Event overview
Abstract: Deportation and the other material practices of border policing and immigration law enforcement are central to the production of what I have previously depicted as the Border Spectacle, a spectacle of enforcement at the border, whereby the spectre of migrant “illegality” is rendered spectacularly visible. Through this same operation, the law, which has in fact produced the “illegality” of the migrants in question, is utterly naturalized and vanishes from view. In place of the social and political relation of migrant labor to the state, therefore, the spectacle of border enforcement yields up the thing-like fetish of migrant “illegality” as a self-evident and sui generis “fact,” generated by its own supposed act of violation. An ever-increasingly militarized spectacle of apprehensions, detentions, and deportations may be taken to supply the scene of “exclusion.” And yet, the more noise and heat generated from this sort of anti-immigrant controversy, the more that the veritable inclusion of those incessantly targeted for exclusion proceeds apace. Their “inclusion” is finally devoted to the subordination of their labor, which can be best accomplished only to the extent that their incorporation is permanently beleaguered with the kinds of exclusionary and commonly racist campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself, precisely, a form of subjugation. What is at stake, then, is a larger socio-political (and legal) process of inclusion through exclusion, labor importation (whether overt or covert) premised upon protracted deportability. This, we may comprehend to be the obscene of inclusion. These mass-mediated operations of discursive separation – producing people as “illegal” in utter isolation and disregard for the legal production of “illegality” itself – systematically disorient and disarticulate the scene and the obscene with the superficial and incomplete language of “inclusion” and “exclusion.” Thus, elucidating the spectacles of migrant “illegality” provides a vital analytical tool for the sort of scholarship or activism that seeks to avoid becoming merely one more contribution to the larger discursive formation which fetishizes “illegality” as a “natural” fact.
Biography: Nicholas De Genova is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has previously taught at Columbia and Stanford Universities (USA) and the University of Bern (Switzerland), and has also held research positions at the University of Warwick (UK), the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), and the University of Chicago (USA). He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago (2005), co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (2003), editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (2006), and co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (2010). He is completing a new book, titled The Spectacle of Terror: Immigration, Race, and the Homeland Security State.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Oct 2011 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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