Postcolonial Girl:

Mediated Intimacy and Migrant Audibility

Imogen Tyler (Lancaster University) and Rosalind Gill (Kings

College)

Abstract

In October 2010, Gamu Nhengu, a Zimbabwean teenager, was ejected

from the popular British reality TV talent show, The X Factor, on

which she was a contestant. There was a public backlash to what many

perceived was an unjust eviction. Within days, however, Gamu became

the emblem of a contrasting kind of eviction campaign, when it was

revealed that she and her family were living illegally in Britain.

`Gamu-gate`, as the case was named in the press, animated a wave of

public anger and resistance, as the stakes were raised from eviction

from a TV talent show to deportation from the UK. In this paper we

explore ‘Gamu Gate’, as a way of thinking about postcolonial

intimacies. We do this by setting out three key notions: the notion

of mediated intimacy, the notion of postcolonial girlhood, and the

idea of migrant audibility. Our aim is to explore the political

possibilities of the ‘affective surplus’ produced by `postcolonial

girls’—that is, how as `manufactured intimates’ they potentially

create avenues for new forms of post-colonial migrant audibility,

forms which might trouble the ‘current emergencies’ and neo-colonial

logic of neoliberal capitalism.

Gamu-gate

In October 2010, Gamu Nhengui, a Zimbabwean teenager who had been

resident in the UK for 5 years, was ejected from the popular reality

TV talent show, The X Factor, on which she was a contestant. In a

tearful eviction scene Gamu appeared stunned when she was told by

celebrity judge Cheryl Cole that her rendition of the aptly titled

song ‘Cry Me Out’ was not good enough to get her into the finals.

The public response was immediate and enormous. Angered by Gamu’s

eviction, hundreds of her supporters converged on her Scottish home

in a show of solidarity; thousands more wrote to the TV regulator

Ofcom to complain about unfairness; and within 24 hours a staggering

quarter of a million people joined a Facebook campaign with the

title ‘Gamu should have got through’.

Within days, however, Gamu became the emblem of a contrasting kind

of campaign, when it was revealed that she and her family were

living illegally in Britain, her mother’s visa having expired.

Suddenly, Gamu went from being a disappointed reality TV contestant

to becoming the face of a different kind of reality: the reality of

what it means to be subjected to Britain’s harsh immigration regime,

a regime marked by dawn raids, detention and enforced deportation

(see Tyler 2006, 2010). Although there was some vociferous lobbying

against Gamu, she became, for the most part, the subject of a

passionate campaign against unjust immigration policies and their

often brutal enforcement. Her case animated a wave of public anger

and resistance, as the stakes were raised from eviction from a TV

talent show to deportation from the UK. Would she and her family get

to stay in Britain or would they be deported to an uncertain future

in Zimbabwe?

In this paper we will explore ‘Gamu Gate’, as it became known, as a

way of thinking about postcolonial intimacies. We will do this by

setting out three key notions: the notion of mediated intimacy, the

notion of postcolonial girlhood, and, developing a concept from the

work of Jacques Rancière, the idea of migrant audibility. Our aim is

to explore the political possibilities of the ‘affective surplus’

produced by `postcolonial girls’, their potential as `manufactured

intimates’ to create avenues for new forms of migrant audibility

which might trouble the ‘current emergencies’ (Bhattacharyya, 2011)

of neoliberal capitalism.

Mediated intimacy

For the last two decades 'intimacy' has been on the agenda as never

before. For many, the notion is appealing for its promise to

'liberate' intimate relationships from their 'domestication' within

the heterosexual nuclear family, and for its openness to broader

constituencies, different kinds of affective ties, and more diverse

forms of sexual practice. Feminist research, LGBT and queer

activism and scholarship, and sociological writing about late

capitalism/ late modernity have coalesced around an interest in the

ways in which intimate relationships might be said to be changing.

Some sociological writing has been concerned with charting the new

and 'the emergent' of intimate lives, with an emphasis upon dynamism

and transformation, as if a bright, shiny (and implicitly

egalitarian) new form of 'Intimacy 3.0' were already in play or

just around the corner, waiting to be unleashed upon the world (Beck

& Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1993). Like other feminist writers

(Jamieson, 1997; Smart, 2007) we remain cautious about this

preoccupation with change, premised, as it sometimes seems to be,

upon a corresponding inattention to things that stubbornly persist

-- 'old' (yet enduring) problems like violence against women and

racism. Our aim here, though, is to open up a different set of

interests, concerned with the mediation of intimacy, and in

particular the potential of the ‘intimate publics’ that reality

media generates, to be transformed from banal sites of pleasurable

entertainment into collective spaces of political antagonism and

hegemonic interruption.

Writing in 1995, Ken Plummer argued that 'sexual stories have become

part of the "mediasation" of society'. Narratives of intimacy, he

contended, have been 'engulfed', as much else, 'in the permeation of

symbolic forms through media technologies' (1995:23). Somewhat

surprisingly -- particularly given the importance of Plummer’s book

-- this claim has provoked relatively little interest or discussion,

especially when compared to the outpouring of writing on

‘transformations of intimacy’. Yet 15 years on, the time to develop

an understanding of mediated intimacy has never seemed more urgent.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, representations of

intimacies clearly seem to dominate mass media – from stories about

politicians’ affairs, celebrity pregnancies and experiences of

heartbreak, to reality shows that are preoccupied with ‘making over’

intimate life. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, an intimate

gaze, closely linked to the confessional and personalising

tendencies of the media, has come to constitute a kind of grammar of

mediation, such that all mediated life becomes refracted through a

lens of intimacy, in a way that is distinct from earlier moments.

This has been theorised in terms of ‘first person media’ (Dovey,

2000), ‘personalization’ (Fairclough,1995) and is part of a shift in

which even distant Others may be represented through technologies of

intimacy (Orgad, 2012). Further, the marketisation of this intimate

gaze can be seen in the proliferation of `reality mediums`, with

reality TV formats now dominating global televisual ouput and

increasingly extending into newspaper, magazine and social media

forums. Thirdly, the technologies of ‘new media’, particularly Web

2.0 and peer to peer social media have come to the fore as a means

of building and sustaining intimate relationships. In affluent

societies many people now live out their relationships through

technologies of mediation. Whilst social media such as Facebook and

Twitter facilitate state and corporate forms of surveillance, by,

for example, encouraging people to reveal their personal and

political values, beliefs and interests, and expose their friendship

networks, they also enable forms of sousveillance as people amass

online to discuss and interrogate repressive state and corporate

governance from below (Joichi Ito et al 2004). These are all

compelling reasons why intimate media, and mediated intimacies,

require our attention as scholars.

This intensification of intimacy is an outcome of a distinctive

historical moment in which distinctions between public and private

have imploded in social and political life. The shifting boundaries

of public/private life, the rapid making and unmaking of publics and

privates through and in mediation, produces intensely complicated

intimacies that may bring to our attention the erotic conduct of a

President, the sexualized torture of detainees, the agonies of

earthquake survivors, and the real-time revolutions of `the Arab

spring`. We want to suggest that an understanding of intimacy as

mediated makes possible a conceptualisation that can make room for

different affects, emotions and attachments which might in turn

extend postcolonial insights about the entanglement of power,

oppression and desire for the Other. As Sianne Ngai notes in Ugly

Feelings (2002), her study of the aesthetics of negative emotions,

what is at stake in critically examining mediated intimacy is

‘thinking the aesthetic and the political together’ (2002: 3). Ngai

insists on carefully attending to the seemingly banal popular

aesthetic regimes which generate public emotions and emotional

publics. As she suggests, thinking intimacy as mediated is not

simply a case of describing emergent forms of closeness, proximity

or kinship (even 'new' forms of queer or friendly kinship) but about

detailing the ways in which the generation of intimate aesthetics

and technologies is profoundly implicated in processes of Othering

or exclusion, for example racializing discourses or particular

constructions of national belonging. Ngai’s emphasis on the politics

of aesthetics resonates with Ranciére’s argument that the political

is always already aesthetic, in the sense that prevailing regimes of

representation and perception delimit ‘the visible and invisible’

and ‘speech and noise’ in ways which shape ‘the place and the stakes

of politics as a form of experience’ (2004a: 13).

We approach Gamu Nhengu’s melodramatic story, then, as an example of

intimate mediation, a complicated political event marked both by the

typical features of a reality TV talent show with the promise of

‘making it’ as a global celebrity, and by the interruption of this

`neoliberal theater` (see Anna McCarthy, 2007). We will suggest that

the banal but intensive forms of intimate mediation which framed

Gamu as a contestant on The X Factor were reanimated with unexpected

consequences on her eviction from the show, and her subsequent

outing as an `illegal migrant`. We will argue that Gamu – threatened

with deportation and forced repatriation – was transformed from the

status of ‘global girl’ (McRobbie, 2007), iconic poster-child for

neoliberalism, postfeminism and ‘successful’ corporate

multiculturalism, into a ‘postcolonial girl’, exposing the harsh

underside of these comforting fictions and briefly exposing the

political reality and violent apparatus of the neo-colonial British

state which is normally kept a `hygienic distance` from shows like

The X Factor (see Marciniak, 2006).

This paper is concerned then with the ways in which a figure, Gamu,

comes to circulate outside the generic reality TV storyline and

hyper reality of consumerist TV in which she was produced. It

explores how her outing as `an illegal` engenders unexpected forms

of counter-publicity for a subjugated population, which implicitly

challenges political consensus around irregular migration and allows

postcolonial history and the political present tense to seep into a

sphere from which it is ordinarily abjected. To put it another way,

the paper asks: how should we understand the intimate activism in

support of Gamu’s petition to stay in the UK – much of the campaign

conducted through Twitter, Facebook and other social media?

From ‘global girl’ to ‘postcolonial girl’

Angela McRobbie (2007, 2009) has argued that young women are

fetishised as model subjects in neoliberal governmental accounts of

national futures. As she suggests, girls and young women are

imagined as the ideal rational actors who have succeeded in re-

inventing themselves, adapting to shifting global market forces as

the new reflexivity winners in educational achievement and

employment. Of course within this prevailing discourse of

'successful girls' some girls are more ideal than others, and

McRobbie provides a series of typologies of girlhood which

constitute an operational axis of ideal and abject girls. Primary

among these types are the `A1 girl’ typified by ambitious ‘TV

blondes’; `the global girl` who is ‘emblematic of the success of

corporate multiculturalism’ (McRobbie 2009: 88); and `pramfaced`

working class girls whose lack of social mobility is the antithesis

of neoliberal girlhood (see Tyler, 2011). These typologies of

girlhood, whether ideal or abject, are dependent on manufactured

intimacy for their affective purchase within the public sphere.

These familiar figures are highly mediated social types who are

mobilized in policy and popular culture as forms of gendered

governance (and self-governance), constituting fields of

intelligibility for girlhood in the Global North. The figure of the

‘global girl’ is also powerfully brought into play across national

boundaries in projects that produce ‘the girl effect’ by bringing

together transnational actors like the UN, with corporations such as

Nike, and grassroots NGOs. Such strategies result in a ‘girling of

development,’ in which corporate branding, global governance and

activism are yoked in uneasy alliance (Koffman and Gill,

forthcoming). McRobbie’s figure of the global girl is useful for

thinking about the contours of girlhood under neoliberalism, but is

less helpful in terms of thinking `the relations between girlhood,

power, agency and resistance` in the context of the global

inequalities to which neoliberalism gives rise (Gonick, et al.

2009: 1). Gamu Nhengu’s story is interesting because it helps to

illuminate ‘the repressed’ (to borrow Stuart Hall’s phrase) of the

figure of the global girl and in doing so potentially politicizes

this figure of girlhood, making visible a different figure – the

migrant girl from the post-colonies. If the manufactured intimate,

the `global girl`, is the PR-exemplar of migrant post-coloniality,

mobilised in national publicity materials as an alibi for the

gendered, racialized and class-based inequalities of global

capitalism, the ‘postcolonial girl’ raises the `spectre of

colonialization` and highlights the deep gendered and racialised

i All references to `Gamu’ refer to Gamu as a mediated figure: a figure whom assumes meaning and ‘reality’ through the brief but intensive focus on, anddramatization of her story within reality TV, news papers, and in online spaces.

inequalities, the uneven mobilities, and the long histories of

exploitation which separate the global north and south.

The public outcry which greeted the eviction of Gamu from The X

Factor exposed the abject underside of the cosmopolitan face of

Britain. Gamu had been a favourite to win the competition, hotly

tipped to become the next global superstar manufactured by the show.

Indeed, reality genre television is the rasion d’etre of the

multicultural `global girl` described by McRobbie, often

misrecognised as meritocratic on the basis of its inclusion of

`national minorities`, and its adoption of `democratic techniques`

such as voting (see Tyler and Bennett, 2010). Programmes such as The

X Factor form part of a mass entertainment complex in the Global

North which arguably function, in part, to immunise audiences

against the inequalities of the political present tense through the

spectacular staging of a meritocratic multi-culture, a culture which

Ranciére describes as `the radiant luminosity of the public life of

equals’ (Ranciére 2001: 23) The reality TV staging of meritocracy

was challenged by Gamu’s sudden expulsion from the show, and even

further by the subsequent revelation that she was resident in the UK

illegally. In becoming visible as an illegal, Gamu polluted the

space of reality TV with politics and history. Gamu was transformed

from a hygienic immigrant into a foreign body. Katarzyna Marcinak

helpfully develops the concept of `hygienic immigrant identities’ to

explain the process of migrant cultural cleansing which this

cultural performance of meritocracy is contingent upon. As she

notes: `To prove adequate, a legal immigrant is generally required

to occupy the place of a “clean” subject—humble, disciplined,

“invisible”' (2006: 36).

Whilst The X Factor producers denied that Gamu’s citizenship status

played a role in the decision to remove her from the show, many felt

this was the only explanation for her sudden departure. Now

designated ‘illegal’, Gamu and her family became subject to the full

force of Britain’s immigration regime (see Tyler 2006). To compound

the drama, shortly after Gamu’s departure from The X Factor, a long

anticipated legal ruling deemed it now `safe` for Zimbabwean

migrants to be forcibly deported, and suddenly it seemed likely that

Gamu would be evicted not only from a reality show, but from

Britain. The UK Border Agency took the unusual step of commenting

publically on the case by confirming that the Gamu family must leave

the UK voluntarily or face deportation to Zimbabwe. Politicians made

a variety of public statements, some appealing for clemency–some,

notably, on the basis of her `exceptional` talent--and others

arguing that Gamu and her family should not be an exception. Faced

with Gamu’s deportation, The X-Factor audience became the unlikely

site of popular opposition to the British government’s border and

immigration policies, with fans initiating telephone and letter

writing campaigns, online petitions and websites, in an attempt to

persuade the government Home Office and Border Agency not to deport

Gamu and her family. The text of one online petition reads:

Gamu Nhengu, her mother and brothers are facing deportation to

Zimbabwe as a result of administrative error. The family moved

to this country in traumatic circumstances eight years ago.

They are a well known and popular part of the community of

Tillicoultry in central Scotland.

The nation has taken Gamu to its heart following her recent

appearance on the TV show X-Factor. Her brothers are settled

in local schools and know Scotland as their home. Her mother

is a hard working nurse known for her compassionate care for

the elderly in the community.

We believe that the family should be allowed to remain

together in the town they call home. (Gamu Must Stay, online

petition, 2009 http://www.gopetition.com/petition/39599.html)

As this petition suggests, Gamu and her family were repeatedly

figured in online spaces as ideal citizens: aspirational, hard-

working, talented, demure, caring, community orientated, law-abiding

and innocent. This narrative of exception circulated throughout an

extraordinary range of public spaces, from Parliament, newspapers,

websites and social media, to the clothing people wore on the

street. Whilst members of both Houses of Parliament tabled questions

calling on the Government to grant her leave to remain, Web

merchandisers began to sell ‘Don’t Deport Gamu’ t-shirts. X-Factor

media mogul Simon Cowell made a series of paternalistic gestures,

engaging his lawyers to support the Gamu family’s anti-deportation

efforts, whilst also attempting to redraw the boundaries between The

X Factor show, and the political reality of the British deportation

regime. As he noted in a newspaper interview: `We are helping Gamu

and her family as much as possible and have lawyers working with her

lawyers. It's not because we have to but because I really feel for

their situation, and that's outside of the show.’ (Rebecca Lefort,

2010). In Ranciére’s terms, we might understand Cowell’s statement

as an attempt to police the `dissensus` generated by Gamu-gate by

redrawing the boundaries between reality TV and the reality of the

State. Policing, in Ranciere’s work:

does not literally refer to the institution of the police, but

rather to the distribution of institutions, differentiated and

hierarchized social positions, modes of communication, images,

ideas, and ways of speaking that generate what Ranciére calls

‘the given’ – the status quo in which everything and everyone

has a place and everything and everyone is in their place

(Faulkner, 2009).

Despite attempts to police the effects Gamu-gate, the meaning and

forms of intimate attachment which this event generated could not be

easily controlled. Indeed, in being revealed so spectacularly as

`out of place`, the figure of Gamu temporarily displaced prevailing

forms of perception, creating uncertainty about ‘common-sense`

understandings of migrancy and citizenship.

Affective politics

Gamu gate erupted into a context marked by overwhelmingly negative

representations of African migrants. Some of the media coverage drew

on entrenched racist notions and popular opposition to what are

portrayed as ‘undeserving’ migrants in the UK. The following

selection of online comments illustrates the hateful tenor of these

ugly feelings–whose pervasiveness and virulence we would not want to

underestimate.

Gamu the X Factor monkey. Export her and the other 500 000

illegals milking our system! they are half the reason this

country is in so much debt! im sick of going to work to pay

for families like hers getting benefits, houses, healthcare

and education coutesy of us! lets turn this country in to a

proud british nation again! instead of a country that puts

everyone first other than its own people!!!! [errors in

original post]

Gamu and her family are just four of the worthless, scrounging

assorted immigrants who dump themselves on the British people

– their agenda is to grab as much as they can con from the

British taxpayers. Hopefully, Gamu and her family will be

given a sharp boot up their backsides on their way back to

their Zimbabwe slum.

These peoples countries are filthy hell holes because they

have made them so, they have done it to themselves. It is

their values that are bad and they will bring them here. Our

cities are awash with imported gun and knife crime, our home

will be as disgusting as the third world toilets they come

from.

If these extracts are indicative of the online racism which Gamu

gate animated, it is important to note the ways in which this

virulent xenophobia also shaped the pro-Gamu campaigns. For as we

have suggested, the pro-Gamu fandom produced Gamu as a singular,

exceptional,talented ‘global girl’, in ways which reinforced deeply

problematic oppositional notions of deserving and undeserving

migrants. The schizophrenic politics of public support for Gamu is

captured by the following quote from a signatory to a pro-Gamu

social media site:

Deporting Gamu and her family is totally out of order. This

country allows scum bags like criminals from other countries

to come and live here and claim benefits and then deport

someone like Gamu's family who deserve to be here. What the

f*** is going on. I say kick out the undeserving foreigners

and allow the good hard working deserving people to stay.

Nevertheless, Gamu-Gate generated an extraordinary outpouring of

positive and intimate responses which–at least temporarily–

interrupted some of the entrenched and familiar depictions of

irregular migrants as `scrounging scum`. Gamu’s treatment generated

widespread public expressions of outrage and calls for clemency, and

cultivated an unexpected if precarious empathy for the wider

situation of irregular migrants. As journalist Afua Hirsch put it,

under the headline ‘When an “illegal immigrant” has the X Factor’,

Gamu had ‘finally woken Britain up to the injustice of the

immigration system’ (The Guardian, October 8th 2010). Gamu gate

became a dense site of national and global political imagination as

`the reality of reality television` and `the reality of immigration

controls’ combined to produce a dramatic postcolonial storyline: a

media event which journalist Laurie Penny described as ‘pop culture

and radical politics with a feminist twist’ (Penny, 2010).

Gamu gate revealed the national political sphere to be what Berlant

terms `a scene for the orchestration of public feelings—of the

public’s feelings, of feelings in public, of politics as a scene of

emotional contestation` (2005: 47). The manufactured intimacy

animated by the spectacular irreality of emotion-laden reality

television became the catalyst for unexpected modes of collective

sociality and attachment, generating forms of online activism which

troubled the prevailing xenophobic political consensus around

African economic migration from the post-colonies. In particular, we

want to suggest that Gamu’s audibility, an extraordinary singing

voice which reduced the judging panel and audience to tears at her X

Factor auditions, and was captured, edited and replayed many

thousands of times in fan-based video sharing communities, created

an aural porthole for the public where the public might see through,

or rather ‘hear through’, the wall of stereotypes about irregular

migrants. As Marciniak notes, `The hygienic version of the

remodelled self [which it is required for migrants to produce] is a

“clean,” nonthreatening one, one stripped of the often painful

memories of the “Old World” and of discomforting otherness’ (2006:

51). It was precisely this hygienic migrant identity which Gamu

troubled as the semiotics of ‘global girl’ were displaced by those

of `postcolonial girlhood’.

Figure One: ‘Don’t Let Me Face Firing Squad’ front cover of the News

of the World, 10 October 2010 (photograph of cover taken by I.

Tyler)

As we have documented here, Gamu was a divisive figure. On the one

hand, as a reality show participant on the verge of global

celebrity, she embodied the self-actualisation demanded by

neoliberal meritocracy in which girls are imagined as the privileged

agents of social change (McRobbie, 2007). On the other hand, as an

African girl from a British post-colony, she exposed the deep and

persistent inequalities between the global north and south, and in

the particular context of Britain and Zimbabwe, between people of

former colonizer nations and those from former colonies. It is

important to note that prior to November 2002, Zimbabweans were free

to travel to the UK without a visa. Today, the vast majority of

Zimbabweans in the UK are undocumented ‘illegal’ migrants

(International Organization for Migration. December 2006).

Furthermore, whilst the British Government has systematically

restricted movement between Zimbabwe and Britain for Black

Zimbabweans, pursuing a policy of detention and deportation, it has

offered hospitality to a number of mainly elderly White British born

Zimbabweans. This includes in 2009 the creation of the Zimbabwe

Resettlement Programme, a government-funded resettlement package for

British nationals resident in Zimbabwe. Thus ‘Gamu-gate’ might be

read as an allegory of the post-colonial history of citizenship in

Britain in as much as it exemplifies what Kathleen Paul (1997) has

described as `the whitewashing of Britain’ through the mechanisms of

citizenship law. From the 1960s onwards, commonwealth subjects where

systemically denuded of their rights of migration to and residency

in the UK. This ‘scaling of citizenship’ (Tyler, 2010) peaked in the

landmark British Nationality Act of 1981 which was

designed to define, limit and remove the entitlements to

citizenship from British nationals in the Commonwealth (the

former colonies) thereby restricting immigration to the

British Isles and creating ‘aliens’ within the borders of the

nation state. [The 1981] Act instituted a ‘citizenship gap’

within the British state, and between the state and former

British colonies, as large numbers of British nationals found

they had been designed out of citizenship (Tyler, 2010, 62).

The geopolitical relations figured through Gamu should be

interpreted within what Jayne Ifekwunigwe describes as `feminized

circuits of global capitalism and under-development’, a neo-colonial

logic which is secured through citizenship (Ifekwunigwe, 2004).

British citizenship describes a legal, political and social field of

intelligibility, a biopolitics that produces some bodies and groups

as failing, abject or outside of the realm of citizenship

altogether. This might mean failures at mundane and banal levels of

everyday interpellation, such as the failure to have the right kind

of educational aspirations or the right kind of body, or the more

explicit failure illustrated through Gamu-gate, such as the failure

to produce the right kind of paperwork to secure leave to remain in

the UK. However, as Peter Nyers argues, citizenship struggles are

not simply about legal status but are struggles ‘for recognition as

someone with an audible and corporeal presence that can be described

as ‘political’’ (Nyers, 1997: 3). As we have suggested, one of the

interesting things about Gamu-gate is the very different and

conflictual kinds of publics which it brings into play. In

exercising a particular mode of migrant audibility through her

performance, Gamu does not only operationalise the official public

of legal entitlements and border controls, but the affective and

intimate publics of reality TV fandom, online racism and migrant

activism.

Migrant Audibility

In his influential writing on politics and aesthetics, Rancière

argues that `politics is aesthetic in that it makes visible what had

been excluded from a perceptual field, and in that it makes audible

what used to be inaudible’ (2004: 226). In other words, the role and

meaning of politics, in his radical redefinition, is to in some way

transform prevailing forms of perception, and in doing so to create

a breach or space for something or someone else to be seen, heard,

felt or in some way to be perceived otherwise.

Rancière’s thesis speaks to long-standing debates about visibility

and audibility in postcolonial studies. For example, it is the

question of in/visibility which is at the heart of Edward Said’s

(1978) project in Orientalism, which details the crude,

essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world which underpin

European and North American art and scholarship. The question of

audibility occupies Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who in her essay `Can

the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985), argued that ‘first world’ attempts to

ameliorate the condition of the subaltern through acts of

translation most often reinforce the inaudibility of the subjugated.

Whether the focus is on what we can see, or what we can hear,

postcolonial theory is from its inception concerned with the

question of representation, and thus with the politics of

aesthetics. Imperialistic representational frames screen colonized

and former colonized populations from view and hearing, and in so

doing curtail the political agency of subjugated populations (see

Said 1978). In Frames of War, Judith Butler develops this

postcolonial critique, theorising the epistemological capacity to

apprehend life in terms of perceptual frames of recognizeability

which ‘organise visual experience’ and ‘generate specific ontologies

of the subject’ (2009: 3). For Butler the question is one of how to

produce ‘a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizeability’

(2009:6). Butler’s account, and in particular her concern with the

possibilities that are generated when majoritarian frames fall apart

or recede, resonates with Rancière’s thesis. In his account however,

it is imperative to begin not from the perspective of the frame

through which the subjugated are perceived (and named as the

subjugated) but with absolute equality as the axiom of all political

life. It is through the force of this emphasis on equality as the

grounds for critical thought that Rancière’s work makes a

contribution to postcolonial theoretical perspectives. What is

additionally important about Rancière’s claims, is that he troubles

an account which is based on the idea that political truth is

obscured behind surface appearances: ‘the hidden beneath the

apparent’ (2004a: 49). On the contrary he suggests that this kind of

revelatory idea(l) is one which remains caught without colonialist

notions of ‘mastery’. For Rancière it is rather a question of

understanding visibility and audibility as part of prevailing

aesthetic systems which are historically contingent, and as such are

subject to disruption, rupture and transformation when their

contingency is exposed. This claim resonates with Butler’s important

account of the social life of norms. For example, whilst for Butler

psychoanalytic laws might operate as normalizing principles which

govern psychic life, and `the social intelligibility of action`

(2004: 41), they are not immutable or a-historical facts, but are

sedimentations of existing social practices (2004: 44). What

Rancière (2004a) adds to these debates, is his emphasis on

aesthetics as the arena of struggle in which a redistribution of

what he terms the sensible (but what might also be conceived as a

perceptual norms), takes place. In turn, this emphasis on aesthetics

allows for a more radical reconsideration of mediation as the form,

space and time within and through which publics and counter-publics

are made and undone.

In the case of antagonisms unleashed by Gamu-gate, we have suggested

thinking about the incompatibility of perspectives represented in

terms of the collision of the figure of global girlhood, one face of

meritocratic globalism, with the figure of the postcolonial girl,

who in our account embodies postcolonial history as well as the

economic inequalities and xenophobic counternarratives of the

political present tense. This is not to say that the prevailing

system of ‘sense’ about postcolonial migrancy is or can be

permanently displaced by an event such as this, rather that these

kinds of ‘scandals’ generate a perceptual ‘shock’ to systems of

perception by bringing incompatible aesthetic and affective regimes

together.

In Rancière’s account, politics is that rare occurrence when a claim

for equality generates a shift in a perceptual field, a rupture in

the prevailing frames of visibility. Politics occurs when those who

have no part, those shadow populations who have been variously

described as ‘the miscounted’ (Rancière 2001), the ‘subaltern’

(Spivak 1985), ‘outcasts’ (Bauman 2004), or the `unintelligible`

(Butler 2009) stake a claim for equality and in so doing become

audible in ways that reveal prevailing norms of perception to be

both contingent and alterable. This is not the same as theorising

the rupture of hegemony in terms of the irruption of subaltern

voices `from below’, but rather conceiving of the ways in which

incommensurable histories of meaning, truth and perception are

already in circulation and collide in ways which activate new kinds

of politics. Politics in this sense might well not take the form of

recognizable acts of political protest (strikes, demonstrations,

etc) but can take place in unexpected sites – even within the highly

orchestrated aesthetics of mass capitalist media.

Capture and Escape

By taking part in a reality TV singing show, Gamu staked a claim for

a slice of the meritocratic dream to which she ‘had no right’: this

is the kind of act that Rancière describes as ‘improper part-taking’

(1999). The happy `intimate multiculturalism` to which reality TV is

yoked, was disturbed by the spectre of `colonialism` which she

embodied. If Gamu was initially configured as one of the neoliberal

‘global girls’ described by McRobbie, one of the growing stable of

post-racial global superstars manufactured by reality TV, then she

later became, unexpectedly, audible as a different kind of figure: a

postcolonial girl fighting for her family’s rights to remain in

Britain. In Gamu’s case, postcolonial audibility was facilitated

both by the distinctive qualities of her beautiful voice, and by her

‘surplus affect’: tearful scenes which momentarily moved audiences

to face the deeply entrenched culture of impunity against unwanted

migrants within the British state. As Gamu moved from

intelligibility as a ‘global girl’ to audibility as a ‘postcolonial

girl’, she troubled prevailing regimes of migrant visibility. Gamu

gate reveals how the same 'sinews of inequality and subordination'

which shaped older colonial mobility flows, such as the

transatlantic slave trade, are in operation in the design of

contemporary regimes of citizenship (Catherine Hall, quoted in

Ifekwunigwe 2004: 400).

However, in becoming a political subject, one also becomes subject

to dominant regimes of power, and the frequent cost of audibility

for the miscounted is that they are recast as those of no account

(Rancière, 1999: 38). In the case study explored in this article, we

can perceive the paradox of manufactured intimacy and its political

potential for interrupting prevailing regimes of audibility, in very

material ways. As soon as Gamu becomes knowable and audible, as an

intimate other, and stakes a claim for a slice of the meritocratic

dream of celebrity, as staged in reality TV, she becomes subject to

racism, state violence and deportation. This paradox brings us back

to Spivak’s conclusion that `the subaltern cannot speak`; for when

such a subject becomes audible they are (re)inscribed as the

subaltern, simultaneously invoked and foreclosed. What Rancière

contributes to this debate is significant, however, for what matters

in his account is not the redistribution of visibility per se, but

the interruption itself. As he writes, `[t]he essence of politics is

the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in

one’ (2001). What matters (and what materialises) is the disclosure

of radical inequality, and the conditions of possibility such

disclosures create for troubling stereotypes and generating

disbelief, outrage and uncertainty.

Gamu gate highlights how non-citizens practice citizenship despite

their lack of formal rights and status, and in doing so might foster

important forms of dissensus which in turn allow for alternative

conceptualisations of migrant agency and resistance. At the same

time we are aware how the argument we are making here stands in

contradistinction to those theoretical accounts which attempt to

push past the perceived limits of representational and identitarian

politics, often through a focus on figures of escape.ii

In this paper, we have focused on the representational struggles

taking place inside neoliberal public culture. Gamu is interesting

as a figure precisely because her story is about migrant desires to

`become majoritarian’, a desire which leads to multiple regimes of

capture as she is variously idealised, abstracted, fictionalised,

loved and abjected in public. Our argument is that the

contradictions, struggles and affects which figures such as Gamu

activate within popular and public imaginaries are important not

only because they expose the inequalities, contingencies and

fantasies of neoliberalism but because in doing so they generate

instability and uncertainity. And as Faulkner notes, `uncertainty is

a first step in a potential process of declassification that is

central to the challenging and reorganisation of the political

given’ (Faulkner, 2009).

Conclusion

In this article, we explored the case of Gamu gate in which a girl

from the post-colonies presents herself as a contestant in a reality

TV talent programme in the Global North in which, because of her

`illegal status’, she cannot be allowed to participate. This case

demonstrates the contradictions between the idea of global

multicultural meritocracy, and the reality of tightly policed

borders and boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Gamu’s

appearance, and disappearance, from The X-Factor is political in

that it exposes the incommensurability of two orders of reality in

the British state. In particular, we have argued that the forms of

intimate feelings and identifications to which manufactured intimacy

ii For example, in Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos argue for an ‘outside politics’ or `imperceptible politics’ as a response to the politics of visibility (and identity).. This argument stands in an interesting, if tense relationship to the politics of popular culture and mediated intimacymobilised in this paper. This raises questions, which beyond the scope of this paper, about different disciplinary understandings of ‘representation’itself, understood in both aesthetic and political senses. These theoretical tensions around politics and visibility are further explored ina forthcoming issue of Citizenship Studies on ‘Immigrant Protest’ (2013) edited by Imogen Tyler and Katarzyna Marciniak.

gives rise generate forms of public uncertainty which trouble the

deep inequalities which underpin and sustain British national life.

Gamu Nhengu had no interest in becoming a figure-head for the anti-

deportation movement. On the contrary, in a newspaper interview she

expressed her anger that public visibility had put her family at

risk of removal.

I believe being on the show made all the difference. The Home

Office said everything was fine. But then Boot Camp was

screened and suddenly there were these problems. I would be a

good person to make an example of. Everyone knows me. [...] If

I hadn't been on X Factor everything would have been fine.

Someone else would have been the scapegoat instead of me.

(Gamu in Carmichael 2010)

Despite her retrospective desire for invisibility and escape,

through her participation in The X Factor, Gamu became animated as a

public figure whom exposed the Janus-face of British citizenship:

the global business in immigrant prisons and the vast, monstrous

bureaucracy from which flow categories of postcolonial peoples

marginalised by, excluded or disqualified from citizenship, living

‘unliveable lives’ at the borders of the British state.

Of course, the intimate activism which arose as a consequence of the

waves of sentimental identification with Gamu’s plight does not

offer any lasting challenge to the deep-seated xenophobia which

frames the visibility of irregular migrant populations in Britain,

and, in some ways, as we have noted, was situated within similar

terms of reference. The legions of reality TV fans and online

campaigners who championed Gamu in her battle to remain in the UK in

the main cite not the injustice of postcolonial border controls, but

her exceptional qualities, that `extraordinary talent` which

distinguishes her from the mass of ‘undeserving’ postcolonial

migrants imagined to be pressing at the border. Furthermore, as we

have detailed, alongside a flurry of `counter-publicity for

illegals’, Gamu-gate unleashed an extraordinary amount of ugly

online racism, banal and well-trodden narratives about `illegal

migrants’ which sought to ‘close the gap’ between lived postcolonial

realities and the ahistorical abstraction of reality TV, which

Gamu’s claim for global stardom had wrenched open.

Nevertheless, by trying to pass as a ‘global girl’ and by being

exposed as a `postcolonial girl’, Gamu breached borders, creating

heated debates about immigration and postcoloniality amongst the

most unlikely of audiences. In so doing, `Gamu-gate’ generated, in

the sense Rancière suggests, an aesthetic rupture which affected the

return of a particular imperial spectre which cannot be so easily

dispelled. For our own part, by restaging the melodrama of ‘Gamu-

gate’ in the space of this paper, our aim has been to further make

tangible the neocolonial logic which constitutes populations of

irregular African migrants from the post-colonies in the Global

North as disposable: a `disposability` which the intimate public

spaces of television and social media forums in this case made

audible in an unexpected way (Khanna, 2009).

Meanwhile, the future of the Gamu family remains uncertain. In May

2011, they won an appeal to remain in the UK, but the British

Government immediately announced its intention to contest the

decision of this ruling and the case is ongoing. Like a piece of

grit removed from an eye, these postcolonial melodramas continue to

irritate the body politic long after they are over. As Gamu sings,

`You'll have to cry me out’.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Shani Orgad, Bruce Bennett, Helene Strauss and Sarah

Brophy for their critical feedback.

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Figures

Figure One: ‘Don’t Let Me Face the Firing Squad’ front cover of the

News of the World, 10 October 2010 (photograph of cover taken by I.

Tyler)