circular, short-term mobility of the
Organised by Liam Connell, Vedrana Velickovic, Jelena Timotijevic and Mark Dunford
C21: Centre for Research in Twenty-First Century Writings | Arts & Humanities, University of Brighton
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artist community is instead multi-directional and creates trans-local spaces that
connect home, host and multiple other cities.
This presentation will explore the mobility patterns of the art community from the
Baltic cities of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. It will assess artists’ movements and
subsequent trans-local connections in order to see how these city spaces are no
longer closed-off but, instead, how they have increasing and expanding links out of,
into, and across their perimeters. Many artists take part in a particular type of shortterm, regular mobility in order to exhibit their work, form contacts, and create
collaborations. With new routes being formed rather than re-treading the same
route(s), plus, every artist has a different set of connections and trajectories, the
home cities have a “global sense of place” (Massey, 1994: 146) and become part of
a “transnational network of cities” (Sassen, 2005: 31) across Europe. However, do
artists move freely or in controlled, pre-determined routes? This speaks to a ‘politics
of mobility’ and a tension between having to move to survive and wanting to move
for freedom and inspiration. Is this a mobility of pleasure or necessity? Even within
the seemingly free flows of artists and circulations of communications, there are
elements of control and restriction in these movements. There are constraints, as
artists must be mobile in order to survive within a global art market that is
increasingly commercially-attuned and a circuit in itself. Furthermore, the Baltic
States only have a recent history (24 years) of having an independent art world and
art market, which means they have had little time to develop. Artists also have to
work harder to survive because of the barrier of geography – being from peripheral
art scenes and being eastern European artists. There are still divisions between east
and west Europe, or “complex relations” and a “subtle dialectic of domination”
(Zabel, 2013:11/27) from the west that serve as restrictions for eastern European
artists.
Sibyl Adam (Edinburgh)
Walking and the Melancholic Migrant in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999)
and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003)
In contemporary characterisations of migrants, melancholia as an affective
experience is linked to their subjective positioning as outsiders or others. This is
situated within a national melancholia, as detailed by Paul Gilroy in his Postcolonial
Melancholia, that entails a relationship between disillusionment with multiculturalism
including ongoing xenophobic rhetorics and the nation’s failure to come to terms
with the history of colonialism. Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) and Monica
Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) exemplify the precarious position many migrant subjects
encompass within the nation. Drawing on Michel De Certeau’s spatial theorising
about walking in the city and Sara Ahmed’s conception of the figure of the
‘melancholic migrant’, this paper will show the ways in which the process of walking
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in public spaces becomes an affective experience for the protagonists in The
Translator and Brick Lane. De Certeau calls the act of walking a series of ‘pedestrian
speech acts’ and thus sees walking as a space of enunciation. In these terms, I will
consider walking as a way of articulating selfhood and as a way of claiming a
physical and imagined space within the nation. In order to consider the positioning
of migrant walkers, I will employ Ahmed’s notion of the ‘melancholic migrant’.
Ahmed discusses how our social obligation to remember the history of empire as
one of happiness is a form of nation building. Therefore, the migrant becomes a sore
point by refusing to participate in what Ahmed calls ‘the national game’ because
they remind us of the negative aspects of imperialism. Overall, I will discuss the uses
of melancholia and walking in the two texts to consider the importance of emotion in
narratives of migrants in everyday space.
Nations and Migration
Annika Bøstein Myhr (Oslo)
‘The Non-Existent Ones: Irregular Immigrants’ Narratives and Norwegian
National Identity’
This paper takes as its point of departure the idea of autobiographical studies that
suggest that individuals’ sense of a stable self or identity is dependent on their
ability to make a coherent narrative from their experiences in the past, and their
ideas about the future. For asylum-seekers and irregular immigrants, the past often
contains traumatic experiences that are not easily represented in a coherent
narrative, and the future is often very uncertain. If mental health is dependent on a
stable identity, then how may writing affect the health of irregular immigrants? And
how are the lives of irregular immigrants represented in fiction? Are authors of fiction
rendering the lives of irregular immigrants in broken narratives, so as to mirror their
traumatic life trajectories? And do irregular immigrants and asylum-seekers do the
same, or are they actually attempting to paper over inconsistencies in their stories?
In order to investigate these questions, I will compare Simon Stranger’s youth novel
The Non-Existent Ones (2003) and the autobiographical works of Maria Amelie,
Illegally Norwegian (2010) and Thank You (2014). All three works were originally
written in Norwegian, and none of them have been translated into English. The
Trandum detention centre in Oslo plays an important part in both Stranger’s novel
and Amelie’s Thank You – but what is its practical and symbolic function for
Norwegian national identity? Norway is one of the principal beneficiaries from global
inequality, but is also said to be concealing its sense of welfare guilt by assuming
the role of peacekeeper and provider of aid abroad. Fictional and non-fictional
stories from the Trandum detention centre challenge Norwegian exceptionalism.
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Here, even the Declaration of Human Rights does not seem to apply. Ultimately, the
question my paper addresses is what literature by and about irregular immigrants
may tell us about the societies in which these non-citizens live.
Cristina Şandru (Independent)
‘Britain’s ‘New Migrants’: A Postcolonial Reading of Postcommunist Texts of
Immigration’
My discussion will focus mainly on the distinct but interrelated types of what I have
termed ‘overcoded fiction’ – i.e. writings which centre on an ‘absent cause’ that
cannot be openly expressed in words, and whose gravitational centre rests on the
significant silences and implicit statements that inhabit their visible textual surface.
They will be shown to have emerged from earlier forms, modes and tendencies
dominant in the literary cultures of the region, which blend seamlessly reportage and
fantasy, lyricism and irony, black humour and tradicomedy, the ludic and the
dystopian. Yet, I argue, these literary forms were adapted in totalitarian East-Central
Europe as distinct imaginative responses to a highly coercive discursive regime.
They constitute, I will show, a network of counter-discourses that confront the
officially sanctioned norms of socialist realism, but also give political valence to
experimental or variously non-realist forms (surrealist, hyper-realist, dystopian,
magical realist etc.). It is this tenor of resistance and subversion which most closely
aligns them with postcolonial literatures, which similarly seek to deconstruct the
language, rhetoric, mental set-up, and symbolic representations underpinning the
imperial project. In addition, and again much like postcolonial texts, such narratives
unmask the potential of the dominant/ repressive discourse for falsification, what
Achille Mbembe calls “the stock of falsehoods and the weight of fantasizing
functions without which colonialism [and communism, I would add] as a historical
power-system could not have worked”. To paraphrase Mbembe’s conclusion on the
role of postcolonial thinking, that “it reveals how what passed for European
humanism manifested itself in the colonies as duplicity, double-talk and a travesty of
reality” (2008), these ‘overcodes’ texts reveal how the rhetoric of equality, fraternity,
and justice at the basis of the communist project in actual fact served to obscure
the brutality, oppressiveness and stultifying misery of the political regime it
engendered. These can be dystopian or magical realist in character, or, more often
than not, mock-comedic and parodic; they testify not only to the desire to
memorialize, but also the need to forge meaningful connections with a ‘normality’
that had been forcibly corroded by political suppression of individual liberties and
institutionalized censorship.
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Philip Phillis (Glasgow)
‘Towards an Inclusive Discourse: Reconfiguring the Greek-Albanian border in
Eduart’
Angeliki Antoniou's Eduart (2006), portrays the true story of Eduart Bako who fled in
1993 to Greece after the crashing of Albania's communist regime only to return to
Albania where he was imprisoned for theft. Following the mass insurrection of 1997,
that led to the second wave of Albanian migration and the criminalisation of the
Greek-Albanian border, Eduart escaped prison, crossed over to Greece and
confessed to the murder of an Athenian man. Eduart's atonement and redemption
are fittingly portrayed at the border, the exact meeting point between Greece and
Albania, where nationalism has served the function of Fortress Europe to ward off
unwanted invaders from its economically unstable neighbouring countries. By
following a trajectory of redemption, the film redeems the border from discourses of
criminality and converges both sides. By leaving its audience at the interstices of
both countries, from where new rationales of meaning and communication can be
forged, the film asks for a new definition of a (Greek) national cinema while
pontificating a transnational cinema without nationalism and Eurocentrism which
reinforce xenophobia. By redeeming a clandestine Albanian migrant from murder, at
a time when racist stereotyping weighed heavily on Albanian migrants, Eduart
challenges media discourse and, through its reliance on the Albanian language and
interstitiality, it emerges on the premise that difference can unsettle national cinema
instead of dissolve and become assimilated. I will thus address the film's capacity to
undermine essentialisms and assess it in terms of its inclusive understanding of
national cinema and migration. Examples from several Greek films that display a
more entrenched approach to Albanian migration will further highlight Eduart as a
departure point from where we can re imagine Greek and European cinemas as
inclusive in times of increasing cross-border movement and growing nationalisms.
Sea-crossings
Agnes Woolley (Royal Holloway) & Mariangela Palladino (Keele)
‘Salvation, Abandonment and the Bureaucracies of Recognition’
This paper examines trans-Mediterranean migration to Europe through the twin
paradigms of salvation and abandonment. Able to confer legal rights of residency on
migrants, European countries often employ the rhetoric of salvation; yet migrants are
also subject to abandonment by their putative saviours. The journey to Europe and
its border spaces are sites of possible death or what Achille Mbembe calls a
‘necropolitcial’ space. This constitutes a political nexus which traps migrants
between death and salvation where they become at once rescuable and killable;
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both saved and abandoned.
This paper examines recent literary and filmic engagements with transMediterranean migrant crossings by focusing on the figure of the harraga, who
problematises the dual narrative of salvation and abandonment in interesting, if
tragic, ways. Migrants who cross borders by sea are known as harragas, from the
Arabic: ḥarrāg, meaning ‘those who burn’; they burn frontiers, but they also burn the
documentation pertaining to their past lives. This destruction of the past suggests
that harragas’ voyages do not anticipate return; the act of burning their documents
before setting out on the journey entails an active renouncement of their former
selves, their histories and identities, in both legal and ontological terms. What’s
more, conceptualising the border as something that can be burned away suggests
an active repudiation of Fortress Europe’s border controls and its bureaucratic
mechanisms of identification. Through readings of J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of
Jesus (2013) and Fernand Melgar’s film The Shelter (2014), we examine the extent to
which such instances of burning can be read as acts of agency, which reject the
rhetoric of salvation and victimhood often imputed to refugees and undermine
European mechanisms of bureaucratic recognition.
Federica Mazzara (Westminster)
‘Porto M in Lampedusa: A new way of archiving the memory of migration’
This paper will consider the current migratory passage in the Mediterranean towards
Lampedusa with a focus on memorial objects. The arrival of migrants’ boats, often
victims of shipwrecks,on the island of Lampedusa has produced a large quantity of
‘debris’, which the locals have stored in improvised ghastly ‘cemeteries’ of boats.
Within the island, the local collective Askavusa has played a central role in rescuing
whatever they could from the wrecked boats, including private photographs, shoes,
pots, religious texts and other personal items that accompany the migrants on their
often deadly passage. We do not know if the owners of these objects survived the
journey. However, they have come to serve as shared material testimonies to a
continuing perilous global transit, which has exposed the inadequacies of European
and international policies that continue to illegalize the right of refugees to move and
survive. Askavusa has not simply collected the surviving objects. They have created
the space Porto M, where the objects are displayed to the public, in order to
preserve something tangible from the often traumatic memory of the passage and to
bear witness to this historical moment commonly characterized as posing a great
threat to the stability of European borders and identity. Porto M is not a traditional
museum though. It resists any logic of mummification and exoticism. The objects
provide the raw material for a project that deals with recycling and rebirth in artistic
works that become the symbol of an ‘aesthetics of subversion’ meant to give a new
sense to the migratory experience of these mostly faceless and nameless travellers.