Representations of Border Crossings in Literature, Media, and the Arts

MIDEX

A hybrid (Online & In Person) two-day event, organised by the MIDEX Representations strand.

P﻿lease sign-up to gain access to the online links for the event, or to see where the event will be held if you are intending to join us in person. Border crossings delineate movement from a place, nation, and culture, inter alia, to another. Border crossers, Jane Jackson (2014) writes, can move temporarily or permanently, and crossings can be forced or voluntary, successful or unsuccessful, contemporary or historical. They can lead to multicultural identity formations, or to experiences and feelings of exclusion and isolation (Martin and Nakayama 2008). Because they are embodied experiences, they are determined by race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion and gender, as well as by biopolitical and necropolitical practices, particularly, when deemed ‘irregular.’ Representations of border crossings play a key role in media, literature, visual, as well as performance arts. Historical and contemporary border crossings form a core segment of literary and artistic production as shown by the publication of literary and graphic migration narratives, museum exhibitions, installations in galleries and open public spaces, and via dance, music and theatre performances (Viljoen 2013). At the same time, representations of contemporary ‘irregular’ border crossings foreground the injurious implications of border control practices, as well as media responsibilities of a ‘crisis’ (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017).For this conference, we invited papers that explored representations of border crossings in media, literature, and the arts. We seek to examine the kinds of narratives that can be told through media, artistic and literary attempts to speak about border-crossing subjects. We hope to determine the extent to which such representations cross borders themselves by being exposed to culturally different audiences (Friedman 2005). We further mean to investigate how border-crossing ‘selves’ and ‘others’, collective, or individual, become displayed in such representations and whether hegemonic, (neo-)colonial hierarchies become undone or reproduced through them. How can a person in the position of the ‘host,’ for instance, ‘imagine another without doing violence to [their] object of description’ (Black 2010: 1)? How can representations of liminal, border-crossing subjects disrupt narratives of modernity/coloniality (Schimanski and Wolfe 2013; Mignolo 2011)? Can such representations show ‘how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices’ (Wolfe 2014: 1; Schimanski and Wolfe 2007)? How do they illustrate that ‘as the border-crosser crosses the border, new […] borders are created and crossed in the crosser’s own story, and in the story of the border itself’ (Schimanski 2006: 47)? What are the strategies that would enable nuanced interpretations of such representations (see Schimanski and Wolfe 2017)?

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