Refugees, Migrants and the Making of Con

Why do borders and those who cross them occupy such a prominent place in our political, social and affective life? Even as contemporary discourses on migration thrive on the specter of exception, it is difficult to think of a time when people did not move, or when global transformations did not demand movement. In this course we will examine the pre-histories of contemporary migration “crises” in order to recover the radical traditions of migrants and refugees at the vanguard of Europe’s social, cultural and political history. Examining novels, films, court transcripts and political ethnographies of 20th-century migrations alongside forensic reports, unpublished poetry and raw footage produced by recent border-crossers, we will trace how migrant subjects - from stowaways to pirates and anticolonial revolutionaries - have driven the formation of new identities, political geographies and emancipatory projects that shook and shaped the world. We will track the emergence of contemporary projects to govern mobility out of practices of policing the colonies, the plantation, the ocean, the factory, racialized and gendered bodies and, finally, we will ask: how and why did we move from seeing migrants as the harbingers of radical futures to treating them as the beneficiaries of human rights and humanitarianism?

Texts include novel(la)s and films by Herman Melville, Claude McKay, John Berger, Stephen Frears, Mati Diop and Igiaba Scego as well as by less known contemporary artists such as Parwana Amiri, Shamshaid Jutt and Chiara Towne; theoretical or historical works by Hannah Arendt, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten; police dossiers, trial transcripts and forensic reconstructions of contemporary migrant passages.