The condition of the refugee is not simply a status or an experience, but a claim and a construct. And refugees are made not just by the conditions that force them to flee but by the response of others to that flight. Claims require the presentation of evidence and its consideration by an audience; this demand for narrative or self-exposure can seem at once like an interrogation or finally a chance to speak for oneself. Borrowing its title from a film by Phil Collins, and reading some of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on being a refugee, this paper will examine the means by which the claim and the refugee is made: aesthetic, political, legal, narrative, and others.
I see evidence being presented, an admission that it doesn’t speak for itself, but needs transmitters, ventriloquists, translators, staging. An asymmetrical collaboration.
Collins: Not to take a picture would have been an insult. People asked (a marker, chaos that needed to be recorded. Azoulay). Also, he’s surprised by how people stand still for the camera (even when it’s a videocamera)
The ambivalence of the witnessing camera. It can be both; a hearing can be an opportunity to be heard, or a violent interrogation.
At the heart of racism is the question that a man is not a man, a person is not a person, a human being.
The need for recognition from those who already consider themselves human and yet treat others like animals…
Claim for a transformation of status, and a declaration of an existing status.
Arendt: They are dependent on others, hence they need recognition, hence they male claims
Refugees have something to prove. There are no refugees without the ritual and rhetoric of proof; without the presentation of evidence.
“The loss of home and political status can become identical to being expelled from humanity altogether”
“Being human is something granted, and hence must be claimed”
Persuading the others on whose social standards we depend
“Humanitarian Reason” Fassin: In the past aid was given unconditionally (when?!), now applicants are required to expose their suffering. Through narrative, the testimony of the body, of forensic experts… Demands for evidence that the authorities require of their supplicants.
In return for the gift of fragments of their life, they receive the countergift of the means of survival.
Today the dominant ethos of the authorities regarding asylum is suspicion.
No evidence speaks for itself, the witnesses need other witnesses (ie; doctor’s certificate..). To make a claim heard always requires amplification.
Decisions for the minimal requirements for inclusion. Discrimination is always happening. Any community is premised on exclusion. Politics contests those demarcations. The history of human rights is that of arguments about who counts as “us humans”. Declaration of human rights: humans declared themselves subjects and objects of the utterance in which they named the human in one another. Their own witnesses and their own judges.
Paradigm of evidence, testimony, witness is a fundamental element of human rights and claiming for them.
With the claim of “we are human too” it’s not just adding chairs to a table it’s bringing in a new one, the definition of who we all are undergoes a shift.
A collection determined by chance 