When the Hostile Terrain 94 exbition opens, the large wall map of the installation is still empty. Hostile Terrain 94 is an artwork in the making. The toe tags are pinned to it little by little, filling the emptiness on the map gradually. The inital emptiness reflects the invisibility that charaterizes so many refugees' and migrants' fates. The toe tags, pinned to the wall, are meant to make these fates more visible.
You can witness how the map gradually fills up with toe-tags here.
Jason De León is director of the Undocumented Migration Project which initiated Hostile Terrain 94. He conceptualized HT94 because he felt the need to visualize border deaths in a way that would allow envisioning the humans behind border death statistics: “I wanted to put names to the dead. This is an act of witnessing. The data come from a Microsoft database. We’re asking volunteers to breathe life into the data by writing out the details. That was the closest way we could think of to get someone to feel the human cost” [1].
In this Q&A, we had the opportunity to ask Jason about his work, the Undocumented Migration Project and Hostile Terrain 94.
The Cemetery of the Companionless: Towards a World Literature of Undocumented Lives in Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (American Studies, Mainz University)
29.01.2021, 18:15 Uhr
Elif Shafak’s 2019 novel 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World revolves around a cemetery on the outskirts of Istanbul. The aim of this cemetery, which is called the cemetery of the companionless, is literally a “prevention through deterrence”: The inhumanity of the state manifests itself in punishing those who transgress its mandates even beyond their own death. The absence of a proper burial and hence of the right to recognition is epitomized by the absence of human decency. On this cemetery of the companionless, there are numbers, not names. The feat which Shafak’s novel accomplishes, then, is that it carefully chronicles the lives and the identities of all those who have been buried on the cemetery of the companionless: from transgender men and women to political prisoners and undocumented migrants. Drawing on Katja Sarkowsky’s and Marcus Llanque’s recent work, this paper argues that the politics of burial are at the core of state-sanctioned violence against undocumented migration. Ultimately, I argue that we need a world literature of undocumented migration (Damrosh 2003): a framework which enables us to link Shafak’s novel to Jason de León’s “Hostile Terrain” (De León 2015). In both these instances, nations police their boundaries by tacitly accepting the deaths of those who risk their lives trying to cross national borders. The punishment for such transgression can be said to continue even beyond the migrants’ death. Conversely, literature, art and anthropology can restore to these lives the decency denied to them by the nation-state: the right to both a proper burial and transnational recognition.
Works Cited
Shafak, Elif. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World. London: Viking, 2019.
Damrosh, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Berkeley: U of California P, 2015.
About
Mita Banerjee is Professor of American Studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz University. Her research interests include postcolonial literature (The Chutneyfication of History, 2002), ethnic American literature and culture (Race-ing the Century, 2005), the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth- Century American Literature, 2008), issues of naturalization and citizenship (Color Me White: Naturalism/Naturalization in American Literature, 2013), and medical humanities (Medical Humanities in American Studies, 2018). She is co-speaker of the research training group “Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience,” which is funded by the German Research Foundation. Her book on “Biological Humanities” is forthcoming from Winter University Press.
To view the short documentary on the exhibition, go here.
Live on Instagram: Witness the installation online
When the Hostile Terrain 94 exbition opens, the large wall map of the installation is still empty. Hostile Terrain 94 is an artwork in the making. The toe tags are pinned to it little by little, filling the emptiness on the map gradually. The inital emptiness reflects the invisibility that charaterizes so many refugees' and migrants' fates. The toe tags, pinned to the wall, are meant to make these fates more visible.
