Calais’s “Jungle”: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance

In fall 2016, the French state razed Calais’s “jungle,” encampments that had sheltered close to 10,000 refugees. An analysis of film and photography set in the “jungle” highlights practices of resistance to the interplay of humanitarian compassion and securitarian repression in the destruction of contemporary camps, nuancing the view of borderscapes as sites of total biopolitical capture, and of refugees as “bare life.”