Precarious diasporas in precarious states

ABSTRACT

Nijhawan builds upon Veena Das’s insight that violence is indistinguishable from the social. Can we think by means of this indistinguishability? Apropos of Nijhawan on asylum law, I consider how the decimation of the welfare state – a process that exemplifies Das’s insight – factors into links between precarity and diaspora. I discuss the situation of precarious diasporas in precarious states, i.e. states more accountable to markets than to citizens and the stateless. The state, I argue, is an abstraction fleshed out by claims made on it. Interior to us, it is only as real as appeals made to the sociality of its violence.

Notes

1 Doubtful of the state’s objectivity, or of its received status as an object of integrated value, I would also underscore that Das’s approach has much in common with insights from Phillip Abrams’s classic article on difficulties of studying the state: ‘We have come to take the state for granted as an object of political practice and political analysis,’ he writes, ‘while remaining quite spectacularly unclear as to what the state is’ (1988, 59). For Abrams, there most certainly is a state system, which consists of functionaries and institutions that are often enough at odds with one another and thus in various forms of disarray or phases of disunity; furthermore, there most certainly is in his view an idea of the state, which coalesces as ‘an ideological power’ abstracted from the disorder of literal functionaries and concrete institutions (69). The state, however, ‘does not, as such, exist’ (69). As a supposed object or entity, rather, the state is in fact ‘a triumph of concealment. It conceals the real history and relations of subjection behind an a-historical mask of legitimating illusion,’ which ‘contrives to deny the existence of connections and conflicts which would if recognised be incompatible with the claimed autonomy and integration of the state’ (77). For another key reading of the state that dovetails with the approaches of Abrams and Das, see Mitchell 1999.

2 Sadia Abbas persuasively argues that in Terrorist Assemblages, we do not alight upon ‘any contestation within Islam (in a range of Muslim diasporas or Islamicate societies)’ and yet, simultaneously, we do find ‘a bizarre tendency to adjudicate between Muslims. The mandate is sheer, but it seems as if Islam exists only to reveal the fallenness of secular-liberal assumptions’ (2013, 170). Moreover, Abbas asks, how does the ubiquitous term ‘agency’ function in Puar’s argument?

Is agency, perhaps, a substitute for rights? Does it mean giving up on changing the law? Agency, in this context, becomes the name of that which is exceptional, which exists in the crevices and interstices of the law. It is the law, which is always already (and apparently forever) given (175–6).

Like the law, clearly, the state in this context would be a fixed, objective, pregiven thing apart from which we stand in vivid defiance. Abbas’s insightful critique here meshes with Dhawan’s sense that, for Puar, ‘queer politics is an alibi for white ascendency’ (2013, 216) and is bound up with an alarming ‘antistatist stance within postcolonial queer scholarship’ (217). This stance, Dhawan notes, is mired in bad faith insofar as ‘it ignores the importance of the state for those citizens [and stateless populations] who do not have access to transnational counterpublic spheres to address their grievances’ (217).

3 For a more expansive reading of this concept of state intimacy and interiority, see Callebert and Soni (2018).