°Enclosure, colonialisation
Clichy-sous-Bois - internment camp? Discuss.
“We feel rebellion more than hatred”
Also, three bloggers arrested for “inciting”.
Qlipoth remarks, “The lessons of colonialism learned from the invasion of Algeria were applied by the French state upon its own subjects. France, like all modern states, was modernized and made uniform by folding the logic of colonialism back upon itself.” And perhaps this is the moment to recall Veracini’s article in Borderlands, but also (as the French Government declares a state of emergency) to backtrack to the emergent-z world piece.
The other question, perhaps, is the extent to which the cites might be better called internment camps, sites of detainment not only spatial but also temporal. An excerpt, then, from a draft of an essay that BN and I just sent off, most of which discusses the AU context of internment camps, excisions and the campaigns against border controls:
[…] the very sense of the exception that suspends time itself in an attempt to correlate to and confine, both pre-emptively and post hoc, the aleatory moment of border crossing—the encounter with difference, if you will—which no amount of control can prepare for.
Such a peculiar temporality pertains not only to the sovereign mechanisms by which the emergency is declared, as is the case with Melville Island [which was excised from the Australian ‘migration zone’]. It also inflects the daily experiences of migrants whose lives are held up, formally and informally, through border technologies. Lan Tran, who arrived in Australia from Vietnam via a camp in Malaysia, remarked:
For me, my ordeal has become an adventure because over the years it has lost its element of danger and profound sense of uncertainty of what the future may hold. From where I’m speaking right now, I am at one point in that future of my past. I can see from my experience that the ordeal wasn’t the journey itself. It was how we were received by the community at large. And that is an on-going process. I am conscious of now and again, beyond my experience as a Boat Person, a refugee, an Australian citizen living in Australia, I am Asian and because of that I would have to continually justify my place in this society through a full admission of my history that was elsewhere.
Although Tran exists ‘beyond’ her experience as a ‘Boat Person’, what she describes here is nothing less than a process of ‘detainment’—of living in the future of her past. It is the same insistence of the future anterior that animates the sovereign decision and finds its material embodiment in the physical experience of detainment or incarceration.
I guess the thing to add here, the thing that every child of immigrants (as I suspect many of those rioting in France are) knows, is that one exists in this perpetual time of detainment at the border by having to consistently respond to the demand that one prove one’s belonging, even if this is simply presented in the form of being characterised as a migrant, when (unlike one’s parents) one has in fact never migrated anywhere.
(As an aside: I thought that I’d outgrown or moved on from the circles in which I’d experience those moments of being characterised as a migrant when I am anything but; so, perhaps this (more than anything else) is why I think a certain postgrad betrays herself as a border cop and is not simply stupid or ill-informed.)
More ridiculous than sublime, but you may be interested in some comments on Tony Richardson’s The Border. It’s a pretty interesting film, too. Ever seen it?
Jon [November 8, 2005 @ 6:44 pm]
See also on France http://dearkitty.modblog.com/?show=blogview&blog_id=776223
dearkitty [November 8, 2005 @ 7:44 pm]
heya,
To quibble just a little and to be mean-spirited … You’re not suggesting a distinction between border cop and stupidity are you? It seems to me that being a border cop is/requires a specific arrangement of stupidity and ill-informedness. I’m thinking among other things of cartoons I used to watch as a kid, in which the very stupid character was always quite sweet, while the villain was always just stupid enough to be mean and conniving…. ;)
take care,
Nate
Nate [November 9, 2005 @ 1:52 am]
Heh. You too can be very sweet, particularly when describing yourself as “mean-spirited” - but you are never stupid.
s0metim3s [November 9, 2005 @ 2:09 am]
Hey thanks, I appreciate it. I was going to say thanks for the autonomous university links on that post, but I’ll do so here instead (you see, multiple thanking would undercut my painstakingly cultivated tough and mean image) - thanks for the autonomous university links.
Nate [November 9, 2005 @ 2:55 pm]
Great point about the perpetual time of detainment and proving one’s presence. I think the corollary is that a citizen whose parents or grandparents migrated, also has to perpetually prove their absence from this borderland. A friend of mine is visible as a person, (camarade or citizen) at work, or in school, or at parties inasmuch as any trace of her Algerian heritage is invisible. Another person I know had told me that she didn’t think there were any students of Maghrebian heritage at the Sorbonne, I presumed because they are not holding a knife in hand or wearing an Algerian soccer jersey.
Great link to Veracini’s article (as well as your writings I’ve read so far). I’ve been fumbling around in the dark trying to express what he, and you, have theorized clearly. Thank you.
Chris [November 9, 2005 @ 10:32 pm]
Thanks Chris, though I think we’re all still groping around, me no less than everyone else.
There’s obviously a lot more to think through about the ways in which time and space function in these instances. One of the things that probably needs to be developed here is relating the perpetual time of detainment, in its particularly racialised aspects, to the reconfigurations of time-space in precarious, informal work arrangements. Obviously, one cannot collapse them into the one paradigm, but I don’t think they’re unrelated.
s0metim3s [November 10, 2005 @ 12:56 pm]