Illegalising, suspending, patrolling, brokering, trafficking, disinvesting, terrorising, displacing
Borders, partitions, walls, processing offices, waiting rooms, streets
Immobilising captures the central role and technologies of the state in validating and legalising the immobility of racialised bodies. Immobilising is a form of displacement that engages with space and time, where uncertainty and waiting are core to the suspension of citizenship as captured in Nicholas De Genova’s analysis of ‘illegality’. In spatial terms we see how extreme violations against humanity proliferate in a growing architecture of national partitions and borders, where a thinning of citizenship rights is matched with a thickening of bureaucracy. A repertoire of spaces associated with deportation and extradition further reveal how race and religion are brought into racial systems of segregation and a heightened politics of fear. Immobilising is also evident in the banal spaces of everyday life, from waiting rooms and processing offices ostensibly for public service. In these spaces we see the intersection of a politics of austerity and re-emergent racisms. These intersections of political segregation and economic investment that favour select interests are globally evident in structural adjustment programmes and historical marginalisation. The extremity of immobilising processes across liberal democracies also produces alternative imaginaries of politics, solidarity and space.
Film/ Fiction/ Visualisations
De Noronha, Luke and BREAK//LINE (Thandi Loewenson and Miranda Critchley). 2018.“Deportation Discs:A Public Hearing”,The Bartlett School of Architecture, 15 – 16 November. [Exhibition/ Podcast]
Diawara, Manthia. 2018. An Opera of the World [Film].
Diop. Mati. 2013. Atlantiques [Film].
Medu. Ongoing. Esodi. Exodi. Migratory Routes from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe
Sack, Jon. 2015. La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico. London: Verso Books.
Core Texts
De Genova, Nicholas. 2018. “The ‘Migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?” Ethnic and Racial Studies. 41:10, 1765 – 1782.
Hall, Suzanne. 2018.“Migrant Margins: The Street Life of Discrimination.” The Sociological Review. 66:5, 968-983.
Lafazani, Olga. 2018. “Homeplace Plaza: Challenging the Border between Host and Hosted.” The South Atlantic Quarterly. 117:3, 896-804.
Xiang, Biao, and Lindquist, Johan. 2014. “Migration Infrastructure” International Migration Review. 48:1, 122 – 148.
Yuval-Davis, Nira., Georgie Wemyss, and Kathryn Cassidy. 2018. “ Everyday Bordering, Belonging and the Reorientation of British Immigration Legislation.” Sociology. 52:2, 228-244.
More Reading:
Anderson, Sean and Ferng, Jennifer. 2013. “No Boat: Christmas Island and the Architecture of Detention.” Architectural Theory Review.18:2, 212 – 226.
Andersson, Ruben. 2014. “Hunter and Prey: Patrolling Clandestine Migration in the Euro-African Borderlands.” Anthropological Quarterly. 119-149.
Ashe, Stephen., Virdee, Satnam., and Brown, Laurence. 2016. “Striking back against Racist Violence in the East End of London, 1968–1970.” Race & Class. 58:1, 34-54.
Auyero, Javier. 2011. “Patients of the State: An Ethnographic Account of Poor People’s Waiting.” Latin American Research Review. 5-29.
De Genova, Nicholas. 2002.“Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 31: 419–47.
Deshingkar, Priya., Abrar, C. R., Sultana, Mirza Taslima., Hague, Kazi Nurmohammad Hossainul., and Reza, Md Selim. 2018. “Producing ideal Bangladeshi migrants for precarious construction work in Qatar,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 24:1, 1 - 16.
Isin, Engin Fahri. 2002. Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Jones, Hannah., Gunaratnam, Yasmin., Bhattacharyya, Gargi., Davies, William., Dhaliwal, Sukhwant., Forkert, Kirsten., Jackson, Emma., and Saltus, Roiyah. 2017.
Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kapoor, Nisha. 2018. Deport, Deprive Extradite: 21st Century Extremism. London: Verso.
Neilson, Brett and Sandro Mezzadra. 2013. Border as a Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rashid, Naaz. 2016. Veiled Threat: Representing the Muslim Woman in Public Policy Discourses. Bristol: Policy Press.
Redclift, Victoria. 2011.“Subjectivity and Citizenship: Intersections of Space, Ethnicity and Identity among the Urdu- speaking Minority in Bangladesh.” Journal of International Migration and Integration/ Revue de l’Integration et de la Migration Internationale. 12:1, 25-42.
Wemyss, Georgie, and Cassidy, Kathryn.2017. “’People think that Romanians and Roma are the Same’: Everyday Bordering and the lifting of Transitional Controls.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. 40:7, 1132-1150.
Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press.