Citizens of Nowhere: Cosmopolitanisation and Cultures of Securitisation in Dionne Brand’s Inventory

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the philosophical concept of cosmopolitanism within the global context of increasing securitisation and the racial surveillance of asylum seekers and migrants. It explores how a literary text, such as Dionne Brand’s long-form poem Inventory (2006), offers a way to assess critically the hidden architectures of migrant detention centres and illuminate what has been called the ‘banopticon’ apparatus and its disciplinary management of the immigrant other (Bigo, D., 2008. Globalized (in)Security: the Field and the Ban-opticon [sic]. In: D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala, eds. Terror, Insecurity, and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/11. London: Routledge, 10–48). In contrast to literary writers who seek to humanise the plight of individuals caught up in the so-called migrant crisis, Brand instead represents flows of data that tally the overwhelming effects of the nation-state’s entanglement with globalisation, as well as the material realities of the state’s response. Drawing on developments in surveillance studies including Steve Mann’s notion of ‘sousveillance’ – a form of counter-surveillance initiated from below – this paper analyses Inventory and proposes that it generates a cynical cosmopolitan vision, a cosmopolitanism of detachment that bears witness to the structural forms of state oppression and disenfranchisement. The paper concludes by aligning Brand’s negative cosmopolitanism with the politics of refusal, as first articulated in cosmopolitanism’s origins by Diogenes the Cynic.

KEYWORDS:

• Dionne Brand
• cosmopolitanism
• cosmopolitanisation
• citizen of nowhere
• poetry
• literature
• migrant detention centres
• securitisation
• banopticon
• sousveillance

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers whose insights challenged and shaped my ideas. Thanks also go to Chris Lee, Renisa Mawani, and Sheila Giffen for organising the workshop that prompted this paper. I am deeply grateful to my graduate students for inspiring me with their stimulating readings of the text; thanks to all but especially Vhaun Bailey, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Duncan Hebenik, Kevin Holowak, Emily Hoven, and Miriam Mabrouk. Thanks also to Dia Da Costa for putting me on the track of refusals. Finally, I owe deep gratitude to Eddy Kent for his unrelenting support and intellectual generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Terri Tomsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Notes

1 As the Breitbart columnist, Virgil notes, for cosmopolitans, a large world order, such as the EU, ‘matters more than any country, even his own home country’ (2016: n.p.).