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Bodies Under Duress (The Dystopic Future is Here)

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Choreographing the Airport

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Abstract

Global air travel has undergone a major shift in its short history, from the glamour of the 1930s to today’s crowded terminals and mandatory searches. Reflecting on the celebratory and dystopic claims of globalisation and nationalism, this chapter attempts to recoup the possibility for affective cosmopolitan belonging amongst the gross unevenness in freedom of movement present in the world and amplified through global travel. In the current age of global terror and neo-conservative liberalism, the airport is a place where the terror threat is specularised by the public; but as yet, our encounter with the disciplining apparatus of state security is an intersubjective one. As a version of the public sphere, cosmopolitan spaces such as the airport circulate affect through shared as well as singular experience; it is at the scale of the body that we might begin to enact an ethics of encounter with difference, with others.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Press release no. 5, 2 February 2017, available from http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2017-02-02-01.aspx/

  2. 2.

    For example, Rossmanith cites a young Indigenous offender who, “when asked by the State Parole Authority if he had anything to say in court, announced in a questioning, confused way, ‘I’m sorry for what I done?’” (2014, 23). See also Rossmanith (2015); Leader (2008, 2010); and Dwyer (2009).

  3. 3.

    For more see Butler and Gayatri Spivak’s printed conversation Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (2007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Justine Shih Pearson

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  1. Justine Shih Pearson
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Shih Pearson, J. (2018). Bodies Under Duress (The Dystopic Future is Here). In: Choreographing the Airport. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69572-3_5

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