Strangers in Paradise: Migrant Figurations in Media Culture

This chapter revisits some of the dominant figurations around migration, often connected to the notion of strangeness and defamiliarization. It first reviews and analyzes theories and notions of the “stranger” as they have emerged in the fields of social theory and cultural studies to then move on to the realm of media culture. The aim is to show how these representations, or forms of estrangement, come into being and how migrants respond by turning defamiliarization into forms of belonging. This will be articulated through a close analysis of the film Stranger in Paradise (2016) by Guido Hendrikx. Through this film, the chapter explores the strategies used by Europe (or the EU) to turn migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, into strangers who are far from being considered future fellow citizens. In the closing section, the chapter briefly revisits the approach to migrant figurations by reviewing the video Stranger (Yabancı 2004–2006) by the Turkish artist Nilbar Güresṃ which explores how strangeness and defamiliarization can be deployed as critical tools for making a feminist, postcolonial, and performative intervention into the space of Europe and its discriminatory default positioning.