Event Date
This talk addresses select visual representations of those who are on the move, the violence unleashed upon them at borders– including at U.S borders and interiors today– and the entangled histories of violence that pulse, invisibly, through our current border regime. Despite their powers of capture, borders are nevertheless breached and redrawn by unruly bodies and unbound imaginaries, by movements both orchestrated and unpredictable. I term these practices and their representation "kino-aesthetic". Recent video installations by John Akomfrah activate memories of historical violence (such as slavery or colonialism) expunged from the official archive. Their multichannel form illustrates the kino-aesthetic power of representation to conjure a politics of memory, movement and metamorphosis.
Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Zaffaroni Chair of Undergraduate Education, Director of Berkeley's Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, and a co-PI for the Mellon-funded A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times. She is the author of The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015) translated into French, and most recently, Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe (Fordham, 2025). Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022) this book addresses migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe's refugee “crisis”.
