Rhetorical spaces of transnational bordering, border artivism, and resistance

ABSTRACT

This essay forms a relational connection between two artivist projects of transnational border intervention—the Aylan project, and the Border Tuner project. These projects created spatio-temporal disruptions and ruptures in the normative discourses about borders and im/migration by harnessing the rhetorical power of victim images. These artivist interventions offer ways to make visible the humanity of the migrant–refugee figure. They offer a potential response to the recent abolitionist telos conceptualized in rhetoric border(ing) studies.

KEYWORDS:

• borders
• bordering
• transnational bordering
• settler-colonial-imperial technologies
• border artivism
• resistance

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the themed issue editors, Michael Lechuga and John Ackerman, for their support and generous read and thoughtful feedback of multiple versions of the essay. The author also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their thoughtful feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lisa A. Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (2020): 247–63.

2 Lisa A. Flores, “At the Intersections: Feminist Border Theory,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019), 113; see also: Flores, “Stoppage,” 252.

3 Flores, “Stoppage”; Flores, “At the Intersections.”

4 Flores, “At the Intersections,” 113.

5 Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 102–21.

6 Michael Lechuga and Antonio Tomas De La Garza, “Forum: Border Rhetorics,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2021): 38.

7 Glissant capitalizes Relation in his Poetics of Relation. He also uses relation without capitalizing it, but the instances when it is capitalized, which are often, signify and introduce his philosophy and specific theorizing of Relation in relation to the process of creolization and captures the relative through a process of relating, as Pascale Guibert indicates, which, Guibert continues, “sets into motion the “real work” of decolonization, one that aims to go beyond the limits set by a dialectical system of thought. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 144; Pascale Guibert, “‘Common Place: Common-Place’ A Presentation of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Compounding Places—Part 1,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies no. 39 (2016).

8 Josue David Cisneros, “Free to Move, Free to Stay, Free to Return: Border Rhetorics and A Commitment to Telos,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2021): 94–95.

9 Kent A. Ono and John Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 362–87; D. Robert DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 43–65; Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013).

10 D. Robert DeChaine, “Introduction: For Rhetorical Border Studies.” In Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012).

11 Flores, “Stoppage.”

12 Karma R. Chávez, “Border Interventions: The Need to Shift from a Rhetoric of Security to a Rhetoric of Militarization.” In Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier (University of Alabama Press, 2012), 86.

13 Josue David Cisneros, “Looking ‘Illegal’: Affect, Rhetoric, and Performativity in Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070.” In Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (University of Alabama Press, 2012), 133–50.

14 Eithne Luibhéid and Karma R. Chávez, eds. Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (University of Illinois Press, 2020); Leandra Hinojosa Hernández, “Feminist Approaches to Border Studies and Gender Violence: Family Separation as Reproductive Injustice,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 130–34; Sara De Los Santos Upton, “Nepantla Activism and Coalition Building: Locating Identity and Resistance in the Cracks Between Worlds,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 135–39.

15 Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 378–85.

16 Karma Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72; Godfried Agyeman Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 484–88.

17 Ida Danewid, “‘These Walls Must Fall’: The Black Mediterranean and the Politics of Abolition,’ in The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship, ed. The Black Mediterranean Collective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 159.

18 Camilla Hawthorne, “L’Italia Meticcia? The Black Mediterranean and the Racial Cartographies of Citizenship.” In The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship, ed. The Black Mediterranean Collective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 176.

19 Clelia Bartoli as quoted in Hawthorne, “L’Italia Meticcia? The Black Mediterranean and the Racial Cartographies of Citizenship.” In The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship, ed. The Black Mediterranean Collective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 177.

20 Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion,” 163–66.

21 Josue David Cisneros, “Free to Move,” 94–95.

22 Ibid., 95.

23 Ibid., 95.

24 Ibid., 98.

25 Flores, “Stoppage,” 248.

26 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2019), 90–96.

27 D. Robert DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 43–65.

28 Laurie Gries. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (University Press of Colorado, 2015), 17.

29 Ibid.

30 Harsha Walia. Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013), 16.

31 Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 8.

32 Ibid.

33 DeChaine, “Introduction: For Rhetorical Border Studies,” 3.

34 Hana Masri, “From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go: Rhetorical Bordering as Transnational Settler Colonial Project,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2021): 86.

35 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 144.

36 Stacey Sowards, “Bordering Through Place/s, Difference/s, and Language/s: Intersections of Border and Feminist Theories,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 120–24.

37 Martin van der Velde and Henk van Houtum, “Communicating Borders,” Journal of Borderland Studies 18, no. 1 (2003): 3.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 121.

40 Shamil Shams, “Kurdi Graffiti Erected in Frankfurt to Highlight Refugees’ Plight,” Deutsche Welle (11 March 2016), https://p.dw.com/p/1IBct.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Christina Guidice and Chiara Giubilaro, “Re-Imagining the Border: Border Art as a Space of Critical Imagination and Creative Resistance,” Geopolitics 20, no. 1 (2015): 83–84.

44 Ibid.

45 Ono, “Borders that Travel,” 20, 28.

46 Ibid., 22.

47 Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvalis: Oregon State University Press, 2017), 79.

48 Manasi Gopalakrishnan, “Aylan Kurdi Graffiti Vandalized in Frankfurt,” Deutsche Welle (23 June 2016), https://www.dw.com/en/aylan-kurdi-graffiti-vandalized-in-frankfurt/a-19350216.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Von Ludger Fittkau, “Mural for Dead Refugee Boy: Death and Teddy Bears on the Banks of the Main in Frankfurt,” Deutschlandfunk, 14 July 2016, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/wandbild-fuer-toten-fluechtlingsjungen-tod-und-teddys-am-100.html.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Interactive Public Art: Border Tuner: El Paso—Ciudad Juárez,” Border Tuner, November 2019. Accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.bordertuner.net/home.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Angela Kocherga, “Interactive Public Art Exhibit Spotlights Border Voices,” Albuquerque Journal, November 17, 2019, https://www.abqjournal.com/1392707/interactive-public-art-exhibit-spotlights-border-voices.html.

61 Cynthia Bejarno and Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez, “The Mantling and Dismantling of a Tent City at the U.S.–Mexico Border.” In Handbook on Human Security, Borders, and Migration, eds. Natalia Ribas-Mateos and Timothy J. Dunn (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021), 71.

62 ART21, “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Border Tuner,” Smarthistory, January 6 2021, https://smarthistory.org/rafael-lozano-hemmer-border-tuner/.

63 Kocherga, “Interactive Public Art.”

64 Flores, “Stoppage,” 248.

65 Ibid.

66 Sarah M. Vasquez, “An Installation Traverses Texas and Mexico to Promote Cros-Border Communication,” Hyperallergic, November 22, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/530009/an-installation-traverses-texas-and-mexico-to-promote-cross-border-communication/.

67 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 25.

68 Lisa A. Flores, Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020), 126–27.

69 ART21, “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Border Tuner.”

70 Kocherga, “Interactive Public Art.”

71 ART21, “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Border Tuner.”

72 UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2021,” June 2022, https://www.unhcr.org/62a9d1494/global-trends-report-2021.

73 Cisneros, “Free to Move,” 96.