The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis

T. J. Demos

The Migrant Image

The

MigrantImage

The ArT And PoliTicsof documenTAry

during globAl crisis

T. J. Demos

Duke University Press Durham & London 2013

© 2013 Duke University Press

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾

Cover design by Cherie Westmoreland, interior design by Courtney Leigh Baker.

Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the

Duke University Center for International Studies’ Globalization and

the Artist Project, which provided funds toward the production of this book.

fronTisPiece:

Baghdad Resistance Fighter (2008), Photograph by Ghaith Abdul- Ahad.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the

Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the

Globalization and the Artist Project of the

Duke University Center for International Studies,

which provided funds toward the production of this book.

Contents

illusTrATions viicheck- in: A Prelude xiiichArTing A course: Exile, Diaspora, Nomads, Refugees:A Genealogy of Art and Migration 1

Departure

Amoving imAges of globAlizATion 21

1 Indeterminacy and Bare Life in Steve McQueen’s Western Deep 33 2 “Sabotaging the Future”: The Essay Films of the Otolith Group 54 3 Hito Steyerl’s Traveling Images 74

Transit: Politicizing Aesthetics 90

Departure

Blife full of holes 95

4 The Art of Emily Jacir: Dislocation and Politicization 103 5 Recognizing the Unrecognized: The Photographs of

Ahlam Shibli 124 6 The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group’s Nervus Rerum 144

Transit: Going Offshore 160

Departure

Czones of conflicT 169

7 Out of Beirut: Mobile Histories and the Politics of Fiction 177 8 Video’s Migrant Geography: Ursula Biemann’s Sahara Chronicle 201 9 Means without End: Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri’s

Camp Campaign 221

Destination: The Politics of Aestheticsduring Global Crisis 245

AcknowledgmenTs 251 noTes 255 bibliogrAPhy 305 index 323

Check- InA Prelude

The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis examines contemporary art in a world where globalization has be-come dominant, though hardly uncontested. According to its liberal—and now largely discredited—portrayal, globalization represents a world-wide interlinking of free markets and cultural institutions, facilitated by advances in communication technologies and deregulated travel. United by the conclusion of Cold War divisions between capitalism and commu-nism, it identifies a new world order that promises democratization and egalitarian participation in society.1 Yet, since the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars and uprisings in the Middle East, together with the recent worldwide financial crisis and the continued destabiliza-tion of developing nations in the global south, globalization’s celebratory ring has ceded to the imperialist realities of “empire,” defined by the in-creasingly unequal command of resources by the privileged few occupy-ing elite corporate multinational and governmental positions.2 The result is what I term crisis globalization, designating an era of growing economic inequality, one facing the increasing influx of migrants and refugees into the North as they seek decent standards of living and escape from repres-sive regimes, widespread poverty, and zones of conflict. Yet they do so only to be met by increased security at European borders that exacerbates political and social inequality at international and regional levels.3 It is this state of crisis globalization, one divided between the neoliberal claims of free markets and democratic participation, and the politics of economic inequality, statelessness, and military conflicts, that identifies this book’s pressing context. Organized around a series of case studies that focuses on the work of artists situated in Europe and North America, the Middle East, and North

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Africa, this book investigates a series of key questions regarding the re-lation between politics and aesthetics, mediums and mobility, socioeco-nomic disparity and emancipatory artistic promise that sheds further light on globalization’s crises. Looking closely at the powerful films of the British artist Steve McQueen, the moving installations of Palestinian art-ist Emily Jacir, and the melancholy photographic cycles of the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, among the work of others, these interrelated chapters trace the critical engagements of these practitioners that reveal the emer-gency conditions of our current world of militarized borders, xenophobic social relations, and the uneven geographies within and between North and South. In particular, this book grapples with the inspired aesthetic innovations responsive to such developments, according to which artists have invented critical documentary strategies and new modelings of af-fect, creative modes of mobile images and imaginative videos, with which to negotiate the increased movements of life across the globe. More specifically, this text examines how recent art explores the cur-rent global situation in which multitudes are reduced to the status of what Giorgio Agamben terms bare life—that is, life stripped of political identity and exposed to the state’s unmediated application of power.4 For Agam-ben, globalization represents an emerging paradigm of newly empowered sovereignty expanded worldwide, bringing with it corresponding zones of transmigration and statelessness. While this biopolitical system in which government comes to control life itself, as Foucault observed, reaches back historically into the middle of the twentieth century and even further (in-deed, Agamben finds legal precedents in the Third Reich, as well as in classical Roman jurisprudence), it also issues from more recent technolo-gies of immobility amid military occupation and security architectures in which the displaced and excluded are denied legal rights, social protec-tions, and the freedom of movement.5 Whereas global mobility follows from the transition to a world of newly opened borders—with its most potent symbol being the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the construction of a borderless eu—it also results from the desperation of multitudes to overcome the increasingly militarized divisions of economic and political power between Europe and Africa, and North America and its southern neighbors. Globalization, according to this view, is less a smooth space of the free flow of people, as many utopian narratives of the 1990s wished to see it, than a fractured geography of borders and archipelagos that divides

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the uninterrupted transmissions of goods and capital from the controlled movements of people.6 While the recent growth of migration is the underlying sociological concern of this project, this study brings together a constellation of related terms—including exile, statelessness, and nomadism—that are developed in their theoretical specificity in relation to singular artistic practices, par-ticularly so in the book’s introduction, “Exile, Diaspora, Nomads, Refu-gees: A Genealogy of Art and Migration,” which examines the termino-logical aspects of contemporary mobility and offers a schematic overview of the conjunction of art and migration over the last few decades. Whereas “migration” denotes traveling abroad with the hopes of gaining citizenship or temporary legal residence, as documented by artists such as Ursula Bie-mann and Yto Barrada, “nomadism” denotes a condition of perpetual mo-bility and existential states of becoming as affirmed in the films of Steve McQueen and the videos of Hito Steyerl, and “statelessness” and “exile” suggest the socially vulnerable position of the involuntary refugee denied the rights of the citizen, as portrayed, for instance, in the art of Ahlam Shibli and mapped by the migrant- rights group Migreurop. The theori-zation of these terms is meant to reveal the complex reality of travel and inequalities of social mobility during the advanced stage of globalization after 2001, as much as the emancipatory potential of movement according to a politics of social justice and equality. My research proceeds from three points of departure, which are devel-oped over the course of this book’s three parts: (1) How have artists in-vented new artistic strategies—mobilizing the image as much as imaging mobility—with which to intervene in the cultural politics of globalization in critical and creative ways? (2) How is it possible to represent artistically life severed from representation politically, as when it comes to photo-graphing the stateless who are denied the rights of citizenship and the legal protections of national identity? And (3) how has the creative recon-figuration of art’s connection to politics constituted an oppositional force directed against the disenfranchising division of human life from politi-cal identity, which defines the status of the refugee? These three areas of concern, addressed over three chapters each, are then each introduced by three “Departures” and divided by two “Transits.” Intended as short criti-cal passages, these transitional sections elaborate on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings and implications of my analysis, rather

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than offering extensive readings of artworks. Finally, the text is concluded by a “Destination” that draws final observations about the book’s argu-ment and offers an outlook for the future, based on its research concerns. If this book’s structure suggests a journey of sorts, then it is one that im-plies many possible trajectories rather than any single route, chronological development, or hierarchical ordering. The first question has led me to investigate globalization as a set of con-flictual narratives, which I map out in the book’s first departure, “Mov-ing Images of Globalization.”7 It includes accounts of how the innovative films and videos of Steve McQueen, the London- based Otolith Group, and the Berlin- based artist Hito Steyerl have challenged the unequal territorial divisions between North and South, and between East and West, by pro-posing a “contrapuntal” system of montage, which brings those divided areas into an insistent proximity.8 With these “moving images”—a term that I adopt to designate the growing convergence of the mediums of film and digital video as much as a new modeling of affect in relation to the image—artists confront geopolitical conflicts by also throwing documen-tary conventions into crisis. The resulting documentary- fictions of dias-poric identities interweave the factual and the imaginary registers of the image for critical and creative effect, as in, for instance, McQueen’s film Western Deep, taking South African migrant workers laboring in a gold mine as its subject, and the futuristic, dystopian worlds that offer startling views onto the nearly forgotten Indian socialist movements of the recent past, as conjured in the films of the Otolith Group. A quick word on the resurgence of documentary approaches in contem-porary art is in order, for this development is a major subject of the present study. No doubt our time of disaster and emergency—including globaliza-tion’s uneven developments and the general failures of neoliberal capital-ism, the pervasiveness of poverty and suffering, economic imperialism, endless wars and political crises, the predicaments of migration and refu-gees, terrorism and insecurity, and religious confrontations—has placed post- Enlightenment paradigms of truth in crisis, and in turn brought new investments in the potential political use- value of the documentary since the 1970s.9 But that is not to say that earlier periods were devoid of their own crises (and, certainly, since the invention of photography, documen-tary and catastrophe have long gone together). The situation of documen-tary’s recent appearance is still more complex, and owes also to the critical

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mass of institutional investment (including documentary- heavy exhibi-tions like the paradigm- shifting Documenta 11) and critical discourse (for example, the many innovative studies of documentary that have emerged in the last decade) that have allowed and encouraged documentary en-gagement to emerge as a central aspect of artistic practice and theoretical debate. Yet another factor has been the recent digital reconfigurations of representation, which has meant that the older analog approaches to docu-mentation are no longer secure and consequently the truth- value of the image has been newly placed in doubt. However, that situation does not make documentaries any less valid or meaningful. As Michael Renov use-fully points out, “If there is a consensus emerging among the newest gen-eration of documentary scholars, it may just be that representations of the real have more rather than less power to shape our world than heretofore, that the production and control of the flow of historically based images is increasingly the arena of social power that matters most.”10 Owing to these circumstances of the conjunction of representation, power, and tech-nology, socially concerned and politically active artists have taken up the ambition of intervening in the world, and have done so by reengaging and reinventing the documentary mode, which in the present context, there-fore, has become an object of sustained inquiry. This book’s first chapter investigates Steve McQueen’s poetic representa-tion of uneven geographies—conjoining the present- day lawlessness sur-rounding African enclaves of protected resource extraction and Europe’s technological advancement and democratic governance. The chapter ad-dresses how Western Deep (2002), with its brutal and visually stunning exposure of the atrocious conditions of migrant labor in a South African gold mine, introduces a critical interval in the otherwise mesmerizing cap-ture of video’s electronic flow (and in the aestheticization of misery). In this regard the film builds on the diverse work of precursors such as the Black Audio Film Collective and the projects of earlier conceptual and structural filmmakers. By engaging the critical interval between frames, between geographies, between the subject of representation and the space of cinematic projection, McQueen’s films construct a perceptual caesura between viewer and image that engenders the potential for a flight both from earlier documentary standards that served to reify victimhood and toward a singular expression that offers a just distribution of appearance. The second chapter considers the essay films of the Otolith Group

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(composed of artists- theorists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar), which assemble footage from diverse sources, including archival material from Sagar’s family in India that documents the country’s past involvement in the Non- Aligned Movement and the subcontinent’s feminist struggles, recordings of recent political protests in London against the recent war in Iraq, and futuristic scenes of space travel. Adding to that array of rep-resentational diversity, the footage is also overlaid with poetic and auto-biographical voice- overs. Finding inspiration in the filmmaking of Chris Marker and Jean- Luc Godard, the group advances what they term past potential futures—designating former dreams of a possible time yet to come. By refusing to allow erstwhile moments of historical struggle to disappear, their films reanimate political solidarities that reveal the prom-ise of a potential tomorrow. The third chapter of the book’s first part exam-ines the films of Hito Steyerl. In her video essay November (2004) Steyerl charts the transformations of her childhood friend Andrea Wolf, who grew up in Germany before returning to her family roots in Turkey, where she was later martyred as a Kurdish freedom fighter. I examine how Steyerl’s fascinating tale reveals the emerging conditions of globalization’s image- regime to be one of virtual drift and endlessly shifting contexts, as much as geographical displacements and post- Cold War political realignments. The chapter contends that by drawing on those circulatory flows Steyerl invents an innovative modeling of documentary on the basis of the un-certainty of meaning owing to the unstoppable mobility of images. My discussion proceeds to examine how Steyerl reconfigures the connection between aesthetics and politics via a montage using borrowed footage of displaced subjects, including pornographic images sourced from the Japa-nese bondage industry, media reports on Germany’s Kurdish population, and contested territories of post- wall Berlin. The second question takes up the artistic representation of the politi-cally unrepresented and has led me to investigate the fragmentary image conditions of statelessness, which, as the title of the book’s second point of departure, I term Life Full of Holes (after the project by Yto Barrada, of the same name). What, in other words, are the image conditions for those consigned to the realm of bare life? And how have artists invented em-powering systems of imagery to analyze and challenge the potential exis-tential reduction that state of exception entails? Here I look closely at the experimental documentary tactics of the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir and

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the Palestinian Bedouin artist Ahlam Shibli, and I consider another film of the Otolith Group that investigates the conditions of opacity in relation to the representation of a Palestinian refugee camp. On the one hand, the photographic and video- based exposure of statelessness (as in the circum-stances of non- Israeli Palestinians who effectively belong to no state, even if they have for many decades fashioned a national liberation movement for themselves) intends to be a political act, which is usefully conceptual-ized as a particular formulation of “the politics of aesthetics” in the work of Jacir and Shibli. According to Jacques Rancière’s well- established formu-lation, art holds the potential to reorganize the realm of visibility so that, unlike governmental politics’ and mass media’s hierarchical channels of access, representation is rendered equitable, a reading I attempt to com-plicate, critically test, and develop further in relation to my case studies throughout the book.11 On the other hand, many of the artists under con-sideration in this book’s second part challenge traditional documentary conventions as developed in film and photography over the course of the twentieth century, in order to investigate what political value accrues from those innovative strategies that negotiate the limits of representation yet nevertheless bring visibility to those who exist in globalization’s shadows. Staying with this question, the fourth chapter considers the art of Emily Jacir, who has created a significant body of work that engages with the Pal-estinian diaspora brought about by the foundation of the State of Israel. Politically directed, her work challenges the long- standing Israeli occupa-tion by making a claim for social justice and human rights; yet, Jacir’s art also movingly reflects on the experiential conditions of exile that hover on the edges of visibility. Rather than reaffirm a relation of opposition be-tween “us” and “them,” however, her work opens up the transformative potential of dislocation that decenters the very basis of national identity, as well as the legibility of its subjectivity. Resonating with recent politi-cal theories of “reciprocal extraterritoriality”—meaning the simultaneous dislocation of self and other, as articulated in the writings of Agamben—Jacir’s art, I argue, envisages a new political horizon for the subject and community beyond the nation- state. Focusing on the photographs of Ahlam Shibli, the fifth chapter builds on this discussion by considering Shibli’s documentation of Bedouin villages that are “unrecognized” by the Israeli state, whose Palestinian inhabitants are thereby denied the right to build permanent architectural structures, construct electrical and sewage

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systems, or benefit from education and health care systems. My analysis assesses Shibli’s photographic strategy of correlating visual absence with political dispossession, according to which the artist paradoxically chal-lenges the invisibility of her Bedouin subjects with images that show their very disappearance. Creatively negotiating this bind, Shibli refuses to turn her camera away from the evidence of state oppression even as she con-fronts the risks of producing an aesthetics of erasure. The Migrant Image’s second part concludes by returning to the work of the Otolith Group, looking particularly at their essay film Nervus Re-rum, which was shot in the Jenin refugee camp. Choosing to avoid both the ethnographic gaze and the compassionate heart of conventional docu-mentary practice, the group refuses to let its camera focus on the inhabi-tants of the camp. They opt instead to develop the significance of the “opacity” of the image, a term borrowed from Édouard Glissant, the late French- Caribbean poet and literary critic, for whom opacity signals the image’s impossibility of capturing the “truth” of its subject. I examine how the film’s voice- over draws connections with a complex history of literary engagements with Palestine, a key reference being Jean Genet’s journal of time spent with Palestinian revolutionaries presented in his book Prisoner of Love. Drawing on this and other similarly provocative accounts, the group joins—somewhat paradoxically, yet because of that, all the more suggestively—a refusal to represent with a provocative networking of lit-erary allusions in order to forge a politics of the image that “turns its back on power” and retains the empowering capacity of subjects to exist beyond representation. The book’s third point of departure, “Zones of Conflict” (named after a research workshop series I directed in London during 2008 and 2009 and an exhibition of the same name that I curated in New York) addresses contemporary art’s strategic interlinking of aesthetics and politics when it comes to the geopolitical crises of borders and camps, as well as military crises and warfare. The diverse artistic engagements of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, founders of the New York- based collective 16Beaver, the Lebanese artists Walid Raad, Lamia Joreige, and Rabih Mroué, the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, and others challenge the division between biologi-cal and political modes of life, which structures the lives of the refugee and the displaced person, via the creative recalibration of the relation between

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aesthetics and politics. Whether in regard to the representation of deten-tion centers operated by the United States, the Lebanese hostage crisis dur-ing the country’s civil wars, or North African transmigration, the singular projects of these artists variously reject the earlier “engaged” artistic solu-tions of activism and political art from the 1990s, where traditional docu-mentary strategies yielded authoritative exposés based on now- outdated regimes of truth. Inventing new paradigms of authenticity based upon the admission of subjective constructions, more recent artistic proposals tend to develop the psychological aspects of the image’s affective economy, as well as dislodge the conventional security of the representational cate-gories of political art. Their creative projects reinvent the artistic possibili-ties of political engagement on the basis of an indeterminate connection between what is aesthetic (for example, sensory appearance) and what is political (for instance, the particular arrangement of the sensible realm), which must be questioned at every turn. The book’s third part begins with the exploration in chapter 7 of the real and fictitious archives of Lamia Joreige, Joana Hadjithomas, and Khalil Joreige, Rabih Mroué and Walid Raad’s invented organization. I take the exhibition Out of Beirut at Modern Art Oxford in 2006, as a useful pretext to investigate the innovative documentary poetics of this generation of Lebanese artists. Since 1999, they have variously collected testimonials and visual artifacts that provide a fascinating record, if fragmented and incom-plete, of the history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975–91). Frequently placing factual civil- war- era documents within fictional scenarios, Raad’s images, which drift between epistemological registers of the political and the imaginary, are commonly understood to exemplify the dubious nature of photographic truth as fits the age of postmodernism. Taking issue with that reading, my analysis contends that this work, on the contrary, proves that the deepest understanding of reality, particularly a traumatic one, neces-sitates an engagement with the fictional and conflictual aspects of images. This realization allows me to situate this work on the cutting edge of glob-alization’s system of images, wherein the representational link between sign and referent has been severed and truth must be reinvented on the grounds of uncertainty. Chapter 8 looks closely at Ursula Biemann’s quasi- ethnographic approach to transmigration in North Africa. It considers in particular her video and research project Sahara Chronicle (2006), which

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charts the geographical patterns, locates the institutional and national players, and interviews the indigenous agents that have turned this region of Africa into a terrain of human mobility and social conflict, militarized control, and economic exploitation. The chapter considers Biemann’s well- articulated claim that video, given its capacity for hybrid montage and vir-tual imagery, is ideally suited as a medium to address the complex layers of such geographies of conflict as the Sahara’s, geographies torn between the demands for migrant rights and the increased European pressures and advanced technological and military means to control the movements of people in this area of Africa. My final chapter examines Camp Campaign (2006), the project of the artists and activists Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, which comprises a multifaceted investigation into the existence of the camp in the United States. Focusing on the Guantánamo Bay detention center and deepening that focus with a consideration of historical precedents of related modes of spatial control—such as earlier American examples of military camps, reservations, internment and relief centers—Anastas and Gabri undertake a fascinating and timely inquiry into the status of human rights in the age of the U.S. government’s post- 9/11 circumscription of civil liberties (de-pressingly upheld throughout the Obama administration’s first term). The chapter argues that by suspending the clear division between aesthetic and political registers, Camp Campaign provides a creative riposte to the sepa-ration of life from law, which is one fundamental function of the camp as biopolitical paradigm. Representing a series of analytical inquiries into these three interrelated categories—the cultural imaginary of globalization, the representation of statelessness, and the war of images that defines globalization today—The Migrant Image also emphasizes the creative ways contemporary art-ists have imagined forms of life capable of inspiring hope and belief in a better world to come. Such hope is not the utopian striving of an artistic imagination that must be seen as irrelevant; rather, it has led to ambitious constructions that are deployed against political regimes that otherwise admit no creative alternatives. In this regard, this book not only engages and draws on artistic practices that construct imaginative possibilities that await potential realization, but sees those works as having the power to mobilize the energy that will help bring about reinvented possibilities. This

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claim is not meant to privilege artistic practice over other forms of political construction; for today, what is needed more than ever are powerful and creative artistic expressions and interventions that join other social move-ments for positive change, social justice and equality, working together toward the progressive re- creation of our common world.

Notes

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1. For an overview of the claims and critiques of neoliberal globalization, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), for a prescient prognosis of this post- 9/11 contemporary reality. 3. My term crisis globalization is inspired by Naomi Klein’s devastating book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Holt, 2007). 4. For a useful discussion of the stakes of the terms bare life and naked life, which are alternate translations of Agamben’s original Italian nuda vita and its further relation to Walter Benjamin’s usage of “bloßes Leben” (mere life), see Eva Geulen, “Bare Life.” Texte zur Kunst 66 (June 2007): 102–7. 5. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2008); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2010). 6. For vivid pictures of this uneven geography of globalization in the African and Middle Eastern contexts, see James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman, eds., Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (Berlin: kw- Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003). 7. For a useful overview of the various, conflicting narratives of globalization as an economic and political discourse, see Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan, “Per-ception, Representation, Theory Construction and the Globalization Debate,” in The Imagined Economies of Globalization (London: Sage, 2004).

noTes 256

8. I borrow this term from Edward Said, who develops his contrapuntal method-ology—which insists on analyzing literature and politics, as much as histories of enlightenment and colonialism, together—in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). Another useful model is Susan Buck- Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Uni-versal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 9. As argues, for instance, Jean- François Chevrier, in “Documentary, Docu-ment, Testimony . . .” In Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photog-raphy, Film and the Visual Arts, edited by Frits Gierstberg et al. (Rotterdam: nAi, 2005), 51. 10. Michael Renov, “Documentary Horizons: An Afterword.” In Collective Visible Evidence, edited by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1999), 324. He continues: “It’s just that the sites and situations of documentary culture have exploded exponentially—on cable TV twenty- four hours a day, on urban billboards and big- screen displays, in museums and on the Internet.” 11. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Lon-don: Continuum, 2004).

chArTing A course

1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illumina-tions, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 258. 2. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Granta 13 (autumn 1984): 159. 3. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico- philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 41. 4. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 243. 5. See Nikos Papastergiadis, Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversa-tions on Cultural Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998), 1: “Does modernity still promise to be the home of enlightenment, progress and reason, or is it an exi-lic state shrouded by techno- mystification, sliding deeper into chaos, committed to inequality, a shabby justification for ecological and cultural upheaval?” See also Nikos Papastergiadis, Modernity as Exile: The Stranger in John Berger’s Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 6. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, both terms have an exten-sive historical genealogy. The etymology of exile dates from c.1300, from the Old French exillier, and from the Latin exilare and exilium, meaning “banishment,” and exul, “banished person,” combining ex- “away” and al- “to wander” (compare the

T. J. Demos

is A criTic And reAder in The dePArTmenT of The hisTory of ArT AT

University College, London. He writes widely on modern and contemporary art

and is the author of Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contem-

porary Art (2012), Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman

(2010), and The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (2007).

librAry of congress cATAloging-in-PublicATion dATA

Demos, T. J.

The migrant image : the art and politics of documentary

during global crisis / T.J. Demos.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5326-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-5340-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Arts and globalization. 2. Culture and globalization.

3. Art and society. 4. Documentary mass media and the arts.

5. Emigration and immigration in art. i. Title.

n72.g55d46 2013

700.86′91—dc23

2012033722