Practices of Resistance

In her essay in our new issue, Debarati Sanyal analyzes practices of resistance as seen through film and photography set in the Calais’s “jungle” refugee encampments, which were razed last year by the French government. She discusses the interplay of humanitarian compassion and securitarian repression in the destruction of the camps, nuancing the view of borderscapes as sites of total biopolitical capture, and of refugees as “bare life.” Making a profound case for both art and resistance, “Calais’s ‘Jungle’: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance” is a compelling and visually stunning read.

Still from Qu’Ils reposent en révolte: Des figure de guerres I, by Sylvain George (2010)

DEBARATI SANYAL is Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham University Press, 2015), she is currently at work on a study of testimony, cultural form, and the refugee “crisis.”

New Issue, Representations 139

Number 139, Summer 2017 (read at UC Press)

NOW AVAILABLE

Debarati Sanyal
Yoon Sun Lee
Dahlia Porter
Carmine Grimaldi
Justin Steinberg
  • Upcoming in Representations 140–“Fallacies”: This special issue features essays by D. Vance Smith on fallacy and the origin of thought, Andrew Cole on Hegel’s “circles,” Branka Arsic on The House of Usher, Maureen McLane on “compositionism,” Alexander Nemerov on photographic evidence, Jonathan Flatley on reading for mood, Rey Chow and Markos Hadjioannou on the Hitchcockian “nudge,” Jonathan Kramnick on the fallacy of interdisciplinarity, John Durham Peters on technological determinism, and Charles Altieri on fallacy and its implications for contemporary literary theory. With an introduction by editor Elisa Tamarkin.