Legal/illegal: protesting citizenship in Fortress America

Abstract

This article examines the issue of legality and illegality, focusing on U.S. citizenship, anti-immigrant rage, and pro-immigrant protests. The central case study is an analysis of what I call digital rage, namely, the rhetorical strategies present in anti-immigrant online activism. I argue that online performance of rage invests in acts of bordering (Nyers 2008) which propel a discourse of white supremacist pure nation and neurotic citizenship (Isin 2004). The final part of this article explores No Human Being is Illegal, a protest art exhibition. Imaginatively refusing forms of citizenship grounded in legal/illegal axis, the exhibition exposes U.S. citizenship itself as illegal, rooted in the colonization of indigenous people and in current neocolonizing practices of exploitation.

Keywords:

• legality
• illegality
• Fortress America
• anti-immigrant online activism
• No Human Being is Illegal

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Áine O'Healy, Marguerite Waller, Imogen Tyler, and the anonymous reviewers for their engaged feedback. The author shows her gratitude to Lalo Alcaraz, THINK AGAIN collective, Yolanda Lopez, and Xico Gonzalez for allowing her to showcase their art and to Carol Wells for helping her secure the images from the CSPG collection.

Notes

1. I am using the notion of ‘rage’ evocatively; the marches and protests, at least in Los Angeles, were peaceful, though guarded heavily by the LAPD whose members accompanied the protesters on motorcycles, on horseback, and in patrol cars.

2. On nationalism, immigration advocacy, and the use of the flag, see Bauder (2006).

3. In order to travel abroad, one had to apply for a temporarily issued passport and go through interviews, explaining and documenting one's desire for mobility as well as signing declarations promising a scheduled return. After the return, one had to return the passport to the authorities.

4. My questioning of the ‘clarity of legality’ is indebted to Linda Kintz who, in her discussion of right-wing visual culture and virtual whiteness, defines this clarity as one that shuts down complexities and denies ‘messiness of interpretation’ (2002, p. 761).

5. As I have discussed in Alienhood, the notion of whiteness vis-à-vis the U.S. immigration policy needs to be de-universalized, as the logic of racial whiteness has been historically fluctuating and slippery, contingent upon changing politics of race (see, e.g. Haney-López 1996, Jacobson 1998).

6. The massacre at a youth summer camp in July 2011 in Norway by Andreas Breivik, propelled by his desire to return Christian Europe to its white ‘native’ glory, certainly urges us to take online white supremacy seriously.

7. Conversation with Carol Wells at CSPG in Los Angeles, 7 February 2008 (quoted by permission).