Deniz Göktürk: "Picturing the World in Migration"

Speaker(s): Deniz Göktürk

The question of migration and border control has become a litmus test for governments, democracies, and civil societies around the world. In a climate of rising nationalist resurgence, political rhetoric focusing on border security evokes the figure of the migrant as a scapegoat for larger-scale processes, which tend to remain outside the frame. How does the staging of migrants on the margins as a threat or as suffering figures on display affect viewers in front of their television or computer screens? How has world spectatorship been changing in times of mass migration and digitization of all realms of life? What might the world look like through the lens of migration? This talk will approach these questions through a recent film that presents a chronicle of migration on a global scale, Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017), reflecting on perspective and participation in the production and consumption of documentary images. In contrast we will turn to a different kind of installation, Weltstadt (2017-18), an exhibition designed in Berlin that assembled a “world city” from model buildings built in collaboration with refugees. The exhibition’s focus was on a collaborative imagination of past memories and future possibilities. Countering the common mode of “migrantology” (R. Römhild), which exhibits migrants as a problem from outside, Göktürk argues that concepts such as integration, social cohesion, and postmigrant society fall short of capturing the challenges of our turbulent times; they will need to be replaced by interaction-oriented models.
 
Deniz Göktürk is Chair of the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture as well as numerous articles on transnational migration, culture, and cinema. Her new book Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Borders and Mobility forthcoming with De Gruyter Verlag in the series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002, new expanded edition 2019); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007); Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (2011); Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (Routledge 2010); Komik der Integration: Grenzpraktiken der Gemeinschaft (2019). She is coordinator of the Multicultural Germany Project and concept coordinator of the electronic journal TRANSIT.