Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity

By Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro

Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity is a multi-genre and transdisciplinary text addressing themes such as colonialism, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow-worlds of the African soccerscape, and immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book invites inquiry into today’s apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, and international criminal justice regimes, as well as the precarity generated by citizen time and 'consulate time'. The aesthetic breaks emerging from the book’s image-text montage draw attention to the ethics of encounter and passage that challenges colonial, domestic, and nation-statist sovereignty regimes of inattention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526174345

Book preview

Introduction

Blurred juxtapositions: passages, images, and affects

Passages: On Geo-analysis and the Aesthetics of Precarity assembles a series of political interventions and ruminations that are as much about ethics as they are about aesthetics. The multiple passages that make up the book are juxtaposed with active images that not only reflect what we are saying but also evoke other worlds and the affects that accompany their aesthetic focalizations. Compositionally the book therefore reads as a montage sequence that enacts an affective proximity between diverse genres, worlds, an assemblage of multiple passages on geo-analysis, on aesthetics, and on precarities.¹

The initial inspiration for our engagement with multiple genres of expression arises from our mutual concern with the short attention span of journalistic media which either sensationalize the suffering they depict or encourage keeping adversity at a distance. To unsettle that hegemonic mode of apprehending precarious lives, we turned to critical loci of enunciation supplied by literary and cinematic texts such as Ousmane Sembène’s film La Noire de (Black Girl) and Zadie Smith’s short story The Embassy of Cambodia, which connect precarious migrant women’s lives to longer histories of servitude, commerce, and intimate pleasurescapes as well as the broader geographies of mass atrocity, colonialism, mass migration, and mass inattention. The compositional plan to shift our collaborative writing from the essay form to a book that juxtaposes fragments, passages, and images was encouraged by our encounter with John Akomfrah’s Signs of Empire exhibition and its accompanying catalogue. In Signs of Empire, Akomfrah enacts an affective proximity between multiple genres of expression and ways of being by inter-articulating the visual and the lexical to provoke critical thinking about lives and deathscapes that are often treated separately. Inspired by the itinerant, outlaw, and pariah ideas and practices that exist on the margins of their own practices or disciplines, Akomfrah uses found and archival footage from diverse domains to create collage-based films where multiple single-channel video installations take us through the lives and ideas of Stuart Hall and Malcolm X, the fractures in contemporary British society, and planetary catastrophes.² More specifically, Akomfrah’s three-screen video installation Vertigo Sea encouraged us to think with images as we apprehended the workings of the sublime in this multi-genre work on human and more-than-human precarities. Vertigo Sea references literary works such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Heathcote Williams’s epic poem Whale Nation, and juxtaposes passages from these texts with archival images about the history of the Middle Passage, fatal migration journeys, whaling, and climate change. By bringing together multiple oppositional communities of sense against the backdrop of a sublime, vertigo-inducing sea, Akomfrah’s installation acted as a kind of passageway through which we were drawn to listen to images.³ The artful juxtaposition of disjunctive words, worlds, and images in Signs of Empire provided a form—a concatenation of aesthetic breaks—that guided some of our initial attempts to disclose the shadow worlds and macropolitical apparatuses that generate the multiple global precarities.⁴

As we pondered the convergence of sublimes in Akomfrah’s Signs of Empire exhibition, our attention was drawn to the significance of listening to multiple image genres: cinema, photographs, woodcuts, and others. Writing about photography specifically, Tina Campt notes that listening to images reclaims the photographic archive of precarious dispossessed black subjects⁵ and encourages us to attune our senses to modes that exceed the occularcentric dimension of images.⁶ To accompany the dominant optical mode, she proposes a counterintuitive haptic mode of engaging the sonic frequencies of photographs.⁷ This mode, she suggests, offers an alternate take on ‘watching’ photos that materializes their transfigurations, albeit not in the form of statements of fact or as narratives of transit or mobility.⁸

To attend to the full vibrations of images and the affective proximities of forms in the manner that Akomfrah and Campt suggest, our aesthetic explorations turned to the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng, whose images are marked by a compositional and stylistic work that involves "Chasing Shadows or looking for something that refuses to be photographed."⁹ Instead of providing a spectacle of suffering, Mofokeng’s photography highlights the spectral and polyrhythmic dimensions of the still image. Recognizing the shadowy operations characteristic of apartheid South Africa, Mofokeng remained adopted the conception of shadows derived from the Sotho and Zulu word seriti or is’thunzi, which can mean anything from aura, presence, dignity, confidence, power, spirit, essence, status and or wellbeing. Consequently, his idea of chasing shadows does not carry the same image or meaning that it does in English.¹⁰ While most of our investigations of precarity-inducing practices explore the shadow worlds that operate behind the scenes or below the thresholds of recognition, we often turn to Mofokeng’s conception of shadows because it provides alternative knowledges and ontologies and unsettles traditional representations of precarity.¹¹ Additionally inspiring for our analysis is the way Mofokeng highlights the precarity of some artists in his work Trauma Landscapes, which involved him traveling to parts of the world and South Africa that he could never have gone during apartheid.¹²

Drawing on Teju Cole’s commentary on the way Mofokeng’s apartheid and post-apartheid images play on light and darkness and abound in deep shadow and blur (for example an unclear image of body parts on a train, captioned The Drumming, Johannesburg—Soweto Line Series: Train Church, 1986), we are instructed by the various forms of precarity, hope, and life presented in Mofokeng’s unusual spatial compositions (for example a funeral scene shot from a great distance with a seemingly fallow space between the photographer and his subject).¹³ As Cole suggests, the details of the funeral procession—a hearse and a crowd of marchers along with a nearby bus, behind which are two women, who might be walking slowly or trying to catch up with the main party … —seem to have less significance than what is around them … the great expanse of the landscape [so that] the photo comes to feel less like an image of a funeral than an image of this space.¹⁴ He goes on to identify Mofokeng’s ability to evoke a space in which the main event is almost too small to be seen. Conveyed by Mofokeng’s hand, creating a blur by shooting at a low shutter speed, without a flash or a tripod and composing a spaciousness that renders the details difficult to apprehend, is an intimacy with this … world … a world that isn’t insubstantial but that is elusive to the uninitiated or to outsiders.¹⁵ As Cole discerns, Mofokeng’s photographic practice has political resonances. In the context of the apartheid world in which his art is fashioned: … the harsh interrogative light of an unjust political reality, the dreamlike … effect of Mofokeng’s photographic compositions … offers … knowledge of a more secret sort.¹⁶ Contrasting shadows and blurs to that harsh interrogative light, Mofokeng achieves his political effect by rendering things difficult to apprehend (and his hand" continues its interventionist role in the darkroom, shaping moods and affects after the images are recorded).

Inspired by the Mofokeng effect, we listen to images and passages that instantiate affective proximities between genres in a manner that resonates with his politically attuned photographic intervention into South Africa’s historiography.¹⁷ As is the case with Mofokeng’s photographic method, our textual interventions and analyses are closely linked to their political impetus. As Patricia Hayes points out,

while his Afrapix [an anti-apartheid documentary photography collective] colleagues were chasing police and protests and producing sharp realist images of unassailable clarity for local and international consumption, Santu Mofokeng was, in his own phrase, chasing shadows [he was experimenting with] effects of a fractured viewpoint, arising specifically in Africa [in order to] offer some possibilities for thinking about photography.¹⁸

The political effect of such a methodological shift, which opens up uncertainties and emphasizes different things,¹⁹ is captured in part by Kaja Silverman’s suggestion that such aesthetic work, which has the effect of displacing us from the geometrical point (i.e., the center) allows us to see in ways not dictated in advance by the dominant fiction,²⁰ and apropos of the political concern animating Mofokeng’s method, alerts us to other people’s memories.²¹

To enact that alert, Mofokeng had to resist the figurative givens and psychic clichés of the global image economy.²² After exploring and rejecting what he called a politics of representation²³ that portrayed South Africa’s Black assemblage only in terms of their victimization, he strove for an alternative representation of black life by showing everyday scenes of normal life, predicated on a counter narrative to the dominant images of townships as places of violent struggle.²⁴ Moreover, rather than pandering to a global audience of voyeurs of the violence associated with South Africa’s apartheid struggle, Mofokeng’s ideal viewers are township dwellers; he constructs scenes designed to be understandable to a Black South African community of sense. As astute commentators (Cole among others) have discerned, the form Mofokeng has chosen constitutes the political sensibility his images convey. In constructing scenes that are blurry and occasionally shrouded in smoke or mist, Mofokeng deliberately sought to occlude rather than expose the Black South African life-world because for him the violence of apartheid existed not in what immediately meets the eye. Rather, as he states, The violence is in the knowing of those who have been oppressed; they are his intended viewers.²⁵

Because there are ambiguities, distortions, and disturbances in what immediately meets the eye, Mofokeng’s images of Black South Africans in the townships, the spiritual life sought in pilgrimages to the Motouleng Caves, or the traumatized landscapes of rural South Africa, Namibia, and Germany, also provide a methodological insight that we try to extend to other genres. Here, our reading of Mofokeng and others is in line with Jacques Rancière’s re-reading of the method of the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman.²⁶ To fully appreciate what is at stake in such a dissensual reading of images, we engage Rancière at length here because his conception of the dissensual effect of the images, bodies, times, affects, that art sets into motion influences our approach in the various chapters.

According to Rancière, images are dispositions of the visible and are the small lights that penetrate [a] horizon of indifference.²⁷ Turning to Georges Didi-Huberman’s treatment of Harun Farocki’s work, Rancière looks at how the survival of a trace of these images of precarious lives is also a trace of survivability and, as he puts it, the surviving image, the image as a division of time, at work in every exposed body is what supports the tensions present in Didi-Huberman’s ‘reading’ of images … [which] calls into question the very conceptual frame within which images are read, namely the frame of the opposition between activity and passivity.²⁸

Collaborations: a note on productive reception

In our collaboration with the artists Barbara Benish and Enrique Leal, we heed Rancière’s conception of images as active and treat their woodcuts and prints as imagistic inhabitations that short-circuit the desire for operative images that represent reality as it is or attempts to faithfully illustrate our essays. Through blades, black ink, sweat, and blocks, they have created sometimes clear, sometimes blurred, composite ghost images that tell their own story while interrupting or supplementing our own. It was our intention to have our collaboration with Benish and Leal encourage their productive reception of our texts. And, crucially, the artists reciprocate with woodcuts and prints that rearrange, distort, or amplify, rather than merely illustrate, what our essays say. Accordingly, their image responses to the lexical texts in the chapters Ruminations on apocalyptic sublimes, Subalterns ‘speak’, and Precarious breaks have resulted, for example, in composite prints where Sembène’s image (of Diouna’s mask) is juxtaposed with the ball (from Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu and Matthieu Donck’s Netflix series The Break/La Trêve) as well as apocalyptic images from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

The juxtapositions of passages and images of precarity in the book are also gestural allegories of survival. They disclose the contingencies of visibility that intervene and make it difficult to be attuned to the ethical weight of other presences. Again, Rancière provides a way of re-reading these images when he reminds us that there are images other than those of the uniform light of the market-oriented world where human activity is transformed into spectacle and all differences are blurred.²⁹ In addition to thinking of images as the subversion of the sensible order such that the people who are uncounted make themselves count, Rancière also encourages a re-reading of images where the emergence of a people is less an indication of subversion than precarity, the precarity in number.³⁰

In our reflection on blindness, shadows, and justice in the chapter on Legal precarities, we have found Rancière’s cautionary note on the dialectic of overexposure and underexposure to be particularly instructive. It alerts us to the way listening to images, re-reading them, and juxtaposing them with passages from texts in multiple genres can also blur, underexpose, or even overexpose the very subjects we are writing about. According to Rancière:

The image and the people connect only on the verge of disappearance, constantly exposed to a double peril of undifferentiating underexposure and blinding overexposure. They connect there as survivors, living in spite of it all, between the perils of disappearing into the night and of being blinded by the light. That is what separates this overexposed humanity. What creates a rupture in the image is therefore not the conflict over the distribution of the sensible. It is survival [survivance], the way in which the famous notion of naked life is divided [se de d́ouble] by living on [survivance], like the beating of a tempo opposite to that which leads to disappearance.³¹

Beyond the content of its analyses, the form in which this book is composed and arranged is central to the way we articulate the aesthetics of precarity. That is, the shadows and blurred or ghost images that appear in various parts of the text are meant to disrupt certitudes by reflecting the tension between the said and the seen. These intermediations of the visual, the lexical, and the compositional are central to our engagement with those vulnerable to the extractive forces of capital, colonial oppression, migration control, the nation-state, as well as new forms of precarity that threaten their lives, stories, knowledges, and images with disappearance or increased surveillance.³² Recognizing that the processes bringing people into contact may also expose them to contagion or trigger various practices geared towards immunizing the community or the body against the other, we also attend to what Roberto Esposito has called the immunitary dispositif within modernity.³³ This immunitary preoccupation with (self)protection, Esposito tells us, limits circulation and relation and, in the attempt to protect life, if carried to a certain threshold, winds up negating life.³⁴ It manifests in the need for exemption and protection that originally belonged to the medical and juridical fields, and "has spread to all sectors and languages of our lives, to the point that the immunitary dispositif has become the coagulating point, both real and symbolic, of contemporary existence."³⁵

Sublime convergences and outlines

The aesthetic investigations that follow are attentive to the intensification, miniaturization, and proliferation of precarity-inducing apparatuses as well as the corresponding convergence of sublimes. Why sublimes? At various points in our inquiries we invoke the Kantian sublime to conceptualize precarity’s imagination-challenging scope. We engage the difficulty of connecting a small world of product use, domestic labor, hospitality industries, experimentality, philosophical discourse, sporting, or even war crimes to the outer reaches of a world economic system of notoriously inconceivable magnitude and interdependence … that brings goods from the ends of the earth … in order to satisfy your slightest desire.³⁶ While this remote, hard-to-conceive larger world fits well within Immanuel Kant’s descriptions of the sublime, the aesthetic and philosophical texts that we treat in various chapters highlight a level of inequality-related dissensus and (post)colonial anthropologies that Kant’s universalizing assumptions failed to acknowledge.³⁷ Rather than embracing Kant’s abstractions, we privilege versions of sublimity which offer an event-focused version of a sublime experience exemplified in W.G. Sebald’s account of the extraordinarily bloody naval battle of Sole Bay during the third Anglo-Dutch War (1672), where the agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension.³⁸

Accordingly, our analysis of the sublimity of precarity presumes a contentious discursive process through which the apprehension–comprehension gap is filled.³⁹ As the following chapters and the images that intervene to create an image–text montage illustrate, the movement from apprehension to comprehension—experienced in a variety of different ways, shaped by different practices of attention—is media-influenced rather than mind-affected. As one reads the different mediations together, it becomes clear that the process through which local sensibilities apprehend and come to terms with remote lives takes place within a contestable space in which diverse media genres compete for sense-making: journalism, documentary films, literature, sketches, and photographs, among others.

Like the diverse genres of expression that our chapters treat, the aesthetic subjects—a variety of textual protagonists—we engage throughout our investigation map the forces and contingencies that shape various kinds of precarious lives. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s insightful remark that art cannot merely occupy the space left by the weakening of political conflict. It has to reshape it, at the risk of testing the limits of its own politics, our focus on aesthetic forms and precarious ways of being presents a version of geo-analysis that deploys a variety of aesthetic subjects to provoke a critical ethically attuned set of encounters.⁴⁰ Among other things, the multiple passages and artistic texts that we assemble draw our attention to the critical locus of enunciation supplied by precarious aesthetic subjects who interrupt the structured tempos and syncopation of the nation-state as well as the unofficial shadow worlds that prey on vulnerable subjects.⁴¹ As for the mode of thinking our inquiry offers, we enact varied instantiations of what Édouard Glissant calls tremulous thought and aesthetic breaks that disturb or create counter-spaces and political hetero-temporalities or forms of dissensus that challenge the institutionalized structures of sovereignty as well as non-sovereign forms of exploitation.⁴² Mobilizing literary passages, deployed on precarious migratory flows and passages, while emphasizing the ethics of the passerby, and evoking the horrors of the Middle Passage, the chapters map the political stakes of our commitment to aesthetics-as-method. Ultimately, we hope to raise critical questions regarding how everyday and historical political apparatuses and processes distribute bodies, affects, death, and senses in ways that challenge or sustain the immanence of sovereignty characteristic of the modern/colonial order while provoking readers to experiment with affective intimacies that enable them to apprehend the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.

Chapter outlines

Our commitment to aesthetics-as-method enables us to bring together diverse concepts, bodies, passages, and images that enact the kind of convergence that the Native American writer Gerald Vizenor imagines in a novel that stages encounters between Native American and Japanese victims of nuclearism. In his Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, Vizenor’s primary aesthetic subject is the main protagonist, the mixed blood Ronin Browne, the orphaned child of a Japanese prostitute (Okichi) and a Native American soldier (Orion Browne),⁴³ who serves to both embody and map part of the planet’s radiation ecology.⁴⁴ Ronin’s adventure begins with a visit to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. Thereafter, he confronts a victim-oriented version of peace in order to solicit a convergence in the way nuclearism has constituted a war on indigeneity. As he begins his quest with a visit to a tourist monument, he effectively fashions himself as a curator. Discontent with apologies for the absence of nuclear weapons⁴⁵ featured in the peace museum, he decides to re-curate the way nuclear atrocities have occurred, those that were sudden (e.g., the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and those that have been more gradual, results of nuclear weapons testing, uranium mining, and uranium waste disposal sites, all disproportionately affecting Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders)—the nuclear standoff through which peace has been proclaimed as war by other means. Vizenor creates a powerful aesthetic with a body that combines, as it migrates through global spaces, the Japanese Ronin, a warrior estranged from masters by earlier violent conflicts, and the Native American Trickster, who provides and enacts a critical perspective through which histories and peoples are fashioned. As Vizenor becomes a vehicle for rewriting a history of wrong, he also exposes connections among what have been canonically treated as disparate precarities.

Like Vizenor’s novel, our first chapter combines disparate discursive spaces of breathlessness (e.g., from industrial pollution, colonialism, and nuclear radiation) that have us emphasizing the precarities and struggles for breath that exist within a planetary, phenomenological, and historical respirationscape whose immensity evokes notions of the sublime, as it mounts a challenge to comprehension. Narrating an interplay of genres of expression, and genres of Man in this chapter, we illustrate how breath, as it has been problematized in a recent series of investigations and political mobilizations, can be apprehended with resort to the diverse discourses and aesthetic practices that connect body and world. To make sense of the breathlessness arising from predatory political and corporate practices, we turn to speculative fiction and other genres that articulate the convergence of sublime sites of violence and speculation and their implication for various respirationscapes. To illustrate these convergences, this chapter begins with a reading of the link between breathing and vitality in Clarice Lispector’s novel A Breath of Life, where breathing is a marker of ontology and is also radically entangled with her vocation as a writer and a thinker. To move from a breathing ontology to an aesthetics of breathing, which, as Jean-Thomas Tremblay suggests, trains us to focus in exchanges between bodies and milieus that make us attentive to ecoprecarity, our analyses turn to the hyperconscious world made possible by the corporate entity Runciter Associates and the reparative spray in Philip K. Dick’s 1969 science fiction novel Ubik. We extend our analysis of speculative fiction and speculative economic practices by exploring recent events such as the opening of Oxy Pure, Delhi’s first oxygen bar, and read these current events against the attritional violence accompanying disasters such as the 1984 toxic chemical release at Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal, India. Our extended reflection on these respirationscapes and the significance of the Bhopal event proceeds through fictional genres such as Indra Sinha’s environmental picaresque novel Animal’s People (2007) so as to illustrate how biocolonial entanglements, corporate power, and racialized spaces of breathlessness are evidence of both spectacular and the more spectral forms of slow violence as illustrated by our concluding reflections on Black respiration and atmoterrorism.⁴⁶

To bridge the apocalyptic speculations in the texts in the first chapter with the apocalyptic tone adopted during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, our second and third chapters offer extended ruminations on apocalyptic sublimes and mimetic violence by exploring the convergence of racial, nuclear, and pandemic sublimes.⁴⁷ Treating the apocalypse in terms of its Greek meaning (apokalupto), which roughly translates to I disclose, I uncover, I unveil and thus privileges thinking, we compose a literary and cinematic montage that addresses the pandemic event by incorporating critical apocalyptic thinking, which opens toward an uncertain future. To make sense of some of the apocalyptic responses to a renewed sense of the fragility of life in the wake of nuclear, racial, and pandemic sublimes, we read two Ingmar Bergman films (Winter Light and The Seventh Seal) alongside a series of philosophical texts that illustrate the way the arts can reveal and unsettle deeply held commitments by creating encounters among diverse sense-making practices that pre-exist the pandemic and other events. Ultimately, the chapter and the images that accompany it emphasize what we can learn by examining the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic’s transversality when it is compared, combined, and contrasted with other sublimes.

With the first wave of the pandemic as backdrop, our fourth chapter turns to consensual and dissensual modes of separation to illustrate how the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the present moment into a time of intense separation, one of which is between those bodies marked as essential versus non-essential, those that have pre-existing conditions and those without, and those located in precarious zones of abandonment, congestion, and containment, and those that, owing to prevailing economic distancing and apartness, can practice a life of social distancing. By examining the immunitary aesthetic of separation that highlighted how some lives and livelihoods were deemed essential yet disposable, the chapter offers a kind of socio-diagnosis of the dynamics of separation that renders certain forms of loss or even death grievable while others are subjected to the sacrificial calculus and discourses of necessity.⁴⁸ Noting the dynamics associated with that emerging division, while at the same time reviewing fictional texts featuring aesthetic separations, the chapter proceeds through a series of ante-metabolic spins that invite us to think critically about the political implications of aesthetic separations and separation aesthetics. These precarious lives are rendered in intimate portraits and scenarios in Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs (a media genre that sees the world more patiently and in a more socially contextualized way than most news media) and Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things (2002). With these aesthetic readings of precarious migrant lives in London, we look at moments of solidarity among exploitable night people who work illegally in the hospitality industry. Juxtaposing secure and insecure bodies in contemporary London’s hospitality industry, Dirty Pretty Things dwells on the difference between touristic central London and its more impoverished, immigrant-inhabited South London area. It also reveals the structural violence arising from the capital-mediated merging of hotel and hospital experiences and functions where out-of-place medical practices are performed on precarious bodies by nocturnal workers in order to feed the demands of a red-market economy and the sweatshop sublime. Ultimately, our reflections on aesthetic separation/separation aesthetics in the wake of the pandemic help map the dynamics of visibility/invisibility, community/immunity, hospitality/hostility that the contemporary politics of the pandemic amplifies. Addressing the precarious labor embodied by some of the characters in films like Dirty Pretty Things, Bruce Robbins captures the difficulty of grasping what he calls the sweatshop sublime where people realize and ignore or fail to realize the conditions of life under which this shirt was, or perhaps was not, produced: the pitifully inadequate wages, not to speak of the locked fire exits, the arbitrary harassments and firings, the refusal of genuine union representation, and so on.⁴⁹ However, the dynamics of circulation and inattention to precarious labor are not confined to sweatshops, factories, and plantations. As the fourth chapter reveals, the very spaces of hospitality and pleasure can also be the site of intense immunization and hostility.

Turning to the very culture of the middle-class households, our fifth chapter illustrates how the contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labor, among which are young women working in homes. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of their precarious lives from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The investigations in this chapter treat the way their articulation of their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembène’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The Embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The Breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Jay Lynn Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard-cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyze raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical and domestic life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of the foreigners working in the most intimate spaces of cohabitation.

Taking seriously the re-inscription and production of frontiers, frontiersmen, the precarity of migrant life, and the dramatization of desire, our sixth chapter turns to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s film La Promesse (1996) and Diego Quemada-Díez’s The Golden Dream (2013) to explore how undocumented migrants are ruthlessly exploited and exposed to death in cities—London and Antwerp—and on the road, traveling from Guatemala through Mexico in an attempt to make it into the U.S. Engaged in critical commentaries on the contemporary migratory condition articulated in global cinema, the chapter composes diverse migratory scenarios to render visible the national, urban, and racial frontiers of human encounter in which racialized migrant bodies