Kevin Potter, "Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
01:07:22 Share

Summer's here and Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dress season ever. From beach days and weddings to weekend getaways and your everyday wardrobe. Discover stylish options under $100 from tons of your favorite brands like Mango, Skims, Princess Polly and Madewell. It's easy too with free shipping and free returns. In-store order pickup and more. Shop today in stores online at nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app.

I think you're on mute. Workday starting to sound the same? I think you're on mute. Find something that sounds better for your career on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn Job Collections, you can browse curated collections by relevant industries and benefits, like FlexPTO or hybrid workplaces, so you can find the right job for you. Get started at LinkedIn.com slash jobs. Finding where you fit. LinkedIn knows how.

You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that.

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and is pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, and welcome to New Books and Critical Theory, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Parvin Mano, the host of today's show. And today I'm joined by Kevin Potter, who's going to be telling us about his new book, Poetics of the Migrant. Kevin, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks so much for having me.

So Kevin Potter is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. So perhaps you want to start, Kevin, by giving us a more expansive introduction to yourself. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Yeah, thanks. So, yeah, as you said, I'm based at the University of Vienna. I've actually been at the University of Vienna since 2017 because it's also the department where I did my PhD there.

Before that, I was living in the Netherlands. That's where I did my master's, and I was living there for a few years. But actually, I'm originally from the United States. So I grew up in the state of Florida. It's where I spent my formative years, high school and university, where I did my undergraduate studies at the University of South Florida. So then I left the United States in 2013, and

And that's where I went to pursue graduate study in Europe. And I've been here ever since. I go back to visit the U.S. every once in a while, but I've been finding a, let's say, a comfortable home here in this part of the world. So that's where all of that started.

basically begins. I started studying literature back in, uh, started getting interested in literature back in high school and, uh, pursued the study of it, uh, as soon as I started university and have been doing this ever since. Wonderful. Um,

So maybe that kind of, you've given us a kind of history of your arrival into Vienna. Maybe that's a nice way to segue into the next question, which is the major project that you've undertaken in your time there. How did you come to write Poetics of the Migrant? Yeah, so Poetics of the Migrant is, well, I should say it started, it was my doctoral dissertation.

And it was a project that I built basically combining interests that I had already had before. So what I was doing for my master's thesis, I also did my master's thesis on migration and migrant literature. But

But I had grown and developed an affinity for the theoretical framework that I ended up developing, the kind of Deleuzian affect studies framework that comes to inform Poetics of the Migrant. I developed an interest in that throughout my graduate studies and eventually hit upon reading works of philosophers of movement.

um, throughout, uh, throughout that time. Um, once I entered into my PhD, I had proposed this project. It was the project I got hired to write on. Um, and this became sort of what developed out of all of those interests. So it was a convergence of my interest in migration as a social phenomenon, uh, as something that I felt, uh,

Offers us insights into all converging forces of social power. Those are what I still find to be one of the most meaningful parts of the study of migrant literature is how it offers us a kind of index and into into global forces of power.

So that was where that began. And then it started as my PhD. The project took various different forms when I was starting out. But then I settled on the idea of kind of constructing a typology of different migrant literatures. And that was what actually helped the project take shape.

So that was where that all began and then completed my PhD in 2022. And it was fairly soon after that, after I defended it, that I was fielding publishers for it.

Yeah. Oh, terrific. Well, let's get stuck into the book. And I'm really struck by, you know, in the opening, you start off by looking at a pamphlet, a UKIP pamphlet. And for listeners who aren't tuned into the British context, UKIP is a far-right political party in the UK. It's an abbreviation for United Kingdom in

Independence Party. So you kind of look at this, one of the pamphlets that they've produced, and you kind of undertake an analysis that claims, the big claim that you make is that the pamphlet enacts a poetics. And I found that a really interesting way of opening the book. I was wondering if you want to say a little bit to frame the rest of the conversation in the way that this opening also frames your book.

Tell us a little bit about the pamphlet, firstly. And then what do you mean by this notion of enacting a poetic

Yeah, so I'm glad you asked this because it was where it was, I felt it necessary for my project to start actually beyond the traditional realms of literature and to look at a genre that we don't typically look at in literary studies, which is the political pamphlet, you know, an explicit form of political propaganda that

And we certainly don't typically describe this genre as having a poetics, but I insist that it does because I think when we talk about poetics at its healthiest or at its most interesting, rather, is what it does for shaping what is visible and thinkable.

And that's not just something that literature does, right? We associate poetics with poetry, with form, and all of those things going all the way back to Aristotle. But really what shapes our knowledge of the world through linguistic cues, through framing, through actions of, through semi, through basically a semiotic form and through discourse.

Right. So the first first to say that my definition of poetics, which we'll get into more, I'm sure, is a very expansive definition. And I that I wanted it that way.

I found this pamphlet, I found it very interesting. The year that it was released, this is a time in which not long after, about a year after Donald Trump gets the presidency, the first time in the United States, not long after there's a wave of far-right backlash. And I was interested in seeing

How different political parties in general were really trying to capture the energy of this moment through various forms of, or let's say, trying to capture the resentment, the latent resentments against immigrants during this period.

And the animosity toward immigrants in this period and how they dress it up in this kind of triumphant language about how we're going to restore the nation and how we're going to restore the identity of a nation and all of these truly awful things.

you know, far-right ideologies. And so they found this pamphlet. I found it interesting to be able to look at it and say, well, this offers us something instructive about how

Political power is constructed through language, and it has always been the case. It has always been the case that politicians rely upon printed language and rhetoric, ways of demonizing people. And so that was, to me...

It didn't work for me to start the project by just saying, you know, this is what migrant literature is. This is what poetics means when we talk about literature. I want to start with raising the political stakes and saying that what we are talking about here, ostensibly the project is about migrant literature.

But what we're really thinking about here is that migrant literature is really a way of contributing to a poetics that we have already seen circulating throughout many societies in the way that political propaganda circulates throughout society. It makes certain relationships or certain relations, certain social relations knowable and thinkable.

And of course, they're trying to shape public knowledge. They're trying to shape ideologies and shape specific epistemologies. And so it is literature. And so how can these two be interacted and how can they be put into dialogue with each other? And of course, how can migrant literature offer, you know,

you know, as I insist, a sort of counterpoetics, right? Tell us a different story. Tell us a different idea that confronts the concepts of national identity, the concepts of history, the concepts of state that all political parties within a certain liberal regime rely upon. But

But maybe we need to confront that at the core of it. And we can start by understanding how we have inherited a kind of poetics that insists upon concepts of bordering and nation and stability and stasis and all of these things that govern migration politics and nationalist politics.

And how can we try to confront those right at the core and actually destabilize these concepts as having their own history, having their own discursive history that needs to be challenged? Yeah. I mean, this is fascinating. And we will get stuck into, you know, the way in which migrants have become these figures of power.

of hatred around which a lot of xenophobia can coalesce. But I'm kind of interested in something you just quite casually mentioned in the beginning, which is really this idea that the book is also pushing back on some of the parochialisms of literary studies, right? And what's taken as an object of study. So you are...

quite unabashed about the fact that literature should be taken as political. We should take that seriously. But what strikes me is also that you have a really strong sense of trying to broaden what counts as literature. And I was just wondering if you could say a little bit about how you see this book and where it sits within

you know, these sorts of parochialism, I think is the word I keep coming back. The parochialism of literary studies and literature departments, I guess, but also the relationship between the book and, you know, a broader political project. Because that seems to be a really strong strand in your work. I'm wondering if you could expand on that a little bit more. Yeah, I actually love this question because it really helps me to discuss the way that

And it's, of course, not unique to me in the sense that, of course, on the one hand, we would say literature or poetry in the various genres within what we all consider to be the sort of traditional medium of literature is actually better understood to me as a form of discourse. Right.

And that's, as I said, that's not unique to me. That has a very long history. I mean, we could talk about Foucault. We could talk about plenty of others who have been very, very keen on this, right? And my sense is that migrant literature also enacts its own, it also has its own discourse. It has its own, let's say, constellation of semiotic forms that we identify with it. Literature itself being one form of discourse among many.

And therefore, if we see all of these discursive regimes as an acting of poetics, then we can see how they are always interacting with power and politics. Right. So the idea, you know, I think you're absolutely right to locate my sort of.

my sort of resistance to the kind of parochialisms, it says, you know, literature and art are over here and politics is over here. No, these are throughout history. These have always been interacting with each other and whether, you know, whether or to what extent you want to say that,

literature is a kind of, you know, is a way of reflecting social power, whether it's a way of confronting social power. That really depends, I suppose, on what is at stake for you or what is at stake for any literary critic or any cultural critic. But to me, the way in which literature has an affective quality, and I rely a lot in

in the book on Jacques Ranciere as well, where he talks about, you know, the politics of aesthetics, which is what reshapes the sensible world, the world of inclusion and exclusion. And he's very clear as well that this is something that we, of course, he's talking about the politics of aesthetics, you know,

boiling down within the regime of art and literature and culture. But he's also saying that a lot of politics in general has to rely upon a discursive regime or a regime of power that determines what is included and what is excluded and what can therefore be apprehended by our senses.

Similarly, I mean, I don't rely on him a lot in this book, but, you know, someone like Frederick Jameson teaching us, you know, a lot of the socially symbolic act is a way of working through the contradictions of a present moment and trying to, you know, enable us to have where a certain, where a totality can be apprehended within style.

These are the it's for thinkers like these guys and several others that the notion that we can see the form of literature as if it is dislodged from history or dislodged from from the contradictions of history.

and all of these problems of power is to me, as you rightly point out, is to me is a parochialism that I would like to overcome because there we can see that literature has these stakes. It also...

It also acts upon power. And that's where that affect theory stuff comes in. It's not just a reflection of it. It's not just a representation of it. It actually acts on power and it acts upon our subjectivity. It acts upon, it acts upon the constellation of the sort of movability of,

intensive movements that we have as a society. And it is interacting with other texts. So putting these things all into combination really required, like I said, and like you're pointing out, you know, it really has to say that migrant literature is again, you know, it's one form of discourse, but really poetics as a regime that has to consider where every kind of

sort of act of reading every speech act every semiotic system is also interacting and sort of creating our knowledge about the world that's wonderfully articulated thank you um

I guess this is a good time to get into, you know, the big theoretical intervention that you make, i.e. kinopoetics. And in your book, you outline that kinopoetics is, it flows out of something known as kinopolitics, give us a little bit of its history. And you claim that kinopoetics supplies an added layer to kinopolitics. And I wonder if this is a good time,

to lay out for us what exactly or how you theorize kinopoetics, but also it's sort of its own intellectual history and what it's drawing on. Sure. Yeah. So I'll say that as you rightly said, I mean, it's an extension of what's called kinopolitics. That's a term from the philosopher Thomas Nail. Yeah.

Thomas was a very he was a great support in this project as well. He wrote the very nice endorsement on the back of the book. He was also part of my doctoral committee. So it was a wonderful thing to have this kind of collaboration with him. But essentially, one of the things that he claims in this concept of Kino politics.

is that we can take a look at the history of movement, of human movement throughout history, and say that actually movement is the dominant political force that shapes society rather than the other way around, right? So we typically, all of us kind of...

intuitively have thought about this idea that there's this sort of establishment of states and states established borders and then that was where we came up, that was where we had to learn to manage the movement of people between states or between territories or between these different spatialities. But rather what he shows throughout his work, but specifically his two books that I rely on the most is that we can reverse this relationship.

What is actually the case throughout human history is that movement shapes all of these different regimes of state, shapes all these conceptions of state and territoriality, and that the migrant is the primary constitutive figure of social history. Now, what is quite interesting about that

is it reasserts the idea, or not reasserts the idea, but rather it challenges the idea that the migrant is this kind of secondary figure to the citizen. It's either the migrant is either a failed citizen or a soon-to-be citizen or as a displaced or marginal figure. This actually reasserts a kind of political primacy.

The migrant is an affirmative figure, a moving figure who shapes everything and shapes all of what we have. And, you know, it's not, and I just want to, you know, because I've been accused of this in the past, I don't want it to seem that, you know, I'm looking at migration as this constantly positive, constantly affirmative force. It is most certainly the case that the history of migration is a history of dispossession.

a history of violence, kidnapping, enslavement, a history of brutality and exclusion. But those exclusions are the driving motor of history rather than secondary mechanisms of how history works. And so the question is, how does it therefore become that the migrant can be seen as this transformative figure

And so that idea really appealed to me, this idea that we'd sort of think about the agents of history, the movers of history, the transformative movers of history, and there are several different migratory figures who are creating this. Okay, so my idea was, how can I take this and give this some kind of...

intervention into literary studies because we haven't really, you know, there's always this case in which how we talk about migrant literature, the way we talk about migrant literature is, and I grew very impatient with this during my master's thesis. I always found that the scholarship was always, you know, how do we talk about a marginal figure, an excluded figure, the figure who is like a sort of stranger to the nation. And those ideas are, are,

are no doubt. Those are thematically represented within migrant literature. But what can we say about a migrant figure who is actively shaping their social milieu? What can we say about the

migrant figure who is creatively shaping their system of power that they are navigating in and how can these texts of migrant literature be also forms of enacting forms of movement what I call intensive movement

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want is a great feeling. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, Prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail-biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast, free delivery, Prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to learn more.

And so I shaped the idea of Kino politics and I turn it into Kino poetics. And I see poetics and politics as these sort of.

systems that mutually reinforce each other. You can't really have a politics without understanding the discursive and epistemological and affective side of things, which is all of what I see as built into poetics or what poetics can be or what it should be. And simultaneously, we can't really understand affect epistemology, language, and discourse without seeing how they are constituted along material power and material, um,

constraints and forces of dispossession. So I see these as mutually reinforcing each other. But as you quote in the book, I say it adds this extra layer because we hadn't really yet been able to talk about, you know, so far the keynote politics was all about the extensive movement, the movement of people across spatial, across space, across borders. But the intensive movement is where it's very interesting for me.

Because I want to see also how do we build out a notion of what is what is poetics and what is discourse and what are semiotics capable of moving? And we we often speak very metaphorically in these terms all the time. Right. We say, oh, this text was very moving. It had this very, you know, oh, I felt so moved by it. So.

we could say these kinds of banalities, but they're actually instructive about a very real, um, a very, uh, real idea of what literature is, is it actually moves us into a new space of what is thinkable and what we can, uh,

possibly process and what we can know about our world. And when I feel moved by something, when I feel, you know, as if my, my affects have been moved a certain way, I'm able to think differently. I'm able to, I'm able to think in turn, think in different intensities about, about the actual, um,

About actual movement, the movement of people, the movement of people who are shaping all of our lives, the movement through cities, the movement across borders, movements within language, which we'll get to. Right. So it seems to me that this question of how can we make a world that is constructed where a world in which movement exists?

Is the primary force. How can we make that visible to us? Because right now we're all almost all of us are stuck in this paradigm in which the nation state is the main unit of reference of how we understand where all political power is consolidated.

And it's we're all still whether we like to admit it or not, we're all inheriting sort of liberal ideas of political subjectivity. You know, the citizen as the you know, the state guarantees rights to the citizen. Right. Isn't it Hannah Arendt who says citizenship is the right to have rights? Right. So that's liberal political theory. Right.

How can we get a discourse that works against that paradigm? And what migrant literature is, is that counter discourse. And what Kino Poetics is, is a way of both methodologically bringing out that counter discourse and illuminating it through, you know, migrant literature, as I see as the genre form that acts as this counter discourse.

But I think it can exist beyond migrant literature as well, which, yeah, I say a little bit of that in the conclusion of the book.

Yeah, I mean, I guess you sort of preempted this because one of the questions that came to mind as you were speaking was, I wonder if what you think about the potential overdetermination of the figure of the migrant and migration. But it seems to me from your response that you really productively think about metaphors of movement.

in a really broad sense, a really productive sense, to think about its politics without discounting the very real ways in which migrants have been demonized and turned into this sort of political figure of hate in some ways, right? Absolutely. You draw a typology of different migrant literatures, right?

You talk about, you know, the distinction between migrant literatures and literatures on migration, which I found quite fascinating. But you also touch on, you know, diasporic literatures and also migration literature. So there are lots of, lots of,

terms here. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about these different terms and, you know, the differences between these things, the productive differences. Sure. I mean, that part of the book, you know, right in the introduction is trying to lay out, you know, why I insist on the phrase migrant literature and what I think it has in common with all of these other sort of adjacent terms.

genres or ways of framing literatures of migration or migration literature or diasporic literatures. These are terms get thrown around a lot in, in the field of literary studies and specifically in sort of post-colonial literature. Um, but to me, I wanted to insist on the phrase migrant literature because the whole, uh,

My insistence is literatures which focalize and which foreground the experience of migrancy as a kind of subjectivity. Diaspora, of course, there's overlaps. There's no question about it. If you think about diasporic literature, surely we have characters who leave their country of origin or

But diasporic literature, to me, the interest there is thinking about how sort of migrant communities sort of form sort of diasporic enclaves within their arrival countries.

which again is not irrelevant to migration. That's a major part of navigating, as you pointed out, you know, hostility, anger, hatred, racism, how these kinds of ways in which society has kind of

pushed immigrants into these kinds of small cloistered communities that feel so kind of often isolated and therefore deeply impoverished as well. So these are things that are major concerns in migrant literature. But as a literature broadly, migrant literature should be concerned with movement issues

with a constant movement rather than a simple sort of one directional trajectory, you know, from place of origin to, to a rival country, one specific enclave without talking about the multiplicity of movements which take place. Right. And in general as well, within,

Within lots of diaspora literature, we also have the notions of sort of second generation, right? Post-migration is another genre that I don't talk about in the book, but it's another one that's very...

gaining traction in the English-speaking world, but certainly is the idea of how sort of the second generation of people, of immigrants whose parents were immigrants and things like this, these are also sort of very, offer very similar thematic preoccupations. But within migrant literature, I'm interested in specifically a subject that

who is therefore carrying out a form of movement in quite literally sort of leaving and immigrating, right? But also how, therefore, through their perspectives,

they are also shaping the story, either through sort of first person or through a kind of, you know, sort of third person limited, but nevertheless, are very much active in the creation of the story through their movement. And that was a distinction I needed to make partially because it needed to be a question about the migrant as a figure rather than migration as a phenomenon.

Right. And therefore, to really think about migrant configurations as enacting something central to the story. And so this this distinction sort of was was where I could recuperate this idea of the migrant again as the primary constitutive figure of history. They're also the primary constitutive figure of the text.

Fascinating. You then go on to talk about these broad traditions of migrant literature, post-tremor studies.

With what you call a kind of sedentary metaphysics, right? And you do this by really opening up a really comprehensive outline of the underpinnings of citizenship and statehood and the nation state. Could you tell us a little bit more?

Yeah, so it's a complex... Incidentally, I just got to say, when I wrote that part in my dissertation, the first and second chapter of the book, the first time it was written was one big chapter, and it was 100 pages in my dissertation.

So this was me just trying to flex my muscles of theory in general and ideas around nation and identity. So that part, I'm very happy you managed to get through that chapter because it is the most theoretically dense. And it's what I usually tell people. I won't be offended if they skip it. But I'm very glad you're asking. It's not bite-sized. I'll give you that.

No, that's no question about it. No question about it. And it's one where I'm surprised the publisher still thought like, oh, yeah, keep that in. So anyway, I mean, I think I would have I think I probably would have said, no, please. I wrote so much. Don't take it away from me. But it's so it's a very dense chapter. So what I talk about with the sedentary metaphysics is my way of.

Talking about what is the prevailing paradigm around which we typically construct and conceptualize migration. It's kind of what I hinted at earlier with the idea that we have liberal political subjectivity. We have notions of citizenship. And all of these are based on settlement.

You know, most of us who have to get visas and residence permits understand that our ability to navigate the job market, our ability to kind of find housing is all, it's all based, it all comes from this notion of settlement. It's all really there as the thing that makes the difference between whether you are legitimized by the state, whether the state legitimizes you.

Whether you're settled or not, I quote, I don't have their names off the top of my head, but I know that I quote these political scientists who talk about the UN Convention on Refugees. And they say, look, this organization does great for you when you've arrived somewhere, but nothing for you when you're on the move.

You know, these are the kinds of things that we deal with as a contradiction for why most liberal democracies cannot handle migration and why they do such a terrible job at offering all the things that we deem to be not only just but necessary to

for providing rights to immigrants and providing safety to immigrants. When you fall outside of this regime of sedentarism, sedentarism is basically the idea of a place-based democracy.

of place-based politics, where as long as you are within circumscribed borders, the state can represent you because they can tax you and because you can be well-respected

sort of located. You can also be well surveilled. And that idea has such a, it goes so far. I mean, it has such a deep history. You know, we have sort of all these sort of proto-enlightenment ideas around, you know, what the nation state is and how the self is constructed in relation to the state. I think I cite Hegel at some point in which he says, you know, the nation state or the, you know, we come to our consciousness of ourselves insofar as we're connected to the state and all of this stuff.

that's how far back that history goes, right with the rise of modernity, right with the rise of what we now understand to be concepts of sovereignty and concepts of the nation state. So all of those ideas, we are still living with that legacy of a sedentary metaphysics. But it's also the case that

As I was saying, you know, it's one of the reasons why liberal democracy is so constrained in what it can offer people in terms of rights. I mean, we're seeing these contradictions now in Congress.

In Palestine, for example, I think if you think about the fact that people who have been considered non-state subjectivities in an illegal occupation, in an apartheid state, that

of many of the sinister aspects of Palestinian existence, of being forced into permanent refugee status since the Nakba and then subsumed under an illegal occupation in 1967.

The contradictions at the heart of that is because liberal systems of sovereignty cannot handle trying to accommodate refugees. And as long as sovereignty is the governing system of how we devise citizenship and how we devise the guarantees of rights and justice,

It is always going to be the case that as long as a people are excluded from the normal, from the norms of citizenship, no political system has the language to

or even the material structure to offer us any kinds of restoration from all of these crimes. And now we're seeing it as well, that what kind of sort of challenge can you pose to a massive military force when you don't even have the benefit of

a state, let alone a notion of citizenship, let alone a notion of rights within a rights-based structure.

And so that system is with all of us. It is what we are all inheriting and what all of us have to navigate. I mean, even in my case, you know, I come to Austria. I'm what's called a third country national here because I'm outside of the EU and I'm also outside of Austria. And my navigating the system, I mean, I'm of a relatively affluent system because, of course, I'm being paid as an academic to be here and all of this stuff.

And yet it's it's it my permit is called a settlement permit. Right. Because that's how they define me. You have settled here. Right. And that notion governs everything from whether I can apply for other jobs or whether I can get an apartment. It's the notion of settlement is paramount. And whether and then when you when you put people in a constant state of dispossession, a constant state of expulsion and exclusion.

that rights-based structure completely falls apart in being unable to do anything to accommodate these contradictions. Again, for the Palestinian people, for example. I think that is going to forever be something that we understand as what falls out of a system of modernity that we've all inherited.

in the legacy of that and where it falls, where, where, um, where a permanently dispossessed, permanently excluded people are always going to have to confront a system that is devised historically through a consolidation of

power, a consolidation of ruling class power that needs to appeal to notions of national identity and a real sense of homogeneity of the nation. And I even complicate notions of multiculturalism. I'm not

I'm not the first to do that either. But it's always going to be hobbled by the fact that at the end of the day, a state system is always going to be exclusionary and borders are always going to be divided. That's how they work. That's how they're always going to work. And if we have only systems of settlement that are going to determine whether people get their basic needs met,

or are they going to be seen as permanently terrorists? Are they going to be seen permanently as criminals? Are they going to be seen as permanently destabilizing the nation? Well, we need to do something at the core of this paradigm because it has created a vast world of violence, a huge world of military conflict, and one in which people are

systematically displaced and dispossessed. So I think the sedentary metaphysics is even what most of us want. You know, most of us who even want justice for migrants and refugees, we're still thinking about systems of asylum and systems of offering passageways

paths to citizenship. It's this kind of teleology that even for those of us who want to advocate for immigrants say, eventually the goal is to restore citizenship.

But that's where that system really has internal contradictions. Because we have more people moving on the planet than we do have people settling. I once looked this up recently. If you sort of look up the number of people moving around the planet, the number of people in sheer numbers is higher than the population of most nations.

So what do we, you know, where, where do we locate them? Where do we locate them? You know, and, and we locate them between borders, but borders, nation states don't have anything to offer or don't have any way to represent you if you are in between or you are in motion, you are moving.

And so we don't have a system for moving people. We don't have a, we don't have, are you a moving citizen? We don't have a permit for that. We have a permit for when you arrive and when you, and what you can do when you arrive. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's a, it's that basic history, basic, you know, several century long history that I'm outlining in that part of the book, which is why it's so theoretically dense and why it's so long only to say that it's this one that we are,

pretty much stuck with for now. But a kinopolitics is a start in the direction of really challenging it at its basis, because it insists on an idea of, you know, our idea, our identity of ourselves is identified with our identity and our identity is identified with our citizenship. And within a certain circumscript, there's kinopolitics and kinopoetics that

Tears that idea down at its core because it says, no, what we actually are are moving figures. What our society is and what our world is, is a world of movement, not a world of settled people with settled identities and settled within borders. So we have to really understand that specific paradigm and how it works before we can try to also challenge it.

Calling hard seltzer lovers. Searching for the tastiest seltzer? Look no further. Neutral Vodka Seltzer is absolutely delicious. Made with real vodka and real juice, Neutral keeps it tasty with every sip. With flavors like pineapple, watermelon, orange, and lime, there's something for everyone. Neutral. Keep it tasty. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2025 Anheuser-Busch. Neutral flavored vodka and carbonation. 4.5% alcohol by volume. St. Louis, Missouri.

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.

PMS, pregnancy, menopause. Being a woman is a lot. Oli supports you and yours with expert solutions for every age and life stage. They just launched two new products exclusively at Walmart. Period Hero combats flow, mood swings, and more during PMS. And Balance Perimeno to support hormonal balance, mood, and metabolism during perimenopause. Grab yours at Oli.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Sure. Yeah, I think what's really interesting is that kind of the preeminent political question that you raise, which is what happens when one is, one finds oneself outside of the category of the citizen, right? Because the nation state structure, the political form of the nation state is fundamentally designed to operate in a kind of really static, in a static way, right? And

And then often what we see these days, as you've pointed out, is

outside of the category of citizen, there's a kind of differential distribution of rights and protections. And that extends and stretches from, you know, labor protections, housing protections, all the way to the, you know, the really basic protection of not having a house bombed. And we see that. We see that on our screens these days, 24-7. But I also think that there is a way in which the state's

or states in general, displace their responsibilities to citizens onto the figure of the migrant. I think about the UK, for example, and this is not, the UK is not the only country that does this, but the UK, where immigration has kind of surged to the forefront of political discourse recently,

And migrants are increasingly blamed for things like long healthcare waiting lists, long NHS waiting lists. But then when you think about it, the visa system, if someone is on a visa, an immigrant who is here on a visa, by definition, they have already paid something that in the UK is called the Immigration Health Surcharge. So they've kind of quantified

what a non-citizen would cost the healthcare system, and they get them to pay it for every year of their visa. They also pay taxes, so there's a doubling there. And a lot of migrants work in the healthcare system, right? So they're not the ones causing the problem. So at sort of every level, when you think about it, empirically, this doesn't line up. Yet, in political discourse, they are sort of held up as the reason why waiting lists are long. Well,

when actually the reason for it is chronic underinvestment in public health care services. There is a way in which the figure of the migrant can be used to stave off the state's responsibility to its citizens within this kind of the limitations of the nation state system.

I wonder if this is a way to try and just get into, and this is in some ways an impossible question for you to give, but I wonder if this is a way for you to tell us about the different kinds of kinopoetics that you have, what that might tell us about the interconnection between

literature and cultural politics. So it's kind of taking us back to where we began, but I'm asking you also to make what might be a massive detour via the various kinophoetics that you outlined. Yeah, so I construct this kind of typology within the book. What I'm interested in is how different forms of migrant literature correspond to different configurations of migrant states.

And so this is, again, something I inherit from the kinopolitics theory. In that way, I'm saying, you know, throughout history, we have had different forms of different forms of migrancy that are correspondent with different sort of, if you like,

modes of production or different modes of state building or different modes of territoriality. And those different figures serve in kind of a similar way that you were just saying. They kind of serve the interests of the state

in order to kind of manage its own scarce resources. And so they use scapegoating, they use forms of exclusion, they use form of violence, forms of depriving people of territory. So in any event, there's these different migrant figures that have proceeded throughout different historic moments

And different types of migrancy. So there's the sort of there's the nomad figure which emerges out of the Neolithic era. There's the barbarian that emerges out of the ancient, out of the sort of ancient era. And we have the vagabond that emerges out of the Middle Ages and the proletariat.

urges out of modernity. Now, I don't talk about the proletariat in this book. There are various reasons for that. I had originally thought I would have another chapter devoted to the figure of the proletariat, but I decided that I have...

I found that trying to talk about the relationship between labor and the forces of refusal were already something I had covered at a different part of the book when I was talking about different poetics of migration. So it didn't really work for me that well. But in any event, I wanted to sort of construct how the other three figures I mentioned, the nomad, the vagabond, and the barbarian,

arrive with different configurations of not just historical configurations, but political configurations and how those are therefore reflected in different discourses, different uses of literature, different ways of relating to power. And so what I did was try to construct a typology of subgenres within migrant literature.

and how these different migration intensities and configurations correspond to the types of texts that we often find in migrant literature, within the genre of migrant literature. And so these, again,

offer us a lot of instructive information about not just exclusion and dispossession and violence and hatred and racialization, but different forms of dispossession, exclusion, uh,

displacement, racism that correspond to how the different migrant figures are relating to their milieu, how they're relating to language, and what level they are actually confronting the state system or the states of power. So that's where this kind of typology came from. And it was really important to me that, again, you know, not just

just collapsing all migrancy as just one thing or migration just looks the same no matter how you look at it. That's not even true historically, let alone true in migrant literature. And it shouldn't be. And so the issue was then not to get too insistent upon this idea of an affirmative type of movement because it is very violent.

It's very cruel, the system of exclusion. And it can create all these kinds of agonies. But what I show within these different literatures as well is how the characters themselves, through their migration, are shaping the story for us. And depending upon how they map onto this typology of migration.

in typology of movement shapes actually how they relate to their own subjectivities and how that subjectivity comes out within these different subgenres. So we could get into it if you like, but just to say that with the first part of the nomad figure, I call this a destructive kinopoetics with the genre of magic realism. I see this as a kind of destructive genre, both

both in a positive and negative sense. But in a positive sense, it really is a genre that really goes against the kind of bourgeois realism

that we've inherited. And it's no accident that it's a distinctly post-colonial genre, right? And so what is its function as a post-colonial genre? Well, I see it as a sort of destructive genre in a good way, right? It destroys the typical parameters around bordering and nations that we're used to. And by doing that, it brings sort of more than one reality into one field of vision,

And by doing that, it actually makes that kind of world outside of the nation state and bordering and citizenship more thinkable. And different texts illuminate these processes, but they also illuminate the violence as well, the violence around modernity, the violence around migration. So that's where that goes. And then a chapter, what I call the wandering kinopoetics, relation to the literatures of the city itself.

Wandering through the city. We call this the social realist text. Sometimes called the industrial novel. Sometimes called the urban city novel. However you want to frame it. It's novels in which the main setting is within a city. Having to deal with the kinds of surveillance. And navigating crowds. Navigating transportation. Navigating...

forms of managing the movement of people within a city and how that attends to a notion as well of criminality, right? You think about stop and frisk laws in New York City, for example, where it's constantly in concentrated urban environments where heavy policing takes place and therefore very overt forms of discrimination become

attached to ideas of criminality, you know, how someone is walking and, you know, following crosswalks and things like this, you know, irregular movement and all of that. And then the final chapter, what I call a stuttering kinopoetics. This is a way of really... This one kind of brings poetics down to the more conventional way we talk about poetics, right? The relationship to language and form and style. And that, what I'm really interested in,

in how language, you know, I quote Deleuze here in which he says, you know, language is set into disequilibrium. And of course, that's where we get the name for the figure of the barbarian. You know, the barbarian was thought historically as the figure whose stuttering or stammering language marked their foreignness. But Aristotle said of the barbarian that the barbarian is a natural born slave.

So it was part of that foreignness that was integrated, that foreign speech pattern that was integrated into the way in which the barbarian figure was interpolated. And it's therefore through a stuttering kin of poetics, we could think about the way in which conventions of standardized language can be challenged through experimenting with language.

language and therefore a stuttering. Either we think of it as a speech impediment or we think about it as a creative way of turning language inside out, you know, and turning it into a new form of how can what can language do? What kind of new ways can language exist? And again, that's something that we've talked about a lot in postcolonial literature and creolization and migrant literature. So it's there that I think

trying to talk about what we already discussed quite heavily in the field of post-colonial and migrant literature, but how can we talk about it through movement? How can movement be the way that this can be discussed rather than how we usually talk about it, which is, you know,

These are identities that are marginal and excluded and not part of the nation. No, they're active. These are active figures. They're actively shaping the world, not excluded from it, not secondary, not failed citizens. It's not that creolized English is a non-standard and therefore shouldn't be accommodated within schools. It's ungrammatical. It's wrong. No, this is an active language. It is reshaping the text and

And it is creative and it is doing something new. It's moving standardization into a new realm of possible ways of thinking how language can be. So these are where I kind of see this different migrant configurations going and different typologies.

That was amazing. It's a tour de force, as some would say. Listen, Kevin, we've taken up a lot of your time. I'm really grateful for you spending some time with us talking about this fantastic book. The traditional final question I ask on the New Books in Critical Theory channel is what next project are you looking forward to? Yeah, well, I have a couple of projects going. I'll just mention two of them. One is my second book. So for...

Any listeners who are familiar with the German system or the German speaking system, academic system, what we do after we do our PhD, when we do a postdoc, we work on what's called our habilitation, which the way I describe it to people outside of the system, it's basically our second dissertation. And it's meant to be

on a topic different from the one I did my PhD in. So my second book is on 19th century British and Irish literature with a focus on anarchist thought. So I look at ontological, political, and theological anarchism in 19th century British and Irish literature. So that's what my second book is going to be. A tentative title for the book is The Abolition Unconscious, which I'm pretty

pretty proud of that title. Yeah. And then the other project has been a major focus of mine. I hinted earlier, just given the horrors of the last 19 months and the genocide in Gaza, Palestine has been a major preoccupation of mine. And I'm working on several both written projects centered around Palestine, a couple of conferences, but also I've been writing publicly and speaking publicly a lot about Palestine. So because I taught

courses on Palestine throughout my career, that has also been a major focus of mine in my effort to try to offer whatever intervention I can as an academic, given how grievous this moment has been for the Palestinian people. And my interest as well in, as I said earlier, these contradictions of the nation state and how horrific

all of this violence is, that has been a major move. I'm moving in that direction now with a lot of my work. And I've been also dusting off some of my old Marxist writing from my earlier parts of my career. So I'm doing a lot of that as well.

Terrific. That sounds really grand and really important work. And I'm looking forward to seeing how that develops. Hey, I want to thank you for being on the show today. Poetics of the Migrant has just been released in paperback, I gather. And have you got a discount code to share with listeners? Yes. If they use the code PAPER30...

all one word, I suppose, paper, the number 30, uh, they'll get 30% off through the Edinburgh university press website. It just came out in paperback at the beginning of May. And, uh, I'm very happy with the new version because they've also corrected some of the typos that were in the hardcover edition. Uh, and so I'm very happy that they're doing that. And yes, uh,

please, I would be very happy if people would be willing to get their hands on it. I have it on good authority that the book is the kind that makes you look interesting if you're reading it in public. So people want to want to know, wow, what are you reading? So I'd be very happy if people would would pick it up. And and also it's available through a lot of university library databases. So.

Excellent. So Poetic of the Migrant is out with Edinburgh University Press. It's out in paperback now. Use the code PAPER30, that's PAPER30, for 30% off. As a bonus, it will also make you look incredibly intellectual, especially if you're reading it on the Metro or in any other public place. Kevin, it was brilliant having you on. I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm looking forward to chatting again, hopefully at some point in the future.

Take lots of care. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.