Friday, December 6, 2024 at 13.00 EST • 18.00 GMT
Event held via Zoom • Registration Link
Debates on forced migration often assume that one is either a refugee or a citizen. To put it more starkly, refugees supposedly want nothing more than to relinquish their refugeeness and become instead, citizen. Accordingly, photographic representations of the journey of transformation and self-reinvention, in emphasizing a trajectory from refugee to citizen, take for granted the power of the nation-state in defining citizenship. However, migrant justice activists, Indigenous activist-scholars, and theorists whose protest against and refusal of “border imperialism” are dislodging the concept of citizenship from the exclusive purview of the nation-state. More than a status dispensed by the state, citizenship is enacted. This presentation considers the visual forms that such an action might take, especially in creating the possibility of “refugee citizenship,” a concept that critic Donald C. Goellnicht invokes to denote alternative forms of citizenship that challenge nation-state frameworks. Through a focus on diverse forms of portraiture, I consider the ways that photographic practices constitute acts of refugee citizenship.
Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Visual Justice at the University of Toronto. She is the author of two books, Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture and Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam. She is also co-editor of three book volumes: Feeling Photography, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada, and Cold War Camera.
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Image credit: Binh Danh, Mother and Child, 2005, 7 x 5 inches. From the series, Immortality: The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War. Chlorophyll print and resin.