Blackness, biopolitics, borders: African immigration, racialization, and the limits of American exceptionalism

ABSTRACT

Centreing the corporeal experiences and material significance of bodies lays bare the border as a site for social reproduction. Utilizing critical discourse analyses on three mediatized encounters – Abdi Nor Iftin, Amadou Diallo, and Ahmed Mohammed – between African immigrancy to the United States and that nation-state's surveillance of bodies discloses a key contradiction within those encounters: a mésalliance that positions Africans as an archetype of human capital and simultaneously a critical threat to the national psyche. This essay argues that African immigrants expose this contradiction, raising questions on Blackness, sexuality, identity, immigration, anti-colonialism, and the afterlife of slavery. This dynamic not only reveals how contingent U.S. citizenship can be, while also “calling the bluff” of its exceptionalism and the underlying social contract of global neoliberalism, but also grounds Blackness transnationally as a way to avoid reproducing the racialized “sorting” that occurs before, during, and after face-to-face encounters.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• racial taxonomies
• citizenship & immigration
• queer of colour critique
• borders

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I invoke the queer in its radical political potential, not only challenging heteronormativity (Ferguson, 2004), but also encouraging the fluidity and movement of peoples’ sexual lives (Cohen, 1997). “Queer” describes a critical relationship to existing sexual and social norms, recognizing particular political, economic, and social geographies and communities that transcend space and time; it is “a regulatory ideal, an elusive construct, a dangerous component of hegemony” (Abdur-Rahman 2012, 5; cf. Cohen 1997; Cobb et al. 2005).

2 Foucault (1980) argued that the subject is the result of social processes, and that subjectivity is produced by a system of knowledge that controls the subject's identity.

3 Legal scholar Anja Louis provided a current definition of legal subjectivity as “the ability to bear rights and responsibilities, basic equality before the law, respect and self-determination” (2005, 12).