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---
title: Second Topic in Curriculum
title: Media and Racialization
has_sessions:
---
# Second Topic in Curriculum
# Media and Racialization
This should work more as an example than anything else. But one could edit and play with it...
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine plunged Europe into a crisis, the EU nations’ humanitarian uproar and self-adulatory valorisation of their response drowned out the voices of Black and other people of colour who were once again caught in quagmire of discriminatory border politics. According to several media reports, while white Ukrainian refugees were granted asylum in several EU nations, people of colour residing in Ukraine were exposed to the brunt of the border complex, undergoing arbitrary detentions and monetary exploitation. Europe’s brutal border regime was further thrown into spotlight by the recent publication of the anti-fraud OLAF Report, which shed light on the numerous human rights violations covered up by Frontex (European Border and Coast Guard Agency), including abandonment of migrant vessels under precarious conditions. What these two cases demonstrate is the differential quality of mobility, with various intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and caste often grading one’s access to the privileges of movement across national and regional borders. In the first case, activists and members of diasporic communities amplified refugees’ voices through social media images and accounts, while in the second, satellite imagery was utilised to prove Frontex’s culpability. The centrality of media to both cases not only throws up questions of representation and difference, but also the mediations that the migrant body undergoes, enmeshed within the discourses of justice, sovereignty and alterity.
Understanding the intersection between race and migration requires questioning of spatial identities as coherent and linear ones, and the long histories of movement that shape them. This requires an ontological recalibration of our understanding of historiography, geopolitics and identity as rooted in mobility and flux, in opposition to settlement (Nail, 2018). It further requires a mapping of the colonialist episteme which produced the racialised body of the other, embedded in a civilisational rhetoric and capitalist interests. The long shadows of slavery and trans-Atlantic movement (Gilroy, 1993), migration of indentured labour (Saunders, 2018; Mahase, 2021), the Partition of India (Chatterji, 2007; Chatterjee, 2019), stretch into the post-globalization era of migration, influencing border regimes and leaving traces in rapidly changing dynamics of mobility. Under the regimes of transnational capital and neocolonial interests, labour migrations between the Global South and Global North (as well as South-South migrations), and forced migrations from Africa and the Middle East also shape the discourse on the migrant body.
One of the key objectives of studying the intertwined histories of migration and race is to problematise the linear narrative of globalization and progress. The gaps and silences in neoliberalism’s celebration of economic liberalization, coercive monetary regimes, increased dismantling of labor rights and appropriation of the politics of difference, require intensified reading and emphasis. Race has emerged as a primary contradiction in these narratives, highlighting the presence of global inequities and power hierarchies that often determine who gets to move where, who are placed in camps, who are the ‘exceptions’. Globalised political economies are also reliant on the hyper-exploitation of precarious communities such as those in refugee camps, which are also determined by racial and geopolitical distributions of power. Mezzadra and Neilson argue that contemporary labor is “more and more crisscrossed, divided and multiplied by the practices of mobility and the operation of borders.” (2013)
Why study media in the context of migration and race? Representational regimes are a key component of border security complexes, generating discourses of migrant criminality and othering. De Genova argues that such discursive production in involved in creating a spectacularization of the border as a site of governmental enforcement and regulation, where migrant illegality is rendered visible (2013). Information and logistics systems converge in more and more automated and algorithmic forms, increasingly expressing the drive for all bodies to become legible, transparent and encoded, fitted and configured in accordance to global capital flows (Rossipal, 2019). Lynes, Morgenstern and Paul argue that production of a migrant crisis and mobilization of a range of images becomes the grounds for the figuration of discourses of migration and borders (2020). The aporetic migrant body (Marciniak and Bennett, 2016) is thus caught within tensions of hyper-visibility, reductive representations and indefinability, subject to further racialization.
Media’s complicity with surveillance regimes also warrants close attention. In a growing economy of social media reliance to build up networks of solidarity and coalitions, the spectre of digital tracking and regulation looms large. This history of complicity can be traced back to visual media’s role in tracing and inscribing a discourses on the body, particularly the racialized other (Zimmer, 2011).The complicity of visual anthropology in the production of colonial ‘scientific racism’ and its long shadow over medical, ethnographic and archaeological knowledge production also needs to be questioned. Engaging with these issues will not only require analyses of contemporary media, but also vast archival repositories of texts. Preceding research on media and migration regimes has focused on the limitations of digital representation of subaltern bodies (Georgiou, 2018), the multifaceted networks of affect in mediatized borders (Chouliaraki and Musaro (2017), embodied modes of subverting bordering techniques (Papadopoulos et al., 2008), migrants’ participation in self-representation (Godin and Dona, 2020).
The complex entanglement of media with discourses of racialization requires reparative pedagogies (Iyer, 2022), with a commitment to decolonizing media studies. This also involves network-building, forging coalitions of activists, scholars, and community-facing organizations to problematize dominant imaginaries of race and build technologies of care. Engaging with border regimes will also involve a re-inspection of the existing technologies of care – the humanitarian regime’s exclusionary practices and complicity in othering as well as the limitations of juridical protection of migrants will have to brought under purview. This involves the building of a repository of tools, texts and technics, as a starting point for a discussion on creating counter-representational mediatic interventions. The following is an initial suggestive bibliography of the same:
## Bibliography
Achiume, E. Tendayi. “Migration as Decolonization,” *Stanford Law Review* 71, (June 2019): 1509-1574.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, *Culture & Society* 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 295-310. doi:10.1177/026327690007002017
Bayraktar, Nilgun. *Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving-Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe*. New York/London: Routledge, 2016.
Benhabib, Seyla. *The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Chatterjee, Chanda. *The Sikh Minority and the Partition of the Punjab 1920-1947*. New York/Oxon: Routledge, 2019.
Chatterji, Joya. *The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India 1947-1967*. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Chouliaraki, Lilie and Pierluigi Musarò. “The mediatized border: technologies and affects of migrant reception in the Greek and Italian borders,” *Feminist Media Studies* 17, no. 4 (2017): 535-549. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2017.1326550
Cohen, Robin. *Migration and its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour and the Nation State*. Burlington/ Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006.
Czaika, Matthias. *The Political Economy of Refugee Migration and Foreign Aid*. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. *Security, Territory, Population. Trans*. by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Genova, Nicholas De. “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion,” *Ethnic and Racial Studies* 36, no. 7 (2013): 1180-1198. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.783710
Georgiou, Myria. “Does the subaltern speak? Migrant voices in digital Europe,” *Popular Communication* 16, no. 1 (2018): 45-57. DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2017.1412440
Gilroy, Paul. *The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness*. London/New York: Verso, 1993.
Godin, Marie and Giorgia Donà. “Rethinking transit zones: migrant trajectories and transnational networks in Techno-Borderscapes,” *Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies*, (2020). DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1804193
Hegde, R. S. *Mediating Migration*. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
Iyer, Usha. “A Pedagogy of Reparations”. *Feminist Media Histories* 8, no. 1, (2022): 181–193.
Izuzquiza, Luisa, Vera Deleja-Hotko, and Arne Semsrott. ‘Revealed: The OLAF report on Frontex’. *FragDenStaat*. 2022. Available at: https://fragdenstaat.de/en/blog/2022/10/13/frontex-olaf-report-leaked/
Jones, Emma. Refugees on Film: ‘How can you make people care?’. *BBC*. 2016. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160118-refugees-on-film-how-can-you-make-people-care.
Krichker, Dina. “Making Sense of Borderscapes: Space, Imagination and Experience,” *Geopolitics* 26, no. 4 (2021): 1224-1242.
Lorenzini, Daniel and Martina Tazzioli. “Critique without ontology: Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence,” *Radical Philosophy* 2, no. 7 (Spring 2020).
Massey, Doreen. *Space, Place and Gender*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Mahase, Radica. *Why Should We Be Called ‘Coolies’? The End of Indian Indentured Labour*. Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2021.
Mbembe, Achille. *Necropolitics*. Trans. by Steven Corcoran. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2019.
Metcalfe, Philippa. “Autonomy of Migration and the Radical Imagination: Exploring Alternative Imaginaries within a Biometric Border,” *Geopolitics* 27, no. 1 (2022): 47-69.
Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. *Border as Method Or, The Multiplication of Labor*. Duke University Press, 2013.
*Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis*. Edited by Krysta Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern and Ian Alan Paul. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020.
Nail, Thomas. *The Figure of the Migrant*. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos. *Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century*. London/Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008.
Rosello, Mireille. *Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest*. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Rossipal, Christian. “Poetics of Refraction: Mediterranean Migration and New Documentary Forms,” *Film Quarterly* 74, no. 3 (2021): 35-45. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2021.74.3.35
Rossipal, Christian. “The Black Box of Detention: Migration, Documentary, and the Logistics of the Moving Image,” *The Global South* 13, no. 2, (Fall 2019): 104-129.
*Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834-1920*, edited by Kay Saunders, Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2018.
*Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy*, edited by Marciniak Katarzyna and Bruce Bennett, Abingdon/ New York: Routledge, 2016.
*The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering*, edited by Nicholas De Genova, Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2017.
“The Left-to-Die Boat”, *Forensic Architecture*. Available at: https://www.forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-left-to-die-boat.
Hosein, Adam Omar. "Refugees and the Right to Remain,” *The Political Philosophy of Refuge*. Edited by David Miller and Christine Straehle. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Zimmer, Catherine. “Surveillance Cinema: Narrative Between Technology and Politics”, *Surveillance & Society 8*, no. 4 (2011): 427-440.