anthropologist, geographer, social theorist, social critic
Nicholas De Genova
The Deportation Regime:
Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement
(Duke University Press, 2010)
co-edited with Nathalie Peutz
“The Deportation Regime is an important and timely book, both for theory and for politics. A series of well-written case studies (from across the world) accompanied by a smart Theoretical Overview by Nicholas De Genova, the collection urges us to see the undocumented migrant/sans papiers/deportable alien/stateless citizen as paradigmatic of our time, as norm rather than exception, and thus as constitutive of sovereignty and the political today.”
-- Charles Piot, author of
Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa
“This valuable collection of essays treating deportation as a distinct form of state social control shows convincingly that deportation demands more specific attention from social theorists. The ethnographically rich and theoretically informed essays provide fascinating case studies on the functioning of the deportation regime in different national settings.”
-- Linda Bosniak, author of
The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership
[The Deportation Regime] marks an important development in the study of deportation, as well as making a significant contribution to the literatures on migration, citizenship, and sovereignty.... This collection is truly impressive. It demonstrates the importance of deportation as a mechanism for producing citizenship and alienage, nations, states, and territories in both theory and practice.... There is much to be done, and this book outlines an emerging research agenda.
-- Bridget Anderson, author of
Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour and
Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control
"[This volume] seeks to help us understand why 'the deportation regime' has become the dominant lens through which undocumented migration is seen.... De Genova's chapter is a masterful overview of what he defines as the 'deportation regime', and ... provides an incisive account of the intersections between debates about sovereignty, space, and freedom of movement....
The Deportation Regime ... is a must read book."
-- John Solomos, co-editor of
the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies
“[I]t is astonishing how little attention is paid by political scientists to the ways that states limit, regulate and restrict the freedom of movement of millions of people … through attempts to control borders through policies of detention and incarceration…. Thanks to Nicholas De Genova, Nathalie Peutz, and Duke University Press, social scientists now have, in The Deportation Regime, an urgently needed compendium providing copious information and analysis of deportation regimes in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, and the Middle East.… the editors did a fabulous job of selecting fourteen extremely well-written and illuminating essays that nicely complement each other.”
-- Jacqueline Stevens, author of
States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals
* * * * * *
Winner
2011 Bronze Award, Past Presidents' Book Awards, Association for Borderlands Studies
Amidst proliferating spectacles of increasingly militarized border policing and the expanding purview of securitization in all aspects of travel and transit, globally, deportation has recently achieved an unprecedented prominence as a definite and increasingly pervasive convention of routine statecraft. The persistent regulation of the elementary human freedom of movement has thus become an ever-greater preoccupation of states in the re-entrenchment of their spatial jurisdictions and their sovereign power. Indeed, deportation seems to have become a virtually global regime.
In pursuit of a critical comparativist study of the historical specificities of migration, citizenship, and state sovereignty on a global scale, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Duke University Press, 2010), co-edited with Nathalie Peutz, includes a co-authored Introduction and Nicholas De Genova’s Theoretical Overview, as well as chapters from scholars working in eleven countries. In his Theoretical Overview to the volume, De Genova elaborates the problems of state power, sovereignty, and space which become telescoped by the practice of deportation, in relation to the freedom of movement as a figure of life itself, and of living labor as the precondition for the very possibility of human social life.
Contents
Introduction / Nathalie Peutz and Nicholas De Genova 1
Part One: Theoretical Overview
The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement
Nicholas De Genova 33
Part Two: Sovereignty and Space
1. Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens
William Walters 69
2. Immigration Detention and the Territoriality of Universal Rights
Galina Cornelisse 101
3. Mapping the European Space of Circulation
Serhat Karakayali and Enrica Rigo 123
Part Three: Spaces of Deportability
4. From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportations across the Mediterranean Space
Rutvica Andrijasevic 147
5. Deportation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Anticipation, Experience, and Memory
Victor Talavera, Guillermina Gina Núñez, and Josiah Heyman 166
6. Engulfed: Indian Guest Workers, Bahraini Citizens, and the Structural Violence of the Kafala System
Andrew M. Gardner 196
7. Deportation at the Limits of "Tolerance": The Juridical, Institutional, and Social Construction of "Illegality" in Switzerland
Hans-Rudolf Wicker 224
8. Deportation Deferred: "Illegality," Visibility, and Recognition in Contemporary Germany
Heide Castañeda 245
9. Citizens, "Real" Others, and "Other" Others: The Biopolitics of Otherness and the Deportation of Unauthorized Migrant Workers from Tel Aviv, Israel
Sarah S. Willen 262
10. Radical Deportation: Alien Tales from Lodi and San Francisco
Sunaina Maira 295
Part Four: Forced Movement
11. Fictions of Law: The Trial of Sulaiman Oladokun, or Reading Kafka in an Immigration Court
Aashti Bhartia 329
12. Exiled by Law: Deportation and the Inviability of Life
Susan Bibler Coutin 351
13. "Criminal Alien" Deportees in Somaliland: An Ethnography of Removal
Nathalie Peutz 371
Part Five: Freedom
14. Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement
Peter Nyers 413