Imaging the Jungles of Calais

 

Imaging the Jungles of Calais: 

Media Visuality and the Refugee Camp

Yasmin Ibrahim, Anita Howarth
Networking Knowledge Journal,  Vol 9, No 4 (2016)
 http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/446

 

Abstract

Calais became a space of renewed media interest in the summer of 2015, with an increased visuality into the state of refugees’ living conditions and their lives. We examine the images of the camps dubbed ‘the Jungle’ over time, when media started reporting on the camp which was demolished in 2009 and the more recent resurrections termed as ‘Jungle II’ or the ‘new Jungle’, thereafter. Earlier media coverage of the Jungle accompanied less visual depictions of their living conditions or daily existence beyond the threat they posed to their immediate environment. However, compared to 2009 there has been a surge in the number of images of the refugees, particularly a steep rise in 2014 and 2015. The refugee as an object of suffering and trauma is the subject of an abject gaze where the corporeal body is both a non-entity and invisible. Both death and the accident are ascribed to it, as inhabitants in this ‘state of exception’. We examine these aesthetics of trauma and violence in the liminal space of Calais. The increased visuality and curiosity in the camps since 2015 reinscribed the refugee as a political by-product of border politics, accentuating the refugee camp as a violent and dissonant space in civilised Europe. Despite the intimacy of the imagery, the increased visuality showcased the madness and futility produced through a border politics of legitimacy and ‘bare life’.

By Michal Bělka [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Coverage of articles and Images on the jungle in the British press from 2004 till 2015

Migrant Voice on Social Media

Sounds of the ‘Jungle’: Restoring The Migrant Voice on Social Media

Ibrahim, Yasmin and Howarth, Anita (2015) Sounds of the ‘Jungle’: Restoring The Migrant Voice on Social Media. JOMEC. (7), http://www.qmul.ac.uk/docs/167415.pdf

Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick / Calais - Manifestation contre les clandestins, l'immigration

This article examines the cross-border tensions over migrant settlements dubbed ‘The Jungle’ in Calais, France. ‘The Jungle’, which was strongly associated with the unauthorized movement of migrants, became a physical entity enmeshed in discourses  of illegality and the violation of white suburbia. The British mainstream media have rendered the migrants either voiceless or faceless, appropriating them into discourses of immigration policy and the violent transgression of borders, while silencing the human trauma of migration through the distancing of the human subject in media discourses. Through the Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS) case study we highlight how new media spaces can rehumanize migrants, enabling them to tell their stories through their own narratives, images and vantage points not shown in the mainstream media. This reconstruction of the migrant is an important device in enabling proximity and reconstituting the migrant as real and human. This sharply contrasts with the distance-framing techniques of the mainstream media, which dehumanize the migrant, locating the phenomenon of migration as a disruptive contaminant in civilized and ordered societies.

The Liminal Space in Calais

Threat and Suffering: The Liminal Space of “The Jungle”

Howarth, Anita and Ibrahim, Yasmin. (2012). ‘Threat and Suffering: The Liminal Space of “The Jungle”’. in Andrews, H. and Roberts, L. Liminal Spaces. London: Routledge.

By AmirahBreen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In 2009 French authorities demolished and cleared an informal shelter in Calais known as "the Jungle". British national press constructed this as a rational response to the problem of illegal migration. Crucial to this justification was the metaphoric use "The Jungle" to describe the descent into anarchic degradation which spilt out into surrounding spaces of civility. This metaphor facilitated the use of a pseudo-rational discourse in which the appropriate policy response to (physical and moral) threat was to expel the other, demolish "The Jungle" so deal forcibly with the illegal migrants. Within this pseudo-rational discourse the issue of immigration becomes a liminal space between rationality and atavism in enlightened societies.