Choreographies of Resistance

Mobile Bodies and Relational Politics

Tarja Väyrynen, Eeva Puumala, Samu Pehkonen, Anitta Kynsilehto, Tiina Vaittinen

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783486748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Choreographies of Resistance examines bodies and their capacity for obstructive and resistant action in places and spaces where we do not expect to see it. Drawing on empirical research that considers cases on asylum seekers, beggars, undocumented migrants and migrant nurses, the book attests to the scope and diversity of corporeal resistance in the realm of politics. It is shown that bodies that are not assumed to have political agency can obstruct and resist the smooth functioning of disciplinary practices that nowadays form the core of migration policies. It is argued that the body is more than a mere target of politics. In so doing, the book contributes to the study of the political significance of movement, mobility and the nonverbal. The body opens up a space of political resistance and action. The resistant body poses a challenge that is both praxical and philosophical: it ultimately invites us to reconsider the meanings and content of political space, community and belonging..

Chapter 1

Introduction

Choreography, Mobility and Politics

All those who had waited on the dark Moroccan beach had been at the mercy of human smugglers. […] They had been loaded into the ship’s hold like modern day slaves. They were not shackled with iron chains but they were chained by their dreams, despair and fears that have made them leave, and seek freedom in Europe. […] She had drifted in cold water and hit a rock. […] On a cold Spanish shore searchlights had blinded her and dogs had sniffed their way to her. The border-guards had looked at her with tired eyes. (Mankell 2001, 6–7)

Henning Mankell’s novel Tea-Bag (2001) provides a powerful introduction to some of the themes that are also central to this book. In the opening scene of his novel, Mankell describes the experience of migration from the perspective of a mobile subject who travels from Africa to Europe. Mankell’s novel addresses events that have become prominent since the eighties, with the gradual imposition of the Schengen visa system that was introduced to control and halt human mobility into Europe (e.g., Bigo and Guild 2005). Owing to the lack of legal routes, the organization of travel is largely operated by networks of human smugglers. Over the years, migration across the Mediterranean has cropped up every now and again in public discourse and has been defined as a ‘crisis’ at different entry points between the Gibraltar Strait, the island of Lampedusa and the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey, not to forget the crisis of mass arrivals to the Canary islands in 2006. The latest of these ‘crises’ began in 2015 with the arrival of more than a million migrants and refugees to Europe over one year. However, not everyone made it to European soil: over 3,770 deaths were documented as people drowned in their quest to flee persecution or acquire better, more worthwhile lives for themselves.

In 2015 mobility became, once again, subject to the most intense political debate within the European Union (EU). The member states struggled both nationally and as a bloc to find ways by which they could govern and effectively manage the growing number of arriving asylum seekers. These events failed to produce any fundamental move towards opening legal access across the EU’s external borders but, on the contrary, strengthening external border controls became once again the more prominent feature of the debate. New ad hoc internal border control measures were introduced at various European borders, calling into question the very existence of the Schengen Agreement that has guaranteed free movement within most of the EU area. These measures aim to curb the ‘uncontrolled’ arrival and circulation of migrating bodies that are regarded as undesirable (cf. Kynsilehto 2014). At the same time, demographic changes within the EU countries have led some to conclude that controlled and selective immigration is one way of addressing the changes as there is need for skilled workers within the EU.

Back to Mankell’s prognostic novel. The reader of the novel soon realizes that the migrant whose experience is presented in the scene is called Tea-Bag. Through Tea-Bag and her body that is constantly on the move, Mankell describes a relational body that moves in space, and by so doing enacts its own agentive capacity. In the scene cited at the beginning of this chapter, Tea-Bag’s body crosses a geographical and political border with great difficulties: the trip with human smugglers is dangerous, and she is forced to fight for her life in the cold sea. The novel depicts border control practices embodied by armed border guards and their dogs that find her too late to ensure her return to Morocco. The border described in the novel represents more than a mere geographical and political marker. It is enacted materially, and although it spatially separates Africa from Europe, it is fluid in its functions (Mountz and Loyd 2014).

The struggle that is depicted in Mankell’s novel unfolds also in reality at the borders of contemporary Europe. It illustrates the ways in which practices of governance intertwine with practices of resistance that mobile subjects enact. As in contemporary Europe, Tea-Bag’s corporeal and lived experience of the border and boundaries is filled with darkness, coldness, fear and struggle. The stories of crossing waters form a core in many of the migrants’ narratives not only in Mankell’s book, but also in the lives of those migrants that struggle to reach not only European territory but also other shores around the globe (e.g., Perera 2013). Migrants row across rivers, lakes and seas; travel in small fishing boats or inflatable rubber boats; and are picked up by border guards’ fast boats and military ships. During these physically demanding journeys migrants invest their bodies at full, risking life and limb to enter Europe and to cross the continent in order to reach a place where life is envisaged as liveable. The mechanisms of control never fully capture the migrant’s body in this dangerous attempt to reconfigure the division between those who are allowed to enter and move about, and those who should stay away—a division which is ultimately about those who belong and those who don’t.

Mankell’s novel also illustrates the power that individual stories can have in creating understanding about how exclusions and inclusions are materially enacted and how the practices of control are undermined. We engage with this dynamic in this book. We draw on empirical descriptions of different choreographies of resistance and their interacting entanglements, and discuss mobility as a material-corporeal phenomenon. The book focuses on mobile bodies and their capacity for obstructive and resistant action by which the bodies disrupt existing scripts and orders that others seek to impose on them. In so doing, we reflect on how positionalities and agentive capacities are created and regulated in various places and spaces. Through developing the notion ‘choreographies of resistance’, we shed light on the ways in which resistance and governance are enacted in mundane and daily relations that yet are connected—in some cases more explicitly than in others—with networks of power and political control. Instead of addressing the body in constraining and abstract terms, we focus on the concrete fractional and mundane choreographies of material bodies that refuse to become firmly and unambiguously located in the systems of power (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005; Kynsilehto and Puumala 2015; Puumala 2013, 2016; Rygiel 2011, 2012; Vaittinen 2014). We illustrate how political agency manifests itself corporeally, with multiple consequences and challenges to the disciplinary practices that regulate bodies. We show how the mobile body is more than a mere target of territorial politics that aims to situate bodies within the state.

Illustratively, Mankell’s novel Tea-Bag depicts how crossing a national border does not guarantee freedom. Rather, it takes the main character to the liminal space of the refugee camp. The camp itself is a de-territorialized space surrounded by fences that prevent her from entering into Europe. The camp is located in Spain, and yet it exists nowhere. No country wants to accommodate the inhabitants of the camp, since they represent the ‘dangerous aliens’ to be managed and kept away from the core of the (nation)state whose existence is seen to be dependent on a coherent national identity. Tea-Bag is not designated to the category of migrant worker, but positioned as one of those who do not belong. As the story of Tea-Bag evolves, the borders she experiences and that her body crosses become even more fluid and ambiguous in their effects. The borders and their effects are navigated and resisted, which reveals that the mobile body is not completely powerless in the face of governmental practices.

Tea-Bag ultimately reaches Sweden, where her existence becomes characterized by attempts to hide and remain invisible to a variety of surveillance practices, including surveillance monitors and CCTVs, digital traces of money transactions and ID checks. However, her solitary life in Sweden is filled temporarily with a sense of community and response-ability among other migrants with whom she leads a life that is largely invisible from the state’s perspective. Despite being invisible to the structures that characterize modern societies, Tea-Bag’s is a life based on resourceful and creative strategies of survival that include living in empty apartments, using stolen mobile phones and acquiring false IDs. Tea-Bag’s body resides in the national space and within its systems of governance and, at the same time, she does not exist for the state.

Through attending to different forms of mobility, such as asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, migrating beggars and migrant nurses, and also the empirical cases included in the book, we position ourselves to attest to the scope and diversity of corporeal and resistance in the realm of politics. These case studies bring forth a variety of resistances and forms of agency that enable us to conceive politics as a relation and allow discussion of the kinds of material-corporeal consequences and effects that emerge through resistance. The focus enables us to conceive subject positions in terms of relational positionalities that take shape and gain their meanings in events as people come together or as they are subjected to governmental practices. Our focus on choreographies of resistance enables us to fathom power in terms of networks and variously ‘demarcated axes’ (Kynsilehto 2011a) that become operationalized in different contexts through multiple practices, instead of claiming that governance creates fixed positions and permanently marginalizes some and privileges others.

In the course of our book, we show that deeply disadvantaged and vulnerable bodies that are not assumed to have any agentive capacity, let alone political agency, can obstruct and resist the smooth functioning of practices of governance, and thus open a space of political resistance and action. In order to grasp the agency and resistance of the mobile bodies we seek to ‘reveal the agency of the seemingly excluded’ (Ackerly and True 2006, 249, emphasis in original). For us, agency is about the abilities and the potential of the material and relational body to enact political choreographies anew (Puumala and Pehkonen 2010; Puumala, Väyrynen, Kynsilehto and Pehkonen 2011; Vaittinen 2014), not so much about subject positions. Consequently, acts of resistance may take place in mundane encounters, and they often disrupt the functioning of the practices of governance targeted at mobile bodies. Political agencies discussed in this book concern the boundaries built between bodies and the efforts to cross these boundaries, so as to raise a different political relationality. Although the kind of doing, corporeal and gestural body politic that we study might sometimes appear as being without clear purpose and direction, it illustrates that the struggles and the everyday relations of mobile bodies evoke a variety of reconfigurations, capacities and potentialities that allow for political agency.

As a whole, Mankell’s topical novel suggests three interrelated features of the (inter)national order of things which are of our interest in this book. We perceive the national order of things as a dominant categorical order of modernity (Malkki 1995a, 1995b), through which bodies, spaces and politics are governed within and in-between states. First is the territoriality of the nation state, which portrays nation states as inescapably territorialized entities, and mystically rooted in particular, geographically delimited sites (Rajaram 2013; Mountz and Loyd 2014). Thus, with the national community imagined as inseparable from its designated place in the world, the national order of things contains, within itself, a tendency to emplace and territorialize whichever categories it attempts to organize: bodies in particular. Secondly, while nationality is no more given that any other feature in our socially constructed identities, it nevertheless remains at the core of one’s political identification in the modern world. Thus, so as to be a right-bearing subject in a national order of things, one must belong to a nation with its designated territory. Thirdly, belonging to a nation is not only a matter of ‘being part of’ or belonging to a larger whole, but a territorialized relation that has corporeal implications on individuals, and their mobility. Namely, just as the idea of nation is ‘rooted’ in a particular territory, so are the bodies that represent different nations inherently ‘incarcerated, or confined, in those places’ (Appadurai, quoted in Malkki 1992, 29; emphasis in the original). This at least is the discursive order of the (inter)national order of things, by which the world works. However, as this book as well as many other accounts in the field of mobility studies testify, by virtue of their mobility, mobile bodies continue to challenge this territorial order of rootedness which, after all involves many other actors, discourses and material practices than those of the nation state. In other words, the state as a fixed entity is also vulnerable to movement.

Mankell ends his novel with a scene where Tea-Bag reminisces the act of crossing the border that separates Africa from Europe and envisions her future:

A bridge was in front of us and the last part of the trip was like a leap into a vacuum. […] I just know that the bridge that we thought we had seen will be constructed. […] One day the pile of bodies lying on the sea bed will be so high and the bridge made out of skulls and ribs will form such an embankment that no border guard, no dog, no drunken sailor, no human smuggler will be able to tear it down. (Mankell 2001, 377–378)

Mankell’s horrific, yet insightful, imaginary of an embankment made of corpses evokes a strong sense of materiality. In the scene, the flow of human bodies is so immense that its material force will challenge nation states’ capacity to monopolize the space of the political and determine who can be considered politically active and have agentive capacity. Mankell’s novel suggests that the sheer number and force of corporeal movement will contest the control and governance of migrants’ bodies. This is the imagery that became prominent in the summer and autumn of 2015, with massive media attention to hordes of people traversing countries on foot and crammed into trains and buses. In this book, however, we are more interested in the minutiae and mundane choreographies that engage bodies in resistant action than in the ‘flow of migrants’. Through our empirical research we show how the human body is always capable of changing its prescribed choreography, no matter how strictly people are governed and how completely their spaces of agency and movement are limited. Here, we draw on the work of feminist scholars, critical geographers and new materialists. This wide range of theoretical traditions enables us to understand the body as simultaneously a material ‘fact’ of life and as a realm of discursive governmentality. In other words, the body is ‘multiple’ (Mol 2002): it is created in and through various simultaneous (material) practices, enactments and configurations, and it can be a myriad thing and be in different places at the same time. Agency is, in this view, about visibility and response-ability (cf. Barad 2007), about the possibilities of becoming visible and of mutual response, which is not to deny, but to attend to the power and practices of governance. In so doing, the book contributes to the study of the political significance of movement, mobility and the nonverbal as the resistant body poses a challenge that is both praxical and philosophical: it ultimately invites us to reconsider political space and fathom the meanings and content of relational politics.

Mobility

Although the number of people on the move in the world today is indeed historically high, migration is not a new phenomenon. Mobility is a defining characteristic of human life. People have always moved from one place to another, in search of food and livelihood, because of love, work, conflicts and disasters. These migratory movements may be temporary or seasonal, or they may be of more permanent nature. They may be about very short physical distances, or trajectories that reach across the globe. Sometimes the movement is forced, other times it is voluntary. Very often it combines elements of both, thus becoming something in-between these two. While it is difficult to pinpoint an exact, universal let alone ahistorical definition of human mobility, there is one persistent and unavoidable feature that is always present, namely, the relational and material body that moves in space, while making space for its own (political) existence—indeed, while making space political.

The burgeoning interest in issues related to human mobility within what has been named ‘mobility turn’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) in social sciences has produced important intersections of different academic fields. Alongside the traditional fields of inquiry—human geography and social anthropology—political scientists have demonstrated an increasing interest in migration and mobility studies (see, e.g., Salter 2007; Squire 2009, 2011, 2015). Over the past two decades or so, there has been an increasing scholarly interest, for example, in the ways that border control measures organize individuals on the move into categories of desired and undesired travellers (e.g., Salter 2006; Adey 2009; Amoore and Hall 2009; Fassin 2011; Bigo, Carrera and Guild 2013; Kynsilehto 2014; Häkli 2015). For those considered to be desirable entrants to the national territory, border controls have been increasingly lifted, such as within the European space of free movement, the Schengen area. As for the travellers categorized as undesirable, ethnic profiling and other forms of creating figures of suspicion enhance the use of internal border controls that indeed extend the border to basically any area, sometimes far from the geographical borders (e.g., Fassin 2011; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). These control measures have become increasingly corporeal ranging from fingerprinting to full-body scanning (Amoore and Hall 2009). Consequently, not all those willing and often forced to leave their countries are entitled to do so, at least in the sense of choosing their destination. In this vein, human mobility can be considered a resource that is differentially accessed (e.g., Cresswell 2010).

As indicated above, this book discusses mobility within the territory of the EU. The EU today is one of the most glaring manifestations of globally uneven mobilities as noted earlier. Since the Maastricht Treaty and its further developments, especially the Tampere European Council of 1998, the EU has designed a common policy on migration and asylum. Since the 2010s, this European migration regime seems to have been developing in two different directions, with labour migration differentiated from that based on humanitarian and family reasons. In addition, along with the successive enlargements of the EU to cover more of Central and Eastern Europe, new mobile populations have emerged within the Schengen area. One of these groups is the Roma people from Central and South-Eastern Europe. In many receiving states, their mobility across the internal borders of the EU, and particularly their presence on the streets as buskers and beggars is represented as a problem. Nevertheless, as EU citizens, the Roma people have the same rights to intra-EU mobility as any other ethnic group, and the resistance towards their visibility on the streets thus tends to unfold as racist complaints directed at legislation. In chapter 5 we provide a detailed empirical account on how these racialized corporeal choreographies are enacted as well as resisted in corporeally entangled events of relational encounters.

As for the mobility of labour into Europe, despite the econo...