Introduction: Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media

Summary

The unending drama of forced migration, with millions of people displaced from their homes and compelled to take on a life of nomadic transience or enforced stasis in permanent waiting zones, ranks as the defining story of our times, the most sweeping transformation of collective historical experience since WWII. The United Nations estimates that the overall population of migrating people, including economic migrants and those swept from their homes by war, persecution, and climate catastrophe, now numbers over a billion people—one in seven humans now alive. This vast exodus has been called the “largest diaspora in the history of the species” (Salopek, 2019). Already in 1951, Hannah Arendt saw the swelling numbers of refugees and stateless people as an insoluble threat to the existence of the nation state. The 21st century, with its ecological crises, civil wars, and intractable hardships, has seen a massive, unprecedented increase in the number of people wandering the Earth or locked in conditions of suspended mobility. The phenomenon of mass displacement, however, also brings into view a striking new mode of human existence: as one writer says, the journey is now shaping a different class of human being, “people whose ideas of ‘home’ now incorporates an open road” or, at the other extreme, people whose mobility is blocked, who have become, as the title of a recent exhibition puts it, “permanently temporary” (Salopek, 2019). Viewed through a guardedly positive lens, the refugee and the migrant, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) further suggests, may represent “the paradigm of a new historical consciousness,” pointing towards a future beyond the binary order of the nation state, defined as it is by the concepts of citizenship and exclusion. Thomas Elsaesser makes a similar observation. Describing contemporary Europe as a “thought experiment,” he characterizes modern Europe as

a continent of immigrants… both East to West and South to North, with migrants, refugees and mobile labour turning the nineteenth century European nation states into multicultural, multi-denominational and multi-ethnic communities which have not yet found a modus of how to live together. (Elsaesser, 2018, p. 85)