Trolling Humanism: New Materialist Performativity in Border

Abstract

Director Ali Abbasi’s film Border (2018; Swedish: Gräns) contributes to new materialism’s ontological and ethical reconsiderations of matter, which call for new cultural imaginaries that equipoise the concerns of interdependently connected humans and nonhumans. This essay examines Border as a new materialist intervention in debates about the meaning and ethics of care in a more-than-human world. The essay also gestures toward how works of representation may contribute to new materialist inquiry, pointing toward underexplored archives by highlighting the multimodal forms through which theoretical inquiry may take place. I argue that Border’s articulation of care work does more than represent material entanglements; it also redefines human responsibility for a posthuman age, one of the most pressing tasks of recent research in new materialism.