Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study underscores the ways European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with immobility, forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on diverse forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, refugee mobilities, and tourism, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayse Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutlug Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Maria Iorio and Raphael Cuomo, and Ergin Cavusoglu. Challenging aesthetic boundaries as well as national, cultural, and political ones, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.