Conviviality as a politics of endurance: the refugee emergency and the consolations of artistic intervention. (3rd April 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ong, Jonathan Corpus; Rovisco, Maria
• Is Part Of: Popular communication. Volume 17:Number 2(2019)
• Page Start: 140
• Page End: 153
• Publication Date: 2019-04-03
• Subjects: Mass media -- Periodicals; Popular culture -- Periodicals; 302.23
• DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2019.1577963
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1540-5702

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artists in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and textual analyses of their performances, we discuss specific motivations and diverse representational practices that aim to enact togetherness-in-difference. We discuss the potentials and risks of convivial artistic productions, which we argue produce a politics of endurance that, as Feldman has said, helps "people live better with circumstances they cannot change."