CITAS Brownbag Session | Transnational Imaginaries of Child Refugees (Julia Faisst)

Weds, Jan 12 2022, 12:15 - 13:30 CET

Transnational Imaginaries of Child Refugees - Julia Faisst (Regensburg)

In the face of the global rise of migratory movements, authoritarianism, and racial violence, this talk examines contemporary literary and visual child migration narratives of transcultural borderspaces that transcend national borderlines, and turn into deterritorialized and necropolitical zones of exception with diminished constitutional protections. Drawing on selected examples of documentary, fictional, and poetic imaginaries of child migration, I hone in on the current border crisis as it plays out in U.S.-Mexican borderlands from the perspective of child refugees. Their cultural narratives negotiate—and often critique—the extrajudicial enforcement practices and politics enacted in transnational borderzones, in which “distinct national localities are linked together by migrant flows, and the diaspora formed by this migration” (Schmidt Camacho 2008, 5), and that are increasingly militarized and policed by border technology. Away from the economic precariousness, government corruption, crime, and environmental instability of the global South and towards the domestic battles of the North—and often back again by way of deportation—I argue that migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras experience what postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha calls the “elsewhere [that is] within here.” This ‘elsewhere’ takes place both while migrants pass through a hostile Mexico and arrive at the U.S. southern border, before they enter a U.S. that denies them basic human rights, including the freedom “to move freely from one place to another” (Sheehan 2018, 4).

Julia Faisst is Professor for American Studies at the University of Regensburg (deputizing for Prof. Dr. Udo Hebel). Her research interests include postcolonial, migration, and diaspora studies, visual cultures, and 19th to 21st century North American literature and culture.