Archaeologies of Nonentity in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope

This chapter thinks ‘the refugee’ with rather than against ‘the citizen.’ I argue that thinking ‘the citizen’ in and through the uncanny menace of ‘the refugee’ might attune us to both recognisable and invisible forms of displacement while reminding us of the singularity of the refugee. My aim is less to valorise displacement or celebrate transplanted identities than to remap the contours of exile and belonging. To explore the consequences of this remapping, I offer a new interpretation of Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope. By honouring the economically superfluous and socially rootless, his film evokes a familiar but seldom appreciated form of habitation, that of denizen, encompassing the alterity of the refugee and the alienation of the citizen.