Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis

Review [Reproducing Refugees] offers migration scholars, geographers, journalists, sociologists and anthropologists a unique and original lens through which broader political, economic and systemic processes can, and should be, critically interrogated. The book is a must read for those interested in the theory and methos of visual enquiry and in the performative role of images for marginalizes communities and systems of power. ― Border CriminologiesThis timely book offers a vivid critical account of the ethics and politics underpinning the visual economy of what has been notoriously called “Europe’s refugee crisis”. From the standpoint of the borders of postcolonial Mediterranean, it opens compelling terrains of critical engagement with epistemologies and lived experiences of “crisis”, tracing how the photographic can become an apparatus of biopoliticized reproduction, visual objectification and epistemic violence, but also, occasionally, comes to articulate transformative solidarity and utopian imaginaries. Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisisprovides an engaging meditation on how fraught registers of precarity, displacement, belonging, and national citizenship are embedded in racialized, gendered, and sexualized fields of vision and knowledge production. In thinking of “crisis” as a frame through which subjects and the political are (re)produced and made (in)visible, the book mobilizes queer feminist, antiracist, and decolonial perspectives to test the limits of bringing crisis and reproduction together. In so doing, it offers a valuable lens through which to imagine the possibility of change, whereby photographìa might be repurposed to unsettle normative figurations of the present. -- Athena Athanasiou, Professor of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political SciencesIn Reproducing Refugees, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi make a compelling case for the central and indispensable role of photography in mediating the spectacle of Europe’s “refugee crisis.” This book offers a vital critique of the visual economy of objectification by which human subjects crossing state borders are turned into the racialized and gendered objects of other people’s pity or protection, or alternately, of their fear and loathing. Meanwhile, the visual discourse of photography propagates an illusion of transparency even as it remains both equivocal and incomplete – lending its imagery to diametrically opposed interpretations, while also framing events and predicaments in ways that conceal far more than they reveal. And by framing “crisis,” the authors show that photography’s visual economy is indeed an economy of power that inculcates ignorance and cultivates consent and complicity with the border regime’s violence. -- Nicholas de Genova, Professor and Chair of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of HoustonA significant intervention into the politics of ‘crisis’ and mobilities, this exciting book foregrounds reproduction, temporalities and the visual. It demonstrates the intensively productive nature of a metaphorical and literal queer lens on human movement. Challenging containment in nations and families in favour of making new connections it offers a guide to thought and action. Read it! -- Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol at University of BristolEngaging with the photographic representation of the summer of migration of 2015 through the angle of social reproduction theory, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi's book offers an excellent decolonial queer-feminist analysis of the contemporary conjuncture of crisis in the modern-colonial world system. -- Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Professor of Sociology, University of Giessen Product Description Since 2015, the ‘refugee crisis’ is possibly the most photographed humanitarian crises in history. Photographs taken, for instance, in Lesvos, Greece, and Bodrum, Turkey, were instrumental in generating waves of p