From the container to the contained: Carceral Geographies and Migrant Identity in Refugee Graphic Novels
Talk by Associate Professor Bidisha Banerjee, University of Hong Kong.
Refugee detention centres are highly securitised spaces of incarceration and isolation. They form part of a larger economy of ‘brutalization’ which transforms parts of the global population into ‘humanity in a cage’ (Mbembe 2020: 151). In these inhumane spaces, migrants are often characterised as legitimate subjects of incarceration, not only as undesirable outsiders but also as potentially dangerous subjects prone to crime and illegal activities. This is a curious notion when we consider that most migrants have done nothing criminal except attempting to cross borders without the adequate paperwork. Despite Giorgio Agamben’s influential work characterising detention facilities as spaces where rule of law is suspended and what we have instead is a state of exception, what we have increasingly seeing is a conflation of criminal and immigration law in dealing with migrants, thus giving rise to the term ‘crimmigration’ (Stumpf, 2006).
If the detainers use space as a means of control (Martin and Mitchelson, 2009), we might ask how migrant detainees may attempt to convert these same spaces into affective spaces of belonging or even of home making. How does the precarity of place and identity determine the framing of migrant identity? Many graphic novelists have taken up the task of depicting carceral spaces visually: for example, Tings Chak’s Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2017), Nick Olle and Sam Wallman’s At Work Inside our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story (2014), Safdar Ahmed’s Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System (2022), Hippolyte and Vincent Zabus’ Les Ombres (2013), and many others. Through a reading of Undocumented, as well as other graphic novels and webcomics exploring migrant detention, this presentation will discuss the portrayal of carceral spatialities and the ways in which practices of policing and detention shape migrant subjectivities.
Speaker bio
Bidisha Banerjee is Associate Professor of English and Acting Head of Department in the Literature and Cultural Studies Department at the Education University of Hong Kong. She has published widely on South Asian diasporic literature and film, visual culture, and the refugee graphic novel. She leads the transdisciplinary project Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces. She recently published her monograph Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2025) as well as the edited collection Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces. She has also co-edited special issues on Thanatic Ethics with Interventions (2024) and Cultural Studies (2026) and on the refugee graphic novel with the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2025).