Locomotion as Political Aesthetic: Reflections on Caravans and Walls of Welcome

• In Event: What Are the Aesthetics of Justice?

Abstract

An aesthetics of basically settled populations and borders undergirds many otherwise very different political paradigms, ranging from militantly xenophobic forms to those with capacious articulations of rights of immigration. Alternatively, this paper suggests that democracy hinges upon an aesthetics of the demos as becoming in motion, in order to conjure up a politics of radical receptivity and militant disruption that has always been integral to struggles for justice - and will remain so in a world of markedly increasing displacement. A political aesthetic of locomotion negotiates ‘locus’ (place) and ‘motio’ (motion) as conditions of each other’s possibility - at least if we are to create a politics that bends toward justice and good places. This paper explores such an aesthetics of political practice through movements that have, quite literally, involved movements - e.g., the Underground Railroad, Freedom Rides, Farmworker Pilgrimage, Undocubus, Caravans, and more. Rather than thinking about these as politics at the margins aiming to expand justice in a basically settled polity, we might consider how such moving may inscribe an unsettled and unsettling democratic aesthetic. Relatedly, this project explores a politics of ‘public things’ (Honig) that might inscribe such an aesthetic, with a particular focus on walls of welcome that - far from just saying no to ’the wall’, co-opt arts of walling precisely to undo the political imaginary of the demos as settled and bordered - whether hateful or more cosmopolitan.

Author

• Romand Coles, Australian Catholic University