Timelapse: Sehen Sie sich die Installation online an
Wenn die Hostile Terrain 94-Ausstellung beginnt, wird die große Wandkarte der Installation noch leer sein. Hostile Terrain 94 ist ein Kunstwerk im Entstehen. Erst nach und nach kommen mehr "toe tags" hinzu, die langsam die große Leere auf der Karte füllen. Die anfängliche Leere der Karte spiegelt die Unsichtbarkeit wider, die viele Schicksale von Flüchtenden und Migrierenden prägt. Die "toe tags", die auf die Karte montiert werden, dienen dazu, diese Schicksale sichtbarer zu machen.
Du kannst hier Zeug:in davon werden, wie sich die Karte immer mehr füllt.
Jason De León ist Direktor des Undocumented Migration Project, welches Hostile Terrain 94 initiiert hat. Hinter HT94 steht Jasons Bemühung, die an der Grenze Verstorbenen als Menschen sichtbar zu machen: “I wanted to put names to the dead. This is an act of witnessing. The data come from a Microsoft database. We’re asking volunteers to breathe life into the data by writing out the details. That was the closest way we could think of to get someone to feel the human cost” [1].
In diesem Q&A hatten wir die Möglichkeit, Jason Fragen über seine Arbeit, das Undocumented Migration Project, und vor allem über Hostile Terrain 94 zu stellen.
Über
Jason De León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles with his lab located in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
De León is Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP). The UMP is a long-term anthropological study of clandestine migration between Latin America and the United States that uses a combination of ethnographic, visual, archaeological, and forensic approaches to understand this violent social process. He has published numerous academic articles and his work with the UMP has been featured in a variety of popular media outlets.
He is the author of the award-winning book “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail”. He is President of the Board of Directors for The Colibrí Center for Human Rights and on the Academic Board for the Institute for Field Research, a nonprofit organization operating over 42 field schools in 25 countries across the globe.
More about Jason here.
The Cemetery of the Companionless: Towards a World Literature of Undocumented Lives in Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (American Studies, Mainz University)
29.01.2021, 18:15 Uhr
Elif Shafak’s 2019 novel 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World revolves around a cemetery on the outskirts of Istanbul. The aim of this cemetery, which is called the cemetery of the companionless, is literally a “prevention through deterrence”: The inhumanity of the state manifests itself in punishing those who transgress its mandates even beyond their own death. The absence of a proper burial and hence of the right to recognition is epitomized by the absence of human decency. On this cemetery of the companionless, there are numbers, not names. The feat which Shafak’s novel accomplishes, then, is that it carefully chronicles the lives and the identities of all those who have been buried on the cemetery of the companionless: from transgender men and women to political prisoners and undocumented migrants. Drawing on Katja Sarkowsky’s and Marcus Llanque’s recent work, this paper argues that the politics of burial are at the core of state-sanctioned violence against undocumented migration. Ultimately, I argue that we need a world literature of undocumented migration (Damrosh 2003): a framework which enables us to link Shafak’s novel to Jason de León’s “Hostile Terrain” (De León 2015). In both these instances, nations police their boundaries by tacitly accepting the deaths of those who risk their lives trying to cross national borders. The punishment for such transgression can be said to continue even beyond the migrants’ death. Conversely, literature, art and anthropology can restore to these lives the decency denied to them by the nation-state: the right to both a proper burial and transnational recognition.
Works Cited
Shafak, Elif. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World. London: Viking, 2019.
Damrosh, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Berkeley: U of California P, 2015.
About
Mita Banerjee is Professor of American Studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz University. Her research interests include postcolonial literature (The Chutneyfication of History, 2002), ethnic American literature and culture (Race-ing the Century, 2005), the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth- Century American Literature, 2008), issues of naturalization and citizenship (Color Me White: Naturalism/Naturalization in American Literature, 2013), and medical humanities (Medical Humanities in American Studies, 2018). She is co-speaker of the research training group “Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience,” which is funded by the German Research Foundation. Her book on “Biological Humanities” is forthcoming from Winter University Press.
Den kurzen Dokumentarfilm zur Ausstellung finden Sie hier.
Live on Instagram: Sei bei der Installation online dabei
Wenn die Hostile Terrain 94-Ausstellung beginnt, wird die große Wandkarte der Installation noch leer sein. Hostile Terrain 94 ist ein Kunstwerk im Entstehen. Erst nach und nach kommen mehr "toe tags" hinzu, die langsam die große Leere auf der Karte füllen. Die anfängliche Leere der Karte spiegelt die Unsichtbarkeit wider, die viele Schicksale von Flüchtenden und Migrierenden prägt. Die "toe tags", die auf die Karte montiert werden, dienen dazu, diese Schicksale sichtbarer zu machen.
