Conviviality as a politics of endurance: the refugee emergency and the consolations of artistic intervention

ABSTRACT

Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artists in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and textual analyses of their performances, we discuss specific motivations and diverse representational practices that aim to enact togetherness-in-difference. We discuss the potentials and risks of convivial artistic productions, which we argue produce a politics of endurance that, as Feldman has said, helps “people live better with circumstances they cannot change.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Originally formulated by Max Weber, the ideal type is a useful heuristic tool because, as argued by Heckman (1983), it provides researchers with a unified approach to the analysis of subjective meaning and the critical assessment of structural forms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [Visiting Senior Fellowship 2018] and British Council [Newton Fund Institutional Links grant 216314572].