Fungibility at the border : selfies, proxies, and (faux) self-representations in the European border regime

The article argues that the (new) media landscape of the European border regime re-hearses colonial and slavocratic tropes often excised from canonical narratives of Fortress Europe, namely the fungibility of the other’s body and self. By discussing examples of (feigned) refugee self-representation, I demonstrate how the ostensible oppositionality of race and racial thinking (primi-tive past) and technology (modern future) fundamentally erodes in the European border regime while contributing to the further erasure of those most harshly targeted by it. The examined self-representations are caught in fungibility as the gaze of the other is circumvented by a proxy, institut-ing a relation of substitution that inherently depends on the erasure of the racialized subject for the purpose of White enjoyment.