CPCL Vol. 9, No. 1. Call for Papers. Social and Aesthetic Borders: Restricted Mobility, Segregation, Resistance – Cultural Productions and the Transformation of Space

CPCL Vol. 9, No. 1. Call for Papers.

Social and Aesthetic Borders: Restricted Mobility, Segregation, Resistance – Cultural Productions and the Transformation of Space

The European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, Vol. 9.1

Edited by Vincenza Pellegrino and Ivano Gorzanelli.

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This special issue aims to examine the consequences of policies of border externalisation and reduced mobility in African countries and the Mediterranean basin, considering how the restriction of African populations’ mobility is profoundly altering the imaginary and lived space of Afro-European countries. On the one hand, European policies of border externalisation are reinforcing the collective self-image of protection through a growing attachment to territory, used as a political mechanism for the symbolic stabilisation of the nation-state – which is, in reality, increasingly in crisis and ever more exposed to global and multicultural economic dynamics. On the other hand, this is leading to increased spending on police systems – European border forces and local forces in transit countries – resulting in a massive social ‘re-militarisation’. We are not thinking here solely or primarily of the social space of the ‘border’ as a device of military and economic border governance, with its investments in control infrastructure, walls, drones and weapons. Rather, we are thinking of the pervasive and daily proliferation of ‘checkpoints’ for the control of mobility, both in Europe and in North Africa and the Sahel – a daily control that in reality affects only those who lack the financial means to obtain travel documents (visas) and thus exacerbates social inequality. The impossibility of spatial mobility is reinforcing and perpetuating an impossibility of social mobility that is becoming unquestioned.

This ‘checkpointisation’ of the Euro-African space – closely linked to the political construct of the ‘enemy’ – is today the most powerful mechanism for the racialisation of populations: people are stopped primarily on the basis of skin colour, and this generates, across all countries of North Africa and Europe, hiding, (self-)segregation, exploitation – to the point of the emergence of new forms of slavery.

Across the entire Afro-European space, camps and encampments are springing up as places to hide, where one can live with a lower probability of being intercepted and deported elsewhere. Spaces that respond to specific urbanistic and aesthetic connotations and which carry with them images capable of legitimising and organising the space of the colony and power relations, but also transformations and resistances.  Calais in France, Borgomezzanone in Italy, Jbeniana in Tunisia, Melilla in Morocco are just a few striking examples of this transformation of living linked to mobility injustice. Huge self-organised camps of people without valid travel or residence documents who have no choice but to wait for onward transit in the hope of reaching places where institutions are more bound to uphold the right to asylum.

In these spaces, people of different mother tongues come together, united by the fact that they are fleeing conditions of violence and must ‘cross’ to seek protection yet are unable to do so because of police and militia dedicated to impeding mobility. Camps housing tens of thousands of people to which local economies have rapidly become tied, thriving on the exploitation of these individuals: from southern Europe to North Africa, and on to the Sahel and Mauritania, people whose movement is restricted fall prey to the black markets of agriculture, mining, sexual exploitation, and unpaid domestic labor that amounts to outright slavery. Finally, in recent decades these camps have become permanent settlements where people of different mother tongues mix, creating common languages – languages born of this segregated yet socially porous concentration-camp-like space.

But ‘ghettoization’ and ‘chronic liminality’ also serves as a mechanism for reorganising the spaces within these boundaries, connecting the city itself with a physical and lived system of extraterritorial enclaves defined by the contingencies of consumption, atmospheres, lifestyles and their morphological characteristics. The border patrolled by law enforcement, then, extends and legitimises itself through the creation of a new urban frontier which, whilst continuing to involve police work, associates it with the more informal enforcement of certain perceptual norms. 

This monographic issue aims to explore these phenomena from the perspective of the imaginary and the cultural production that generates them and is generated by them.

On the one hand, we are interested in examining the link between new political imaginaries and the segregation of otherness: how should we understand the construction of the enemy, and what are the deep connections between the control of mobility, segregation, racialisation and the foundations of the state? How can we study the externalisation of the border as an export of racism and a global regeneration of the colour line?

On the other hand, we are interested in analysing the consequences of these imaginary scenarios in terms of the spatial and cultural contexts they create: what is life like in these spaces of concealment and self-protection, which are nevertheless highly visible and today represent the most striking example of poverty swept under the carpet by the institutions? How do we name the struggle, the hope, the goal? How do languages dedicated to concrete elements necessary for survival and inherent to the journey intermingle? Furthermore, what schools, what songs, what dances concern those born and raised in these camps where people remain for decades?

What forms of cultural and material manipulation emerge, and how might they represent cultures of resistance and processes of subjectivation for people whose mobility is restricted—a group that is constantly growing across the planet? How do these processes translate into the rearticulation of the urban dimension within a system of aesthetic enclosures? What are the forms of the physical city most closely linked to the perceptual infrastructure of racialisation?

This special issue aims to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions on these issues.

 

Editorial guidelines

Theoretical essays, case studies, interdisciplinary readings, visual contributions and non-fiction experiments on these liminal figures are welcome.

CPCL accepts full papers in English, up to 6,000 words, including footnotes and bibliography, with flexibility to be agreed upon.

Language: English.

Submission: authors must clearly indicate the relevant call for papers at the beginning of the text or in the submission system. Contributions that critically rework works already published in other languages are welcome.

All contributions will be subject to anonymous peer review.

Manuscripts should be submitted online at cpcl.unibo.it

CPCL does not accept email submissions.

 

Contributing to the development of this issue of the Aesthetics and Social series are:

 

Editors | Pierpaolo Ascari and Andrea Borsari | Vincenza Pellegrino and Vando Borghi.

 

Scientific Board | Jacopo Anderlini, Pierandrea Amato, Paola Rebughini, Giovanni Semi;

Stefano Catucci, Filippo Fimiani, Jörg H. Gleiter, Elena Tavani, Matteo Vegetti, Silvia Vizzardelli.

 

Editorial Staff | Aurosa Alison, Giada Coleandro, Francesco Di Maio, Daniel Finch-Race, Elena Girelli, Ivano Gorzanelli, Zeno Mutton, Claudia Nigrelli.