The Migrant is Dead, Long Live the Citizen!: Pro-Migrant Activism at US and EU Borders

• In Event: Circuits of Graphic Protest

Abstract

The late January 2017 Executive Order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries suspended the entry of Syrian refugees indefinitely, a rejection of one of the most severe humanitarian crises and five million displaced peoples from Syria. Tens of thousands continue to protest at airports and public officials’ offices. What kind of pedagogies of dissent does the performance art of protest teach us? How do pro-migrant “artivism” around the circulation of (dead) West Asian migrant bodies in the the United States and the European Union? The Syrian refugee crisis exposes the fragility of civil and human rights discourses that bind the US and the EU, the former as the “nation of immigrants” and the latter as welcoming asylum seekers in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

This paper explores the significance of protest art against exclusion in the US and EU that incorporates human matter into the art itself. This paper considers such artivism as the mural painted entirely of human blood ineligible for donation by disqualified populations--HIV positive and men who have sex with men—by Los Angeles-based artist Illma Gore and the INDECLINE art collective that has been most famous for naked Trump statues in prominent public spaces to the exhumation in Italy of a drowned Syrian migrant woman, her transport to Germany, and her memorial service in front of the German parliament by the Berlin-based artivist organization, the Center for Political Beauty. Contesting notions of geography, form, and life in its 2015 multimedia performance project The Dead Are Coming!, the piece involved faked government press releases and announcements of new public works projects such as a bridge across the Mediterranean, inspiring impromptu “Graves of the Unknown Migrant” across continents. Given the extremely precarity of Syrian refugees, the Center’s featuring of a dead person enables the most profound critique of distinctions among mind, body and flesh that dehumanize and obscure these migrants. Inspired by Black diasporic theorists Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, and Sylvia Wynter, this paper questions long-standing certainties of ostensibly liberatory practices--the recuperation of migrants’ human rights and equal inclusion into the nation-state--through performance art circulating around decaying human flesh and blood. How does the refugee corpse trouble and expose the limitations of feminist materialism and posthumanism as well as intersectionality and assemblage as Jasbir Puar identifies in her 2012 article, “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”? How does the (un)mourned death of Syrian refugees reveal the contiguities and intersections among Arab, Asian, and Muslim diasporas and identities converging around the world?

Author

• Lynn M Itagaki, Ohio State University