Description
Since November 2018, the so-called English ‘Channel migrant crisis’ has been constructed as a spectacle of militarised maritime border policing, as the British state is continually seeking to performatively ‘take back control’ of its borders. The accompanying political and media discourses of a ‘crisis’ in the Channel have produced an assemblage of images and narratives, mobilising an imagination of the island nation closely associated with aesthetic registers of whiteness, sovereignty, and invasion.
Albeit the escalation of domestic and international hostile environment strategies has led to a proliferation and dispersal of bordering practices, border spectacles such as the ‘Channel migrant crisis’ persist in depicting the border as a ‘line in the sand’ at the limits of the national body politic. Responding to Étienne Balibar’s seminal intervention of “invisible borders, situated everywhere and nowhere” – this paper posits the questions of why, how and to what effect the border is made (hyper)visible at the border. The paper argues that it is precisely due to the diffuse nature of bordering that states pursue a politics of ‘crisis aesthetics’ to make the border hypervisible, ultimately enabling the reproduction of a racialised border regime.
