A Politics of the Body as Body Politics: Rethinking Europe’s Worksites of Democracy

Abstract

Recapturing displaced memories, Dagmawi Yimer, documentarist and film-maker, rematerializes what lies under the calm surface of the sea: the migrant’s body. The voices of the dead, in his short Asmat/Names, rise in opposition to the oversimplified one-sided narrative that dominates the political spheres and the mainstream media. Their objective is to challenge the historical paradigms that justify the economic exploitation of underdeveloped areas, putting Europe to the test vis-à-vis new forms of colonialism. Grounded in a theoretical framework that engages with the Gramscian concepts of subalternity and hegemony, Fanon’s and Césaire’s critical texts on colonialism, Butler’s observations on Precarious Life, and with the concept of the archive expounded by Chambers, Grechi and Nash, this study examines how the migrant body is remembered and memorialized.