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Carceral Citizenship in an Age of Global Apartheid Jenna M Carceral Citizenship in an Age of Global Apartheid Jenna M. Loyd that he will swim back to Africa now he is drown. that the shadow of this Coast Guard Cutter of blockade has nothing to do w/his coconut head & the cost of his arms folded sleeping in salt? —Kamau Brathwaite1 n estimated 20,000 people have lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe in the past two decades.2 The Australian Border Crossing Observatory project reports that over 1,487 deaths have been recorded in the seas surrounding Australian territoryA between 2000 and 2013.3 In the Caribbean Sea, where, to my knowledge, comprehensive numbers are not being compiled, in the last two months of 2013 alone, two capsized boats led to the deaths of over 45 people.4 These fatalities in perilous waters must be counted alongside the Jenna M. Loyd is an assistant professor in the Zilber School of Public Health and a member of the Urban Studies Program faculty at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978 (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and the coeditor, with Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (University of Georgia Press, 2012). She is currently writing a book with Alison Mountz on the late– and post–Cold War history of US migra- tion detention and border deterrence policy. She is a co- principal investigator on two research projects: Transforming Justice, a transdisciplinary effort (with Anne Bonds, Lorraine Halinka Malcoe, Jenny Plevin, and Rob Smith) to docu- ment the harms of mass criminalization and redefine health and safety from the perspective of criminalized Milwaukee residents; and Geopolitics of Trauma, a feminist geographic project (with Patricia Ehrkamp and Anna Secor) on the role of PTSD in admission and resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the United States. 1 K. Brathwaite, DS (2): Dreamstories 2 (New York: New Directions, 2007), 197. 2 J. Shenker, “Mediterranean Migrant Deaths: A Litany of Largely Avoidable Loss,” Guardian, October 3, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/mediterranean-migrant-deaths-avoidable-loss. 3 Australian Border Crossing Observatory, Australian Border Deaths Database, 2014, http://artsonline.monash .edu.au/thebordercrossingobservatory/publications/australian-border-deaths-database/. 4 Associated Press, “Up to 30 Feared Dead as Migrant Boat Capsizes in the Bahamas, Telegraph, November 27, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/bahamas./10477192 /Up-to-30-feared-dead-as-migrant-boat-capsizes-in-Bahamas.html; M. Martinez, “17 Migrants Die When Their 2 occasion lives lost on land, such as in the Evros River valley between Greece and Turkey and in the deserts stretching between Arizona and Sonora and between Morocco, Algeria, and Libya. The deaths of people attempting to navigate treacherous spaces between relatively wealthy and powerful regions and less politically powerful places are the clearest evidence of the life and death stakes of global apartheid. Global apartheid is constituted most evidently through migra- tion regulations and practices of border policing, militarization, and interdiction.5 Yet global apartheid is not solely about assertions of nation-state sovereignty internationally or at national boundaries. Not only does global apartheid rely on the fortification and policing of sovereign territory and on the delegation of this work regionally to third countries, but it also relies on domestic policing and crime policies and their infrastructure of detention facilities, jails, prisons, and the methods for moving people within this network or removing them through deportation. International geopolitical struggles are increasingly intertwined with carceral regimes, linking domestic and foreign space. In the time since Jonathan Simon published “Refugees in a Carceral Age” over sixteen years ago, the intersection between criminal justice and immigration policies has grown increasingly strong.6 Despite a growing literature on this intersection, however, the implications that an inter- linked machinery of confinement and deportation poses for political theory and organizing are much less explored.7 I suggest that global apartheid must be understood in relation to the carceral state, which together form a regime of carceral citizenship that is global in scope. The construc- tion of global apartheid, moreover, is tied up with military (and imperial) logics, which are most evident in the fortified land boundaries and patrolled seas between the Global North and Global South.8 These fortifications have specific geopolitical histories, which are intertwined with spe- cific regional racial formations. Whereas geopolitics and migration policy tend to be understood as (inter-)national issues, I suggest that racial projects advanced at regional scales—regional racial formations—are import- ant for understanding the uneven development of national policies. To advance this argument, I build on Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formations—“the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed”—and geographic theories of region.9 Cheng defines “regional racial formations” as “place-specific processes of racial forma- Intercepted Boat Capsizes at Turks and Caicos,” CNN, December 26, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/25 /world/americas/turks-caicos-migrant-deaths/. 5 J. Nevins, Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008); A. Mountz, “The Enforcement Archipelago: Detention, Haunting, and Asylum on Islands,”Political Geography 30, no. 3 (2011): 118–28. 6 J. Simon, “Refugees in a Carceral Age: The Rebirth of Immigration Prisons in the United States,” Public Culture 10, no. 3 (1998): 577–607. 7 J. Sudbury, ed., Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex (New York: Routledge, 2005); M. Escobar, “No One Is Criminal,” in Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. CR10 Publications Collective (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), 57–69; N. Tadiar, ed., “Borders on Belonging: Gender and Immigration,” special issue, S&F Online 6, no. 3 (2008), htt p://sfon l i ne .barnard.edu/immigration/; J. M. Lawston and M. Escobar, eds., “Policing, Detention, Deportation, and Resistance,” special issue, Social Justice 36, no. 2 (2009); J. Loyd, M. Mitchelson, and A. Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 8 J. Loyd, E. Mitchell-Eaton, and A. Mountz, “The Militarization of Islands and Migration Control: Tracing Human Mobility through US Empire on Bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific,”Political Geography (under review). 9 M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55; C. A. Woods, Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta loyd | carceral citizenship in an age of global apartheid 3 tion, in which locally accepted racial orders and hierarchies complicate and sometimes challenge hegemonic and facile notions of race.”10 In the case of the United States, specific histories of conquest, racism, and empire have cre- ated transnational regional racial formations. The colonial and ongoing establishment of a sharp boundary between the United States and Mexico, across Native lands, is an example of a transna- tional regional racial formation in the borderlands. Anglo projects to dominate these spaces and Mexican and Native inhabitants continue to inform contemporary anti-Mexican xenophobia and exclusionary policies elsewhere in the nation and at a range of geographic scales.11 Further, Mae Ngai traces how anti-Chinese agitation on the part of Anglos in California led to exclusionary legislation at the federal level.12 Understandings of more contemporary immigration histories tend to overlook the anti- Black racism driving US interdiction practices in the Caribbean. The use of detention and inter- diction as deterrents to Haitian migration in particular, however, established the legal and practical grounds upon which current US immigration detention polices and “territorial denial” strategies deployed along the United States–Mexico boundary took root. US interdiction prac- tices, moreover, created the conditions for other nations to deploy similar exclusionary practices in the international waters near their territories.13 Examining the anti-Black roots of US border and immigration policy, then, suggests a genealogy of global apartheid tied up in the ricochets of slavery and empire, where US Coast Guard cutters signal not so much safe passage but a con- temporary Middle Passage.14 background and theory: refugees, rights, and carceral citizenship Hannah Arendt sought to remedy the problem of statelessness for refugees created by the dis- solution of European empires in World War I by extending the “right to have rights.”15 That is, she wanted to extend the civil and political rights, responsibilities, and protections that, ideally, citizens within a democratic state can expect. Members of the United Nations began crafting the rights of refugees that signatory states must protect with the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (following on work that the League of Nations had done). The conven- tion was expanded with a protocol in 1967 that removed geographical
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