Chasing some bodies: Tracing the embodiment of female refugees in transnational settings and reading tales of their bodies (original) (raw)
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The undercurrents of autobiographies can reveal more than just stories to their readers. The entanglement of authors and readers provokes the dialogic imagination and reproduces a text beyond the book. I ask how this entanglement can be addressed through notions of representation, subjectivity and embodiment. The article explores auto/biographies of two Iranian female refugees to trace the emergent process of their dialogic voices. Their voices are followed through their portrayal of body and home in transnational settings. I read their tales of desire and sorrow while departing from the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination to frame the narratives of embodiment and home in the mode of Deleuzian becoming.
Being and Becoming: the body and border landscapes
Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2017
Essay published in the catalog for the fine art exhibition "Where is Diana?" at Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, Madrid, Spain. June 2017. Diana Coca, in her exhibition Where is Diana? uses landscape and performance to invite the viewer to contemplate the relationship between the body, systems of control and the construction of the subject in the contexts of national borders and globalization. The movement of people across national boundaries has been accelerated by an integrated world economy, and in recent years, by war, terrorism and organized crime violence. Today about 244 million people, or 3.3 percent of all people in the world, live outside of their country of origin. Another 40 million people live as refugees in their own country, having fled war, extortion or local gang violence. These internally displaced persons often go unrecognized by international support systems designed for refugees. Nation-states have responded with new techno-social controls and enhanced surveillance systems to manage border crossing, and the result is that our bodies have become sites of multiple encoded boundaries. Coca takes up this problem of bodies and codes of state control, and through her own travel, she places borders and border crossing at the center of her artistic practice. Having completed residencies in Beijing, China and in Mexico City and Tijuana, Mexico, she creates a series that enacts the time-space compression characteristic of the postmodern condition and uses her images to stage the disorientation and violence of the protocols of state regulation of migrant mobilities. Her images of a lone black-clad figure in the landscape are both exhilarating and unsettling, linking disparate spaces through the migration and presence of the same singular figure. The landscape and the figure alike suggest alienation and the disintegration of identities that were once rooted in particular histories and specific local places.
Embodied transnationalism: bodies in transnational spaces
Population, Space and Place, 2009
Transnationalism has become a popular concept within migration studies and human geography. A series of concerns have been raised about the early use of the term, mostly prompted by an exaggerated characterisation of mobility. Adopting an embodied approach to the study of transnationalism is a powerful corrective to the dangers of exaggerating mobility and footloosedness. When the scale of analysis is upon migrants rather than migration fl ows, and upon transnationals rather than upon transnationalism, a much more complicated and realistic picture emerges. Transnationals are simultaneously mobile and emplaced. And the extent of choice and compulsion (of both mobility and sedentariness) is uneven across racialised axes, birthplace, gender, and disability. At the embodied scale the affective and emotional geographies of transnationalism are more palpable. Importantly, an embodied analysis of transnationalism reveals the ever-present valency of place.
International Political Sociology, 2010
Corporeal choreography can capture the kind of political agency needed for a transformative politics to emerge. Interviews with failed asylum seekers exemplify negotiations and articulations of agency through movements in a bodyspace we call the interzone. In the explorations of the ways and implications of failed asylum seekers moving between body politics and the political bodyspace Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas of the ontological body, politics and the political are utilized. We suggest that by paying attention to bodies and their movement in living everyday life as failed asylees the spatial gaps and openings can be scrutinized and the functioning of asylum politics as usual disrupted.
In Touch With the Mindful Body Moving With Women and Girls at the Za'atari Refugee Camp
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Progress in Human Geography
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Women's Narratives of Displacement and their Afterlife
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Death at the Border: Making and Unmaking the Migrating Body
Forum Transregional Studien Essay Series, EUME, 2016
This essay explores Marie NDiaye’s novel Trois Femmes Puissantes about the trials of three loosely connected women, who reveal the traffic links between France and Senegal. Set apart from other critiques of the novel, this paper focuses on the last “strong woman” of the triptych—Khady Demba—as an allegorical figure of today’s African migrants pushed out of a homeland that refuses to provide for them and toward perilous journeys. NDiaye highlights the interconnectedness of the material and metaphoric/ ideational in apprehending the border. She does this through a play on the abstract—literalizing metaphors and the figurative to highlight the way language and the ideational intersect with and even affect and shape the material. In doing so, she draws attention to the categories in which the world is represented and to the way these conventions shape social reality.