Lennart Soberon & Kevin Smets
In the last decade themes of migration and border control have increasingly been incorporated in popular reality TV formats and franchises. Whether it concerns variations of existing genres, such as 90 Day Fiancé’s (2014) spin on the dating show genre, or widely distributed and glocalized formats, such as Border Wars (2010), reality TV has become an important site in which socio-political concerns relating to migration are tackled. Not surprisingly, because these issues are entangled with institutional dynamics of state power, such programs have the potential to reproduce state-sanctioned discourses on border enforcement and further cement exclusionary discourses on citizenship. This chapter tackles Channel 4’s two-part miniseries Smuggled (2019) to elaborate on the different dimensions of border securitization and migrant criminalization reality TV can reproduce. We argue that Smuggled makes for a particularly interesting case study since it gamifies migrant experiences through the lens of the border security apparatus. Within the challenge-type structure of the show different British citizens are asked to re-enact popular migrations routes to “test the UK’s borders”. In the process, the program paradoxically opens a space to discuss the harsh living conditions and perilous journeys migrants are made to undertake, only to accommodate such emphatic engagement within hegemonic state logics. Generic conventions and narrative formula of borderveillant media (Fojas 2021) here function to recalibrate the spectator’s understanding of migrant experiences and direct the gaze to align with that of UK’s border force.
August 2023
Link: hdl.handle.net/20.500.14017/e1a501a7-64ca-404f-a356-6a2abf53c7eb
Title: Creating Europe from the Margins: Mobilities and Racism in Postcolonial Europe
Publisher: Routledge