Foreigners In, Foreigners Out. J.M. Coetzee's and Christoph Schlingensief's Allegories of Migration

At a time when an unprecedented number of asylum seekers is reaching the borders of Fortress Europe, and Western discourses on national identities take on the features of collective hysteria, postcolonial writing can once again prove crucial in probing the boundaries of political and ethical debates. Such is no doubt the case of J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013), i.e. a dystopian fiction in which all the characters, including the protagonists, are strangers more or less recently arrived by boat to a mysterious “new” country with no apparent history and a decidedly Beckettian twist. In this new location, which seems to be posthumous or downright unreal (as its Spanish name Novilla literally translates as “no city”), every newly arrived has been shorn of his/her memory and is looked after by a pervasive state bureaucracy which, though maintaining a benign attitude, allows for no variety, no personal initiative, no individual passion and no irony. Comparing Coetzee’s novel to Christoph Schlingensief’s performance art show Foreigners Out! Schlingensief’s Container (2000), in which a dozen assumedly “real” asylum seekers were provocatively engaged in a parodic reality show and exposed to be voted out of Austria by the local audience, I intend to demonstrate that explicitly postcolonial (and dystopian) allegories and parodies may have an unprecedented impact on present-day voyeuristic society’s understanding of geopolitical dynamics. Drawing on Deleuze’s immanent idea of difference as difference-in-itself, which undermines traditional binary oppositions and processes of othering, I propose that postcolonial art such as Coetzee’s and Schlingensief’s has an irreplaceable power of envisaging alternative possibilities of relating and living together in the contemporary identity-driven postcolonial world.