Call for Submissions
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS DEPORTED: REMOVAL AND THE REGULATION OF HUMAN MOBILITY Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds.
In recent years, undocumented migration has widely become the central and often constitutive preoccupation of immigration politics and policy debates in migrant-receiving states around the globe. The palpable practical effect of such immigration lawmaking has not only meant that so-called “illegal aliens” are deemed unsuitable for citizenship and increasingly criminalized, but also that the specific expression of immigration law enforcement has been to make ever-greater numbers and ever-more diverse categories of migrants subject to arrest, detention, and deportation. But deportation is seldom recognized to be a distinct policy option with its own socio-political logic, as well as far-reaching effects. How precisely does deportation come to be so ubiquitously regarded as not only one conceivable response to “unauthorized” or “irregular” migration but rather as the apparently singular and presumably natural or proper retribution on the part of state powers to those found to be traversing nation-state borders and thereby transgressing territorial jurisdictions, or simply living and most commonly working without “permission”? How indeed has undocumented migration become effectively defined, enforced, and lived as a more or less categorical susceptibility for deportation? If deportation has been configured as a preeminent means of defending, enacting, and thus verifying state sovereignty against those who have allegedly violated the material and symbolic boundaries of “the nation,” then it cannot be apprehensible simply as the unfortunate but predictable consequence of an “illegal” migration gone awry, or a “failed” petition for refugee asylum. As profoundly disruptive and plainly debasing as a deportation can be for all those immediately affected, there is indubitably something greater at stake in such practices of removal, including the formulation and emphatic reaffirmation of state sovereignty itself as well as its concomitant production and refashioning of political subjectivities for “natural” and “naturalized” citizens, all manner of “immigrant” and “foreign” denizens, the communities where the deported are more or less coercively “returned,” and of course the deportees themselves. Recently, social scientists, historians, and cultural critics have begun to direct more sustained scrutiny toward deportation as something more than a natural or inevitable conclusion to various ostensibly “failed” migrant or refugee endeavors. These provocative advances have interrogated deportation as a disciplinary practice and as an instrument of sovereignty that renders certain populations “deportable,” regardless of their practical connections or affective ties to the host society. As a still incipient field of inquiry, the study of deportation offers fertile ground for theoretical advances in migration, citizenship, and sovereignty studies. As a routinized and entrenched state practice, forced removals (and the anti-deportation campaigns they increasingly inspire) provide an instructive occasion for the critical reexamination of dominant conceptions and conceits concerning the privileges and practices of citizenship. In what ways may deportation (re)constitute the distinction between “alien” and “citizen”? In what ways does it supply a practical horizon for differences and inequalities within a wider economy of “alien” or “immigrant” status? What are the sociocultural and political ramifications of forced removals for a migrant community that remains (un-deported)? How is deportation gendered and racialized? What kinds of subjectivities are produced through deportation? How have deportation laws and practices changed historically? How has deportation and its effects been represented in popular culture? How might scholars theorize and historicize significant distinctions between deportation and other forms of removal, such as “voluntary” repatriation or extra-legal rendition? How might immigration detentions be productively elucidated by comparative perspectives from the study of incarceration and the “prison-industrial complex”? What is the political economy of detention and deportation? How may the experiences and perspectives of deportees inform and enable innovative critiques of “the law”?
This edited volume invites chapter submissions that analyze deportation in light of any of these questions or themes, from a variety of perspectives: historical, legal, ethnographic, literary, and political. Chapters may focus on specific deportation cases or the experiences of individual deportees; communities subjected to deportations or to which deportees are “returned”; anti-deportation political campaigns, protests, and movements; legislative debates; legal proceedings and deportation hearings; detention policies and practices; immigration authorities and other enforcement agents; etc. Furthermore, we are interested in submissions (in English) that address the immigration and/or refugee policy regimes and enforcement practices of any national state or international border, and we welcome work examining deportation from countries not conventionally considered to belong to the so-called “West” or the global “North.”
Please submit brief paper abstracts or proposals, and direct any queries to: Nathalie Peutz npeutz@princeton.edu
KJ