‘Crossing’ into‘the West’? Migration, Hermeneutics, and
Possibilities for Another World
October, 24 Wednesday
FASS 1080
14:00 - 15:30
This paper argues that contemporary anti-immigration discourses in the United States and Europe project an essentially violent imagination of border life and what it means to ‘cross over a border’ onto the figure of ‘the migrant,’ one that significantly contrasts with the constitutive purposes of migrants. Taking its cue from Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s short story, “Mother Tongue,” and in conversation with the idea of living onas conceptualized by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, as well as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theorization of the subaltern as a site of teaching, this paper urges a hermeneutical losingof ‘crossing over borders’ in the political theoretical discourse of ‘migration’ in favor of other subaltern understandings and teachings about living on after life’s accidents.