When A Seventh Man was published in 1975, the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr’s claim was to create an inventory of moments from daily lives of the immigrant workers in Europe, especially Turkish immigrants in Germany during the 70s. In 2010, John Berger wrote a new preface for the second edition. In this preface he does not talk about the data itself that could potentially explain the book’s contemporary relevance. On the contrary, he starts to make another list of what possibly could not be mentioned in the book: the present establishment of the global economic order, declining power of trade unions, migratory transformations of factories, neoliberal forms of oppression against minority populations in the Global South, the polarizing financial agency of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (7). With the articulation of such list, Berger makes the audience see the images that reconstruct an everyday life repeatedly, each time with added layers of perception, knowledge, and meaning-making. In the end, the photographic image, its circulation and interpretation will reveal one’s own unequal reality that takes place within the act of looking, and within the placement of the image as an object of looking: “The album is alive.” (9) Jean Mohr’s photographs in A Seventh Man (1975) resurface in the contemporary moment in one of the most watched contemporary films in Germany, titled Almanya: Welcome to Germany, (dir. Yasemin Samdereli, 2011). The untroubled continuity of the images as forms of intertitles in the story rendered the continuing problems expressed by the presented community itself as non-existent. In turn, the popularity of the photographs in the film serves for an affirmation of Turkish community’s potential reconciliation with the German government’s policies. Here, the legitimacy of knowledge also depends on its possibility and degree of its evaluation. This allows me to ask a set of critical questions about the criteria of what life means, and whose life meets such criteria: what counts as life? Which particular articulations of life do institutions, festivals and literary award organizations financially and aesthetically evaluate, support, promote and distribute, and which do they not? What kinds of perception and resistance do such legitimizations lead to? In asking these questions, I consider Germany as a place for investigating these questions on a more comparative scale, especially with its centrality in Europe with regards to more recent politics of immigration.

The conjunction of authoritarian rule, state and regime fragility, terrorist insurgents and forced migration has long been a core feature of Middle East politics. But today’s unprecedented number of the forcibly displaced is set to become a defining feature of the 21st century. Its political impact reaches into both domestic and foreign policy spheres and poses challenges to areas of origin, transit and destination. Germany stands out as the sixth among the world’s main countries of asylum, and as the first by far among European countries. The influx of one million refugees to Germany and Chancellor Merkel’s open-border policy, have led public discourse to refer to it as a “refugee crisis”. It is more accurate to describe it as a political crisis over the issue of forced migration. The proposed paper therefore presents a cross-time within-case comparison of the German case, comparing political reactions and foreign policy strategies as a reaction to two waves of migrant influx (1992 and 2015). The paper finds striking parallels in how both waves have been politically dealt with. The broader research question that can travel to different cases is therefore, why root causes of forced migration have (still) not been effectively prioritized in German foreign-policy formulation and implementation despite mounting public pressure at home that resulted in heavy political crises. Methodologically based on document analysis and a range of interviews with practitioners, two instances of policies vis-à-vis Arab countries are discussed. This demonstrates that while 2015 was not the first significant refugee influx to Germany, very similar patterns of reaction can be observed both domestically (e.g., a tightening of the legal framework governing immigration) as well as in foreign policies. However, this paper focuses on the latter. Incoherent policy priorities and inconsistent to contradictory jurisdiction are a result of an inefficient state bureaucracy and an ongoing stability-over-change-paradigm when dealing with Middle Eastern autocrats. Thus authoritarian rulers cash in on desperate European attempts to calm down public pressure at home thereby reinforcing the very causes of forced migration. Illustrative examples of Germany pushing for unsustainable moves veiled in a narrative of “combatting root causes of migration” include the Merkel-initiated “EU-Turkey deal,” the “Italian-Libyan bargain,” recent readmission agreements with Morocco and Tunisia and ongoing talks with Egypt’s president. Although this presentation focuses on Germany, both its research question and the methodology allows for transferrable implications and thus insights into other cases.

The Arab world still bleeds from the wounds of colonialism. Continued Western intervention in the Middle East has created a climate in which wars for oil, water and ideology are constant, homes are destroyed and peoples dispossessed. Yet, from the people whose homes were where the fires were hottest and the destruction at its worst have emerged art of a new and different quality. Conflicts have created refugees and refugees have created Arabfuturism, a genre not defined by its structure or aesthetics, but by its themes. Related to science fiction and other alternative futurisms, Arabfuturism functions as a way to process the damages of a colonial history on a now increasingly global people. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to better understand the meanings and motives behind the artists in this nebulous but emerging genre. Through analyzing the film, A Space Exodus (2008), and the album, Toyour (2017), I will examine how Arabfuturism manifests across medium while accessing the same themes. As I will argue, Arab artists use exploratory science fiction aesthetics to tell stories of lost homelands and lost peoples, searching for a place to belong in the cosmos. This paper is split into two distinct sections. First, I explore what makes a work of art Arabfuturism. This requires an understanding of the related histories and functions of “Western” science fiction, Arab speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. The second part consists of an analysis of Larissa Sansour’s short film, A Space Exodus, a film that follows a Palestinian Astronaut’s journey to the moon, and Hello Psychaleppo’s electronic album, Toyour, which utilizes an electronic sound palette to recontextualize samples of Arab classical music. Both artists’ works address their situation as Arabs of diaspora displaced by conflict. This paper sheds light on an emerging, politically charged genre and the dispossessed artists who create it.