Surveillance, Human Rights, and Solidarity in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things

• Main Authors: Tseng,Yin Hsi, 曾尹璽
• Other Authors: Jiang Tsui Fen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/53193001668660216735

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文研究所 === 96 === This thesis aims to explore the issue of citizenship and human rights in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. Dirty Pretty Things describes the British government’s surveillance on asylum seekers, such as Okwe, an illegal refugee from Nigeria, and Senay, the Turkish asylum applicant, and unveils illegal refugees’ organ trade in exchange for passports in London. The thesis attempts to decipher how the ambivalent status of asylum seekers disturbs the surveillance of nation-states, exposes the defect of the citizenship gap and argues only through solidarity among different ethnicity, class and gender, could the subordinated fight against deficiencies in the mechanism of nation-states and exploitation of global capitalism. Through the perspectives of Derrida’s conditional hospitality and Foucault’s Panopticon, Chapter Two examines the surveillance of nation-states on asylum seekers in Dirty Pretty Things. In Chapter Three, I adopt Brysk and Shafir’s analysis to explore the citizenship gap between citizenship and human rights in the film, which reflects the difficulty in handling the cases of legal and illegal asylum seekers in nation-states on the basis of citizenship in the era of globalization. In Chapter Four, I will utilize the perceptive of Foucault’s resistance and Laclau and Mouffe’s radical plural democracy to suggest how counter strategies and solidarity could rebel against fissures in nation-states’ apparatuses and reveal a new possibility of alliance beyond borders in the era of globalization. The last chapter concludes by summing up the gaps in the system of nation-states and rejecting any enclosed ideology so as to articulate multiplicities and differences beyond limitations of ethnicity, class and gender across borders in the era of globalization.