Abstract
In this chapter, Karen Emmerich examines two instances of transmigrant protest staged in northern Greece in 2016, projects that both inhabit and supersede spaces of stasis created by European tactics of bordering, by acting out the very impossibility of certain kinds of action within that context of border securitization. In the temporary, informal settlement that arose in the village of Idomeni, where thousands of refugees camped in defiance of legal restrictions regarding their movement, a small group of residents formed Refugees.TV, a news outlet whose camera was a log, and whose microphone a paper cup. The group initially depended on other media for broader visibility, that is, for the mobility of even a “message”—yet their continual gesture to that dependence was also an insistence on granular self-representation, while the participatory events the group staged became fleeting hubs where people on the move formed practical and affective connections. In another camp in northern Greece, residents built a replica of the clock tower in Homs that was the site of a brutal massacre in 2011, stopping the clock hands at the moment of their initial entrance into the camp, signifying the lack of forward movement in this legal and geographic holding zone. This chapter treats these two performances of stasis and obstruction as instances of the mobile commons at work and play, while also proposing the mobile commons as a site and model for intellectual efforts that straddle the scholarly and non-scholarly worlds.
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Notes
- 1.
See Roitman pages 22–23 and 35–36 on the relationship between “crisis” and “critique.”
- 2.
As the New Keywords Collective writes, “Labeling a complex situation (such as that of the contemporary dynamics of mass migration and refugee movements) as a “crisis” and therefore as “exceptional” tends to conceal the violence and permanent exception that are the norm under global capitalism and our global geo-politics, and may serve to perpetuate the conditions that have led to the purported “emergency” in the first place. … Indeed, the proclamation of “crisis” consequently serves the ends of particular forms of governmental intervention, usually through the deployment of authoritarian measures: a situation of “crisis,” after all, appears to demand immediate responses that cannot afford the more prolonged temporalities of democratic debate and deliberative processes, or so we are told” (2016, 11). See also De Genova 2017 on the strategic state and EU deployment of “crisis” to manage human mobility in the Mediterranean, and Douzinas 2013 on the ways “cynical capitalism” and cynical neoliberal governance have used the evocation of crisis to extend the reach of their own power; his elaboration (after Peter Sloterdjik) of a “kynical” response of playful protest resonates with the first of my examples of transmigrant protest below.
- 3.
- 4.
I borrow this phrase from Papadopoulos and Tsianos, who borrow it in turn from Peter Linebaugh, in their effort “to cultivate an imaginary and a practical sensibility to what lies after citizenship” (2013, 179) via their exploration of the mobile commons .
- 5.
There are striking parallels between Papadopoulos and Tsianos’ work on the mobile commons and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s discussion of the “prophetic organization of the undercommons” (28) in the university’s “beyond,” where critique is supplanted by study. Among other similarities, the language of physical movement—“exile,” “refuge,” “refugee,” “asylum,” “border,” “beyond”—permeates Harney and Moten’s discussion of the undercommons and the university. Care should be taken not to romanticize either the undercommons or the mobile commons, and I try to walk that fine line when I return more explicitly to these concepts at the end of the paper.
- 6.
To my knowledge, no one has yet written of spaces like Idomeni in the context of the Occupy movement; in the Greek context specifically, the settlement in Idomeni could be placed alongside occupations of public space in the period of austerity, including the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2012. Idomeni had, of course, been a crossing spot for much longer; see Anastasiadou et al. 2018 for a summary account of this history. See also Thornhill 2018 for a sketch of her time as a volunteer at Hara Hotel, working out of the Park Hotel in Polycastro, which served as a base of operations for many small NGOs and independent volunteers active in the region in winter and spring of 2015–2016.
- 7.
Of this last occurrence, on April 10, 2016, Marianna Karakoulaki, one of Greece’s leading journalists of the “refugee crisis,” writes that “The lengths that states go to in order to protect their borders in peaceful times became even more evident to me that day” (2018, 82). Karakoulaki’s account of her involvement as a reporter is unusual in that she abandons the problematic premise of journalistic objectivity for an explicit defense of a “no borders” perspective; it might be a model for a form of engaged scholarship that likewise refuses the premise of political neutrality.
- 8.
Transcribed from “Refugees.tv interviewed in Idomeni by Hala Bedi Irratia.”
- 9.
“Smile, You’re on Handmade Camera” first aired on This American Life on August 5, 2016.
- 10.
See Dunn 2012, 2 and throughout.
- 11.
Transcribed from “Refugees.TV at Idomeni.”
- 12.
Transcribed from “Refugees.tv interviewed in Idomeni by Hala Bedi Irratia”.
- 13.
Quoted in Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, 188.
- 14.
I borrow this phrase from Anastasiadou et al. 2018, 8.
- 15.
See Papataxiarchis 2016a and b on the “symbolic hierarchies” of “being there” on the “front line” of the “refugee crisis”; see also Andersson 2014 (particularly Chap. 1) on the problematic relationship between ethnographic research, academic advancement, and complicity in structures of knowledge extraction.
- 16.
There are echoes, here, of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s intellectual “undercommons,” which sees the university as “always a state/State strategy” (2013, 32), and rejects the idea that it is possible “to embark on critical projects within its terrain, projects that would turn its competencies to more radical ends” (34). The undercommons, they write, is both wary and weary of critique, tries to escape from its “degradation as university-consciousness” by “retreating … into the external world” (38).
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Emmerich, K. (2020). Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016. In: Boletsi, M., Houwen, J., Minnaard, L. (eds) Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_2
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