I am told that you raised your hand against yourselfAnticipating the butcher.[…]So the future lies in darkness and the forces of rightAre weak. All this was plain to youWhen you destroyed a torturable body.-- Bertold Brecht“On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.”Like many influential contemporary thinkers, Arjun Appadurai and Giorgio Agamben suggest that globalization invites us to rethink our relationship with the nation or “postnation” (Appadurai; Agamben). One emblematic figure crystallizes the urgency of such a challenge: the refugee (Nyers; Shemak; (...) Bohmer; Chetail). In European urban centers--regardless of whether we speak as refugees, to refugees, or about refugees--complex transnational dialogues emerge. They .. (shrink)

This article focuses on Stephen Frears's 2003 Dirty Pretty Things. I argue that Frears's portrayal of the encounter between a Nigerian man and a Turkish woman in contemporary London invites us to re-conceptualize the relationship between the migrant and the host country. The film invites us to compare the circulation of migrants across a globalized transnational world to organs removed from one body and implanted into another. It questions our usual definitions of home and belonging, host and guest, health and (...) the power to circulate. It both refers to the hospitality paradigm and radically rephrases it by making us consider the relationship between migrants and nations according to a different grid. It does not simply propose an alternative grand narrative but rewrites a familiar script without trying to erase it. (shrink)