Re-Drawing Heterotopias: Challenging Refugee Camps as Other Spaces in Kate Evans’ Threads: From the Refugee Crisis
Abstract
This essay deals with the “other” spaces that migrants, refugees, asylum seekers find themselves inhabiting within the borders of European nation states. It concentrates on refugee camps in general, and on the Calais “Jungle” in particular. On the model of Michel Agier, I will talk of refugee camps as “heterotopias” adapting the concept developed by Michel Foucault in 1967. I will then concentrate on Kate Evans’ graphic reportage, Threads: From the Refugee Crisis – a first-hand account of the time the author spent in the Calais camp – and I will explore how the comic book illustrates, but also challenges and resists the perception of the camp as “other space” and, therefore, as a space of otherness.
Bibliografia
Adams, Jeff. 2008. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. Oxford-New York: Peter Lang.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2006 [1951]. Minima Moralia. Reflections from the Damaged Life. London: Verso.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. We Refugees. Periodicals Archive (Symposium Summer) 49, 2: 114-119.
Agier, Michel. 2012. From Refuge the Ghetto is Born: Contemporary Figures of Heterotopi- as. Ray Hutchison & Bruce D. Haynes eds. The Ghetto. Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies. Boulder (CO): Westview Press, 265-292.
Agier, Michel. 2008. Quel temps aujourd’hui en ces lieux incertains. L’Homme, 185-186: 105- 120.
Agier, Michel. 2002. Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps. Ethnography, 3, 3: 317-341.
Barnum, Anthony. 2014. Marginalized Urban Spaces and Heterotopias: An Exploration of Refugee Camps, http://rumiforum.org/marginalized-urban-spaces-and-heterotopias-an- exploration-of-refugee-camps/ (consulted on 15/02/2018).
Colfer, Eoin & Andrew Donkin. 2018. Illegal. London: Hodder. Evans, Kate. 2017. Threads: From the Refugee Crisis. London: Verso.
Foucault, Michel. 2008 [1967]. Of Other Spaces. Michiel Dehaene & Lieven De Cauter eds. and trans. Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a Postcivil Society. London: Routledge, 13-29.
Glidden, Sarah. 2016. Rolling Blackouts. Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Knowles, Sam, James Peacock & Harriet Earle. 2016. Introduction: Trans/formation and the Graphic Novel. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52, 4: 378-384.
Sacco, Joe. 2014. Palestine. Seattle (WA): Fantagraphics Books.
Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin. Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge.
Stallybrass, Peter & Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press.
Sulaiman, Hamid. 2016. Freedom Hospital. London: Jonathan Cape. Visintin, Fabio. 2014. Natali neri e altre storie di guerra. Roma: Comicout.
Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Pictures, Words, and the Space Between Them ‒ What Cartooning Is and How It Works. Wolk Douglas ed. Reading Comics. How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge (MA): Da Capo Press.