Abstract
This chapter looks at the shifting expressions of biopolitical life, using as a case study the collaborative project Borderless: A Docu-Poem About the Lives of Undocumented Workers (2006), directed by Min Sook Lee. It discusses how liberal and neoliberal rationalities privilege some individuals as autonomous self-regulating agents, while subordinating and disciplining others, such as undocumented migrants, as invisible or dangerous. Depicted as a risk to society’s security, the illegal workers portrayed in the documentary film Borderless occupy a paradoxical borderline position in Canadian society. The docu-poem aligns itself with a body of work by vocal contemporary writers, visual artists and critics calling for a radical reconfiguration of social and biopolitical relations in our unevenly globalized world.
Key authors, texts, case studies or examples
Min Sook Lee’s docu-poem Borderless
Although neoliberal strategies of government appropriate and utilize older forms of power—sovereign power, pastoral power, and disciplinary power—biopower offers the most effective and appealing set of strategies for governing social life under neoliberalism because it finds its telos and legitimacy in its articulated capacity to maximize the energies and capabilities of all: individuals, families, market organizations, and the state.
Majia H. Nadesan, Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life (2008, 3).
The task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004, 147).
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Notes
- 1.
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), philosopher Giorgio Agamben discusses the state of exception in terms of ‘the limit concept of the doctrine of law and the state, in which sovereignty borders (since every limit concept is always the limit between two concepts) on the sphere of life and becomes indistinguishable from it’ (11). Agamben thus articulates sovereignty and homo sacer as ‘borderline’ concepts. See Agamben’s Means without End: Notes on Politics (2000) for further reference.
- 2.
The related genre of the docudrama has gained popularity in the last few years, particularly after 9/11, with titles such as The Road to Guantanamo (2006), directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross. See the collection Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (2006), edited by Rhodes and Springer, for further reference on the workings of this artistic genre.
- 3.
While being aware of the generic differences, I use the terms ‘docu-poem’ and ‘short doc’ interchangeably in my analysis of Borderless, following Min Sook Lee (in Michael 2009).
- 4.
Min Sook Lee’s other works include El Contrato (2003), Hogtown: The Politics of Policing (2005), Sedition (2008), Badge of Pride (2010) and the comedy series She’s the Mayor (2011).
- 5.
Even though the circumstances of Angela’s arrival in Canada are not addressed explicitly in the documentary, it appears that she held refugee status when she first entered the country, according to the additional educational material that is included in the DVD version of Borderless.
- 6.
In his analysis of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India , anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan discusses biotechnology as yet another form of enterprise inextricable from contemporary capitalism. Employing Foucauldian and Marxist theory, Sunder Rajan explains how what he refers to as ‘biocapital ’ stands as a system of exchange, involving systems of production, circulation and consumption under current processes of techno-scientific capitalism. As he claims: ‘Biocapital, like any other form of circulation of capital, involves the circulation and exchange of money and commodities, whose analysis needs to remain central and at the forefront of analysis. But in addition, the circulations of new and particular forms of currency, such as biological material and information, emerge’ (17). See Hall’s analysis of Stephen Frear’s film Dirty Pretty Things (2003) in the chapter ‘Success in the City’ in this volume for a further examination of this notion.
- 7.
Jasbir Puar reorients Mbembe’s insights to focus particularly on how queerly racialized bodies live and die in a post 9/11 context of growing Islamophobia. In order to grasp the complexity of all the processes at play here, Puar insists on the need for ‘bio-necro collaborations’ (Puar 2007, 35).
- 8.
From the 1970s onwards, Canada has been systematically associated with the concept of the cultural mosaic, a convenient term to construct the nation as the ideal space for the development of multicultural identity. Nevertheless, even though policies such as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988) recognize cultural diversity , they do so, as Smaro Kamboureli puts it, ‘by practising a sedative politics … that attempts to recognize ethnic differences, but only in a contained fashion , in order to manage them’ (Kamboureli 2000, 82). As a result, numerous voices have emerged in the last three decades exploring how the rhetoric of tolerance that is intrinsic in multicultural Canada masks race, sex and class issues (Kamboureli 2000; Bannerji 2000; Brand 1994).
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García Zarranz, L. (2017). Borderless (Alien) Nations: Disposable Bodies and Biopolitical Effacement in Min Sook Lee’s Docu-Poem. In: Martín-Lucas, B., Ruthven, A. (eds) Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62133-3_7
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