Migratory Angels: The Political Aesthetics of Border Trauma

Abstract

Post-traumatic conditions are the result of wounds crossing bodily or psychic borders. At the same time, crossing territorial borders can cause traumas. How do migration narratives figure the traumatic effects of border-crossings? To answer this question, I apply a border aesthetics approach, arguing that the borderings of what may be sensed (cf. Jacques Rancière’s concept of the partage de sensible, the “distribution of the sensible”) in the borderscapes of migration narratives are often regulated by the epistemological borderings that take place in the fixations, substitutions and blind spots of trauma. I suggest that migration literature can combine different styles of presentation—for example, images and narrative—in order to create new forms of political aesthetics and counteract the desensitizing logic of media spectacle.