Debarati Sanyal, "Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges" (Fordham, 2025)

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Gina Stamm (2:01)

Welcome to The New Books Network.

Welcome to The New Books Network. I'm your host, Gina Stamm, and with me today is Professor Debarati Sanyal to discuss her new book, Arts of the Border, Fugitive Bodies at Europe's Edges, published by Fordham in 2025 Dr. Sanyal is Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and is affiliated with the designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of European Studies. Her teaching and research interests span 19th to 20th century French and Francophone literature, Memory Studies, Aesthetics and Bio-Necropolitics, Critical Human Rights, and Refugee Studies. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently co-PI on the Mellon-funded A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times. In addition to the book we are discussing today, Dr. Sanyal is also the author of Memory and Complicity, Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, which is also published in French translation, and The Violence of Modernity, Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form, as well as guest and co-editor of multiple special journal issues and author of numerous articles and book chapters. Dr. Sanyal, welcome to the podcast.

Debarati Sanyal (3:15)

Thanks for having me.

Gina Stamm (3:16)

Could you tell us about the genesis of this project and how you developed it?

Debarati Sanyal (3:20)

Sure. There are multiple sources.

One of them is I've always been very interested in the production of narratives, and specifically of narratives of trauma, which I have a kind of long-standing vexed relationship to the concept of trauma and the kinds of differences that it can obliterate.

And so I was interested in thinking about how it is that asylum applicants have to kind of organize their narratives in very specific ways according to diagnostic codes that are often very universalizing. So initially, I thought this project was going to be about those codes and it was going to be something like on the Poetics of Political Asylum. But then I was also really interested in how certain sites of detention camps, like I'm thinking about Rive-Salt for instance in France, are palimpsestic sites of concentrationary memory, like Rive-Salt served as a site of detention for Spanish folks who were fleeing Franco, then also among other detainee populations, also housed Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, I imagine, who were destined for Drancy, then became a place for haqqis and also for supporters of the Algerian independence, and then finally, before it closed down and became a memorial, also detained illegalized migrants. So I'm really fascinated by sites of detention, how they work. And then, of course, there's this camp paradigm that people often kind of evoke to explain all these different kinds of detention. And I wanted to see how it is that there are different forms of detention, and there's a nuance that aesthetic representations of containment, control, deportation, and detention can actually really attend to those nuances. So I guess those are two sources for this project.