This article is part of the Global Perspectives Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata, and focuses on an unusual work, Tings Chak’s Undocumented, a graphic text on the detention centers in Canada. It argues that Canadian cities incorporate heterotopias—refugee spaces—that invert the city spaces. The refugee centers themselves invoke an architectural uncanny when they function as home and not-quite-home, in Chak’s depiction, inhabited by human simulacra. The centers are also spaces where punishment technology defines the space. Finally, it argues that Chak forces us to see how travel, displacement, and mobility terminate in spaces that constitute the very antithesis of movement.
University of California Press