Migrant Lives in a State of Exception (II): Sovereignty, Mobility and Agency in a Globalised World

The present volume is the second of two special issues that focus on Migrant States of Exception, published by Parallax as consecutive issues 27.2 and 27.3. Based on an interdisciplinary symposium at the University of Wuppertal in November 2019, these two parts function as companion pieces. In tandem, they engage and put into dialogue a variety of perspectives and disciplines – such as legal and philosophical approaches, human geography as well as literary, cultural and media studies – to gauge the complexity of a phenomenon that affects nearly every part of the world today. Neither scholarly work nor literary or filmic representations tend to have a direct influence on political or legal decision-making processes. Yet they constitute important means of reflection that are indispensable if we intend to move beyond the historically given and thus – potentially at least – to change the ways we imagine belonging, participation and, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, our ‘imagined communities’.¹ Judging from the ever-increasing number of internal and international migrants, displaced persons, refugees and asylum seekers, we urgently need such re-imaginings and the social, political and legal possibilities that can evolve from them.

Published as Parallax 27.2, the first part of Migrant States of Exception draws attention to the complex ways in which borders and sovereignty have been dispersed.² It highlights the powerful and often subversive tactics migrants use to negotiate borders, sovereignty and relations of power in gendered, racialised, material, embodied and imagined manners. In two sections, dedicated to ‘Strange Citizens, Citizen Strangers’ and ‘Migration, Refugees and the Law’, it includes scholarly articles by Katja Sarkowsky,³ Lea Espinoza Garrido,⁴ and Fiona Eichinger,⁵ as well as an extensive interview with Thomas Spijkerboer,⁶ all of which shed light on migrant states of exception from the viewpoints of North American studies, political science and legal studies. In addition, issue 27.2 offers a substantial introduction, and we kindly invite readers of the present volume to consult it, since it is pertinent for the contributions collected in both issues. In the following, we briefly revisit some of those key definitions and concepts introduced in issue 27.2, on which the second issue of Migrant States of Exception draws, in order to provide readers with a theoretical framework and orientation that will allow them to navigate 27.3.

As suggested by the phrase ‘migrant states of exception’, both special issues take their cue from Giorgio Agamben’s provocative claim that, in modernity, states of exception become the norm, ‘a [p]aradigm of [g]overnment’.⁷ Tied as the ‘state of exception’ is to the exertion of sovereign power,⁸ this claim may be counter-intuitive at a time when globalisation seems to have all but eroded state sovereignty, and when the concept of governance, due to the nuanced analysis of the micro-political workings of modern power it facilitates, has gained widespread acceptance.⁹ In fact, forms of governance also play a major role in regulating migrant movements and existences around the world, as shown in contemporary forms of ‘techno humanitarianism’, ‘datafication’ and ‘digital identity management’, but also in processes of de- and re-subjectification that migrants often (have to) undergo after receiving refuge, successfully attaining asylum or acquiring a temporary status of acceptance.¹⁰

However, it cannot be overlooked that, at the present historical moment, states of exception abound, and that concerns about the uses and abuses of exceptional law and states of emergency have become more urgent.¹¹ Although, for many populations in the Global North, living in a state of exception remains an exception and the abuses of exceptional law constitute a possible (yet for the most part seemingly abstract) threat, migrants around the world have been habitually subjected to states of exception. This also holds true for people who live in the postcolonies, especially if we regard European migration law.¹² When considering refugee camps in Europe, the Mexican border processing zone (where many internal migrants work, yet which is partly exempt from Mexican labour laws) or the Rohingya’s situation in Myanmar and Bangladesh, the manifold forms that a state of exception can take become apparent. Migrants’ relation to sovereign power in these various contexts is best characterised by Agamben’s notion of ‘inclusive exclusion’.¹³ Defined as a ‘relation of exception’ that constitutes ‘the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion’,¹⁴ this concept allows us to think through mechanisms of (biopolitical) sovereignty that affect, even shape, migrant lives: relegated to a position of ‘inclusive exclusion’ in virtually every part of the world, migrants endure states of exception of a legal, political and economic kind, not to speak of the emotional and psychological toll this takes and the metaphorical states of exception that such forms of ‘inclusive exclusion’ entail.¹⁵

However, given the abstract and often overly generalising nature of Agamben’s claims (as opposed to the great historical, geographical and legal diversity of states of exception endured by migrants), it is also clear that his ideas have to be modified, extended and, at times, re-formulated in a more nuanced manner, in order to use them as productive tools of analysis. A particularly important case in point would be the racist and colonial dimensions and heritages of forms of ‘inclusive exclusion’ and of the exception as a mode of governance. Similarly, processes of de- and re-territorialisation that mark the present moment are highly complex and cannot be easily captured by – to borrow from Malini Johar Schueller – ‘global theories’ such as Agamben’s.¹⁶ Keeping the need for modification, extension or re-formulation – as the case may demand – in mind, we find that the topography of exception and the notion of ‘inclusive exclusion’ remain useful to reflect on the mechanisms of power that frame migrant lives.

Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ and the homo sacer (a figure he takes from ancient Roman law where it exemplifies bare life) are equally productive, while also warranting qualifications and adjustments to geographical, political, historical and gendered specificities. Homo sacer or bare life is the living ‘remnant’ deposited at the thresholds of our communities; the person whom the law does not see as a person and, hence, does not protect, but abandons; the unintelligible one, who still maintains a relation to the sphere of law precisely by not being part of it. As we have argued in our introduction to the first part of Migrant States of Exception in Parallax 27.2, the situation therefore ‘goes beyond a clear-cut dichotomy of being inside or outside, of being either included or excluded, and thus, at least potentially, protected or unprotected’.¹⁷ What is more, it also goes far beyond passive victimhood. While the precariousness of bare life and the desolate circumstances which many migrants and refugees have to endure are indisputable, human beings relegated to positions of bare life are not devoid of recourse or agency. Since the range of individual actions and the possibilities for collective movements are often severely restricted, it is all the more important to pay attention to the creative ‘tactics’ employed by migrants in order to negotiate and potentially circumvent or undermine coercive and exclusionary frameworks.¹⁸ That migrant agency can have large-scale effects is evidenced, for example, by the so-called caravans from Central America. As Alicia Schmidt Camacho suggests, these migrant collectives might turn into agents of social and political change by fostering forms of solidarity that go beyond statehood and might even provide models for future communities.¹⁹ By functioning as a ‘limit concept’, the ‘figure of the migrant’, to use Thomas Nail’s term, is simultaneously constitutive of our conceptualisation of citizenship as it is a challenge to it.²⁰ It can, therefore, play an important role in processes of devising more sustainable and cooperative futures.²¹

Parallax 27.3, the second part of Migrant States of Exception, complements its companion piece by contributing three additional important perspectives: firstly, it adds philosophical and artistic reflections on precarious mobilities and globalised capitalism beyond Agambian paradigms; secondly, it offers cultural and sociological analyses of narratives that shape real and represented topographies of exception as sites of inclusive exclusion; and thirdly, it introduces an ecocritical focus on the environmental emergencies that result from anthropogenic climate change and the differential allocation of vulnerability, while also reflecting on new forms of community-making that these emergencies reveal. This issue, therefore, builds on the foundations laid by 27.2 and brings to the fore some of the main challenges of the present moment and the necessity to develop more life-sustaining as well as sustainable social, political and environmental imaginaries.

Section 1: Precarious Mobilities and Belongings

As we argue in our review of the vast body of criticism of Agamben’s work in the introduction to Parallax 27.2, his conceptualisation of the state of exception fails to acknowledge the crucial roles that slavery and colonialism play in the formation of modern notions of citizenship, law and emergency, as well as in articulations of modernity and the state system. Rather than approaching his topic via Agamben, Smail Rapic, in his contribution to Section 1 of this issue, ‘Precarious Mobilities and Belongings’, engages with Michel Foucault’s and Hannah Arendt’s theorisations of the state, territoriality and community. This allows him to throw into relief the role of colonialism in the emergence of the modern state as well as the effects of capitalism on territorial definitions of belonging. Modern conceptions of citizenship, Rapic argues, are always already racialised and hence exclusionary. Following Arendt, he claims that the protection of human rights in the era of globalised capitalism is only possible if the nation-state comes to an end.

Touching on similar issues, namely human rights and mobility freedoms, but in contrast to Rapic’s philosophical take, Yehuda Sharim’s documentaries delve into quotidian articulations of boundaries, inclusions/exclusions and heroic struggles to sustain a dignified life. In a Gramscian manner, Sharim’s films Seeds of All Things (2018) and Songs That Never End (2019) grapple with questions concerning the role of the artist/intellectual/filmmaker in turbulent times of mass displacement, racial oppression and an overall state of moral crisis. In the interview we conducted, Sharim explains how we can imagine social change in and through art, and reflects on the possibilities of filmmaking to (re)present the rich spectrum of the micro-politics of migrant states of exception beyond the sphere of the law. The moving story of the travails of a family of Syrian refugees, which the two films tell, bears witness to the human spirit in the face of adversity as well as to the callousness of abstract legal notions and ‘universal’ human rights.

Section 2: Loci Sacri

Section 2 of this special issue, entitled ‘Loci Sacri’, places topographies of exception – specific sites of literal or metaphorical inclusive exclusion – at the centre of attention in order to explore not only the precarious existences they produce but also their potential to challenge the territoriality of law. Martina Tazzioli and Aila Spathopoulou’s article examines the recent shift in terminology – from ‘refugee crisis’ to ‘migration crisis’ – in public and political European discourse, suggesting that the idea of the ‘deserving refugee’ has been replaced by the figure of the ‘undeserving migrant’. Focusing particularly on new means of containment and deterrence which are being tested on the Greek island of Lesbos, one of the many loci sacri around the world, Spathopoulou and Tazzioli analyse how migrants are actively prevented from accessing their legal rights in asylum procedures and deliberately kept in a precarious state of dependence on humanitarian actors.

Julia Wewior’s contribution examines another site of exception, namely Massacre River (the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), through the lens of precarity. While the river’s function as a border is central to creating the migrant body as a form of bare life in Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones, its very fluidity – its flexibility and constant change – also suggests permeability. As represented by Danticat, Massacre River therefore points to the non-fixity, not only of this particular border but also, at least implicitly, of borders in general. The threshold in the novel, then, features as a site of ‘inclusive exclusion’, and can thus become a potential locus of new social and political conceptualisations that challenge the very foundations and territorialities of the nation-state.

Section 3: Environmental States of Exception

While the ‘climate refugee’ neither features as an official category in the ‘Geneva Convention’, nor in the United States' ‘Immigration and Nationality Act’ (INA), nor in the EU's ‘Charter of Fundamental Rights’, the environmental impacts of globalisation and the ‘Capitalocene’ increasingly cause their own ‘states of exception’ and migratory movements. Section 3 of this issue, on ‘Environmental States of Exception’, explores interrelations between migration, states of exception and environmental displacement.²² Demi Wilton’s discussion of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, and Jenny Stümer’s analysis of Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, both bring to the fore experiences of the displacement of largely ‘unimagined communities’, along with questions of sovereignty, voice and political participation.²³ Zooming in on West Bengali refugees, who are excluded both from the knowledge production and the ‘displacement management’ that co-determine their existences, Wilton’s contribution illustrates that local histories and epistemologies are central to understanding the unique nature of the losses and traumata these communities undergo due to climate change. The novels at the centre of her article, however, suggest alternatives to such topographies of movement and knowledge. They thus imagine a potential for change in the geographical and temporal re-orientations afforded by local knowledges as well as by long-term historical perspectives.

In the closing article, Jenny Stümer analyses how Beasts of the Southern Wild makes use of a fictional bayou community in southern Louisiana to represent environmental displacement. Focusing particularly on the agency of the homines sacri of this threshold community, Stümer argues that Zeitlin’s film subverts the capitalist hierarchies that underwrite narratives of climate dispossession and imagines climate sovereignty and self-determination as alternative forms of managing and reacting to environmental disaster. At the same time, she argues that the film’s mapping of climate precarity onto the body of a Black female child and the celebration of the wild run the risk of obscuring histories of racialised violence and exclusion that intersect with and contribute to environmental migrant states of exception.

Many of the core questions our contributors tackle cross over from one issue to the other. To readers interested in the theorisation of migrant states of exception,²⁴ in migrant subjectivities,²⁵ in migrants’ lived realities,²⁶ in migrant agencies,²⁷ in the contributions offered by art (specifically literature and film) as alternative modes of thinking,²⁸ in liquid borders,²⁹ and questions of citizenship and belonging,³⁰ we recommend to explore also Parallax 27.2. Given the proliferation of migrant states of exception around the world, the complexity of their social, political and cultural dynamics, as well as their varied, sometimes long, histories, a publication of this kind can never be comprehensive. And yet, it is for these very reasons that public debates, cultural interventions, responsible and constructive political actions as well as scholarly reflections accompanying and, potentially, fostering/feeding these efforts are more necessary than ever. As guest editors of these two issues of Parallax, we hope to contribute to academic and broader public discussions of migrant states of exception as well as to the process of developing new social imaginaries that will help prevent them in the first place.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lea Espinoza Garrido

Lea Espinoza Garrido is a researcher and lecturer of American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Wuppertal and an associated member of the Graduate School “Practices of Literature” at the University of Münster. She is co-editor of Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene (Palgrave 2021) and an editor of the interphilological, peer-reviewed journal Textpraxis. Lea has published on representations of race and gender in contemporary U.S. American popular culture and is currently working on a project on “Postpost-9/11 Poetics” as well as on a collective monograph on the German band Rammstein (Metzler 2022, forthcoming). Email: [email protected]

Sylvia Mieszkowski

Sylvia Mieszkowski is Professor of British Literature at the University of Vienna and deputy-speaker of the interdisciplinary research platform GAIN (Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities). Currently, she does research on neo-Victorian (bio-)fiction, literary sound studies, the concept of transparency and Refugee Tales. Publications include: “Polymath Revisited: Cross-Lighting R. F. Burton between Cultural Passing and Steampunk Action” in Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Re-Imagining 19th-Century Historical Subjects, eds. M. L. Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Brill / Rodopi, 2020), p. 265-293 and More Than Meets the Ear: Sound & Short Fiction, ed. with Manon Burz-Labrande and Harald Freidl, double issue of Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 11.1&2 (2021). Email: [email protected]

Birgit Spengler

Birgit Spengler is Professor of American Literature at the University of Wuppertal. Her publications include Vision, Gender, and Power in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, 1860-1900 (2008) and Literary Spinoffs: Rewriting the Classics – Re-Imagining the Community (2015), as well as the co-edited volume An Eclectic Bestiary: Encounters in a More-Than-Human World (2019). In her current research, she focuses on articulations of exception and precarious being in contemporary American literature as well as on time-space arrangements and the more-than-human turn. Email: [email protected]

Julia Wewior

Julia Wewior is a researcher and lecturer in the field of American Studies at the University of Wuppertal and is currently working on her PhD project tentatively entitled “Narrating Precarity in Adichie’s and Danticat’s Writing”. She holds a Magister degree from Goethe-University Frankfurt and studied American, English and German Studies in Frankfurt, in Olomouc (Czech Republic) and, as a stipendiary of the State of Hesse, at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh (USA). Her research interests include Caribbean Studies, African American Studies, Ethics and Aesthetics, Precarity, Narratology, Gender Studies, Women Writers and Postcolonial Studies. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 95.

2 Mieszkowski, Spengler, and Wewior, eds., Migrant States of Exception, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tpar20/27/2?nav=tocList

3 Sarkowsky, “The Other Side of Citizenship.” This article questions the Canadian self-image as a ‘multicultural’ and ‘humanitarian’ nation as well as the romanticised image of the perfect refugee as passive, victimised and inherently deserving, which exposes the unequal access to citizenship and belonging in Canada.

4 Espinoza Garrido, “Porous Borders, Porous Bodies.” This article analyses gendered states of exception presented in a multi-perspectival novel, which draws on traditions of domestic drama and ponders possibilities of Arab and Muslim American female agency and belonging within U.S. society. The article suggests a substitution of patriarchal notions of the border as an immovable and solid boundary with a more productive metaphor of the border as porous and permeable.

5 Eichinger’s “Labourer, Citizen and Neighbour” identifies a set of implicit and explicit expectations that are projected onto migrants in the U.S. and in Germany. By comparing and contrasting the respective legal as well as institutional frameworks on the basis of interviews conducted with two distinct groups of refugees, Eichinger illustrates how Bhutanese refugees in Pittsburgh and Syrian refugees in Berlin accommodate and resist specific narrations of subjectification.

6 In this interview, Spijkerboer demonstrates the pervasiveness of the colonial legacy of European case law by framing the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 as a discursive production. He argues that its racial specificity – hidden but important for the legal definition of ‘emergency’ – is all too easily erased. By connecting Achille Mbembe’s concept of the postcolony to contemporary techniques of legal pluralism, he critiques how the European legal tradition, in the wake of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, self-servingly and problematically engages with the state of exception.

7 Agamben, State of Exception, 1.

8 Both Agamben and the Nazi regime’s principal political theorist, Carl Schmitt, on whom Agamben’s theorisation of the state of exception draws, closely link the state of exception with sovereignty.

9 See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, for the concept of a ‘micro-physics of power’, 26; see Spengler, Vision regarding the concept of a ‘micro-politics of power’, 52. See our introduction to Migrant States of Exception I for a more in-depth discussion of Agamben’s approach as well as of the criticism he has garnered. While we share this criticism, like many other scholars, we seek to work productively with and beyond Agamben’s philosophical framework, to develop modifications, precisions and, perhaps most importantly, ways to consider some of its blind spots, rather than abandoning his concepts altogether.

10 The term ‘techno humanitarianism’ is used by Martina Tazzioli and Aila Spathopoulou in their contribution to this volume regarding the uses of technology as a form of governance in the EU/Greece, harkening back – as do the terms ‘datafication’ and ‘digital identity management’ – to Tazzioli’s talk at the 2019 symposium and our ensuing discussions out of which our double issue grew. The term ‘conditions of possibility’ was used by Fiona Eichinger at the same symposium on Migrant States of Exception. See also her contribution to issue 27.2.

11 Both trends by far exceed the current pandemic. A case in point would be the United States, where scholars of constitutional law have grown increasingly concerned about the extent of emergency powers and the limited checks that are in place to prevent their abuse.

12 See our interview with Thomas Spijkerboer, issue 27.2.

13 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8.

14 See our interview with Thomas Spijkerboer, issue 27.2.

15 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18. For concrete examples of migrant states of exception, see our introduction to the two special issues, published in full length in issue 27.2, and, particularly, the vignettes inserted there.

16 Schueller, “Decolonizing Global Theories Today,” 235.

17 Spengler et al., “Introduction,” 123.

18 Cf. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life.

19 Schmidt Camacho, “Migrant Justice.” See also our discussion of migrant agency in the introduction to issue 27.2.

20 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 134.

21 Cf. Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 9.

22 Cf. Donna Haraway’s notion of the Capitalocene in “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene.”

23 Nixon, Slow Violence, 150, with reference to Anderson, Imagined Communities, 95.

24 Rapic’s article in this issue and the interview with Spijkerboer in 27.2 offer productive critiques and expansions of Agamben’s terminology and thought.

25 The article by Tazzioli/Spathopoulou in this issue, as well as the interview with Spijkerboer and the contribution by Eichinger in 27.2, discuss how legal and other institutional structures shape migrant subjectivities.

26 The article by Tazzioli/Spathopoulou and the interview with Sharim in this issue, as well as Eichinger’s contribution and the interview with Spijkerboer in 27.2, all touch upon this point.

27 The articles by Stümer, Tazzioli/Spathopoulou, Wewior, Wilton and the interview with Sharim in this issue, as well as the contributions by Eichinger, Espinoza Garrido and Sarkowsky in issue 27.2, all highlight this dimension, which, all too often, is lost in discourses on migration.

28 The articles by Stümer, Wewior, Wilton and the interview with Sharim in this issue, as well as the contributions by Espinoza Garrido and Sarkowsky in issue 27.2, put particular emphasis on the cultural work performed by art as a medium of social self-reflection.

29 The articles by Stümer and Wewior in this issue, and that by Espinoza Garrido in 27.2, discuss the metaphorical as well as physical liquification of various borders as well as their consequences.

30 The articles by Rapic, Stümer, Wilton and, to some extent, Wewior in this issue, as well as those by Eichinger, Espinoza Garrido and Sarkowsky in 27.2, all trace how migrants face notions of citizenship and belonging, how these notions are questioned, re-confirmed or displaced.