Mundos, Murallas, Murales: Muralism and the Global Border Industrial Complex

Abstract

Walls have been a medium upon which peoples imprint their visions and dreams of the world:their world-views. Muralism on national border barriers has become a popular aesthetic and mode of cultural production that has been photographed, archived, circulated, and debated around the globe for many decades. In this dissertation, I analyze the rise of national bordermurals as art that has the potential to disrupt, resist, and decolonize at an epistemic level (epistemic decolonization) and will argue that the “sensations” (in the form of emotional residue, affect, auras, and traces for example) are what give national border murals their provocative capacity. This dissertation is focused on a comparative, rhetorical analysis of national border walls and border wall murals; murals that seem to be connected through a similar symbology across boundaries, make political arguments, and provoke emotional responses from their audiences such as by depicting human rights violations, unlawful detentions, and death. By considering a phenomenology of border murals (the barrier’s histories, discourses, aesthetics, and affects), this dissertation addresses questions of rhetorical importance as it examines how national border barrier murals circulate, materialize, disrupt, and undo the (dis)illusions of nationalism, neocolonialism, and settler colonial logics. The Global Border Industrial Complex (GBIC) is a matrix of seemingly invisible exchanges of power. Border wall murals reveal some of those exchanges and relationships through their explicit imagery as well as their affect. The affect of globalized borders and border arts can be articulated through a decolonial, rhetorical, embodied, research methodology focused on the senses–facultades serpentinas. In this dissertation, using a facultades serpentinas methodology, I will analyze murals at different national borders (Israel, US, Berlin), each for their local or regional geopolitical context, and will specifically examine how they relate to the sensorial and the GBIC. In studying these sites, I hope to discover how the aesthetics of the border barriers resist and reproduce the (dis)illusions of extremist politics and governments through the senses. This dissertation will explore how/whether border muralists can act as agents of decolonization who can deconstruct the narrative of national walls and reconstruct it through a form of sensational or sensorial rhetoric capable of decolonizing both the geopolitical landscapes/borderlands. Political and epistemological decolonization can be understood as both a process of land and government (or governance) redress and well as critical consciousness raising (conscientização). I will provide an analysis that is focused on historical moments of colonization and deterritorialization within political, local and global, rhetorical frameworks (that attend to globally connected/globalized matrices of power). I expand on areas of study that braid together arts, scholarship, and resistance, and maintain an emphasis on the possibilities of muralism as a decolonial (or decolonizing) expressive form through the decolonial aesthetics theory as described by the Transnational Decolonial Institute (TDI).