Theory & Event

On May 8, 2015, an x-ray image taken at the border of Ceuta revealed a living boy from the Ivory Coast hidden in a suitcase hauled by a Moroccan woman. The child's father lived on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura and had tried to bring his son over from the Ivory Coast legally, but his salary fell short of the sum required to apply for permanent residency. He resorted to paying a Moroccan courier to take eight-year-old Abou Ouattara across the Moroccan border into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, believing that the boy would be smuggled into Spanish territory by car.² Ceuta is a Spanish enclave at the northern tip of Morocco and, with Melilla, is one of only two land borders between Africa and Europe.³ A Spanish border patrol officer noted the smuggler's hesitation and assumed that the suitcase contained drugs. Upon scanning, what the suitcase delivered was not cocaine or hashish, but a living child curled up in fetal position. The suspicion of illegal substances led to the discovery of illegal material, in the form of a dark [End Page 324] silhouette.⁴ Processed by the scanner, the embryonic figure is laid bare, at once vaporized and enfleshed as an anonymous brown shape. The media framed this scan within the narrative of humanitarian rescue: the border patrol found the boy in a "terrible state"; "It could have ended in tragedy" had he remained zipped up in the suitcase.⁵ Yet the scandal of a child packed into a suitcase by a mercenary smuggler hired by an irresponsible father distracts from a far greater scandal, which is the border's production of illegality. The fait divers of a boy rescued by border patrol obscures conditions that illegalized migrants face as they attempt to cross Europe's outer frontiers. Abou Ouattara was stuffed into a suitcase in order to pass frontiers that block illegitimate human bodies while allowing for the free circulation of legitimate goods. It is the border that materializes migrants as targets of surveillance and capture, rescued out of humanitarian care, packaged as merchandise not only by smugglers but by the Euro-African border's productive economy, one that benefits the Spanish military and reaches deep into the European Union.⁶

This essay argues that the security fences dividing Europe from Africa rehearse ongoing racialized histories of exclusion, extraction, and exploitation, but in a distinctively contemporary configuration of technology, security, economy, violence and care. I initially examine how the border figures migrants as they seek to cross the fence into Europe–as inert or swarming materiality, as subjects of threat and objects of care, consigned to zones of non-being and non-belonging. I then turn to two documentaries in which migrants and refugees diagnose this racial apparatus in its complexity, challenge its operations, and invoke new forms of becoming and belonging from within the border itself.

Border security and its technologies of surveillance materialize clandestine bodies into dehumanized matter. The border "matterphorizes" them into an invading swarm, as profitable commodities or as victims to be rescued, to borrow a term from the editors of this issue: "Whereas the concept "metaphor" is the trope of meaning transfer and substitution by means of analogy, matterphor denotes the articulation of meaning in relation to matter." In the case of Abou Ouattara, these technologies use x-rays to reach into the illegalized body itself. Not only are bodies literally, as well as figuratively, scanned to be permitted to cross, but their physiological processes are tracked by technologies such as carbon dioxide probes, heartbeat detectors or infrared cameras. These technologies also metaphorize and dematerialize illegalized persons into data through the abstract rhetoric of border control. Alongside the biologization of moving bodies, their "matterphorization" into savagery, illegality and vulnerability, border technologies also metaphorize migrants into bits of data tracked by security and stored in information banks. The discourse of population management [End Page 325] at such borders vaporizes bodies into forces whose trackable course is defined by...