Description
This paper critically examines instances of ‘counter-aesthetics’ that disrupt the racialised aesthetic regime underpinning the operation of the UK sea-border and the re/production of the so-called ‘small boats crisis’ in the English Channel. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics and politics, I conceptualise potential avenues for rupturing the representational regime of the border. I extend Rancière’s formulations of renegotiation by engaging post- and decolonial perspectives on resistance through aesthetics. By foregrounding registers of race and empire as central to the aesthetics of border enforcement, I offer a re-reading of ‘border aesthetics’
Building on this theoretical framework, I analyse three forms of counter-aesthetics, each challenging the border’s violent logics of exclusion: (1) counter-evidencing and counter-mapping projects, which engage in a politics of witnessing and visualising the border’s racialised violence; (2) counter-narrations in the form of documentary photography and filmmaking, which destabilize the ‘common-sense’ of the border; and (3) ‘border art’ that directly or indirectly intervenes in the border’s ‘partition of the sensible,’ opening up spaces for reimagining the nation and its borders.
