Playscapes of Resistance: Art and Humour at the Border : WestminsterResearch

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Chapter title	Playscapes of Resistance: Art and Humour at the Border
Authors	Mazzara, F.
Abstract	Borders are not only geographic demarcations; they are performative tools meant to be seen, and most importantly they are porous, contested, and subject to continuous reimagining. Starting with a reflection of theories of landscape and borderscape, this chapter intends to address issues of counter-visuality in relation to contested borderscapes, more specifically the Palestinian apartheid barrier and the US/Mexico wall. It does so, by engaging with the cultural analysis of some artistic interventions that address the violence of borders through the lens of humour and the absurd, strategies of subversion that this chapter will situate within a wider tradition and through the conceptual framework of the ‘playscape’ that I adopt in this chapter for the first time. These interventions reframe human movement not as threat or a crisis, but as human right constrained by border violence; they do so by interrupting normalised practices of sovereignty and unsettling the familiar. The chapter recognises the border as an aesthetic construct and situates resistance within a tradition of playful and performative subversion; in so doing, we can better understand how visual practices generate counter-hegemonic possibilities. These practices are not marginal; they challenge the very logic that render undocumented border crossing as spectacle and violence as governance. In their ritual, playful, and collective qualities, they imagine borders otherwise.
Book title	Beyond Globalization: Landscapes, Visual Politics, and Planetary Imaginaries
Year	2026
Publisher	Mimesis International
Published	Jul 2026

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Playscapes of Resistance: Art and Humour at the Border

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