No Pestilence at the Border

Mexico–United States barrier at the border of Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, USA. The crosses represent migrants who died in the crossing attempt. Some identified, some not. Surveillance tower in the background. © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

In this poem, I explore what various politicians have stated about immigrants using pest metaphors while interweaving pest control discourses. A pest is an animal that is “out of place.” Immigrants, too, are often “out of place” or “uprooted” or in between places. They live between the world in which they are from and the world in which they inhabit presently, never fully fitting into either world. As there is a multiplicity of immigrants who choose to cross the border from Mexico, there is also a multiplicity of pests who cross different kinds of borders and boundaries. Pests and immigrants are liminal beings, making some people uneasy. My intention here is not to universalize the figure of the immigrant nor the figure of the pest, but instead to explore the complications of immigration-pest discourse in US political cultures.

Review of After Art by David Joselit (Princeton)

David Joselit’s slim volume “After Art” offers multiple intriguing frameworks to analyze art in the present-day globalized art world. After Art backs away from the traditional approach of artist intent and production and looks at what happens to images once they are attached to the networks that circulate them. Instead of proselytizing individual or even original artworks, Joselit champions images that are constantly reproduced and remediated by artists and architects such as Tania Bruguera, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, Matthew Barney, Le Corbusier, and Rem Koolhaus.