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Spatial Imaginaries and the Sovereign Crisis

Abstract This article attempts to explore the “national” spatial imaginary through a close reading of the 2016 film Journey, commissioned by the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, focusing on two distinct spatio-temporal frameworks operating throughout the film, as a means of discussing immigration and asylum policy in the context of performative spatial imaginaries. This critical focus on the specific medium of film takes into account the ideological production of spatial narratives, and introduces a form of close reading which explores juridico-political frameworks through the cinematic art form, building on a body of scholarship which examines the visual dimensions of the law (Anne Bottomley and Nathan Moore, “Law, Diagram, Film: Critique Exhausted,” Law and Critique 23.2 (2012), 163–182; Law, Culture and Visual Studies, eds. Anne Wagner and Richard K. Sherwin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014); Genealogies of Legal Vision, eds. Peter Goodrich and Valerie Hayaert (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015)). In the context of a global crisis in forced displacement, it is important to do more than simply want to take these frameworks to task, by bringing to the fore the complicity of these filmmakers in producing a distinctly ideological spatial imaginary of Australia for particular purposes: if the government want this film to be “seen,” it will be seen through a critical eye which subverts its cinematic techniques and reveals its peculiar strategies.