The arts and humanities: tackling the challenges of mass displacement

As historians are at pains to point out,
the current ‘refugee crisis’ is not without precedent. Though we should be wary
of too simplistic historical parallels, ‘lessons from history’ provide an important longer view on
contemporary displacement. But we can also look to the history of art and
literature for a politics of recognition of the refugee and asylum seeking
figures that populate our smartphone and television screens. Stories of exile,
migration and forced displacement are abundant in Western literature and art. As
ever, Shakespeare provides an ideal starting point: Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck on the coast of Ilyria (present
day Adriatic coast) and with Viola’s words, ‘What country, friends, is this?’
as she comes ashore; Richard II
begins with a scene of banishment as Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke are
sent into exile on the king’s orders; and King
Lear’s ‘unaccommodated man’ has formed the basis for many theorisations of
the refugee as a figure of ‘bare life’ who exists outside the terms of citizenship and
social belonging. In fact, when writing King
Lear, Shakespeare was lodging with a Huguenot family in London’s Barbican,
so these are not just aesthetic, but also social and political connections.

We can, of course, reach even further back
to the classical world. Aeschylus’ The
Suppliants, written c. 470 BC, is remarkably relevant to today in its
narrative of a group of African women who fled forced marriages in Africa to
seek asylum and protection in Europe. This was staged
in Sicily in 2015. Euripides’ The Trojan
Women (415 BC) set in the aftermath of the Trojan war, has also resonated
with many struggling to come to terms with displacement as a result of war and
conflict. One project, Queens of Syria, which is both a theatre production and
documentary, has been especially effective. 

Canonical works of visual art like J. M. Turner’s
Slave Ship, which dramatically
portrays forced migration in the form of slavery, reminds us of the temporal
and spatial connections between the legacies of colonial history and its
current forms. Turner’s young patron, John Ruskin, in his write up of the
painting, confined to a footnote the fact that the boat in the painting is a
slave ship, Zong, and that slaves are
being thrown overboard for insurance purposes. So in his framing of the
picture, Ruskin leaves out those very connections that the painting aims to
evoke.

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon coming on (“The Slave Ship”) by J. M. W. Turner 1840 (Wikimedia Commons)

These kinds of omissions happen, too, with
current visual imagery of migration and refugees. Images of refugees in camps and on
European borders are ubiquitous and often deeply shocking. While
they have worked to galvanise certain populations into acts of solidarity – in
Britain, for example, protests and responsive
organisations
dedicated to supporting those in Calais – there’s a longer, more complicated
story not always graspable through these fleeting images. It’s a story not just
about the experiences of those who have been forcibly displaced but about the
kinds of societies receiving them.

In a situation where we’re
letting people die rather than providing safe passage, we are facing not so
much a ‘refugee crisis’, as a crisis of values. How are our values being
recalibrated by our daily confrontation with the spectacle of, and sometimes
interaction with, people perishing on European shores? The arts have a vital
role to play in shaping how we respond to our current age of mass migration. Cultural
and creative responses need to sit alongside the work of advocacy groups,
political organisations and governments. Not only can the arts offer a counter
narrative able to reaffirm the political and social subjectivity of border
crossers, they also explore what’s happening outside the journalistic frame;
and help shape, critique and deepen our engagement with forced displacement.

Telling stories creatively,
through literature or film, was one of the principle ways that Britain’s
earlier migrant communities went about reflecting, interrogating and celebrating
their stories of migration: its benefits as well as its antagonisms. The same
can’t be said for refugees. In order to have a legitimate voice with which to
speak up, one must first have a legitimate legal status. As long as refugees
are languishing in detention centres or makeshift camps outside
and inside Europe, often lacking the means of self-expression and public
engagement, the conversation will continue to be one-sided. This is one of the
reasons we struggle to steer the direction of the conversation away from
security fears and threats to resources, and towards the value of being a
country that welcomes refugees and migrants of all kinds.

Of course, refugees and
migrants are adept at finding ways to voice their experiences on their own
terms, often to great effect. For example, the organization ‘Freed Voices’ is a group of ‘experts by
experience’ who raise awareness about immigration detention in the UK by
telling their stories.  But the
combination of bad journalism and bad law-making means that refugees are often
trapped by the polarising opposition between derogatory media depictions on the
one hand, and a requirement to testify to authentic experience on the other; to
conform to a kind of idealized notion of what it means to be a refugee. The
arts can help us think through this binary and provide a more nuanced picture.
Take the poetry collective, Bards without Borders, a group of poets from
refugee and migrant backgrounds dedicated to exploring the connection between
Shakespeare and migration. Globalising Shakespeare in this way casts new light
on a figure often seen as relating exclusively to British culture and identity.

What art and literature can do more generally –
actively, even – is to draw out the intersecting temporalities and territories
that constitute our contemporary moment and seek lines of connection between
the varying means we have to understand and shape our responses to displacement
and migration. The arts allow us a way into social and political questions and
the moral and ethical assumptions that underpin them: questions about
humanitarianism as political practice and humanism as a set of values.

This is what we aim to achieve
with our network ‘Responding to Crisis: Forced migration and The Humanities in
the Twenty-first Century’. Through a series of international workshops and
events, we will create ‘contact zones’ where artists, activists and academics
come together and formulate interventionist models of critical and creative
work in response to the unfolding ‘crisis’ in contemporary forced migration.
Our idea is to develop new modes of collaborative response which draw on the
creative energies of cross-sector working. We aim to impact positively on
refugees’ lives by deploying the arts and humanities to transform public
attitudes and inform policies.

On this strand on openDemocracy, you will find
contributions from our network participants – activists, academics,
practitioners – on topics arising from our collaborative events over the next year.

See www.respondingtocrisis.wordpress.com for more up to date details
of the project.