Though migration is a fact of all ages, it has recently come to the fore in public discourse and has in effect “migrated” massively into the literature of political philosophy and the canons of contemporary artistic production. This is largely due to the iniquitous treatment of migrants before the gates of Europe, a continent from which people once emigrated en masse but now unable to deal with a net influx of migrants – a fact which has understandably attracted the attention of activists, theorists and artists. But it is also a sign of the emergence of a competing paradigm for understanding the effects of migration and the agency of the migrant. Instead of the dominant “residentialist” understanding which construed migration as a deviation from the norm of settled life, the phenomenon has come to be seen as a dynamic feature of social life; rather than typecasting migrants as passive victims, “in a dream dreamt by another” as writer John Berger once said, it has become more interesting to consider how and with what resources they plot their journeys. If representations of migration still draw upon alienating images, migrants are no longer portrayed as torn from their homelands, but as lost in an what might be described as an open labyrinth – a paradoxical figure, to be sure, but one which merges the migrant’s predicament somehow universal. It may even make the migrant very model of an agent of change in the name of a global humanity. Drawing upon examples of art and other symbolic configurations (videos of Ursula Biemann, Angela Melitopoulos…), we will examine the contours of this new paradigm while considering how such issues as "migration" have migrated into aesthetic and ethical discourse.

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Stephen Wright is a Paris-based writer, curator and independent researcher. Since 2004, he has curated a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship. He has written extensively on the use-value of art as an extradisciplinary practice, particularly in contexts of collaborative undertakings outside the performative framework of the artworld, where art is often a mode of pursuing political philosophy by other means. A former programme director at the Collège international de philosophie (2000-2007), he is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text (London). A number of his text may be found on the collective blog n.e.w.s (http://northeastwestsouth.net/)

Narratives of Muslim women’s victimization by religion— ostensibly rooted in inherently regressive, anti-modern and immutable “Islamic” laws—have been standard fixtures in mass media, policy circles and numerous academic tracts for some time now.  This paper offers one reading of how these narratives are produced and sustained.  Located within the new global economy of fear, into which liberal feminism has been explicitly enlisted the paper explores the violence incurred in translating notions of gender justice across a number of borders, all suffused with the politics of imperialism. These translations and borders include linguistic borders and the challenge of reproducing the language of rights into the idiom of morality and honor; the secular-religious divide and so on.   The paper assumes that these borders are not part of objective reality but produced through language; they are idiomatic realities across which translation becomes necessary; translation creates difference as well as eases communication.

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