(David Farrier) Postcolonial Asylum Seeking Sanct

Postcolonial Asylum
Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 9
Farrier_PostcolAsylum_Final.indd 1 21/01/2011 15:25

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines
Series Editors
Graham Huggan, University of Leeds
Andrew Thompson, University of Leeds
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for

postÂ�colonial studies. It is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance in
colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline – English literary/
cultural studies – and to make the case for a combination of disciplinary knowÂ�
ledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial critique. Edited by leading
scholars, the series aims to be a seminal contribution to the field, spanning the
traditional range of disciplines represented in postcolonial studies but also those
less acknowlÂ�edged. It will also embrace new critical paradigms and examine the
relationÂ�ship between the transnational/cultural, the global and the Â�postcolonial.

Postcolonial Asylum
Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law
David Farrier
Liverpool University Press

First published 2011 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2011 David Farrier
The right of David Farrier to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Note to the Reader ix
List of Figures xi
Introduction: Before the Law 1

A scandal for postcolonial studies 1
The camp dispositif 9
Overview 15
1 Nothing Outside the Law 24
The colonization of the in-between 24
Kenomatic fetish 34
The heritage of colonial infrahumanity 38
Necropolitics and national narcissism 49
2 Horizons of Perception 57
In/visible relations 57
Gorgoneion 61
Horizon of perception 1: the camp in the city 73
Horizon of perception 2: the camp and the dispersal system 77
Horizon of perception 3: the camp and asylum destitution 85
3 Be/held: Ban and Iteration 92
Be/held 92
Bogus women 95
Re/producing ‘home’ 106
Continua 114

Contents
4 Allow Me My Destitution 124

Parasitic reading and reading parasites 124
Dead letters 130
Kalumnia and formula 135
‘Let me become the echo of a name to you’ 140
Preference and assumption 147
5 Terms of Hospitality 153
The receding refugee 153
Asylos/Asylao 156
The transgressive step 166
The necessary other 174
6 The Politics of Proximity 181
Response-ability 181
Metaxis 187
The journey is the film is the journey 193
The limits of dignity 201
Afterword 209
Bibliography 212
Index 228
vi

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following people for granting permission to reproduce the

images in this book: Neil Burgess, for the image from Sebastião Salgado’s Migra-
tions; Melanie Friend, for the image from her collection, Border Country; John
Perivolaris, for the images from Walking with Thaer (including the image on the
cover); and Heidrun Lohr, for her photograph of Shahin Shafaei. In particular, I
greatly appreciate the generosity of John and Heidrun for allowing me to repro
duce their work free of charge.
Every effort has been made to contact the rights holders of the images repro
duced here. Where it has not been possible to gain permission, any necessary
corrections will be made in subsequent editions.
A version of Chapter 5 has appeared as ‘Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak
Gurnah’s By the Sea’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43/3 (2008), pp.
121–139. Parts of Chapter 6 have previously appeared as ‘The Journey is the
Film is the Journey: Michael Winterbottom’s In This World’, Research in Drama
Education, 13/2 (2008), pp. 223–232, and ‘“The Other is the Neighbour”: The
Limits of Dignity in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
44/4 (2008), pp. 403–413.
I owe grateful thanks to the University of Leicester and the Arts and Humani
ties Research Council for providing me with consecutive periods of research
leave, in 2009, in which to write this book. Thanks also to Anthony Cond and
Alison Welsby at Liverpool University Press, for their assiduous editorship,
and to Graham Huggan and Stuart Murray for suggesting I approach Liverpool
University Press in the first place.
The process of researching and writing this book was helped inordinately
by many good people. I am grateful to Alwyn Jones, Campbell Jones, Â�Margareta
Kern, John McLeod, Maggie O’Neill, John Perivolaris (who showed me the route
of his walk with Thaer Ali), Alex Rotas and Shahin Shafaei, who discussed
aspects of the research with me, or simply for remarks that have made a
vii

Acknowledgements
telling difference. Alwyn Jones also very kindly agreed to look at the work in
draft and gave invaluable feedback, as did Mark Rawlinson, Phil Shaw, Abigail
Ward and Andrew Warnes. Ros Horin was exceedingly generous in sharing her
unpublished manuscript for Through the Wire with me. I hope that what I have
produced does justice to their goodwill. Needless to say, any errors are solely
down to me.
A much earlier debt of inspiration is owed to the Allen, Kayij, Nyantou and
Qadir families, to Mr Aziz, and to everyone else who helped create a community
of and for refugees as part of Welcome to Leeds. Most of all, for everything
else I owe overwhelming thanks to Rachel, Isaac and Annie (whose arrival made
a year of writing even more special); it is to them that Postcolonial Asylum is
dedicated.
viii

Note to the Reader
Readers should observe that most of this book was written in 2009, and thus
cannot comment on subsequent events in the asylum regimes discussed below.
Dispiritingly, however, advances in the treatment of asylum seekers – such
as the UK supreme court ruling, in July 2010, that an asylum claim based on
fear of homophobic persecution is valid – have been offset by overwhelming
negative developments: despite the acknowledgement of the British deputy
Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, that the detention of children for immigration
purposes constitutes a ‘moral outrage’, at the time of writing the practice
continues, while the UNHCR reports increasing numbers of unaccompanied
minors travelling to Europe; the deaths of Jimmy Mubenga, who died during a
forced removal in October 2010 (the first such death since that of Joy Gardner in
1993) and Osman Rasul, who leapt from a tower block in Nottingham following
the forced closure of Refugee and Migrant Justice (a charity which provided
free legal advice to asylum seekers), indicate the persistence of necropower
in the UK asylum system. Beyond Britain a similar picture emerges. Despite
evicting the UNHCR from its offices in Tripoli, without explanation, in July 2010,
Libya and the European Commission concluded a deal reportedly worth €50bn
over three years to cooperate over control of North Africa immigration (and
curtail, in Muammar Gaddafi’s words, a ‘black Europe’); in September of the
same year, 13 African migrants drowned in the Gulf of Aden during a failed
rescue attempt by the US Navy. What I have tried to do, in Postcolonial Asylum,
is analyse those trends, evident throughout Western asylum regimes, which
frame asylum seekers as contemporary figures of the infrahuman; trends that,
with depressing reliability, seem to exceed any individual instance of improved
receptivity to people fleeing persecution.
ix

List of Figures
Figure 1 Sebastião Salgado, ‘Border Crossing Mexico/USA’, from pages

30–31 of Salgado’s Migrations (2000). © Sebastião Salgado/
Amazonas/nbpictures 2000. xii
Figure 2 Image of Mahzer Ali scaling the perimeter fence around
Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre (IRPC),
Australia, during the Good Friday protests in 2002. xii
Figure 3 Still from Pip Starr’s documentary of the Woomera protests,
Through the Wire (2004). Available at <www.archive.org/details/
through_the_wire>. 59
Figure 4 Melanie Friend, ‘The Visits Hall, Lindholme Immigration Removal
Centre (IRC) (near Doncaster), April 2006’, from Border Country.
© Melanie Friend 2007. 69
Figure 5 Still from Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000). 83
Figure 6 John Perivolaris’s photograph from Walking with Thaer (2008).
Â�Available at <www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/global_
refugees/image_makers.html>. © John Perivolaris 2008. 120
Figure 7 Heidrun Lohr’s photograph of Shahin Shafaei’s performance in
Ros Horin’s Through the Wire (2005). 192
xi

[Image removed for digital edition as electronic rights not granted.]
Figure 1 Sebastião Salgado, ‘Border Crossing Mexico/USA’, from pages 30–31

of Salgado’s Migrations (2000). © Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas/nbpictures 2000.
Figure 2 Image of Mahzer Ali scaling the perimeter fence around Woomera
Immigration Reception and Processing Centre (IRPC), Australia, during the Good
Friday protests in 2002.

Introduction:
Before the Law
In early 2002 the minister of state for immigration, Lord Rooker, reportedly
answered a blunt ‘no’ to the question of whether there existed any legal
avenues by which legitimate refugees might enter the UK.
Matthew Gibney1
A scandal for postcolonial studies
To begin with, two scenes (see Figures 1 and 2).

A silhouetted figure flees an on-rushing jeep. He darts off-road towards a
steep, dusty slope, and a tall metal fence marking the border between the US
and Mexico. The man – an irregular Mexican migrant – is on the US side, and
is attempting to evade a US border patrol vehicle by returning to the border
he has just crossed. Writing of this image, a photograph by Sebastião Salgado,
Salman Rushdie makes a claim for the migrant as a seminal figure: ‘for Salgado,
as for myself, the migrant, the man without frontiers, is the archetypal figure of
our age’.2 More afraid, as Rushdie says, ‘of the men bearing down on him […]
than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind’, the running man is
attempting to ‘unmake his bid for freedom’.3 The image provokes questions for
Rushdie about the freedoms such border protection measures are designed to
preserve, and acknowledges the ‘hierarchy of mobilities’ that characterizes the
globalized world.4 The man’s decision to flee to the border is the false agency of
1 Matthew Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to
Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 129.
2 Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction, 1992–2002 (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2002), p. 415
3 Rushdie, Step Across This Line, p. 413.
4 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998),
p. 69.

Postcolonial Asylum
the global poor – the impression of choice where none really exists. Between the
competing demands of globalized flows and post-9/11 border-consciousness,
Rushdie’s running man is an exemplar of the persistence and even pre-eminence
of the boundary. Yet he is also called ‘the man without frontiers’. He signifies
something that is, for Rushdie, fundamental to the human condition; he has
crossed a line, and in doing so, is affiliated with an innate opposition to fixity,
including the striations of the nation state. The (wo)man without frontiers (to
recover Rushdie’s formulation from androcentrism), as a contemporary arche
type, is thus indicative of a rhizomatic, deterritorialized ‘being out of place’, in
accordance with the dominant postcolonial emphasis on the creative potential
of migrancy to unsettle fixed notions of boundaries and belonging: as Rushdie
says, ‘In our deepest natures, we are frontier-crossing beings. […] We become
the frontiers we cross’.5
In the foreground of the second scene is a large sign, announcing ‘Welcome
to Woomera IRPC’. Behind it is a chain link fence, crowned with razor wire;
balanced on top, prostrate and bare-chested, is Mahzer Ali. Ali, an Iranian
asylum seeker detained in Woomera Immigration Removal and Processing
Centre, Australia, scaled the fence on 10 February 2002 in protest at the deten
tion of children in the centre. His was one in a series of protests that included
hunger strikes and lip sewing, as well as a breaching of the perimeter fence
by Australian protesters on Good Friday 2002. Other detainees can be seen
mounted on the fence and holding placards that read ‘freedom or death’;
‘release or send back’; but it is the sight of Ali, semi-naked and suspended on
the razor wire, which speaks most eloquently of the circumstances of those in
the detention centre. Poised on the boundary between spaces of the citizen and
non-citizen (or as Suvendrini Perera has described it, between Australia and ‘not
Australia’)6 Ali occupies in one sense the same interstitial position as Rushdie’s
running man, who is drawn back to the border he has just crossed. Yet he is
also caught in the wire that defines the camp. In this sense to say that Ali has
‘become the frontier he has crossed’ takes on a very different resonance.
Postcolonial studies has long deployed diaspora theory as a means to describe
minoritarian agency. Defined by an anti-nationalist politics and the alloying
effect of post-independence commonwealth immigration, postcolonial critics
and authors from Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall to Wilson Harris and Hanif Kureishi
have opposed a form of root-less/route-oriented to a concept of ‘arborescent’
belonging, advocating, by polysemous and hybrid invocations, ways to recon
figure marginal and peripheral spaces as places of agency; from where, as Homi
Bhabha famously suggested, we ‘emerge as the others of our selves’.7 Such an
emphasis on creative border living aimed to dismantle the centrist model of
colonial discourses and reconfigure exclusion; as Bhabha stated:
5 Rushdie, Step Across This Line, pp. 408 and 410.

6 Suvendrini Perera, ‘What is a Camp?’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002), 63 paras. Available at
<www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html>. Accessed 12 Â�January 2009.
7 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture [1994] (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.
56.

Introduction
To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and ambiguities

enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in
the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity: ‘I am
looking for the join … I want to join … I want to join.’8
Bhabha’s play on ‘join’ illustrates his sense of the interstices as the location
of the homely within the unhomely, or rather the homeliness of being not-at-
home. The margin is recast as a site of resistance to hegemony, where newness
enters the world.
However, postcolonialism’s privileging of textuality has also left it open
to stinging criticism, notably from a materialist perspective suspicious of a
perceived tendency to thematize the liberatory aspects of displacement: what
Andrew Smith has acidly called the ‘free-air-miles sentiment in postcolonial
theory’.9 Along with Aijaz Ahmad, E. San Juan Jr. and Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry
has been one of the most consistent critics of this proclivity in textualist/cultur
alist postcolonial studies to employ ‘“diaspora” as a synonym for a new kind of
cosmopolitanism’.10 For Parry, the absence of a sufficiently rigorous engagement
with the material experiences of ‘economically enforced dispersal’ (to which
we may reasonably add politically and environmentally enforced) is evidence
of a debilitating insufficiency in much postcolonial enquiry.11 I do not wish
to rehash the existing arguments between materialist and textualist positions
here, except to locate them in relation to this book’s concern with issues of
asylum. A total rejection of postcolonial identity politics in favour of a materi
alist position would occlude the way that identification (as deserving refugee
status, or as undeserving) is fundamental to asylum seekers’ material circum
stances; furthermore, Parry’s criticism that textualist postcolonial studies too
easily replaces antagonistic with dialogic encounter misses a crucial element of
dissensus in the textualist position.12 However, in light of Bhabha’s claims for
the ‘join’ as articulating both a desire for solidarity and the location through
which it is realized, it seems essential to ask, where does the asylum seeker –
whose very designation articulates a desire to join (in contrast to the postcolo
nial ‘migrant’, whose excised directional prefixes, ‘im-’ and ‘em-’, suggest a state
of perpetual transition) – come into this discourse of empowerment?
It is widely acknowledged that one of the principal obstacles to the forma
tion of a positive refugee identity is the manner in which terms like ‘refugee’
8 Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 26–27.
9 Andrew Smith, ‘Migrancy, Hybridity and Postcolonial Literary Studies’, in Neil Lazarus
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 245.
10 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), p. 4; Benita Parry, ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’, in Neil Lazarus
11 Parry, ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’, pp. 73–74.
12 I have in mind Bhabha’s observations that ‘dissensus, alterity and otherness are the
discursive conditions for the circulation and recognition of a politicised subject’. Bhabha,
Location of Culture, p. 34.

Postcolonial Asylum
and ‘asylum seeker’ are progressively dehistoricized. Rushdie’s claim that ‘the
man without frontiers is the archetypal figure of our age’ elides the specific
characteristics of any particular frontier; as Sara Ahmed has said, such state
ments construct ‘an essence of migration in order to theorize that migration as
a refusal of essence’.13 Postcolonial efforts to bring the marginal migrant subject
to the centre, by valorizing their displacement, can thus be read as compounding
the effects of marginalization. The trend in much writing on cosmopolitanism
to criticize the neo-colonial nature of triumphal, capitalist globalization refers
to a sense of convivial cosmopolitanism as a necessary rejoinder to this species
of criticism; yet it is often too readily assumed that this convivial culture will
include all categories of the displaced: as Sheldon Pollock, et al. have suggested,
‘[r]efugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles represent the spirit
of the cosmopolitical community’.14 In its eagerness to revise the hierarchy
of mobility such a formulation too easily equates voluntary exiles and asylum
seekers, and ignores the possibility that these various categories of displace
ment may themselves be organized as a hierarchy of mobility.
How ‘the postcolonial’ relates to globalization remains an open-ended
question, but the tension between these discursive formations is deeply scored
by the problematic figure of the asylum seeker, who is often posited as intro
ducing crisis into territorial concepts of belonging, but for whom, crucially, the
territorial state is frequently both the cause of and the hoped-for solution to
displacement.15 The images of Salgado’s migrant and Mahzer Ali articulate this
tension between postcolonial studies’ emphasis on the politics and poetics of
deterritorialization and asylum seekers’ desire for recognition and sanctuary
conferred by a territorial sovereign. Borders now have a ubiquity that exceeds
the conventional territorial model; sovereign power has invaded interstitial
spaces, while also conjuring with a multitude of diversified and dispersed
border formations, such as Woomera detention centre, an outpost of the border
located deep within the national territory. The deployment of extra-territorial
processing centres, so-called ‘white lists’ of ‘safe third countries’ (in the UK), and
the suspension of rights in Immigration Removal Centres in Western refugee-
receiving countries demonstrates a new sovereign familiarity with the topog
raphy of deterritorialization.
Thus we have, on the one hand, Arjun Appadurai’s new ‘diasporic public
spaces’ of ‘mediation and motion’ (not forgetting the question of how Â�accessible
13 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), p. 82.
14 Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Cosmo
politanisms’, Public Culture, 12/3 (2000), p. 582. See also Walter D. Mignolo, ‘The Many
Forms of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture,
12/3 (2000), pp. 721–748.
15 As Daniel Warner has pointed out, crucially, ‘the state is at the same time the root
cause of refugee flows and the durable solution for refugees in exile’. Daniel Warner,
‘The Refugee State and State Protection’, in Francis Nicholson and Patrick Twomey
(eds), Refugee Rights and Realities: Evolving International Concepts and Regimes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 261.

Introduction
these fluid ‘scapes’ are to the global poor); on the other, Gayatri Spivak’s asser
tion that the question of subaltern consciousness within this globalized forma
tion constitutes the ‘beyond of postcolonial discourse’.16 This involves, Spivak
says, un pas au de-là, a step beyond that also (as pas is the enclitic adverb used
to complete a negative) indicates restrictions within.17 It is the purpose of this
study to consider the asylum seeker’s candidacy as the new subaltern who initi
ates the step beyond postcolonial discourse – both describing its limitations
in relation to the new globalized formation and indicating the direction of its
advance, redrawing lines of engagement with deterritorialized sovereignty.
This is not to make a claim for the asylum seeker as a special case, a migrant
apart, but to establish the ground for a discussion of what is particular about
asylum. In many ways the forces that proscribe asylum are the same as those
that have always afflicted arrivants to the self-proclaimed colonial centre. To
take the case of the UK, the nation’s borders have not suddenly been shut after
a period of unobstructed free traffic (contrary to the prevalent mythology of
British hospitality), as attested by the Aliens Act 1905, and the ‘surrender to
racism’, which, Peter Fryer asserts, took place between the increasingly restric
tive Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 and the Immigration Act 1971.18 The
wrongful deaths of Charles Wotten in Liverpool and Mahommed Abdullah in
Cardiff, both in 1919; David Oluwale in Leeds in 1969; Kelso Cochrane in 1959
and Stephen Lawrence in 1993, both in London; and Joy Gardner, who was suffo
cated in 1993 in a struggle with immigration officers intent on deporting her,
all bear witness to the potentially lethal violence that casts a shadow over first-
and second-generation immigrant life in Britain. Equally, the vitality of literary
representations of metropolitan immigrant life does not entirely leaven the loss
attendant on leaving home and the vileness and violence of the lived experience
of racism – brutal immigration officials, battered suitcases and everyday aggres
sion abound in Rushdie or Kureishi’s writing, where a talent for self-fashioning
is a fundamental necessity in the face of the ‘disorder and strangeness’ that
are frequently the condition of immigrant existence.19 Similarly, the past 100
years of Australian immigration history have been book-ended by the notorious
‘White Australia’ immigration policy and the Howard government’s overtly
hostile approach to asylum, which gave it, until 2007, a claim to operate the
most restrictive and aggressive system in the world.20 It is, therefore, reductive
16 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and

London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 22 and 4; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
‘The New Subaltern’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd edn (London
and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 235.
17 See Spivak, ‘The New Subaltern’, pp. 229–240.
18 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984),
p. 385.
19 Hanif Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (London: Faber,
2002), p. 3.
20 Additionally, although the admission of over half a million refugees between 1945 and the
early 1990s gave the state a plausible claim to being a ‘model international citizen’, Gibney
also comments that mass immigration before 1975 was principally driven by economic

Postcolonial Asylum
to speak of a simple binary between the vigour of diaspoetics and the current
miseries of asylum.
Where it is granted, asylum is designed to confer on individuals the capacity
to remake their lives free from threat and limitation. To seek asylum, however,
refers to their induction into a condition of waiting, uncertainty and dependency
that frustrates any chance for self-creation; it is a period of especially fraught
relations with the host nation, and with the law. Not least, the asylum seeker
presents a challenge to the anti-nationalist stance and what Simon Gikandi has
called the ‘redemptive narrative’ of postcolonial cosmopolitanism.21 Gikandi
has acknowledged that, for the postcolonial flâneur, displacement constitutes
a form of recognition, an encounter with the otherness of the self.22 However, it
is evident that the claim ‘I am an asylum seeker’ operates as a more problematic
request for recognition from the nation, that simultaneously acknowledges the
nations’ right to determine who is permitted to enter and discredits the nation’s
presuppositional founding mythologies of nativity and homogeneity.
This paradox suggests that the asylum claim is a form of double-voiced
discourse (in the Bakhtinian sense that no instance of language can be monologic,
because each utterance contains multiple other utterances and moments of
speech). To invoke asylum articulates at once notions of sanctuary and illegit
imacy; the ‘genuine’ refugee and the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker converge in the
polyphony of official, media and vernacular voices. The claim also expresses at
one and the same time the language of adherence to authority and the language
of resistance; it is a kind of split statement, challenging and acknowledging
sovereign power in equal measure. As an appeal for admittance it affirms
sovereign power to exclude, but also undermines this by presupposing a right
to sanctuary that supersedes the nation’s founding prescriptions. Bhabha’s
description of the way the self is overlaid with its alterity, ‘that bizarre figure
of desire, which splits along the axis on which it turns’, could also be read as
a summary of the paradox of the asylum seeker’s request, which threatens to
bring its object of desire into crisis.23
This ‘splitting’ in the asylum claim is most evident in its contestatory relation
to the action it initiates. The asylum seeker’s request can be read as a contest
or split between perlocutionary and illocutionary interpretations – that is,
between a word that merely looks forward to the consequences of its enuncia
concerns and the desire to create a British-inflected political and social Â�community: he goes
so far as to suggest that, ‘[i]f European states are jusitifed in describing as “bogus refugees”
economic migrants who claim asylum, Australian officials could be said to have operated
a bogus refugee policy’, which operated on the condition that non-European refugees and
immigrants did not undermine official economic and demographic (i.e., racial) aspirations.
Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum, pp. 167 and 174.
21 Simon Gikandi, ‘Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality’,
in Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds) Re-routing the Postcolonial:
New Directions for the New Millenium (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 26.
22 Gikandi, ‘Between Roots and Routes’, p. 24.
23 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 63.

Introduction
tion and an action that is performed by virtue of the word – where, according to
Judith Butler, ‘the name performs itself, and in the course of performing becomes
a thing done’.24 Sovereignty is wholly invested in interpreting the claim as a
perlocutionary speech act, one that must wait upon a decision. Thus to request
asylum necessarily requires the speaker to identify himself/herself as the object
of sovereignty’s desire – the citizen’s ‘dark reflection’ who gives material
presence to the ban.25 The speaker is made to internalize the conditionality
expressed in their claim: to claim asylum is, in this sense, to internalize a sense
of the self as fetish.
However, the claim as a statement (illocutionary) also suggests that the
outcome has been presupposed – that is, it declares a basis in events that have
already made the subject into what they claim to be (a recipient of asylum),
performing their initiation to a state of refuge. The claim-as-request demon
strates that it is the asylum seeker’s desire to be admitted that is the locus of
the split – it forces them to present themselves as subject to a perlocutionary
logic, that is, to a sovereign decision; yet this desire constitutes in effect a
counter-will, an insistence on the provision of refuge. Therefore the asylum
claim splits along its axis as a request and a demand, articulating both subjuga
tion to the sovereign decision and disruption of it.
Michael Dillon has said that the ‘scandal of the refugee’ is that s/he is ‘[n]
either in nor out’; ‘s/he brings the very ‘Inter’ of international relations to the
foreground in a disturbing and unusual way’.26 Dillon’s proposition is that the
refugee is a scandal for philosophy and politics: for the former by recalling
the ‘incalculability of the human’; for the latter by reproaching those political
orders that produce refugees.27 Mahzer Ali’s position on top of the razor wire
fence articulates these reproaches to the ‘national order of things’ but does
not convey a corresponding sense of the possibilities inherent in boundary
spaces;28 rather, his semi-nakedness expresses the asylum seeker’s biopolitical
reality, constituted by the nation state as merely bare life, without any kind of
political agency. Ali’s protest, in a sense, makes visible the ‘inter’ that is the
scandal of the refugee. He incarnates the political and ethical absence to which
each asylum seeker is relegated. As such the interstices available to and inhab
ited by the asylum seeker differ from that described by postcolonial studies
as a ‘smooth space’ of productivity and difference – rather, it is a space of
detention and exclusion through inclusion, striated by razor wire and legis
lated Â�segregation.
24 Judith Butler, ‘Burning Acts: Injurious Speech’, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew
Parker (eds) Performativity and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp.
197–198. Emphasis in the original.
26 Michael Dillon, ‘The Scandal of the Refugee: Some Reflections on the “Inter” of Interna
tional Relations’, Refuge, 17/6 (1998), p. 30.
27 Dillon, ‘The Scandal of the Refugee’, p. 30.
28 Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu
Refugees in Exile (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 6.

Postcolonial Asylum
Such a scandalous inbetweenness is also, I suggest, a scandal for postcolonial

studies. The asylum seeker presents a challenge to the nation state in terms of how
it deals with strangers, bearing witness less to the kind of kinetic, Â�hybridizing
discourse characteristic of postcolonial diaspoetics than to the Â�incursions of
sovereignty in the interstices. As such, Ali’s protest forces a rethinking of the
place of the asylum seeker and refugee in postcolonial studies. It seems perti
nent therefore to ask how far postcolonial ideas of the in-between can tolerate
and accommodate the asylum seeker. In leaving home and arriving elsewhere,
what kind of interstices does the asylum seeker encounter?
Homi Bhabha is a particularly problematic figure here. In The Location of
Culture, Bhabha is explicit in his criticism of global cosmopolitanism and
championing of minoritarian expression; his model of postcolonial political and
theoretical engagement is rooted in dissensus and antagonism while retaining
an insistent belief in the possibility of conviviality. Yet he is also open to accusa
tions that he privileges textualization, and thematizes displacement, moving
too quickly from literary to literal minoritarian positions, and thence to a sense
of unhomeliness as the contemporary condition. Bhabha’s sense of the inter
stices as ‘the overlap and displacement of domains of difference’ emphasizes
that presence is always negotiated, in a manner that is often profoundly antago
nistic and incommensurable, and always performative, and thus invites compar
ison with the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, for whom politics always resides
in ‘antagonism between parts of the community that are not real parts of the
social body’.29 Furthermore Bhabha’s claim, following Étienne Balibar, that
vernacular cosmopolitanism is ‘marked by “a right to difference in equality”’,
resembles Rancière’s politics of disagreement as ‘dissensus: putting two worlds
in one and the same world’.30 In fact, Bhabha’s dialogic hybridity – in which
‘your person divides, and following the forked path you encounter yourself in
a double movement … once as a stranger, and then as a friend’ –could be read
as a claim for a form of postcolonial dissensus: ‘You are part of a dialogue that
may not, at first, be heard or heralded – you may be ignored – but your person
hood cannot be denied’.31 Such a prescription for agency speaks directly to the
situation of Mahzer Ali, whose position on top of the razor wire is a gesture
towards a personhood that cannot be ignored, regardless of how incommensu
rable it may be with the established political order. However, in his emphasis on
‘opening out’ the space of a new politics of identity in the in-between spaces,
Bhabha’s concept of the interstices loses touch with the material experience,
for many, of the interstices as a place of literal or social death.32 Commenting
on the inflationary media rhetoric surrounding asylum, particularly references
to government efforts to ‘slash’ the number of asylum claims, Zygmunt Bauman
29 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 2; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy,

trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1999), p. 21.
30 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. xvii; Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’,
South Atlantic Quarterly, 103/2–3 (2004), p. 304.
31 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. xxv.

Introduction
(typo)graphically illustrates the incursion of what Achille Mbembe has called

necropower into the parenthetic, in-between spaces, and thus the true nature
of the kind of ‘join’ inhabited by Ali: ‘slash … do you smell blood?’33
The camp dispositif
It should be acknowledged that a tendency to universalize displacement is as

apparent in discourse about ‘the refugee’ as it is in certain areas of postcolo
nial studies; as Liisa Malkki has explained, when specificities of time, place,
culture and gender are removed, the concomitant ‘universalization of the
figure of “the refugee”’ can be linked to “the discursive externalization of the
refugee from the national […] order of things”’.34 The result of generalizing
refugee experience is, in effect, the ‘discursive construction of the refugee as
bare humanity’.35 In similar terms, Giorgio Agamben has also written on the
refugee as a contemporary exemplar of the homo sacer, a figure in Roman law
not invested with any political rights, who may be killed without consequence.
In Homo Sacer, Agamben explicitly configures the refugee as the icon of bare
life in modernity, which is itself the nomos of contemporary politics. Agamben’s
arguments have attracted a good deal of criticism: Vicki Squire suggests that
his methodology is both ‘formalistic and totalizing’, reproducing the presup
positional operations of sovereignty;36 Rancière argues that Agamben’s reliance
on Hannah Arendt (for whom the Rights of Man presuppose membership of a
political community) leads him to elide the possibility of protest;37 Engin Isin
and Kim Rygiel agree with Rancière’s assertion that Agamben conjures with
‘apolitical spaces’, which deny their inhabitants any political agency.38 Imogen
Tyler is critical of what she calls Agamben’s tendency to fetishize the refugee
in a manner that ‘foreclose[s] the uncertain ontology of the excluded’. 39 Tyler
argues that Agamben’s privileging of the term ‘refugee’ in his discussion of
sovereign governmentality actually resembles governmental strategies of
exclusion, because it fails to revise the language of the law it seeks to contest.
Tyler’s criticism is, to an extent, justified. Agamben shows little interest in the
specificity of individual experiences of asylum or in the structures of different
asylum regimes. Furthermore, by basing his arguments in Arendt he invokes
33 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004),
p. 55.
34 Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 8–9.
35 Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 11.
36 Vicki Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),
p. 147.
37 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’.
38 Engin F. Isin and Kim Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps’, in E. Dauphinee
and C. Masters (eds), Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), p. 185.
39 Imogen Tyler, ‘“Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum’, European Journal of
Cultural Studies, 9/2 (2006), pp. 197–198.

Postcolonial Asylum
a context of ‘the refugee’ (not the asylum seeker) rooted in the European
mid-twentieth century.
Nonetheless, I believe productive use can be made of Agamben’s work in
developing a concept of postcolonial asylum. Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem
‘The Death of Joy Gardner’ casts her as homo sacer, bearing witness to the
Â�pervasiveness of the infrahuman in Britain’s immigration history: ‘Nobody killed
her | And she never killed herself’.40 Agamben’s apparently uncritical use of the
term ‘refugee’ might recall Rushdie’s universal migrant, but, as Paul Gilroy has
argued, the twentieth-century camps that contributed to the creation of the
refugee Agamben refers to are essential to our capacity to recognize ‘our own
postmodern predicament’.41 As I will show, contrary to Squire’s suggestion that
Agamben reproduces presuppositional governmentality, his analysis rigorously
exposes how such presuppositionality operates and does describe viable forms
of protest. What is more, it is untrue to say that Agamben’s use of ‘refugee’ is
entirely uncritical, at least implicitly. His attention to the operations of sover
eignty is rooted in a linguistic sensibility: ‘Language’, he says, ‘is the sovereign
who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside
language and that language is always beyond itself’.42 Language is the basis of
Agamben’s model of sovereignty, and the field in which he foresees its undoing
and demise, as he looks forward, in State of Exception, to the opening of a space
for reflection on possible future uses of the law beyond the exception. This
space, he suggests, will be constituted by ‘a word [that] says only itself’.43 This
linguistic focus brings Agamben together with the influence of deconstruction
on textualist postcolonial studies, but coupled with a rigorous sense of the way
contemporary politics is (at least where infrahumanity is concerned) charac
terized by the exception. Consequently, Tyler’s argument, while alert to the
absence of direct reference to the dehistoricizing of ‘the refugee’, is not cogni
zant of the implicit way in which Agamben’s model of sovereignty is based in
language, and thus language is the object of his counter-sovereign arguments.
The main question that preoccupies this book, which resonates at the inter
section of postcolonial studies and refugee studies, is what is the place of
the asylum seeker before the law? To come before the law suggests several
different things. It can refer to the manner in which asylum seekers petition the
host nation, to be admitted to sanctuary; but it can also refer to the concept
of sanctuary itself, that which precedes the legal definition of asylum (and thus
to the instability of sovereignty’s claim to presuppose any challenge to it). My
understanding of sovereignty is informed, after Agamben, by Carl Schmitt’s
40 Benjamin Zephaniah, Propa Propaganda (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), p.

11.
41 Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2000), p. 86.
42 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 21.
43 Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 88.
10

Introduction
assertion that, ‘sovereign is he who can decide on the state of exception’.44

However, I do not understand the power to decide as realized only in a definite
act or acts, but in the assertion of an innate power of (un)decidability – the
capacity to decide, for instance, on the division between ‘citizen’ and ‘mere
man’, but also to wield this authority in what Agamben calls a threshold of
indistinction (Nicholas De Genova affirms the defining role of uncertainty when
he states that, ‘migrant “illegality” is lived through a palpable sense of deport
ability’; Bauman affirms that the asylum seeker is ‘Derrida’s “undecidable” made
flesh’).45 Where it suggests a predefined identity or status, to come ‘before
the law’ potentially undermines this presuppositional authority. It is gener
ally acknowledged that the definition of a refugee is declaratory rather than
constitutive: that a person is recognized because s/he is a refugee, rather than
becoming one by virtue of host state recognition. Yet, in practice, Western
refugee-hosting states have rigorously defended their right to exercise discre
tion over who is afforded sanctuary.
‘Before the law’ thus articulates both a challenge to the fundamental opera
tions of sovereign power as it is applied to asylum seekers and also sover
eignty’s response. Recent criticism has identified a distinct trend towards the
securitization and criminalization of asylum. Squire attributes this not simply
to increased refugee flows, but to a series of events in the West, since the
shrinkage of European guest-worker programmes in the 1970s and subsequent
increased visibility of asylum seekers; the declining efficacy of asylum as a
political tool post-1989; political conditions in Europe, such as the collapse of
Yugoslavia, and the increased liberalization of movement within the European
Union (EU) following the Schengen agreements of 1985 and 1995; and the
increased anxiety regarding security that was intensified exponentially by
the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid and London.46 The result, Squire
says, is the ‘dislocation of a territorial order of governance and belonging’, in
which exclusionary asylum politics assuage the anxieties provoked by European
integration and/or globalization.47 I engage in detail with this process of dislo
cation in Chapter 1; but perhaps a more central element of securitization is
what Squire calls the ‘rearticulation’, by a process of managed migration, of
categories of desirable or undesirable migrants as, respectively, productive and
unproductive.48 When this observation is read alongside De Genova’s asser
tion that migrant ‘illegality’ is ‘produced as an effect of the law’, and ‘sustained
as an effect of a discursive formation’, we come to see that ‘before the law’
also articulates how sovereignty reinforces its position.49 Although De Genova
44 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George
Schwab (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 5.
45 Nicholas De Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual
Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002), p. 439; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age
of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 45.
46 Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, pp. 7–8.
47 Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, p. 10.
49 De Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality”’, p. 431.
11

Postcolonial Asylum
is writing about undocumented Mexican migrants in the US, his argument is

applicable to wider contexts. In effect, he argues that the discursive apparatus
that sustains illegality is not aimed at achieving deportation per se, but rather
a state of deportability that ensures undocumented migrant labour remains an
available commodity.50 The law thus produces illegality, but hides this activity
under the benign profile of ‘managed migration’, at the same time delegating a
transgressive ‘unproductivity’ to the unwanted asylum seeker.
De Genova’s emphasis on deportability, which conceptually I relate to the
sovereign’s decidability, is critically reminiscent of Agamben’s theory of the
sovereign ban. The ban originates in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and describes
a condition where the subject of the ban is held within the purview of law’s
censure but excluded from its protection: Agamben says it is to be ‘abandoned by
[the law], that is exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law,
inside and outside, become indistinguishable’.51 The one who is abandoned is
also, simultaneously, held by the law. A compelling example are those asylum
claimants in the UK whose claim has been refused, and who, under section 4 of
the Immigration and Asylum Act (IAA) 1999, are thus only eligible for govern
ment support if they agree to repatriation; the alternative being the withdrawal
of support, and, often, destitution. In such circumstances the asylum seeker
is quite literally abandoned by the law, but the law remains far from indif
ferent to them; they are in fact held by the law’s vested interest in their exclu
sion. Unable to stay or return, they incarnate the very worst of border-living. In
this sense, ‘before the law’ summarizes the condition of abandonment where
asylum seekers are simultaneously excluded and included, cast out by but also
made subject to the sovereign.
The ban, as a form of relation, fundamentally underpins my understanding
of the place of the asylum seeker before the law. Its origins in the modern
context can be traced to the post-war emergence of ‘the refugee’ as a figure
of international concern. Hannah Arendt has argued that the emergence of the
stateless person out of inter-war European politics (and the forerunner of the
contemporary refugee in terms of international legislation) blurred the line
between lawfulness and unlawfulness where the sovereign right to expulsion
was concerned, introducing the paradox of the exception. The two avenues
previously available for dealing with migrants, repatriation and naturaliza
tion failed in the face of mass statelessness (because there was nowhere to
return the stateless person to, and because states withdrew naturalization
processes).52 This left the stateless person in a condition of illegality. As Arendt
says, ‘Since [the stateless person] was the anomaly for whom the general law
did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did
50 De Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality”’, p. 438. Hannah Arendt notes that the key concern
of post-war international discussion on the framing of the refugee was, ‘[h]ow can the
refugee be made deportable again?’: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951]
(San Diego, New York and London: Harvest/ Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 284.
51 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 28. Emphasis in the original.
52 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 281–285.
12

Introduction
provide, the criminal’. Prosecution by the law guaranteed equality, in that all
men are equal before the law, yet according to the logic of inclusive exclusion,
‘[o]nly as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it’.53
Today, illegality in the form of the ban is endemic in asylum regimes
throughout the West. Agamben argues that the concentration camp, as the
materialization of a state of exception within a biopolitical paradigm that
defines modern citizenship, embodies and unifies the discursive formation
of the ban. Following Agamben (with some important qualification), I argue
that ‘the camp’ as a discursive formation, is necessarily the starting point for a
discussion of asylum. Postcolonial arguments must acknowledge the (extra)legal
forces that exclude asylum seekers if they are to speak productively about new
forms of political identity and belonging. As Agamben has asserted, where the
camp indicates the ‘materialization of the state of exception […] then we must
admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of the camp every time
such a structure is created’. Agamben defines the camp as ‘the pure, absolute
and impassable biopolitical space’ whose influence is the creation of bare life.
He also calls it a ‘dislocating localization’, a description that is founded on
multiple paradoxes.54 The camp represents a permanent space dedicated to the
impermanence of its inhabitants; a place where the rule of law is defined by its
suspension; where those who do not belong are accommodated. It is an expres
sion of the capacity of the political border to reproduce itself. As the disorderly
presence of the other is contained by the camp, the orderly continuity of the
nation is maintained, defining therefore the limits of the nation. Like Agamben,
I do not use ‘the camp’ to indicate any particular instance of detention, but
rather to signify the embodiment of a condition of unbelonging encoded within
the concept of citizenship.
As noted above, however, Agamben’s use of the camp requires some
Â�qualification for my own purposes. Didier Bigo has described the emergence
of the ‘ban-opticon dispositif’, a compound of the ban with Foucault’s idea of
governmental surveillance, and the dispositif, a kind of Althusserian trans-discur
sive apparatus of coherence, to describe an effect similar to that embodied
by Agamben’s camp.55 Foucault described the dispositif as a ‘heterogeneous
ensemble […] of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory
decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical
and moral propositions’ operating through a ‘system of relations’ that consti
tute an ‘apparatus’. It is marked by significant and regular shifts of position
and function between its various elements, and often constituted in response
to a specific need.56 The dispositif is the organizing principle behind the
53 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 286.

54 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 174, 123 and 175.
55 Didier Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon’, in D. Bigo and
A. Tsoukala (eds), Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (In)Security Games (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2006), p. 6.
56 Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 194–195.
13

Postcolonial Asylum
Â�
contemporary climate of insecurity, and the ban-opticon indicates the substi
tution of the panopticon’s emphasis on immobilizing bodies under the gaze
of a custodian with a form of exceptionality.57 The contemporary dispositif
occurs without ‘centralized manifestation’, but this does not mean its frequent
positional shifts represent a limit to sovereignty’s influence, a point corrobo
rated by Squire, who argues that securitizing moves may be discontinuous and
sporadic, and nonetheless effectively restrict the ‘scope of contestation’.58 The
exception does not equate with a state of political emergency, then – rather,
like the dispositif, it is an expression of how adaptive sovereign power is capable
of sustaining itself through selective interventions.
Bigo’s reading of the present-day surveillance landscape, as it incorporates
Agamben’s understanding of the ban, highlights the way that Mahzer Ali’s
protest was directed not just at the practice of detention (the localized camp),
but also the range of discursive and non-discursive practices utilized by host
states, in various shifting formations, to produce illegality (the camp dispositif).
Although Bigo’s neologism, ‘ban-opticon’, effectively underlines the Â�importance
of those immigration practices that control visibility and appearance, I believe
it is important to retain Agamben’s emphasis on the camp; Bigo’s claim that
the Ban-opticon dispositif, ‘channels flows instead of dissecting bodies’, sets his
argument apart from Agamben’s focus on bare life, losing a crucial emphasis
on the way immigration regulations impact on the welfare of asylum claim
ants.59 Thus I will use the term ‘camp dispositif’ to combine Bigo’s insight with
Mbembe’s necropolitics, a form of politics where ‘death […] lives a human
life’.60 The example of Abas Amini is a case in point. In May 2003 Amini, a
Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker living in Nottingham, sewed shut his eyes, ears
and mouth in protest at the treatment of his claim by the Home Office. He had
been granted asylum several months earlier, but began his protest when he
learned the government intended to appeal; even once the Home Office was
refused leave to appeal against Amini’s refugee status, he continued his protest
for a further three days to highlight the plight of others. In all, he endured this
self-mutilation for nine days, without food. On 30 May, as the stitches were
being removed by a nurse, a friend of Amini read the following poem:
He sewed up his lips so that he could speak out.

He sewed up his eyes to make others see.
He sewed up his ears to make others hear.
You whose eyes, ears and mouths are free, see, hear and speak out.61
57 Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security’, p. 44.

58 Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security’, p. 34; Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, p. 72.
60 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15/1 (2003), pp.
14–15.
61 ‘Stitches Removed from Asylum Protester’ (30 May 2003). Available at <http://news.bbc.
co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/2949896.stm>. Accessed 19 June 2008.
14

Introduction
Amini’s somatic protest, like Ali prostrating himself on the barbed perimeter
fence, speaks directly to the enforced disappearance (in Rancière’s sense of
being denied political presence) of asylum seekers – either in detention, or in
the inhospitable complexities of asylum adjudication systems. Amini’s protest
inverted political appearance, making visible the action of sovereign power
upon the lives of the excluded through his own symbolic disappearance. In the
manner that he brought together two worlds, of visibility and invisibility, within
himself, Amini articulated dissensus (the association between visibility and
speech in the sewing of his eyes, ears and mouth is also typically Rancièrian).
As such, his action speaks to the context of channelled flows Bigo emphasizes
in the Ban-opticon neologism – Amini was addressing his place in the dispositif
of legislative hostility, enforced dispersal and exceptionality. But the fact that
he chose to stage the appearance of necropower through the medium of his
body (somatic protest), demonstrates the prevalence of the camp, described by
Agamben as acting on the body, within the dispositif. With careful attention to
criticism that Agamben’s use of the historical concentration camps is essential
izing, I believe that retaining ‘the camp’ in a theorization of the dispositif also
retains a crucial reference to the lived, material reality of seeking asylum.
The images of Mahzer Ali and Rushdie’s running man both concern acts of
inhabiting and thus making visible the space of the inter; in Postcolonial Asylum I
consider the benefits and limitations of a range of responses to the question of
the threshold. One of Rancière’s main criticisms of Agamben is that, in locating
his theory of power-relations in the depoliticized scene of Arendt’s critique of
the Rights of Man (that these are ‘the mere derision of right’ where they relate
to those outside the political community), Agamben reproduces a ‘sphere of
exceptionality that is no longer political’.62 Setting himself in opposition to
what he sees as the fixed positionalities of those with a part and those with
no part in Arendt and Agamben, Rancière asks, ‘[w]here do you draw the line
separating one life from another? Politics is about that border’.63 Where Ali’s
protest problematizes Rushdie’s claim for border-living, pointing instead to the
bare life that characterizes a certain kind of border habitation, Rancière argues
for the border as an inherently political space. What is at stake, however, as I
have indicated above, is a sense of what is particular about the asylum regime,
and the possibility of a non-thematizing politics that can offer a genuine sense
of hope in the coming community.
Overview
Malkki’s observation, that the archetypal refugee is typically represented as ‘a

figure who is thought to “speak” to us in a particular way: wordlessly’, suggests
an immediate parallel with Spivak’s famous assertion that the subaltern cannot
62 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, pp. 298 and 299.
63 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 303.
15

Postcolonial Asylum
speak.64 Spivak has more recently qualified her position, suggesting that more
critical attention must be paid to the ‘practices of muting’ that would reveal ‘our’
complicity in this silencing.65 In effect, she argues for a recovery of the validity
of speaking about subaltern contexts – ‘[a]ll speaking, even the seemingly most
immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best,
an interception’ – which, to avoid romanticising subalternity, must attend
to circuits capable of ‘mobilizing […] subalternity into hegemony’.66 Spivak’s
thinking reflects therefore the way asylum seekers are, as it were, knocking on
the gates of Western nations. Within the new globalized formation, the concept
of the subaltern as occupying a kind of sub-stratum within a hierarchy of power
must be re-thought: today, s/he is no longer only the silent, en-shadowed figure
of the archive, but a presence in the political landscape that asks insistently to
be admitted in full.
The questions of who is the new subaltern and how subaltern material
should be handled without reproducing epistemological violence are equally
constituted, for Spivak, at thresholds of indistinction. The ‘ground’ of the new
subaltern is located, she says, ‘where the boundary between global and local
become indeterminate’.67 Where this recalls Agamben’s description of the ban,
it also harks back to Spivak’s earlier prescriptions for approaching the archival
subaltern. In describing how to read representations of subaltern experi
ence, always striated by the tendentious interventions of academic praxis, she
stresses the necessary interaction of multiple disciplines: in this case, histori
cism and literary criticism.68 Each discipline must perform a critical interruption
upon the other, bringing both ‘into crisis, in order to serve their constituen
cies’. In approaching this study, which has necessarily involved a step beyond
my own disciplinary background in postcolonial literary studies, I have tried
to enact Spivak’s dictum that one must ‘“re-constellate” the text to draw out
its use’.69 Just as the question of the new subaltern is, for Spivak, linked to
crossing boundaries (intellectual, territorial and socio-political), investigating
the relationship between postcolonial studies and discourse on refugees and
asylum seekers has necessitated going beyond the divisions erected between
discursive formations, and redrawing lines of engagement.
The intertextual model I use in Postcolonial Asylum is based on what Gillian
Whitlock has called the ‘Nauru epistolarium’: an archive of personal letters,
photographs, gifts, legal correspondence, newspaper clippings and anti-
detention campaigning materials relating to or produced by asylum seekers
64 Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoriciza

tion’, Cultural Anthropology, 11/3 (1996), p. 390.
65 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing Present (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 308–309.
66 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 309.
67 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 275.
68 Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1988),
p. 241.
69 Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 241.
16

Introduction
detained at the behest of the Australian government on the Pacific island of

Nauru. Between 2001 and 2007 Nauru was utilized by the Australian govern
ment, under John Howard, as an off-shore detention and processing facility for
asylum seekers, as a feature of the ‘Pacific solution’, the origins of which were
in the now-iconic Tampa incident.70
On 26 August 2001 the MV Tampa, a Norwegian freighter, rescued 438 Afghans
and Iraqis whose boat had begun to sink in the Pacific. The Tampa initially set
sail for Indonesia, 246 miles away, but, given the poor health of some of those
rescued, changed course for Christmas Island, an area of Australian territo
rial sovereignty seventy-five miles distant. Permission to enter was refused by
Australian government officials, and when this was ignored by the captain of the
Tampa the Australian military sent forty-five SAS soldiers to board the vessel.
After a stand-off of several days, during which, as Julian Burnside QC suggests,
the nation acted in breach of its international obligations, it was resolved that
the 438 asylum seekers would be transferred to Manus Island in Papua New
Guinea and to Nauru, where they would be detained until an alternative venue
for sanctuary could be found.71 John Howard had promised during the crisis that
‘no asylum seeker arriving by boat would ever again be permitted to land on
Australian soil’.72 This was the inception of what came to be called the ‘Pacific
solution’, which saw the Australian government both expand and retract its
territorial borders in order to exclude asylum seekers. The Pacific solution
advocated intercepting ‘boat people’ and processing their asylum applications
in offshore locations in Pacific islands states with an economic dependency on
Australia. Robert Manne has called the Pacific solution a ‘new penal-social insti
tution’, dubbed ‘the Ruddock archipelago’ after the then Immigration Minister
Phillip Ruddock.73 Prem Kumar Rajaram has said the policy illustrates postcolo
nial Australia’s neo-colonial ‘strengthening of Australian “place”’ at the expense
of the ‘derogation of other “placements”’ such as Nauru.74
Burnside, one of the lawyers who contributed to the action brought by the
Victorian Council for Civil Liberties to compel the government to conform to
its obligations under the 1992 Migration Act in relation to the Tampa asylum
seekers, and the artist Kate Denham compiled an archive of material from
Naura that Whitlock, following Liz Stanley, characterizes as an epistolarium:
a collection of letters and artefacts that takes on the transitive, ambivalent
quality of the letter. For Stanley, letters conjure simultaneously ‘the there and
then of writing’ and ‘the here and now of reading’; in simulating the presence
of their author, by this temporal slippage they also signify the relationships
70 Gillian Whitlock, ‘Letters from Nauru’, in Gillia Whitlock and Kate Douglas (eds), Trauma
Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 152.
71 Julian Burnside, ‘Refugees: The Tampa Incident’, Postcolonial Studies, 5/1 (2002), p. 17.
72 Robert Manne, ‘Reflections on the Tampa Incident’, Postcolonial Studies, 5/1 (2002), p. 29.
73 Manne, ‘Reflections on the Tampa Incident’, p. 29.
74 Prem Kumar Rajaram, ‘“Making Place”: The “Pacific Solution” and Australian Emplace
ment in the Pacific and on Refugee Bodies’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/3
(2003), p. 290.
17

Postcolonial Asylum
they were originally intended to sustain.75 The Nauru epistolarium compiled by

Burnside and Denham contains a wide range of diverse material, which collec
tively articulates the kinds of multiple acts of crossing and exchange (territorial;
relational; disciplinary) that occur in what follows: letters in English and Dari,
some unsigned and often in multiple hands; letters addressed to one corres
pondent taken up by another; photographs; gifts sent by asylum detainees to
anti-Â�detention Â�activists; copies of letters that are printed on scrap campaigning
material; collective statements produced by the detainees referring to their
situation; newspaper clippings; and formal instructions to legal representa
tives.76 The emphasis, for Whitlock, is on the potential within the epistolarium
for ‘intersubjective exchange’, and the opportunity to reflect on the question
that also primarily occupies Postcolonial Asylum: who ‘will and will not be counted
as viable speaking subjects’?77
The Nauru epistolarium is a crucial interdisciplinary space that bears witness
not just to the fact of the desubjectification of asylum seekers, but also to
a methodology for contesting this desubjectification. Whitlock observes that
the epistolarium most often articulates its subject(s) through ‘inconsisten
cies’ (tears in the material; crude translations into English; the evidence of
multiple hands) that witness to the imposed inarticulacy of the detainees; they
also carry echoes of the official discourse that sanctions this silencing, in the
form of references to correspondence with DIMIA (Department of Immigration
and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs). This latter feature is also evidence,
for Whitlock, of the detainees’ facility in moving across the boundaries of
discourse(s) – of how asylum seekers operate in ‘different and contradictory
networks simultaneously’.78 In Postcolonial Asylum, I seek similarly to demon
strate that in many instances asylum seekers’ strategies of resistance engage
with and make use of the same terms and strategies employed in promoting the
striations of the camp dispositif, such as Abas Amini’s silence. This kind of step
beyond (resistance), which also addresses restrictions within (the operations
of the camp dispositif), marks the convergence of subject and method in Postco-
lonial Asylum. As I will argue in the chapters that follow, the ban that subjects
asylum seekers to the inclusive-exclusive relationship is replicated in the
citizen’s declaration of ‘we’: one excludes by retaining the abandoned subject
in the grip of the law’s censure; the other includes by referring to those who
fall outside the definition of the collective. The manner in which letters involve
what Stanley calls a process of ‘mutual metonymy’ between correspondents,
and by which Whitlock has characterized the Nauru epistolarium, describes also
how in Postcolonial Asylum I set the ban and the citizen’s ‘we’, and the variety of
discourses that constitute both, to work upon each other in order to unsettle
75 Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondence’, Autobiog-

raphy, 12/3 (2004), pp. 208–209.
76 Whitlock, ‘Letters from Nauru’, p. 156.
77 Whitlock, ‘Letters from Nauru’, pp. 152 and 153.
78 Whitlock, ‘Letters from Nauru’, pp. 157–158.
18

Introduction
the prescription of relationship and community under the camp dispositif.79

There are clear and present risks in a study of this kind, of which I am well
aware. In addition to the risk of reproducing the essentialized portraits of
subjective migrant experience that Ahmed despairs of, there is the potential
to carry over into a discussion of interdisciplinary refugee narratives a permis
sive, almost neo-imperial ‘habitual framing’: a borderless approach to border
narratives. Again, the Nauru epistolarium provides a model response: Whitlock
also notes that the production and reception of the Nauru letters was an incre
mental process played out via multiple epitexts. Extracts from some letters
were included (often anonymously) in From Nowhere to Zero, a collection of
letters from Australian detention centres;80 Denham participated in a 2002 BBC
documentary on Nauru, and also produce a series of 272 paintings based on
the events of the SIEV-X affair, when 353 asylum seekers en route to Australia
from Java drowned on 19 October 2001, only months after the Tampa incident;81
Whitlock also includes here scholarly work on the epistolarium, ‘the work of the
third person’.82 The third person here is the academic observer of the writer–
recipient relationship. But it also, I believe, invokes the ‘third party’ of Levina
sian ethics: that aspect of any encounter between self and other that gestures
outwards to a relation to humanity as a whole. The third is other than the other,
thus realizing the possibility of commonality. It would be a large claim to say
that scholarly work on asylum can intervene in its subject to such an extent as to
function as a Levinasian third party; yet I believe the involvement of the scholar
can do much to break the habitual frame.
Embedded within and in the points between legal, literary, ethnographic
and witnessing narratives can be found both commonalities that present each
as similarly concerned with textuality and distinctions (for example, the different
understandings of ‘culture’ in ethnographic and legal narratives) that illuminate
the most significant tensions in the reception and framing of refugee narra
tives. As Anthony Good has observed, while anthropologists ‘treat ambiguity
and complexity as immanent aspects of all real-life situations’, lawyers ‘attempt
to prune away what are deemed extraneous details, in order to identify the
abstract, general, de-contextualised legal principles assumed to lie concealed
within’.83 Good’s observation highlights the competing narrative pressures
imposed upon asylum seekers, which situate them at a point of intersection
between multiple disciplinary frames. However, I contend that just as the Nauru
79 Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium’, p. 212. See also Whitlock, ‘Letters from Nauru’, p. 152.
80 Meagahn Amor and Janet Austin (eds), From Nothing to Zero: Letters from Refugees in
Australia’s Detention Centres (Melbourne, London, Oakland and Paris: Lonely Planet Publi
cations, 2003).
81 See <www.katedurham.com>. Accessed 15 April 2010. SIEV-X stands for ‘suspected
illegal entry vehicle x’ (i.e., unknown). The events of the sinking of SIEV-X were devel
oped as a play, A Certain Maritime Incident, in 2004 by Tony Kevin.
82 Whitlock, ‘Letters from Nauru’, p. 160.
83 Anthony Good, Anthropology and Expertise in the Asylum Courts (New York and Abingdon:
Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), p. 19.
19

Postcolonial Asylum
epistolarium opens up multiple relational possibilities (as Stanley says, letters

are ‘porous to other kinds of writing’),84 the critical measures in tracing the lines
that cross and run between different disciplines can be enabling to a discussion
of the place of the boundary in the contemporary asylum age. In this sense,
my role has in part been to explore the common othering of complementary and
competing disciplines.
Postcolonial Asylum engages with critical legal studies and political theory; it
deals with film, documentary, photography and various kinds of performance
and visual arts projects: these, as much as literary texts, are the materials of
asylum discourse, and engaging with them has yielded multiple instances of
the value of contiguity as a critical measure, enabling, as Bhabha suggests, the
evaluation of the traffic between borderline jurisdictions.85 This movement
between disciplines and critical positions does not entail the total dismissal of
postcolonial studies, as I indicated above, but an investigation of its ‘beyond’
– the step beyond (un pas au de-là) that is also a restriction within, both in the
sense of remaining within the confines of the discourse and also testing its
limits. Postcolonial Asylum is an attempt to take this kind of step beyond postco
lonial studies – to assess the limits of its application to asylum contexts while
remaining faithful to its ethos of dismantling dominant power structures.
In geographical terms, my focus is principally, though not exclusively, on the
asylum regimes of the UK and Australia. This is because, as Anglophone postco
lonial nations with a common recent history of hostility to asylum seekers, both
countries provide a means to examine the connections between the postcolo
nial and issues of asylum. Nonetheless, I also consider artistic matter of South
African, Austrian, Sudanese, Dutch and American origin, as well as asylum
contexts as diverse as France, Albania, Canada, Sweden and the United States.
This approach has also led me to posit a range of critical positions, not all of
them complementary. Although I have spoken above of the need to describe the
hierarchies within hierarchies of mobility, the constitution of power in the camp
dispositif is a matter of, as Rancière has said, a horizontal distribution rather than
one of ‘surface and substratum’, and thus contains within it the starting princi
ples for resistance. Whereas to search for ‘the hidden beneath the apparent’
inevitably establishes a position of mastery, as the Subaltern Studies project has
demonstrated, a horizontal distribution implies ‘combinations between systems
of possibilities’, and thus ‘a topography that does not presuppose this position
of mastery’.86 Over the course of the book I suggest a number of ways in which
asylum seekers can resist or revise the camp dispositif, but I have deliberately
avoided attempting to prescribe a single strategy. Not only would this be reduc
tive, it would also inhibit the effectiveness of resistance to a power formation
that is marked by constant shifts of position. Foucault says the dispositif repre
84 Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium’, p. 218.

85 Bhabha, ‘Democracy De-realized’, Diogenes, 50/1 (2003), p. 32.
86 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel
Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 49.
20

Introduction
sents a species of incremental genesis, and thus my argument follows a path of

heterogeneity and flexibility, in reflection of the camp dispositif as a system of
relations capable of modifying function according to need.87
What emerges then might best be described as a series of what Rancière
calls ‘heterologies’, disturbances in the distribution of the sensible that is the
topography of power. In Chapter 1 I examine how sovereignty’s occupation
of boundary spaces and the operation of the ban as both kenomatic (that is,
empty) and presuppositional enable the sovereign claims, ‘there is no more
outside’, and ‘there is nothing before the law’. This is evident in the use of
extra-territorial processing by the UK and Australia, especially the 2001 Tampa
crisis. Here the nation state effectively makes itself a fetish, disavowing itself
in order to consolidate sovereign control of the border. I examine the long
history of colonial infrahumanity, via a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s imperial
parable Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and the work of Paul Gilroy and Achille
Mbembe. Gilroy and Mbembe’s investigations of the (post)colonial infrahuman
represent a necessary corrective to Agamben’s de-racialized homo sacer, but
Gilroy’s prescription of diaspoetics as a response to (territorial, tribal) ‘camp-
thinking’ must take into account sovereignty’s familiarity with interstitiality.
Finally, I argue that the convergence of asylum and (post)colonial concerns are
nowhere more starkly illustrated than in settler Australia’s insistence on the
infrahumanity of its indigenous and asylum-seeking populations.
In the next two chapters I examine a wide range of forms of artistic produc
tion, including photography, performance art, film and the literary novel. This
generic range reflects my understanding of the dispositif as a distribution of the
sensible, and that engaging with and moving between these forms is an essen
tial aspect of engaging with asylum seeker subjectivities. Chapter 2 considers
the constitution of the camp dispositif, according to Rancière’s notion that
politics is determined by the horizon of perception – who can be seen and
heard. First, through a reading of Melanie Friend’s photographs of UK Immigra
tion Removal Centres, I argue that Agamben’s reading of the keno-aesthetic
of the concentration camp conveys an aesthetic sensibility comparable with
Rancière, and provides an important frame for reading spaces of detention as
politicized spaces of interruption and protest. Then, based on Engin Isin and
Kim Rygiel’s criticism of Agamben, I consider three separate horizons of percep
tion in which the camp dispositif is a discernible presence, nestled as it were, in
the city: Christoph Schlingensief’s installation of a temporary detention centre
in the centre of Vienna in 2000; Pawel Pawlikowski’s film Last Resort (2000),
which deals with the dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK; and Caryl Phillips’s
‘Northern Lights’, the final section of Foreigners: Three English Lives (2008), which
in retelling the story of David Oluwale also, I believe, speaks to the contempo
rary context of asylum destitution.
Chapter 3 is framed by a consideration of how the ban prohibits asylum
seekers from engaging in the forms of social and even biological reproduc
87 Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, p. 195.
21

Postcolonial Asylum
tion enjoyed by citizens, and how the ban can be resisted by forms of iterative
self-staging. Reproduction is a central operation of the camp dispositif: just as
the law produces illegality, it also places restrictions on its subjects’ capacity
to reproduce themselves relationally. This is especially the case with women
asylum seekers, and, via readings of Kate Adshead’s play The Bogus Woman
(2009), Stephen Frears’ film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Leila Aboulela’s novel
Minaret (2005), I examine how this exclusion is replicated in Derrida’s theory of
hospitality. Finally, through readings of a range of ‘walking practices’, founded
on Misha Myers’ Plymouth-based ‘Way from Home’ project (2004– ), I then
argue that a proper response to this emerges from an integration of postcolo
nial studies with the discourse of the ban to produce a complementary sense
of iterative dissatisfaction.
Chapter 4 engages with strategies of reading textual and epitextual worlds
and concomitant questions of response and responsibility. Here J. Hillis Miller’s
idea of ethical reading as inherently parasitic, occupied with that which is ‘in
para’ or on the threshold, forms the basis of my contrapuntal reading of Herman
Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ (1853), in which the eponymous protagonist’s insistent ‘I
prefer not to’ creates havoc in the ordered world he enters into. In particular,
I consider his disruptive influence on paper, identified by Derrida as a signifier
of political presence, and the legal texts contained within it. When read along
side the writing and narratives of asylum seekers, ‘Bartleby’ illustrates how,
following Agamben’s sense of the homo sacer’s potential to defy the sovereign,
a practice of assuming the status of bare life can disrupt the presuppositional
basis of the law in the ban. Chapter 5 examines what, in effect, is the opposite
stance: the value of reciprocal narratives in revising the place of the asylum
seeker before the law. The title of this chapter, ‘Terms of Hospitality’, refers to
a sovereign’s capacity to set the conditions in which hospitality is offered; to
the divisive, reductive effect of asylum terminology that has, as Roger Zetter
argues, undergone a process of fracturing into ever-increasing labels of illegiti
macy; and to the temporal experience of claiming asylum for a fixed or indefi
nite term. Following an examination of how these elements are embedded in
the current asylum determination process in the UK, I read Abdulrazak Gurnah’s
novel By the Sea (2001) through Derrida’s hospitality theory, and argue that
Gurnah challenges the effectiveness of assuming a status of bare life in favour of
a more dialogic approach encapsulated in Adriana Cavarero’s relational theory
of the narratable self, and the necessary other who can recognize the self’s
inherent narratability. Cavarero’s assertion that everyone has a story to tell,
and that we discover and identify ourselves through another’s acknowledge
ment of these stories, speaks productively to the context of asylum determina
tions, where narratives have a currency often equivalent to life and death, and
credibility is a matter of subjective judgement.
The final chapter is also concerned with issues of response and responsi
bility. Rather than consider practices of reading, however, as in Chapter 4, here
I am concerned with acts of substitution – of standing in the place of another
– and the affectivity and effectiveness of such gestures. The ethical philosophy
22

Introduction
of Emmanuel Levinas is the inevitable starting point of this enquiry into what
Rosalyn Diprose has called ‘response-ability’, a ‘sensibility beyond’ the relational
norm.88 But, as with the step beyond postcolonial discourse, I argue it is neces
sary to pursue a step beyond Levinas’s theory where his emphasis on the unreal
izable other tips over into a totalizing understanding of the self as irreplaceably
responsible for the other, and a negation of all forms of representation. Starting
with Shahin Shafaei’s Refugitive (2003) and Ros Horin’s Through the Wire (2005),
two examples of Australian ‘verbatim theatre’ (that mixes asylum testimonies
with performance), which both feature performances by Shafaei, I consider the
politics and ethics of proximity, of standing in the place of another. Where
Levinas insists on an absolute passivity in proximity, however, the performance
theory of Augusto Boal posits a transitive relation between actor, spectator
and subject, in which all engage sympathetically with each other but without
devolving agency. This also has a bearing on matters of form, and the potential
for representations of asylum seeker and refugee experience to engage with
an ethics of proximity and substitution. Finally, I look at the manner in which
Michael Winterbottom’s film In This World (2002), in which the journey of the
film and of its subjects are multiply overlaid, simply highlights the incongrui
ties between respective experiences of movement; whereas by investigating
the motivations behind and consequences of what are inevitably partial, limited
gestures of sympathy with asylum seeker experience, Caryl Phillips’s novel A
Distant Shore (2003) demonstrates a sensibility of relational possibilities that
goes beyond the scandal of the ‘we’.
The ultimate aspiration of Postcolonial Asylum is the pursuit of, in Michael
Dillon’s words, a positive questioning of ‘the “we” of the human as such’,
indicating ‘other ways of political being’.89 Despite Rancière’s criticism, I suggest
that Agamben does go beyond simply diagnosing the contemporary politics,
and contributes something significant to this debate (although his work needs
to be supplemented and read alongside that of his critics). Agamben argues that
it is precisely because the refugee is a limit-concept, s/he can indicate new forms
of political belonging. Rancière, Agamben and Dillon each articulates a sense,
akin to that in postcolonial studies, that the threshold is a place of potential
newness, but combines this with an appreciation of the ban: ‘the refugee attests
to the very aporeticism of the “we” and re-opens it for us. In the process […]
we, however we are, are continuously reconfigured’.90
88 Rosalyn Diprose, ‘Responsibility in a Place and Time of Terror’, Borderlands, 3/1 (2004),
32 paras. Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no1_2004/diprose_terror.htm>.
Accessed 8 October 2009.
89 Dillon, ‘The Scandal of the Refugee’, pp. 37–38.
90 Dillon, ‘The Scandal of the Refugee’, p. 38.
23

chapter 1
Nothing Outside the Law
How do you stay open to business and closed to people? Easy. First you
expand the perimeter. Then you lock down.
Naomi Klein1
The colonization of the in-between
In ‘Reflections on Exile’, Edward Said insists on a distinction between the promi

nence of exile as a modernist trope, and the current ‘age of the refugee, the
displaced person, mass immigration’.2 The difference is principally one of scale;
but it is also marked by advances in the possibilities of violence and imperial
territorial ambitions such that now ‘exile cannot be made to serve notions of
humanism’.3 Rather, the asylum seeker is a trope of the infrahuman. Said’s
compelling reminder of the devastation that can accompany displacement is
an important counterpoint to the postcolonial emphasis on diaspoetics, but
it presupposes a division between the early twentieth-century exile and the
contemporary refugee (or asylum seeker) that occludes the heritage of colonial
infrahumanity in the contemporary camp dispositif. In this chapter I will examine
two key strategies of sovereign power in relation to asylum seekers: sovereign
ty’s appropriation of the interstitial tactics advocated by postcolonial diaspo
etics and the presuppositional strategies by which sovereign law presents itself
as always anterior in its relation to life. Both, I argue, are key features of the
operation of the camp dispositif and have their roots in the tactics of imperi
alism. First I will demonstrate how the emphasis on extra-territorial processing
1 Naomi Klein, ‘Fortress Continents’, Guardian (16 January 2003). Available at <www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/16/usa.comment>. Accessed 2 February 2009.
2 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural
Reflections (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 174.
3 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, p. 174.
24

in the UK and Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century indicates sover
eignty’s contemporary facility with processes of deterritorialization as a means
of consolidating territorial authority. I will then trace the colonial heritage of
this deployment of the rule of the exception through readings of the work of
Achille Mbembe, J. M. Coetzee’s colonial parable, Waiting for the Barbarians and,
finally, the illegal detention and deportation of Australian citizens Vivian Solen-
Young and Cornelia Rau in Australia in 2001 and 2005.
In order to read asylum experiences in light of a non-thematizing politics
that can offer a genuinely hopeful sense of a coming community, it is essential
to consider the operations that work against the production of asylum seeker
voices. In doing so, it is necessary to set against the claim that the refugee
offers a new way of being together through aporia, Agamben’s assertion that
the sovereign exception also functions through aporia, because it ‘traces [a]
threshold of indistinction between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion,
[the sovereign decision] is the position of an undecidable’.4 What constitutes
decidability in the context of sovereignty, then, includes an element of the
undecidable, of the mediation of power through aporia – through indirection,
uncertainty and evasion.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have been among the most prominent
exponents, in recent debate on the post-millennial global formation, of the
need to describe a new role for aporia in the constitution of power, which is
encapsulated in their theory of Empire:
In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power

and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deter-
ritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global
realms within its open, expanding frontiers.5
Hardt and Negri’s Empire describes a decentred network of boundary-less

power that eschews the old imperial model of governed and governing terri
tories as the only means to maintain sovereign reach; freed of the constraints
of a centralized structure Empire can inhabit any space, including the rhizom
atic spaces that were previously the preserve of minoritarian subjects. Under
Empire, sovereignty has a protean capacity to mimic rhizomatic forms; it is
‘realized at the margins’, characterized by conjunction and multiplicity, both
(centre) / and (margin); it is discontinuous, in that ‘centre and margin seem
continually to be shifting positions, fleeing any determinate locations’.6 Like
Rushdie’s archetypal migrant, it is without frontiers. Significantly, Empire both
accounts for the political order and provides a model for resistance, the latter
described by Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude, ‘an internally different,
5 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard Univer
sity Press, 2000), p. xii. My emphasis.
6 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 39.
25

Postcolonial Asylum
multiple social subject’, whose agency is a consequence of a desire to resist held

in common rather than an imposed unity.7
On its publication in 2000, Hardt and Negri’s theory was lauded for
advocating transnational solidarity and demarking key elements of a post-
nation state world order. The events of 9/11, however, and the subsequent
US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, have demonstrated that there is life
yet in the old imperial, nation state model, which simply restructured itself to
face a new order of threat. Indeed, in the build-up to the Iraq invasion, Hardt
conceded that the ‘multilateralism squared’ of Empire presents only a poten-
tial alternative to the renaissance of ‘the old European model, but on a global
scale’, under US unilateralism.8 Nonetheless, despite the limitations of Hardt
and Negri’s argument highlighted by subsequent events, I concur with Arif
Dirlik’s opinion that the ‘flexibility’ of their politics ‘resonates with the circum
stances of a present where not only capital but its political and military defence
are premised on flexibility’.9 Western responses to the increased presence of
asylum seekers have been characterized by a suppleness in the constitution of
their own borders, the application of their immigration laws, and the relevance
of ethical considerations. Thus, Hardt and Negri’s vision of a decentred power
formation speaks productively to the derogation, by means of reproducing and
reinforcing the liminality of asylum claimants, of Western nation states’ obliga
tions to provide sanctuary.
Hardt and Negri explicitly position their concept of Empire in opposition
to earlier models of deterritorialized belonging in postcolonial studies. They
criticize postcolonial hybridity theory, in particular, for relying on concepts of
‘centre’ and ‘margin’ to articulate resistance, implicitly sustaining the bounda
ries it would subvert. Postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, they claim,
are too focused on the historicized colonial order to critique the contemporary
moment of global power. Their response is to declare the end of the dialectic
between inside and outside: ‘[t]here is no more outside.’10 Because Empire has
no place, but is everywhere, the place of politics is, in Hardt and Negri’s words,
‘de-actualized’: ‘power is both everywhere and nowhere’.11 Thus, everything is
within the reach of power; yet everything is also, by the same token of sover
eign rule, subject to exclusion.
The declaration that there is no more outside does not signal the advent of
a world without borders, as recent history attests. But the dispersal throughout
the camp dispositif of a hostile response to asylum seekers demonstrates that
sovereignty has reconfigured itself in the age of global flows and agency in
the margins. Neither does the collapse of the inside and outside mean that
7 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004), p. 100.
8 Michael Hardt, ‘The Folly of Our Masters of the Universe’, Guardian (18 December 2002).
Available at <www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,861942,00.html>. Accessed
2 September 2009.
9 Arif Dirlik, ‘Empire?’, Interventions, 5/2 (2003), p. 215.
11 Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 188 and 190.
26

inclusion and exclusion no longer feature as defining elements of sovereignty.

Michel Agier has observed how borders and camps have been conflated as
‘screening vestibules’, designed to keep undesirables ‘“locked up outside” but
also isolated on the inside’.12 Because nothing is outside, everything is inter –
that is, potentially subject to sovereign rule.
Criticism of Hardt and Negri has, however, thrown them together with their
postcolonial bête noire. Benita Parry is suspicious of the way Hardt and Negri’s
model privileges dispersal, drawing parallels with her criticism of postcolonial
studies in general. Both, she argues, ‘manifest an affection for dispersal and
diaspora that militates against a proper attention to the material and existential
conditions of […] dispossessed migrant populations’. In Empire, she suggests,
‘dislocation and dissemination take […] manic form’.13 Parry is not alone in
speaking caution against too ready an appropriation of Hardt and Negri’s ideas.
Bhabha himself warned that too eagerly embracing their ‘emancipatory ideal’
would neglect the salient point that displaced people ‘don’t merely circulate’
but also ‘need to settle’.14 Vijay Devadas and Chris Prentice have also suggested
oversights in Empire, although they are more interested than Parry in a rehabili
tation of Bhabhaian postcolonialism. Summarizing Hardt and Negri’s argument
– that ‘postmodern sovereignty […] has appropriated difference for its own
end, blunting the radical potential for postcolonial critique’ – Devadas and
Prentice respond that this overlooks the political motivation at the core of
postcolonialism and, more importantly, is based on a misreading of the kind
of hybridity propounded by theorists such as Bhabha.15 They contend that
Hardt and Negri conceive of hybridity as ‘organic’ as opposed to ‘intentional’
(following Mikhail Bakhtin), which has significant consequences for its political
application. Bakhtin defined an organic hybrid as that which created new forms
through fusion, which he opposed to the intentional hybrid’s mode of ‘double-
voiced discourse’ in which ‘two voices are dialogically interrelated’ but maintain
‘two different linguistic consciousnesses’. Such an encounter is both relational
and antagonistic – Bakhtin describes the intentional hybrid as a ‘collision’ in
language marked by ‘openendedness’.16 This kind of potentially antagonistic
hybridity also characterizes Bhabha’s theory, in which there is room (albeit
qualified by his tendency to extrapolate universal meaning from minoritarian
contexts) to create dissensus rather than the hybridity ‘built upon a politics of
12 Michel Agier, ‘The Camps of the Twenty-first Century: Corridors, Screening Vestibules
and Borders of Internal Exile’, in Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio (eds), Native Land:
Stop Eject (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2009), p. 241.
13 Benita Parry, ‘Internationalism Revisited, or in Praise of Internationalism’, Interventions,
5/2 (2003), pp. 299 and 308.
14 Homi Bhabha, ‘Making Difference’, ArtForum, 41/8 (2003), p. 237.
15 Vijay Devadas and Chris Prentice, ‘Postcolonial Politics’, Borderlands, 6/2 (2007), 21 paras.
Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/device_editorial.htm>. Accessed
12 February 2009.
16 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagina-
tion: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), pp. 324, 358 and 360.
27

Postcolonial Asylum
addition, which adds “difference” to the social fabric, but which in adding up
only serves to reaffirm hegemony’, which, Devadas and Prentice suggest, is the
basis of Hardt and Negri’s (mis)understanding of postcolonial studies.17
Devadas and Prentice rightly argue that Hardt and Negri underestimate the
potential within postcolonial critique; I also agree with Parry to the extent that
Hardt and Negri’s prescription for ‘counter-Empire’, the multitude that connects
all acts of localized resistance into a global network of agents acting ‘from
below’, risks thematizing resistance. Bashir Abu-Manneh points out that this
evacuation of structure cuts both ways: ‘[i]f Empire is centreless, then so is
counter-Empire’.18 Nonetheless, material and textual evidence from the camp
dispositif attests to the operation of sovereignty in a deterritorialized manner.
Hardt and Negri are not alone in observing the deterritorialization of the
border. Étienne Balibar has affirmed that borders are now ‘dispersed a little
everywhere’;19 for Peter Nyers, the border is a ‘ubiquitous elsewhere’, merged
with other spaces of social marginalization (‘health care clinics, social housing
cooperatives, schools, food banks, welfare offices and police stations’).20 It is
my argument that this deterritorialization is most fully realized in the camp
dispositif under the rule of the exception. Bigo notes an explicit correspondence
between the fragmented and heterogeneous forms of the dispositif, and Hardt
and Negri’s Empire;21 and the dispositif is replete with examples of sovereignty
policing its borders in a deterritorialized fashion. The Italian government, at
the time of writing, processes the vast majority of its asylum claims on the
island of Lampudesa, away from the Italian mainland, and in 2009 was accused
of illegally intercepting boats of migrants in the Mediterranean and returning
them directly to Libya; more broadly, Vicki Squire refers to the numerous infor
mation-sharing systems in the EU as evidence of a ‘functional creep’ in the
increasingly securitized management of asylum;22 in March 2009 the United
States announced the implementation of what critics have called ‘the perfect
Google border’ – a network of cameras along the US–Mexican border that can
be accessed online, allowing members of the global public to report suspi
cious activities.23 However, my analysis in this chapter will focus on the rubric
17 Devadas and Prentice, ‘Postcolonial Politics’, § 9.

18 Bahsir Abu-Manneh, ‘The Illusion of Empire’, Interventions, 5/2 (2003), p. 172.
19 Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans.
James Swenson (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 1.
20 Peter Nyers, ‘No One is Illegal: Between City and Nation’, in Engin F. Isin and Greg M.
Neilson (eds), Acts of Citizenship (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), p. 167.
21 Didier Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon’, in D. Bigo and
L’Harmattan, 2006), p. 34.
22 This includes FADO, an imaging archive for identifying counterfeit documents; EURODAC,
a biometric database; the Schengen Information System (SISI II), which contains lists of
‘undesirables’; and Visa Information System, a biometric database designed to prevent
asylum ‘shopping’. Vicki Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), pp. 102–103.
23 The Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition reported that tip-offs had been received from as far
28

of the exception in the UK and Australia, because they provide some of the
most striking illustrations of what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called ‘the empire of
camps’.24 Since the UK IAA 1999, which was intended to resolve comprehen
sively the arcane system inherited by the Labour government in 1997, there
have been five subsequent acts of legislation relating to immigration, in 2002,
2004, 2006, 2007 and 2009, with a ‘simplifying bill’ intended to consolidate the
existing legislation (the Immigration and Citizenship Bill) in preparation at the
time of writing, demonstrating in practice that ‘Empire is materialising before
our very eyes’.25 Additionally, the use of destitution as a tool of legislation
to encourage failed asylum seekers to return and to discourage others from
seeking asylum, should be understood as an extension of the camp. Just as, in
his protest on the razor wire at Woomera, Mahzer Ali demonstrated what it
means to ‘become the frontier’ he had crossed, every asylum seeker, by virtue of
their designation as such, is always and everywhere an extension of the camp,
enmeshed in the dispositif.
Agamben’s description of the state of exception corresponds with Hardt and
Negri’s claim that there is no more outside. The exception refers to the suspen
sion of law as a means of maintaining its enforceability. It is, Agamben says, ‘the
legal form of what cannot have legal form’; ‘neither external nor internal to the
juridical order’: its topological structure, and that of the sovereign who deter
mines and incarnates the exception, is ‘[b]eing-outside and yet belonging’.26
Agamben develops Schmitt’s famous declaration, the sovereign is the one who
decides on the state of exception, to encompass this topology: ‘I, the sovereign,
who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law’.27 Power
is everywhere because it is nowhere, tracing the threshold between inside and
outside. The topology of exception is fundamentally inter, a threshold that
banishes the concept of the outside but not the force of exclusion. That the camp
could be described as a topology in which detainees are described, conversely,
as ‘being-inside and yet do not belong’ is in keeping with a trend of symmetry
in Agamben’s thinking here: as he says of the sovereign and the homo sacer, ‘the
sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri,
and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’.28
Thus sovereignty is manifest in the in-between spaces.
Needless to say, however, sovereignty’s primary impulse remains voraciously
territorial. It is notable that Agamben also follows Schmitt in characterizing the
‘ordering of space’ around the exception as ‘not only a “taking of land” […] – the
afield as Australia. Richard Luscombe, ‘Patrol Watches Texas–Mexico Border: From Pub
in Australia’, Guardian (23 March 2009), p. 22.
24 Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (London and
New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 145.
25 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. xi.
26 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, Ill. and London: Univer
sity of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 1, 23 and 35.
27 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 15. My emphasis.
28 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 84.
29

Postcolonial Asylum
determination of a juridical and territorial ordering […] – but above all a “taking
of the outside”, an exception’.29 Despite constituting a Â�‘decentred and deterrito
rializing apparatus of rule’, Hardt and Negri aver that Empire operates through
‘territorial segmentation’; it relies on the reinforcement of striated spaces. In
this sense, the use of detention regimes by Western nations to process asylum
applications represents the most apposite example of territorial segmentation
by a deterritorialized apparatus of rule. But the end of the outside also has conse
quences for the constitution of borders. Alessandro De Giorgi has observed, in
the same spirit as Hardt and Negri, that ‘borders are becoming flexible instru
ments for the reproduction of a hierarchical division between deserving and
undeserving populations, wanted and unwanted others’.30 The ‘flexibilization’ of
borders in fact takes place in service of recognizably imperial aims.
Both the UK and Australia have demonstrated a consistent drive towards
border flexibilization as a means to shore up border control. Matthew Gibney
has traced a heritage of using legislative means to prohibit asylum claimants in
the UK, including the successive imposition of visa restrictions from the 1960s
onwards and the Immigration (Carrier’s Liability) Act 1987, which made it an
offence for carriers to bring into the UK persons without proper documentation
(unless they made a successful claim for asylum).31 In May 2002 the Guardian
reported that Tony Blair had assumed ‘personal control’ of UK asylum policy,
and that among his proposals was the use of ‘Royal Navy warships to intercept
people traffickers in the Mediterranean and carry out bulk deportations in RAF
transport planes’.32 Since 1991 the Sangatte agreement has established juxta
posed controls between Britain and France, by which each State is ‘permitted
to operate full immigration controls on the territory of the other’.33 This has
since been extended in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003, and further expansion of
juxtaposed controls was mentioned in 2007 as part of the UK government’s
strategy for creating a new offshore border.34 The Labour government at the
time all but conceded that such a strategy amounts to a process of territorial
segmentation by a deterritorialized apparatus of rule: juxtaposed controls are
designed, it said in 2007, ‘to move aspects of the UK border to ports across the
Channel […] fundamentally altering the way the UK operates at its border’.35

30 Alessandro De Giorgi, quoted in Michael Welsh and Lisa Schuster, ‘Detention of Asylum
Seekers in the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy: A Critical View of the Globalizing
Culture of Control’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 5/4 (2005), p. 344.
31 Matthew Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to
Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 122–123.
32 Seamus Milne and Alan Travis, ‘Blair’s Secret Plan to Crack Down on Asylum Seekers’,
Guardian (23 May 2002), p. 1.
33 Sile Reynolds and Helen Muggeridge, Remote Controls: How UK Border Controls are Endan-
gering the Lives of Refugees (London: Refugee Council, 2008), pp. 39–40.
34 Reynolds and Muggeridge, Remote Controls, p. 40. See Home Office and Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, Securing the UK Border: Our Vision and Strategy for the Future (March
2007).
35 Quoted in Reynolds and Muggeridge, Remote Controls, p. 40.
30

Such extensions of the border are a significant part of current UK strategy

for managing migration. In 2007 the Labour government published two strategy
papers (Securing the UK Border and Managing Global Migration) that described
plans to ‘develop a new offshore border’.36 In Securing the UK Border the then
Minister for Immigration, Nationality and Citizenship, Liam Byrne, and the
former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Foreign and Common
wealth Office, Lord Triesman, observed that ‘[b]order control can no longer just
be a fixed line on a map’.37 The report went on to dismiss the notion of the
‘single, staffed physical’ border as a ‘twentieth-century concept’ that is insuffi
cient to manage globalized trends; instead, ‘a new doctrine is demanded, where
controls begin offshore’.38 The proposed means to achieve this included greater
use of biometric technology and the construction of an electronic border of
interoperable screening systems between allied countries.39 Following these
strategy documents, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) was launched in 2008 as
a single body for the management of immigration, customs, visas (including
therefore overseas border checks), and deciding asylum claims in the UK. At
the time of writing, the Refugee Council noted that UKBA deploys over 9,000
border control officers in the UK and worldwide in 135 countries;40 officers
operating outside the UK are designated either immigration liaison officers
(ILOs), mandated to contribute to the prevention of illegal migration in their
host country, or airport liaison officers (ALOs), charged with advising carriers of
their responsibilities under sections 40 and 41 of the IAA 1999 as they relate to
carrying passengers without proper documentation. According to the Refugee
Council, although ALOs have no legal powers, their advisory capacity carries
sufficient weight that ‘advice to refuse embarkation [is] almost always followed’.
Neither ILOs nor ALOs are obliged to consider an intercepted person’s need for
international protection.41
There is, in short, a wealth of evidence that recent UK immigration policy
has constituted a rubric of territorial segmentation driven by a deterritorialized
apparatus of rule. Borders are pushed further and further outwards without
any diminishing of sovereign authority to exclude, and Byrne and Triesman’s
dismissal of the old model of the border as a ‘line on a map’ echoes the claims
36 Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Managing Global Migration: A
Strategy to Build Stronger International Alliances to Manage Migration (June 2007), p. 8.
37 Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Securing the UK Border, p. 2
38 Securing the UK Border, p. 3. Managing Global Migration speaks of the need for ‘a different
doctrine of control’. It also refers to the UK’s participation in both the East African Migra
tion Routes Initiative, designed to disrupt flows of illegal migration from the region,
and the Gateway Protection programme to resettle Congolese refugee camp residents
in the UK. Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Managing Global Migra-
tion, p. 8. Both are examples of the government’s intentions to ‘take border controls
“upstream” to the earliest possible point in the individual’s journey to the UK’. Reynolds
and Muggeridge, Remote Controls, p. 17.
39 Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Managing Global Migration, p. 8.
40 Reynolds and Muggeridge, Remote Controls, p. 17.
41 Reynolds and Muggeridge, Remote Controls, pp. 35–36.
31

Postcolonial Asylum
of Hardt and Negri, Balibar, Nyers, et al. that sovereignty has been reconfig
ured. A similar process is observable in Australia’s response to asylum seekers,
most notably in the events surrounding the Tampa incident in 2001, and the
state’s use of extra-territorial processing centres (EPCs) between 2001 and
2008. Since 2008 the Labour government under Kevin Rudd has repealed some
of the more repressive legislation that characterized the asylum policy of the
Howard government, which had earned Australia a reputation as ‘arguably the
most unwelcoming country towards asylum seekers in the Western world’.42
This includes the closure of Woomera, where Mahzer Ali was held, and the
repealing of the ‘Pacific solution’ (however, although the Labour government
closed the Manus Islands and Nauru detention centres, it opened a detention
facility on Christmas Island in 2008).43 Nonetheless, the Australian response to
the Tampa incident is an acute illustration of the process by which sovereign
control is enacted at its borders.
As noted in the introduction, Prem Kumar Rajaram has called the Pacific
solution a ‘strengthening of Australian “place”’ at the expense of the ‘deroga
tion of other “placements”’ like Nauru.44 The Pacific solution included legisla
tion, the Border Protection Bill of 2001, which excised certain Australian island
territories (including Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef and Cocos Islands) from
the ‘migration zone’.45 Australia’s borders were both expanded and retracted as
a response to requests for asylum. Just as the Pacific solution required that the
laws of other states be suspended to allow for the indefinite detention in their
territory of asylum seekers who had not been convicted of a crime, Australia
willingly surrendered parts of its territoriality within the migration zone, at
least as far as asylum claims were concerned, in order to enforce a policy of
exclusion. Centre and margin shift positions in the service of a drive to bring
about the end of the outside in order to exclude.
It is significant that the examples given above of both the UK and Australian
border management constitute a potential violation of the principle of non-refoule-
ment (from the French refouler, to deter or drive back), which was established
in Article 33 of the 1951 Convention.46 Non-refoulement commits participating
42 Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum, p. 167.

43 ‘Australia Announces Changes on Asylum Seekers’, New York Times (30 July 2008). Avail-
able at <www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/world/asia/30australia.html?_r=2&oref=slogin>.
AcÂ�Â�Â�cessed 25 February 2009.
44 Prem Kumar Rajaram, ‘“Making Place”: The “Pacific Solution” and Australian Emplace
ment in the Pacific and on Refugee Bodies’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/3
(2003), p. 290.
45 Burnside describes the migration zone as ‘any place on shore, or adjacent to a port’ from
where persons would have access to a claim for asylum in Australia. Julian Burnside,
‘Refugees: The Tampa Incident’, Postcolonial Studies, 5/1 (2002), p. 18. Guy Goodwin-Gill
suggests that as many as 4,891 places were excised from the migration zone, indicating
sovereignty’s excessive zeal to limit itself as a means of furthering its influence. Guy
S. Goodwin-Gill and Jane McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, 3rd edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 255.
46 Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, p. 201. The UK incorporated
32

nations to ensure they do not return any person seeking asylum to a country
where they may be at risk. Such a principle is inherently resisted by national
sovereignty; indeed, Guy Goodwin-Gill and Jane McAdams note that it is not
an ‘absolute principle’, and issues of national security have been ‘recognized
as potential justification for derogation’.47 Nonetheless, non-refoulement is the
central principle determining the position of the refugee in international law,
and consequently its circumvention is a necessary feature of deterritorialized
sovereignty. The flexibilization of the border by UK and Australian immigration
authorities indicates a de facto intention to derogate. As Goodwin-Gill notes in
relation to the activities of ILOs and ALOs:
Non-refoulement is precisely the sort of obligation which is engaged by extra-

territorial action […] The fact of interception – the taking of control and
custody – establishes the necessary link between the State and the conse
quence [i.e. risk of return to persecution or torture].48
Similarly, Burnside notes that the Tampa was brought under the obligation of
Australian sovereignty once it was intercepted by the military, yet the subse
quent grant of habeas corpus was not allowed.49
The common feature here is an action of simultaneous recognition and
disavowal that links sovereignty with the creation of a fetish. In the case of
both the Pacific solution and the deployment of ILOs, sovereignty appears to
itself and its subjects by disavowing itself. Through the creation of exceptional
spaces, particularly the excised migration zone, sovereignty creates a space of
the absence of law (the offshore border) in which sovereign power can nonethe
less remain absolutely enforceable over the body of the legally absent but physi
cally present asylum seeker. As Goodwin-Gill has observed, this is a common
response to the obligation to non-refoulement:
[A]nyone presenting themselves at a frontier post, port, or airport will already

be within State territory and jurisdiction; for this reason, and the better to
retain sovereign control, States have devised fictions to keep even the physi
cally present alien technically, legally, unadmitted.50
Although Goodwin-Gill notes that the 2001 Border Protection Bill was ‘carefully
constructed so as to fall within the letter, if not the spirit, of international law’,
the emphasis on exclusion indicates a significant risk of derogation.51 In 2006 the
Australian government presented draft legislation that would excise the entirety
the 1951 Convention into the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993. At the time
of writing, Australia has only incorporated the 1951 Convention in the definition of the
term ‘refugee’ in the Migration Act 1958, and not by reference to ensuing obligations.
47 Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, pp. 234–235.
48 Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, ‘The Legal Dimensions’, in Reynolds and Muggeridge, Remote
Controls, p. 23.
49 Burnside, ‘Refugees: The Tampa Incident’, pp. 19–21.
50 Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, p. 207.
51 Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, p. 256
33

Postcolonial Asylum
of the Australian mainland from the migration zone. Australia as a territorial

entity for asylum purposes would effectively cease to exist. This Â�legislation was
eventually withdrawn, but it indicates the lengths Western nations are prepared
to go in disavowing themselves, and promulgating the ‘empire of camps’.52
Kenomatic fetish
As the contested application of non-refoulement attests, the asylum regime in the

postcolonial age is fundamentally about a crisis of law. In this order of crisis the
camp is a persistent presence. In January 2009, the same month in which Presi
dent Obama ordered the closure of the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay (the
site where, Agamben has said, ‘bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy’
and which in the early 1990s held Haitian refugees for processing),53 the London
Detainee Support Group published Detained Lives, a report that highlighted how,
in the UK, hundreds of failed asylum seekers and foreign ex-offenders are subject
to indefinite detention in immigration removal centres (IRCs) because the Home
Office is unable to guarantee safe return to their country of origin. This report
criticized the fact that the UK is one of the few European countries not to
impose a time-limit on detention: furthermore, in contrast to other nations
with no upper limit, the UK operates on a presumption of long-term detention.
The Immigration Act 1971 allows for the deportation of non-British citizens
where it is thought conducive to the public good, and also allows the detention
of ex-offenders pending removal. Detained Lives noted that, although ‘the burden
of proof is on UKBA to justify detention’, in recent years ‘[t]he presumption of
liberty has been seriously undermined’.54 In September 2008 UKBA rescinded
its commitment to a ‘presumption of release’, articulated in a 1998 Govern
ment White Paper, Firmer, Faster, Fairer. However, the High Court of England
and Wales (EWHC) has found that in fact since April 2006, when the Home
Secretary Charles Clarke was forced to resign over the failure to deport certain
foreign ex-offenders, the Home Office had been operating a clandestine policy
of ‘presumption of detention’, described by Mr Justice Davis as both ‘unlawful’
and ‘contrary to the presumption of liberty in the 1971 Act’.55 As with the legis
lation that followed the Tampa incident, Mr Justice Davis’s findings illustrate
how sovereignty operates at the threshold of the law when it comes to asylum
and detention.
Agamben’s assertion that the camp is the ‘biopolitical nomos’ of contem
porary politics is controversial, although he is not alone in arguing for the
camp as a decisive moment in modernity. Zygmunt Bauman has directly
ascribed the concentration camp to the technical and ethical accomplishments
52 Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, p. 145.

53 Agamben, State of Exception, p. 4.
54 London Detainee Support Group, Detained Lives: The Real Cost of Infinite Immigration Deten-
tion (January 2009), p. 10.
55 London Detainee Support Group, Detained Lives, p. 10.
34

of Â�modernity.56 Yet there are many who advise caution. Engin Isin and Kim
Rygiel suggest that Agamben’s ahistorical focus essentializes the camp.57 Paul
Gilroy has also been alert to the problems associated with making ‘the camp’,
whose most iconic incarnation is the Nazi death camps, speak for very different
contexts. Yet Gilroy also insists that understanding the link between the camp
as metaphor for ‘the pathologies of race and nation’ and as an actual, political
technology rests in recognizing that as harbingers of ‘catastrophic moder
nity’ the camps also signify our ‘postmodern predicament’: being conscious of
the heritage of the camp means also ‘being alive to the camps out there now
and the camps around the corner, the camps that are being prepared’.58 The
‘rational administration’ of the camp as detention centre or IRC capitalizes on
the heritage of the post-Second World War refugee camp as, in Liisa Malkki’s
words, ‘a standardized, generalizable technology of power’ through whose
ordering processes ‘the modern, post-war refugee emerged as a knowable,
nameable figure and as an object of social-scientific knowledge’.59 Although the
post-war refugee and the contemporary asylum seeker are distinct categories
of displaced person, I suggest that it is the inheritance of the post-war camps
in the contemporary detention centre’s function as a technology of power that
makes the asylum seeker into a knowable object contained by and identifiable
with the camp (localized or delocalized) as exceptional space.
Agamben has distinguished between the camp under the exception and
carceral spaces.60 Yet he also calls the exception a threshold of indistinction,
and as threshold spaces many IRCs in the UK operate in an ambivalent relation
to the prison system. Reports based on unannounced inspection visits to several
IRCs by Anne Owers, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, in 2007 and 2008, found
that of the ten facilities around the UK, four exhibited signs of symbiosis with
carceral institutions. Colnbrook IRC is equipped to operate as a Category B
prison; 88 percent of detainees in Dover IRC, a former prison and borstal, were
found to be ex-offenders; and staff at Lindholm IRC (a former Category D prison
adjacent to HMP Lindholme) and Haslar IRC, both run by the Prison Service at
the time of inspection, were found to wear Prison Service uniforms and to carry
batons.61 These examples indicate that, while the camp is not the same as the
56 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell,

1995), pp. 194–195.
Macmillan, 2006), p. 184.
Penguin, 2000), pp. 85, 86 and 87.
59 Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of
Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995), p. 497.
60 Agamben refers to the camp as ‘the absolute space of exception […] topologically
different from a simple state of confinement’. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 20.
61 Anne Owers, HM Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Full Follow-up Inspection
of Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre (18–22 June 2007). Anne Owers, HM Inspector of
Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Inspection of Dover Immigration Removal Centre (19–23
35

Postcolonial Asylum
prison, IRCs in the UK do conjure with elements of the carceral. The Detained
Lives report draws a contrast between the relative transparency of the criminal
justice system and ‘a detention system apparently devoid of limits, causality
and comprehensibility’, a point that recalls Agamben’s assertion that the state
of exception ‘is not a dictatorship […] but a space devoid of law’, and associ
ates the UK detention regime with the state of exception itself, ‘at the limit of
politics and law’.62
Agamben notes that rather than being ‘pleromatic’ (from pleins pouvoirs, ‘full
powers’), the exception is ‘a kenomatic state, an emptiness of law’.63 In this
gap sovereignty operates through its own suspension, or disavowal. This lack
means that the exception functions, like the Pacific solution, in the manner of
a fetish. The state of exception occurs as the ‘opening of a fictitious lacuna’ in
the juridical order in order to ensure the normal situation:
It is as if the juridical order [il diritto] contained an essential fracture between

the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme circumstances,
can only be filled by […] creating a zone in which application is suspended,
but the law [la legge] remains in force.64
Disavowal, the fundamental characteristic of the fetish, is the means by

which the law ensures its enforceability. Yet, as Derrida has observed, the law’s
entire being is in its enforceability; such is its ‘mystical foundation of authority’,
that ‘there is no such thing as law (droit) that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in
the analytic concept of its structure, the possibility of being “enforced,” applied by
force’.65 As with the Pacific solution, Agamben’s description of the state of excep
tion demonstrates that the exception as fetish compensates for the absence of
a transcendental authorizing power of the law by creating an absence – a ficti
tious lacuna – of its own: one lack compensating for another. In this sense, the
exception fetishizes emptiness, and it is significant therefore that Goodwin-Gill
and McAdams state that, in relation to international refugee law, some states
use ‘“legal” fictions to deny “legal” presence in spite of “physical” presence’.66
Such machinations are necessitated, Agamben argues, by the law’s funda
mental emptiness: ‘Law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture
inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio […] [T]he law truly
March 2007). Anne Owers, HM Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Short Follow-
up Inspection of Lindholme Immigration Removal Centre (16–18 July 2007). Anne Owers,
HM Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Short Follow-up Inspection of Haslar
Immigration Removal Centre (5–7 November 2007), all available at <www.justice.gov.uk/
inspectorates/hmi-prisons/immigration-removal-centre-inspections.htm>. Accessed 16
February 2009.
62 See Detained Lives, p. 21; Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 50 and 1.
63 Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 5–6.
65 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Drucilla
Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility
of Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6.
66 Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, p. v.
36

“has no existence in itself, but rather has its being in the very life of men”.’67
Law’s structure, because it is kenomatic, is avidly presuppositional, taking
everything within itself so that nothing should stand outside the law and thus,
as Jessica Whyte has said, ‘establishing a circle in which law’s authority stems
from law itself’.68 In the camp dispositif what is detained by the law is bare
life in the form of the intensely politicized but wholly disenfranchised body of
the asylum seeker, repeating an emptiness of agency captured by the law to
compensate for its own kenomatic state. This is most evident in what Agamben
says about the relationship between law and life, in which life is ‘implicated in
the sphere of the law only through the presupposition of its inclusive exclu
sion, only in an exceptio. There is a limit-figure of life, a threshold in which life
is both inside and outside the juridical order, and this threshold is the place
of sovereignty’.69 The asylum seeker or refugee is the archetypal limit-figure
in Agamben’s writing, one who incarnates a threshold that both unsettles the
sovereign order (both inside and outside) and, by virtue of the latter’s continual
reconfiguration, is the sovereign order.
It is possible to argue that the entirety of international refugee law has a
presuppositional structure. According to Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, the
original wording of Article 14 (i) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
1948 reads: ‘everyone has the right to seek and be granted, in other countries,
asylum from persecution.’ However, at the behest of the UK delegation ‘to be
granted’ was removed during drafting, and replaced with ‘to enjoy’, a formula
that insinuates the ‘right to asylum’ to reside with the state ‘in the form of a
discretionary power’, not the individual.70 It is thus an expression of the sover
eign right to decide. For Agamben, the ban is the structure in which law relates
to life through its own suspension, in which ‘[i]t is literally not possible to say
whether one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order’.71 In
this sense, Agamben’s gloss on ‘the paradox of sovereignty’, ‘[t]here is nothing
outside the law’, mediates between Whyte’s assertion that ‘law’s exterior is
nothing but human life’ and Hardt and Negri’s pronouncement of the end of
the outside, to produce the asylum seeker as compensation for the kenomatic
structure of the law.72

68 Jessica Whyte, ‘Its Silent Working Was a Delusion’, in Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron
and Alex Murray (eds), The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 68.
70 Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, pp. 358–359 and 414. My
emphasis.
71 Goodwin-Gill and McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, pp. 28–29.
72 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 29; Whyte, ‘Its Silent Working Was a Delusion’, p. 73; Hardt and
Negri, Empire, p. 186.
37

Postcolonial Asylum
The heritage of colonial infrahumanity
For Agamben, sovereignty is essentially concerned with the production of bare

life – zoē, not bios. This notion of biopower has, however, been criticized by
Achille Mbembe, who proposes that biopolitics must be augmented by a theory
of necropolitics to account for the practical conditions under which sover
eignty, whose power is realized in the negation of human subjects, inaugurates
‘politics’ as ‘death that lives a human life’.73 Mbembe’s intervention is crucial
for a proper understanding of how the camp dispositif is both biopolitical and
necropolitical, empowered to decide on matters of life and death. While it is
unfair to suggest that Agamben elides any sense of sovereign necropower –
his definition of the sovereign as ‘the one with respect to whom all men are
potentially homines sacri’ places necropower right at the (decentralized) heart of
sovereignty74 – as Catherine Mills has suggested, for Agamben bare life is the
reduction of human life to survival: life exposed to the possibility of death.75
Thus Mbembe’s coinage of ‘necropolitics’ is a useful supplement to Agamben’s
discourse on the exceptio, especially in terms of its application to asylum and
in relation to postcolonial studies. Mbembe’s work also, crucially, traces a
heritage of colonial infrahumanity that connects directly to the constitution of
the contemporary camp dispositif.
The decision to award sanctuary is often one that directly concerns issues
of life and death: fear of wrongful death is frequently what motivates asylum
claims and, as the principle of non-refoulement makes clear, a decision to return
them to their country of origin might involve placing the asylum seeker at fatal
risk. This is reflected in the structure and orientation of the camp dispositif.
Since 2007 the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) has documented 228 deaths
of people seeking asylum in the UK in the past sixteen years, either in transit
or, as Harmit Athiwal notes in a separate IRR report in 2006, ‘as an indirect
consequence of the iniquities of the immigration/asylum system – either by
taking their own lives when claims were not allowed, or by meeting accidental
deaths evading deportation, or during the deportation itself, or by being
prevented medical care, through becoming destitute in the UK’.76 Athiwal and
73 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15/1 (2003), pp.
14–15.
74 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 84 and 8.
75 Catherine Mills, ‘An Ethics of Bare Life: Agamben and Witnessing’, Borderlands, 2/1 (2003),
24 paras. Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no1_2003/mills_agamben.html>.
Accessed 15 March 2009.
76 Harmit Athiwal, Driven to Desperate Measures (London: Institute of Race Relations,
2006), p. 2. This report documents 221 deaths. Such a figure is almost certainly an underes-
timate. Furthermore, Athiwal notes that the figure of 221 does ‘not include those “settled”
black people, those with leave to remain who have met their death in the custody of the
police, prison and psychiatric hospitals and in racial violence attacks. Nor does it include
deaths in custody of asylum seekers arrested on suspicion of committing criminal offences’.
Athiwal, Driven to Desperate Measures, p. 3. See also Harmit Athiwal and Jenny Bourne,
‘Driven to Despair: Asylum Deaths in the UK’, Race and Class, 48/4 (2007), 106–114.
38

Jenny Bourne attribute these deaths to anti-asylum laws, which prevent legal
entry (forcing many into extreme risk-taking) and also prevent certain migrants
from working legally, the most striking example of which are the twenty-three
Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecombe Bay in 2004. They also cite
deaths due to the dispersal of asylum seekers to non-receptive communities,
such as Firsat Dag, a Kurd killed on the Sighthill estate in Glasgow in 2001, and
Wei Wang, who was also killed in Sighthill in 2006; to the desperation of deten
tion, such as Manuel Bravo, an Angolan who hanged himself in Yarl’s Wood IRC
in 2005 on the day before he was due to be deported; and to destitution, such
as an unnamed, homeless Iraqi asylum seeker, who set himself on fire in 2004
in protest that his asylum claim had been refused.77 Athiwal’s report for the IRR
records the death of Babak Ahadi, an Iranian asylum seeker who in 2005 also set
himself on fire. Athiwal observes that ‘the coroner recorded a verdict of suicide
and commented, “I have no doubt in my mind that the failed asylum applica
tion had dire results and was the prime cause of Mr Ahadi’s death”’.78 The UK
National Council for Anti-Deportation Campaigns attributed Ahadi’s death to
‘seeking asylum in the UK’.79 This final claim bears the most compelling witness
to the necropolitical structure of asylum in the UK, along with Athiwal’s 2006
IRR report that contains a roll call of deaths, many anonymous; this juxtapo
sition of literal and political deaths forcefully illustrates the ‘death-in-life’ to
which the asylum seeker is subject.80 ‘Necropolitics’ thus provides a vocabu
lary for describing the ‘new and unique forms of social existence in which vast
populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status
of living dead’, which Mbembe sees everywhere in the postcolonial world, from
the organization of South African townships to the occupation of Gaza and the
West Bank.81
Mbembe’s work traces the exception through colonial and postcolonial
incarnations, and both he and Paul Gilroy demonstrate the centrality of the
infrahuman in coloniality. Following Mbembe and Gilroy, I will argue that the
camp dispositif does have its roots in colonial forms, albeit with certain essential
differences. However, although Mbembe and Gilroy may be read as a neces
sary rejoinder to Agamben’s ‘de-emphasis’ of race in his account of biopolitical
modernity, I will also stress that the ‘inter-consciousness’ of Agamben’s analysis
77 Athiwal and Bourne, ‘Driven to Despair’, pp. 106–107, 108 and 112. Bravo killed himself
in the belief that his son would be allowed to remain in the UK.
78 Athiwal, Driven to Desperate Measures, p. 21.
79 Helen Hintjens, ‘Like Leaves in the Wind: Desperately Seeking Asylum in the UK’, Race
and Class, 48/1 (2006), p. 80.
80 In a briefing paper for the IRR Athiwal has described the lacuna into which many asylum
deaths can disappear, where the family of the deceased are overseas and possibly
unknown to the authorities: ‘In such cases, there is rarely anyone to speak for the
deceased person and to ensure that the reasons for his/her death are examined’. Harmit
Athiwal, Asylum Deaths: What to Do Next, Institute of Race Relations Briefing Paper, 4
(2007), p. 2. This indicates that the association of asylum seeker and homo sacer, as those
who may be killed without consequence, is least on occasion justified.
81 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 40; see also pp. 26–30.
39

Postcolonial Asylum
of the camp makes it necessary to read back, as it were, sovereignty’s occupa

tion of inter-spaces, particularly into Gilroy’s work on the camp as a metaphor
for the pathologies of race. Whereas Gilroy fixes the infrahuman as an icon of
nationalism, omitting the effective colonization of the in-between, Mbembe’s
insistence on the persistence of the colony as a site of exceptionality in the
Western imaginary provides a more supple account of the colonial heritage of
the camp dispositif.
Agamben acknowledges the camp’s colonial origins, citing the Spanish
campos de concentraciones, established in Cuba in 1896, and the concentration
camps used by the British during the Boer War between 1899 and 1902 as
possible prototypes (although his omission of nineteenth-century Australian
Aboriginal internment camps supports criticism that he is not sufficiently
mindful of colonial contexts). However, he is satisfied simply to link the colonial
setting to the existence of the exception: ‘[w]hat matters here is that in both
cases, a state of emergency linked to a colonial war is extended to an entire
civil population. The camps are thus born not out of ordinary law […] but out
of a state of exception.’82 This point is not pursued, and thus, although they
cite Agamben, Gilroy and Mbembe emphasize that a proper understanding of
the exception must necessarily be placed squarely in its colonial context, and
racialized. Race, says Mbembe, is the calculus that justifies biopower, and Gilroy
argues that colonialism reproduced the homo sacer as a racialized figure: the
colonial project merged ‘the critical figure of the person who could be killed
with impunity or disposed of without conscience’ with ‘the infrahuman native
and the racial slave, the negro, the aboriginal and the indigene’, manifesting ‘a
new kind of geopolitical space […] filled […] with a new cast of readily racial
ized characters’.83
For Gilroy the creation of infrahumanity is a colonial strategy whose contem
porary incarnation, such as the operation of ‘an economy of colonial alterity’
in the US’s Guantanamo detention facility, is simply a variation of a long-estab
lished theme.84 Mbembe cites Hegel’s descriptions of Africans (‘all that is foreign
to man in his immediate existence, and nothing consonant with humanity is to
be found in his character’) to the same effect, asserting the centrality of the
infrahuman in coloniality.85 As Gilroy says:
The insubordinate native, always closer to death and scarcity, stood at the
epicentre of governmental action, [and] the colony [was] identified as a special
kind of place [whose] necessary reliance on divisions within humankind […]
demanded and institutionalized the abolition of all conceptions of citizenship
as universal entitlement.86
82 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 166–167.

83 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 17; Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?
[2004] (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 53.
84 Gilroy, After Empire, p. 52.
85 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 2001), p. 176.
40

This statement could equally suffice to describe the situation of asylum seekers
within the camp dispositif: subject to necropolitical influences and the basis
for an organization of space (i.e., the camp) that divides the within in order to
control the without.87 This is not to elide important contextual differences but
to underline that the production of infrahumanity has a long history. Squire
is correct to distinguish between the explicit racialization of the debates
surrounding post-war immigration in the UK (e.g., Enoch Powell’s infamous
‘Rivers of Blood’ speech) and the rearticulation of the contemporary debate
in terms of securitization and criminalization.88 Nonetheless, racialization and
securitization are variant expressions of the same exclusionary politics.
Mbembe has described two ‘scenes’ where the exception operated in colonial
space; the plantation and the frontier. He calls the plantation system ‘emblem
atic’ of the exception, where ‘slave-life’ equated with ‘a form of death-in-life’.89
Mbembe quotes Gilroy’s summation of the plantation as an ‘anti-discursive
and extralinguistic’ space: ‘there may […] be no reciprocity on the plantation
outside of the possibilities of rebellion and suicide, flight and silent mourning,
and there is certainly no grammatical unity of speech to mediate communicative
reason.’90 In this he recalls Agamben’s link between language and law: law is
founded in the ‘presuppositional structure of human language’, which declares
that there is ‘nothing outside language and that language is always beyond
itself’. This link creates a bond in which, Agamben says, ‘a thing is subject
because of the fact of being in language, of being named. To speak [dire] is, in
this sense, always to ‘speak the law,’ ius dicere’.91 Naming – as subhuman in the
colony, or asylum seeker in the camp dispositif – presupposes a role before the
law that it is impossible to speak against without, as Agamben says, speaking
or invoking the law. What remains are modalities of violence (‘rebellion and
suicide’) that, as they express resistance, also articulate sovereign power.
In Between Camps Gilroy asserts that the structure of the plantation contex
tualizes the political administration of the camp, associating the latter with the
pathologies of nationalism. This is certainly apt to describe the Nazi camps that
are also the basis of Agamben’s analysis. But Gilroy’s designation of nation
alism as ‘camp-thinking’ does not fully account for the constitution of the camp
dispositif in its contemporary manifestation.92 While Gilroy suggests that diaspo
etics can neutralize camp-thinking, ‘comfortably operating in the in-between
locations that camp-thinking deprives of any significance’, his argument does
not allow for sovereignty’s interstitial confidence – that, in effect, it concurs
87 Perera has described biopolitics and necropolitics as ‘paired modalities’ in colonial

Australia’s treatment of both indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Suvendrini Perera,
‘Acting Sovereign’, in Suvendrini Perera (ed.), Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty
Post-2001 (Perth, WA: Curtin University of Technology, 2007), p. 12.
89 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 21.
90 Gilroy, quoted in Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 21.
92 Gilroy, Between Camps, pp. 82–83.
41

Postcolonial Asylum
with the grammar of diaspoetics (a kind of, as it were, ‘campoetics’).93

Gilroy’s camp-thinking is drawn into greater proximity with Agamben,
however, when read against Ghassan Hage’s idea of the racist as a self-appointed
‘spatial manager’ and the fact that racism in Western asylum regimes is as
often manifest as culture-based xeno-racism (‘racism in substance, but xeno
in form’), as skin-based prejudice.94 It is not incidental that the Cronulla Beach
anti-immigration protests were staged on the beach, an iconic environment
in settler Australian culture but also, as Greg Dening has shown, a key liminal
space in the iconography of colonial encounter; a space of negotiation, where
‘things come across […] partially, without their fuller meaning’.95 Jon Stratton
has argued that the beach as liminal site in the Australian national imaginary
has been both racialized (as encapsulating the values of ‘white Australia’) and
combined with a necropolitical topos: it is both the national boundary and the
‘fatal shore’ of national myth.96 As a site in which to stage an anti-immigration
protest, then, the beach also stages white colonial anxiety over the refugees’
uncomfortable reminder that ‘nationality is necessarily a becoming’; but it
nonetheless also demonstrates sovereignty’s new orientation towards liminal
or interstitial spaces. 97
The second scene Mbembe discusses is the colonial frontier, which he likens
to the colony itself; both are zones of disorder and exceptionality, where
‘the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of
“civilization”’.98 In effect, Mbembe describes a system of disavowed spaces.
The colony is a threshold, which disavows its threshold-character by fetishizing
the frontier. This recalls the constitution of the camp dispositif by deterritorial
ized borders, that may exist well within (immigration removal centres) or far
beyond (the offshore border) the nation’s territorial limits. The Cronulla beach
protests, motivated by a kind of territorial managerialism of the beach as a
synecdoche of the nation, echo Mbembe’s suggestion that the colonial frontier
stood for the colony itself, masking the ambivalence within. The colony/frontier
is a shifting site inhabited by a mobile, non-formalized shadow-population of
enemy ‘savages’, where it is impossible to establish a distinction between those
with whom the colony is at war and those with whom it is at peace (‘combatants
and non-combatants’), or even between internal and external sources of threat
(‘enemy’ and ‘criminal’).99
93 Gilroy, Between Camps, p. 84.
94 A. Sivanandan, ‘Poverty is the New Black’, Race and Class, 43/2 (2001), p. 2. See also Liz
Fekete, ‘The Emergence of Xeno-racism’, Race and Class, 43/2 (2001), 23–40.
95 Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land, 1774–1880 (Honolulu: Univer
sity Press of Hawaii, 1980), p. 34.
96 Jon Stratton, ‘Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death’, in Suven
drini Perera (ed.), Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001 (Perth, WA: Curtin
University of Technology, 2007), p. 169.
97 Katrina Schlunke, ‘Sovereign Hospitalities?’, Borderlands, 1/2 (2002), 26 paras. Available
at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/schlunke_hospitalities.html>. Accessed 20
December 2008.
42

This process of governance through indistinction has a contemporary legacy.

In February 2000 nine Afghan men hijacked an internal flight in Afghanistan and
forced the pilot to fly to Stansted airport in the UK. All nine were members of
the Young Intellectuals, a political group that opposed the Taliban, and were
fleeing persecution. The stand-off was resolved peaceably after around ninety
hours, and the nine were convicted of hijacking offences in December 2001.
Their convictions were overturned in 2003, however, by the Court of Appeal,
which ruled that the men had acted under duress; two years later they were
awarded temporary admission to the UK on the grounds that their lives were
threatened by the Taliban. This was the start of a series of judicial moves to
counter Home Office efforts to remove the men as an enemy threat when,
unquestionably, the issue had taken on a far greater political significance
following 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. In 2006 the EWHC ruled that the
nine’s indefinite temporary leave was unlawful, and awarded them discretionary
leave to remain, subject to a rolling six-month review. An appeal against the
ruling by John Reid was unsuccessful, making him the fourth Home Secretary to
fail to remove the men. His response implicitly invoked the measure of indis
tinction: ‘The court has ruled that it is not open to me to deny leave to enter the
United Kingdom to the Afghan hijackers, or people like them, whose presence
we regard as undesirable.’100 As Squire has said, this comment establishes
‘an exclusionary relation of equivalence’ between conflated forms of external
threat – war (‘hijackers’) and disorder (‘undesirables’, i.e., asylum seekers) – and
the judiciary, signifying the internal threat to executive rule.101 Thus the camp
dispositif is marked by the same indistinction that, for Mbembe, characterized
the colonial frontier, where ‘war and disorder, internal and external figures of
the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other’.102 The violence of
the camp as IRC may not always be directly enacted on the body of the asylum
seeker (although there is a wealth of evidence of mistreatment, particularly
during forced removals), but, as Harmit Athiwal and others have shown, it is no
less implicated in the promulgation of sovereignty via necropower.
Mbembe attributes far less significance than Gilroy to positing an exact,
causal link between the plantation or colony and the Nazi camps; such a
concern is, he says, irrelevant. What remains vitally important is the persis
tence, in the European political imaginary, of the colony as ‘the site where
sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of power outside the law’.103
The comments of John Reid address sovereignty’s aspiration towards the excep
tion, which is realized spatially in the (re)production of infrahumanity in the
IRC. In postcolonial writing, the early works of J. M. Coetzee repeatedly circu
late around this persistent fantasy of sovereignty operating outside itself. In
100 James Sturcke, ‘Judges Overrule Reid in Afghan Hijack Case’, Guardian (4 August 2006).
Available at <www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/aug/04/immigration.immigrationpolicy>.
43

Postcolonial Asylum
particular, Waiting for the Barbarians can be read as a parable of the infrahuman
within coloniality. The novel is set in a remote outpost of an unnamed empire,
where rumours of a barbarian invasion have led to a state of emergency. The
town receives a visit from Colonel Joll of the Third Bureau, whose abuses
of barbarian prisoners prompt an ethical crisis in the town magistrate. The
magistrate forms a compulsive relationship with a barbarian girl who has been
crippled by her interrogators, which ultimately leads to his designation as an
enemy agent. Through this problematic proximity with both Joll and the girl,
Coetzee plays on the question that resonates between the novel’s (anonymous)
colonial setting and the conflation of the inside and the outside in the rhetoric
of the camp dispositif: who, when so much is rendered indistinct, is the enemy?
Waiting for the Barbarians dramatizes the coincidence of the exception and
the norm in the relationship between life and law. Despite his abhorrence of
Joll’s methods, the magistrate is ultimately compelled to acknowledge that ‘I
was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire
tells when harsh winds blow’.104 Joll and the magistrate represent the alter
nating faces of implacable sovereign law in the Empire. The magistrate’s crisis is
thus juridical as much as ethical; as a servant of empire charged with dispensing
the law, his troubling complicity in Joll’s extra-juridical methods describes a
split within the law as much as within ethics: as Slavoj Žižek affirms, ‘[l]aw divides
itself necessarily, into an appeasing law and a mad law. The opposition between
the law and its transgressions repeats itself inside the law itself’.105 This crisis
in law, as eternally riven, is the foundation of the exception, and thus what
permits the authority of what Mbembe calls commandement, the expression of
the absolute jurisdiction of colonial sovereignty, which announces, ‘[l]et it be,
and it is. Let it not be, and it is not’.106 Commandement, Mbembe insists, was
based on a ‘régime d’exception’, and in fact exhibits marked similarities with
the exception as characterized by Agamben. Agamben uses the construction
‘force of law’ to describe the exception where ‘what is at stake is a force of law
without law’.107 Commandement is similarly kenomatic; Mbembe notes it reveals
the concept of right as a void, ‘except where deployed in the form of arbitrari
ness and the right of conquest’. The fundamental emptiness and arbitrariness
of colonial sovereignty functioned, like the exception, to blur the boundaries of
its field of operation: commandement, Mbembe says, ‘eliminated all distinction
between ends and means’, and ‘introduced infinite permutations between what
was just and unjust’.108 Its force is all-encompassing, self-legitimizing and, as Joll
evinces, always at the point of violence.
Mbembe asserts that commandement perpetually seeks to institutionalize
itself as a form of fetish, constituted by a (necro)political vocabulary invested
104 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians [1980] (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 148.
105 Žižek, quoted in Sinkwan Chen, ‘Civilization and the Two Faces of Law: J. M. Coetzee’s
Waiting for the Barbarians’, Cardozo Law Review, 24/6 (2003), p. 2352.
106 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 188.
108 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, pp. 25 and 26.
44

with a non-negotiable ‘surplus of meanings’ behind which there always lies the
threat of the ‘systematic application of pain’.109 It is this feature of comman-
dement that most fully realizes its relation to the exception as the dominant
paradigm in contemporary politics. Like the ‘Pacific solution’ and Agamben’s
reading of law in the exception, commandement, as a fetish, ‘fakes the power of
originating its own meaning’, hence the (re)production of ‘illegality’ and crimi
nalization of asylum seekers.110 Thus presuppositional sovereignty is a fetish, as
is the operation of law under it.
Yaakov Perry has described how, in Mbembe’s postcolony, law not only must
disavow its origins but must also ‘constantly re-enact its ordaining mandate’.111
In Waiting for the Barbarians this mandate is continually re-enacted upon the
body of the barbarian girl. Captured by Joll and accommodated by the magis
trate, she is realized by both men as a fetish, but commensurate with each as
the incarnation of opposing forms of law (‘mad’ and ‘appeasing’) she signifies
crucially different aspects of commandement. For Joll, his unfettered access to
her body as a legible space within the field of colonial power marks her as a
fetish for the non-negotiable excess of sovereignty and the law’s capacity to
operate beyond itself. This recalls the way asylum seekers’ bodies, in being
made to bear witness to the abuses they have suffered and thus to the legiti
macy of their claim, also inevitably bear witness to sovereign power in the
host’s capacity to find them credible or incredible witnesses. As sovereignty
sees itself when it looks upon the body of the asylum seeker, the barbarian girl
is reduced to a decipherable body, a tangible residue of the empire’s influence.
For the magistrate, the girl is the arbitrariness and emptiness of commande-
ment made explicit. An unspoken condition of his charity is that she submits to
a ritual bath, in which he oils and massages her damaged body. The appeal, for
him, of this non-sexualized intimacy is the opportunity it affords him to become
lost in the rhythm of handling her, when all that remains is a ‘space of time
which is blank to me’.112 During the ritual, her body becomes a substitute for
the absence of law under the emergency that has granted Joll such unlimited
power, and thus the absence of the kind of law represented by the magistrate.
Both bear out that the law, as essentially kenomatic, always requires a body in
which to invest evidence of it enforceability.
Judith Butler has described how the political constitution of ‘us’ (in the
broadest sense) is in part due to ‘the social vulnerability of our bodies’: from the
start, she says, our bodies are ceded ‘to the world of others’, always exposed
by their public dimension.113 Intimacy is, Butler says, ‘the crucible of social life’;
109 Achille Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, Africa, 62/1 (1992), p. 4.
110 Achille Mbembe, ‘On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics’, African Identities, 4/2
(2006), p. 171.
111 Yaakov Perry, ‘Law’s Violations: The Formalization of Authority in Achille Mbembe’s
Reading of the Postcolony’, Postcolonial Studies, 10/3 (2007), pp. 245 and 253.
112 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 30.
113 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London and New York:
Verso, 2004), pp. 20 and 22.
45

Postcolonial Asylum
Mbembe also asserts that it is a feature of the fetish.114 If this is evident in the
magistrate’s relationship with the girl, it is also the case between himself and
Joll. The magistrate’s compulsion to be intimate with the girl is also a source
of torment, rendering explicit the direct correlation between himself and Joll.
He concedes that, while his behaviour resembles that of a lover’s care, if he
were to ‘tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate’.115 That
his behaviour is made possible by a vast inequality in power does not negate
the fact that he is tied to the girl by a bond of vulnerability, and it is his (only
partially formed) awareness of this that informs his sense of self-annihilation;
as Butler says, to lose another is to ‘become inscrutable to myself’.116 Just as
the fetish is ‘arbitrary to the extent that it reflects only itself’, the arbitrari
ness and emptiness of commandement that he reads in the girl’s body is effec
tively his own.117 Thus the girl is a substitute for the magistrate’s own absence
within the law itself. What the magistrate rebels against is this loss of himself
(as the ‘appeasing law’, the peaceable man with humane interests in barbarian
welfare and culture) to the incursion of mad law, signified by Joll’s abuse of the
prisoners.
The loss he experiences is not a total abandonment, however, but the abanÂ�
donÂ�Â�Â�ment of the ban. The magistrate remains bound to Joll, and to his duty
to the Empire, despite the abrogation of his authority. This is evident in his
interest in the interior lives of the torturer and the tortured, which only provide
him with a reflection of himself. The novel is full of motifs of featureless faces
and sightless eyes – in the magistrate’s recurring dream, the girl’s face appears
as ‘another part of the body’, an ‘internal organ’.118 The symmetry between Joll’s
sunglasses, which give him an aspect of having ‘insect eyes from which there
comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me’, and the
barbarian girl’s burned retinas, in which the magistrate imagines he appears
only as a blur at the centre of a hazy circle of light, demonstrate that his capacity
to enter the interior lives of others (he continually worries over the imagina
tive life of Joll, Mandel the policeman and the girl) is as much oriented towards
the realization of the self as the excess of imagination that produces the other
as absolute enemy.119 This simultaneous venture and failure of imagination
also characterizes commandement. Mbembe argues that the colonial exception
was maintained by the ideological distinctions of racism, which cast ‘savage
life’ as ‘beyond imagination or comprehension’, and the creation of an extra-
judicial field of total warfare, where ‘[a]ll manifestations of war and hostility
that had been marginalized by a European legal imaginary f[ound] a place to
re-emerge’.120 In other words, the exception is maintained by a simultaneous
114 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 26. Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, p. 10.
115 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 46.
116 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 22.
117 Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, pp. 10–11.
118 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 51, 40 and 57.
119 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 47 and 33.
120 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, pp. 24 and 25.
46

evacuation and excess (or overdetermination) of the sovereign imagination,

illustrated by Coetzee’s empire that, in its neurosis, ‘dooms itself to live in
history and plot against history’, fuelling Joll’s tireless pursuit of its enemies
‘through the boundless desert’; as the magistrate observes, the stories of the
barbarian invasion proceed from the capitol, the centre of the empire.121
This can be likened to what Butler calls the ‘derealization’ of the other.
Violence, she says, ‘renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility
of its object’, and thus the unreal object of violence is fetishistically rendered
‘interminably spectral’.122 This excessive signification of the other finds its
correlate in the other’s almost total invisibility. Like the ‘spectral infinity’ of the
war on terror imagined as a war without end, the true barbarian threat never
fully emerges; most ‘barbarians’ in the novel are paralysed by destitution, or,
like the barbarian girl, prove troublingly blank. When he is apart from her, the
magistrate struggles to recall the girl – when he tries to recall his first encounter
with her he can only summon ‘a blankness’, and he rapidly loses hold of his
memory of her face once he returns her to her people. All that remains is the
fetishized memory of intimacy with her injuries: ‘my hands sliding over her
knees, her calves, her ankles.’ Despite his humanistic impulses, he as much as
the agents of the Third Bureau has ‘devoted a life to the law’.123 It is important
to emphasize that although Mbembe’s reading focuses on commandement as a
feature of African ‘postcolonies’ such as Cameroon his insistence on the impor
tance of the lingering presence of ‘the colony’ as a site of total power in the
Western imaginary, coupled with his assertion that ‘power in the postcolony is
itself always multiply situated’, suggests that commandement can be read also
as a feature of the space of the postcolonizer.124 Enrica Rigo has defined the
migrant subject as a postcolonial subject, both ‘as a legacy of colonial history
and because migrant subjects radically contest the “place” assigned to them by
political and legal boundaries’.125 Gilroy has also observed that ‘[t]he immigrant
is here now because Britain, Europe, was once out there’, and thus, in a sense,
represents a corpus of bodies invested with the fantasy of commandement.126
Mbembe’s assertion that the postcolony is ‘chaotically pluralistic’ but possessed
of an ‘internal coherence’ recalls the camp dispositif, as does the fact that the
postcolony operates through both an ‘economy of signs’ and tangible ‘corporate
institutions’.127 The camp dispositif, similarly, works through the manipulation
of signs and the application of institutional power. Athiwal’s work has revealed
the necropolitical potential within the detention estate, and the denigration

122 Butler, Precarious Life, pp. 33–34.
123 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 94–95 and 138.
124 Mbembe, ‘On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics’, p. 161.
125 Enrica Rigo, ‘Citizenship at Europe’s Borders: Some Reflections on the Post-colonial
Condition of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement’, Citizenship Studies, 9/1 (2005), p.
5.
127 Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, p. 3.
47

Postcolonial Asylum
of the term ‘asylum seeker’, while not directly attributable to government, is

certainly amenable to government aims to deter the wrong sort of immigrant,
and thus could easily fit Mbembe’s description of ‘a distinctive style of political
improvization, [marked] by a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion, as
well as by distinctive ways in which identities are multiplied, transformed and
put into circulation’.128
This capacity for improvization marked the UK government’s response to
the provision of sanctuary for the Afghan hijackers, from Reid’s slur on the
judiciary to Tony Blair’s assertion that the decision was ‘an abuse of common
sense’ (demonstrating how sovereignty, in its aspiration to total power, casts
the appeasing law as mad, just as Coetzee’s magistrate becomes the enemy
because of his sympathetic attitude to barbarian rights).129 It is this capacity
to negotiate the threshold of indistinction that gives sovereignty its power.
Coetzee’s novel bears witness to this in the magistrate’s designation as an
enemy agent; under torture commandement teaches him that ‘the meaning of
humanity’ is bare life. Like the 216 bodies abandoned to necropower in the IRR
reports, or the uncounted thousands of asylum seekers subjected to destitu
tion, the magistrate learns ‘the misery of simply being a body’.130
Waiting for the Barbarians, as a parable of colonial infrahumanity, speaks of
the persistence of sovereignty’s coercive power despite the ambivalence of the
fetish. As Butler has said, violence is the primary tie that binds us, as bodies,
‘outside ourselves and for one another’; the potential for violence, ‘a vulner
ability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot pre-empt’, always
resides within expressions of ‘we’.131 Commensurate with this, in addition to
Hardt and Negri, Agamben and Mbembe, Michel Agier, Didier Bigo, Peter Nyers
and Étienne Balibar have all asserted that the effects of the ban are not local
ized but dispersed. Agier speaks of border spaces so spread out they become
‘personalized’, coinciding with the person of the asylum seeker;132 Bigo
describes a diffuse dispositif without ‘central manifestation’, similar to Hardt and
Negri’s Empire;133 Nyers calls the modern border ‘widespread and seemingly
ubiquitous’;134 Hardt and Negri observe that in ‘the society of control […] mecha
nisms of command become ever more “democratic”, ever more immanent to
the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of the citizens’.135
Agamben similarly states that the sovereign decision ‘is not the expression of
the will of a subject hierarchically superior to all others, but rather represents
128 Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, p. 3.

129 Sturcke, ‘Judges Overrule Reid in Afghan Hijack Case’.
131 Butler, Precarious Life, pp. 27 and 29.
132 Michel Agier, ‘The Camps of the Twenty-first Century: Corridors, Screening Vestibules
Stop Eject (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2009), 237–251 (p. 244).
133 Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security’, p. 34.
134 Peter Nyers, ‘No One is Illegal: Between City and Nation’, in Engin F. Isin and Greg M.
Neilson (eds), Acts of Citizenship (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), p. 167.
48

the inscription within the body of the nomos of the exteriority that animates it
and gives it meaning’.136 For Mbembe, commandement is located ‘not so much
in the will of power to exercise domination, but in the rulers and the subjects’
unconscious itself’.137 As it is dispersed, sovereignty replicates itself, constantly
reproducing its influence in the bodies of its citizens. Hardt and Negri’s maxim,
that power is everywhere and nowhere, is incessantly re-enacted in a field
of immanence in which nothing is outside the law and into which bodies are
inexorably drawn. Foucault called the dispositif a ‘strategy without a subject’, an
incremental process of adjustments and accretion of elements that results in a
strategy that feigns coherence but for which ‘it is no longer possible to identify
a person who conceived it’.138 The influence of the media in driving govern
ment asylum policy in the UK is testament to a form of ‘democratization’ of
sovereign will in asylum decision making. Thus it is possible to say that sover
eignty’s greatest achievement is to ensure that the citizenry are collectively cast
as potential agents of terror and refuge, replicating a dispersed sovereignty, a
circumstance that the asylum seeker who exposes the aporeticism of the ‘we’
both affirms and contests.
Necropolitics and national narcissism
The convergence of asylum and (post)colonial concerns is nowhere more starkly

illustrated than in settler Australia’s insistence on the infrahumanity of its indig
enous and asylum-seeking populations. Here, as Perera has said, ‘“camp” and
“nation” [are] reciprocally constitutive, intertwined and contiguous’.139 Perera
has also suggested that the Tampa incident had ‘a distinctly nineteenth-century
feel’.140 Certainly, the arrival of new potential settlers by boat carried what
Aboriginal historian Katrina Schlunke has called ‘an unsettling echo’ of colonial
Australia’s origins.141 Those origins were, as is widely acknowledged, in forms
of the camp, first as a penal colony and then as an enthusiastic incarcerator
of indigenous peoples. As Wadiwell has said, ‘the Australian nation-state was
founded on the camp’.142 Perera and Mirzoeff cite the establishment of the
Board of Protection for Aborigines in 1860 (which founded internment camps
136 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 25–26.

137 Mbembe, ‘On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics’, p. 161.
138 Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Harvester Press, 1980), pp.
202–203.
139 Perera, ‘Acting Sovereign’, pp. 13–14.
140 Suvendrini Perera, ‘A Line in the Sea’, Australian Humanities Review, 27 (2002), p. 1.
141 Schlunke, ‘Sovereign Hospitalities?’, § 13.
142 Dinesh Wadiwel, ‘“A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare”: Palm Island and
Australian Sovereignty’, in Suvendrini Perera (ed.), Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sover-
eignty Post-2001 (Perth, WA: Curtin University of Technology, 2007), p. 154. Australia
began detaining asylum seekers as a consequence of the 1992 Migration Act. The policy
of indefinite detention was discontinued in July 2008.
49

Postcolonial Asylum
for indigenous people) as a special date in the history of the Australian camp
system, although the Wybalenna settlement, used as an internment camp for
displaced Aboriginal people on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait between 1833
and 1847, suggests the camp was a feature of settler Australia at an even earlier
juncture.143 In fact, Perera argues that the Australian camp has developed via
multiple (iconic) incarnations, in turn ‘the outstation, the penal camp and the
mission’, constituting a constellation of camp sites (and thus a dispositif).144 The
purpose of these sites was to reconfigure the indigenous person, as Tony Birch
has said, as ‘a landless and homeless refugee’ (Robert Drewe’s novel Grace (2005)
makes this parallel explicit, as the climax of the novel involves a race to convey to
sanctuary both a young Afghan refugee and the disinterred bones of an ancient
Aboriginal Australian).145 The ‘mechanism of the camp’, Perera explains, was
employed to effect a ‘rupture in the indivisible Indigenous category of blood/
land/law, of country […] accompanied by dislocating the native from the citizen’.
Thus, where the European camp signalled the rupturing between human and
citizen, the colonial camp in Australia produces ‘a third category, the native, to
signify something other than both the citizen and the human’.146 In its contem
porary incarnation in Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre,
Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, et al. the Australian camp similarly
marks a space inhabited by a third category, the asylum seeker instead of the
native.147 This is not to suggest a simple interchangeability between the two. But
it does justifiably draw attention to similarities in the implementation of a camp
regime, especially as a strategy to enforce homelessness, by settler Australia.
Dinesh Wadiwel has described how the Australian camp brings issues of
race together with Agamben’s theories. Topological similarities with Agamben’s
camp descriptions and Bigo’s Ban-opticon are evident in Wadiwel’s descrip
tion of Palm Island penal station in Queensland, which ‘operated in a void
within regular laws’, subjecting inmates to rigorous and extensive surveillance
and censure and denying access to legal redress.148 The detention centre also
operates on a regime of surveillance, and is similarly kenomatic. In fact it has
been suggested that a kenomatic basis is the foundation for settler Australia’s
dealings in general with indigenous peoples, via the law.
143 See Suvendrini Perera, ‘What is a Camp?’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002), § 17. Available at
<www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html>. Accessed 12 January 2009.
Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, p. 127. See also Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People [1995]
(London: Penguin, 2004).
144 Perera, ‘What is a Camp?’, § 19. Forms of the camp identified by Perera include Wybalenna,
the Palm Island penal station established in 1918, the Cherbourg and Victoria mission
stations, and the Cootamundra homes for the children of the stolen generation (§ 18).
145 Tony Birch, ‘The Last Refuge of the “Un-Australian”’, UTS Review, 7/1 (2001), p. 17; Robert
Drewe, Grace (Camberwell, Victoria: Viking Penguin, 2005).
146 Perera, ‘What is a Camp?’, § 18.
147 The Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship lists five immigration deten
tion centres operative in 2009: Villawood, near Sydney; Maribyrnong, near Melbourne;
Perth; Christmas Island; and Northern, near Darwin.
148 Wadiwel, ‘“A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare”’, p. 157.
50

The landmark Mabo decision categorizes the law of settler Australia as

presuppositional. In Mabo the Australian High Court followed the International
Court of Justice in rejecting the principle of terra nullius, which had been the
foundation of the colonizing ideology. Mabo was succeeded by the 1993 Native
Title Act, which introduced a native title claims process. However, Aboriginal
historian Irene Watson notes that this simply replaced ‘the injustice of terra
nullius’ with ‘the power of extinguishment’.149 A title claim can only be successful
provided the claimant can prove sufficient indigeneity and that overriding
property interests do not extinguish native title.150 Furthermore, Mabo stopped
well short of acknowledging the existence of Aboriginal law. In its ruling the
High Court stated:
The common law of this country recognizes a form of native title, which in
the cases where it has not been extinguished, reflects the entitlements of
the original inhabitants, in accordance with their laws or customs to their
traditional lands.151
The reference to ‘laws or customs’ demonstrates Mabo’s fidelity to the colonial
conceptualization of Aboriginal law as ‘a bundle of primitive customary
Â�practices’.152 Watson calls the process by which colonial Australian law estab
lished itself as sovereign and lawful (and thus Aboriginal law as ‘unlawful’) as
‘juricide’; certainly, it bears the hallmarks of a presuppositional strategy, in
which the law presents itself as anterior to everything, where there is nothing
before the law.
According to Maria Giannacopoulos, both Mabo and Tampa demonstrate this
presuppositionality. In the Mabo judgment, ‘[b]y positioning patriarchal white
society at the centre, the High Court can comfortably concede the existence of
some other law and custom’. In the case of the Tampa incident, ‘the refugees are
made to represent the antithesis of the Australian nation even though it is precisely
their exclusion that constructs the Australian border’.153 Â�Presuppositionality,
first incarnated in the doctrine of terra nullius and subsequently embodied in new
global forms, thus characterizes settler Australia’s dealings with both Aboriginal
149 Irene Watson, ‘Aboriginal Laws and the Sovereignty of Terra Nullius’, Borderlands, 1/2
(2002), 53 paras. Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/watson_laws.
html>. Accessed 18 December, 2008.
150 Watson, ‘Aboriginal Laws and the Sovereignty of Terra Nullius’, § 26.
151 Mabo and Others v. Queensland (No. 2) (1992) quoted in Maria Giannacopoulos, ‘Mabo,
Tampa and the Non-justiciability of Sovereignty’, in Suvendrini Perera (ed.), Our Patch:
Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001 (Perth, WA: Curtin University of Technology,
2007), pp. 50–51.
152 Irene Watson, ‘Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities’, in
Suvendrini Perera (ed.), Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001 (Perth, WA:
Curtin University of Technology, 2007), p. 25. In 1873 Anthony Trollope describes indig
enous Australians as themselves ‘extra-juridical’, beyond the law: ‘The black man […]
is such that the law can hardly reach him either to defend or punish’. Quoted in Elleke
Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870–1918 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 24.
153 Giannacopoulos, ‘Mabo, Tampa’, pp. 49–52.
51

Postcolonial Asylum
peoples and asylum seekers.154 This state of affairs occurs in contradiction of

Derrida’s assertion that ‘[a] nation state is never properly itself [because] its terri
tory is never properly its own’.155 In fact the failure to recognize Aboriginal law
sets a precedent for the colonial nation’s subsequent failures to recognize itself,
as the cases of both Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solen Young demonstrate.
On 31 March 2004, in Queensland, a woman calling herself Anna, who,
despite having no formal means of identification, claimed to be a German
citizen, was detained under section 189 of the 1958 Migration Act. In the
absence of an immigration detention facility in Queensland she was detained
in Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre from 5 April until 6 October, when
she was transferred to Baxter, in Port Augusta. In the meantime, on 11 August,
Cornelia Rau, an Australian woman with a history of mental health difficulties,
was reported missing by her family. Despite the fact that ‘Anna’ spoke only
broken German with little or no accent, it was not until 3 February 2005 that the
Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA)
established that Anna was Cornelia Rau – and this only after the Age newspaper
and the Sydney Morning Herald had reported on the case of an unidentified and
possibly mentally unwell German woman held in Baxter.156 Almost exactly three
years earlier, on 30 March 2001, a woman calling herself Vivian Alvarez was
admitted to a New South Wales hospital after a serious fall. She was subse
quently admitted as an involuntary patient in the Richmond Clinic Psychiatric
Unit. Based on information provided by Vivian, staff at the clinic reported her
to DIMIA as a possible illegal immigrant. On 20 July, under section 189 of the
1958 Migration Act, she was removed to the Philippines. Vivian was in fact
Vivian Solen Young, an Australian citizen of Philippine origin who had lived in
Australia since 1984. Her deportation was attributed in part to the failure of
DIMIA officials to establish that Alvarez was her correct name or to link this with
the names ‘Solen’ or ‘Young’.157
The cases of Rau and Young illustrate the problem the colonial nation has
in recognizing itself in its citizens and are symptomatic of what Ghassan Hage
has called ‘paranoid nationalism’.158 White colonial paranoia, consolidated and
154 ‘The racist colonising theory of terra nullius, despite its “rejection” in the Mabo decision,
continues to find new global forms to embody itself’. Watson, ‘Aboriginal Laws and the
Sovereignty of Terra Nullius’, § 2.
155 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Perfectibility, Responsibility’, in Paul Patton and Terry
Smith (eds) Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars [2001] (Sydney: Power Publica
tions, 2006), p. 96.
156 Andra Jackson, ‘Mystery Woman Held at Baxter Could be Ill’, The Age (31 January 2005).
Available at <www.theage.com.au/news/National/Mystery-woman-held-at-Baxter-could-
be-ill/2005/01/30/1107020257062.html>. Accessed 7 October 2008. For a full account
of the case, see M. J. Palmer, Inquiry into the Circumstances of the Immigration Detention of
Cornelia Rau (Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia, 2005).
157 For a full account, see John McMillan, Inquiry into the Circumstances of the Vivian Alvarez
Matter (Commonwealth of Australia, 2005).
158 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society
(London: Merlin, 2003), p. 3.
52

aggravated by the absence of a treaty with the indigenous population, the inhos
pitable nature of the Australian environment and the recurrent settler anxiety
of invasion by Australia’s Asian neighbours, have combined with what Hage
calls post-9/11 ‘anthrax culture’ to create mode of national belonging character
ized by neurosis.159 Because whiteness, associated with a select set of values
and access to a heritage of civilization (‘Europeanness’), is both the ideological
foundation of settler society and fundamentally aspirational (and thus insecure),
it is dogged by a perpetual sense of threat from the incursion or insurgence of
the non-white. Paranoid nationalism describes white settler Australia’s attempts
to recoup confidence in governmental power through worrying. It is an essen
tially narcissistic response, based in the worrier’s sense that the nation cannot
protect them from the object of their fears. As such, Hage argues, ‘[t]he primary
source of worrying […] is internal to the relation [between national-subject and
national-society]’: the threat is ‘intrinsic rather than extrinsic […] it is nothing
but the manifestation of the national subject’s relation to the motherland, the
subliminal fear that “she” is going to abandon us’.160 Thomas Keneally’s The
Tyrant’s Novel (2004) reflects this sense of play in the subjectivity of citizen
and non-citizen in Australia. The novel recounts the experiences of a detained
asylum seeker from the Middle East who insists on being called ‘Alan Sheriff’,
and uses Anglo-Saxon names throughout to designate characters of Middle
Eastern origin.161 This defamiliarizing device bears witness, on the one hand, to
the invisibility of the inhabitants of the inter; but it also opens up the aporia of
the ‘we’, demanding a different order of identification from what might typically
be an Anglo-Saxon readership.
Both Rau and Young were Australian citizens, yet section 189, which
provides that immigration officers must detain any person they know to be or
have a reasonable suspicion of being an unlawful non-citizen, made it possible
to detain and, in Young’s case, to remove an Australian citizen from Australian
territory. Their treatment bears out the truth that the ‘threat object’ (the incur
sive other) is intrinsic to the nation, not extrinsic – the neurosis of paranoid
nationalism in effect turns in on itself, failing to recognize itself in the national
subject (Rau and Young). On 7 February 2005, two days after the identification
of Anna as Cornelia Rau, the Sydney Age reported that, according to the 2003
census, nearly 1 million Australian residents who had not taken up citizen
ship were at risk of falling into the category of ‘unlawful non-citizen’.162 Rau’s
detention and Young’s expulsion therefore actualized the fear at the root of
159 ‘Anthrax culture prevails when a generalised culture of “threat” permeates the whole
society. The national interior becomes subverted; the citizens begin to perceive every
thing and everywhere as a threat, as a border; a supposed Islamic threat on the border
becomes an Islamic threat everywhere. Every breath of fresh air becomes imagined as a
line behind which the enemy (always ready to infiltrate the nation) lurks’. Hage, Against
Paranoid Nationalism, pp. 45–46. See also pp. 51–52.
160 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, pp. 2 and 30. My emphasis.
161 Thomas Keneally, The Tyrant’s Novel (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004).
162 Andra Jackson, ‘This Could Happen to You’, The Age (7 February 2005).
53

Postcolonial Asylum
paranoid nationalism, that national belonging is contingent. Hage suggests that

the accusations made during the ‘children overboard’ case, when then Immigra
tion Minister Phillip Ruddock alleged that asylum seekers on a boat intercepted
by the Australian Navy in October 2001 had thrown children overboard, were
plausible to some in Australia because they were ‘unconsciously worried about
being thrown overboard themselves by their own motherland’. Thus, as it is
adapted to describe the singularity of law and sovereignty in relation to who
is and is not a citizen, the fetishistic doctrine of terra nullius, which compen
sates for a lack of legitimacy by describing an absence, leads the colonial
nation in effect to turn on itself and reconfigure the within as the without.
Referring to Paul Keating’s response to Mabo – ‘it was we who did the dispos
sessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life’
– Hage describes the ‘undeconstructed colonial effect of Keating’s “we”’, which
constructs indigenous peoples as ‘another (different) national “we”’.163 Hage
suggests that Keating’s ‘we’ attributes justice to the gift of the colonizer and
configures Mabo as an act that answers primarily the colonizer’s sense of shame
(thus effacing any indigenous affective response). But it is also true to say that
the cases of Rau and Young reveal a further splitting of this national ‘we’, in
which the national manager’s neurotic attempts to excise the other are in effect
a form of self-excision.
It is significant that Rau’s whiteness was no barrier to her detention,
supporting Hage’s claim that racist modes of thought and action can be more
productively classified as nationalistic rhetoric and practices fundamentally
concerned with control of space. Categories such as ‘undesirable’, ‘too many’,
Hage suggests, ‘are primarily about categories of spatial management’ that cast
the ‘worrier’ in the role of (potentially disenfranchised) national manager.164
The anti-immigrant slogan of the Cronulla Beach protests in 2005, ‘We grew
here, you flew here’, both articulates the sentiments of the national spatial
manager and stakes a presuppositional claim that implicitly effaces Aboriginal
sovereignty. The use of an organic metaphor can also be read as an assertion
of national/natural belonging; yet it also contains an element of what might be
called an unconscious double-voicedness, invoking the settler’s anxious fear of
rejection by the land as well as Australia’s (to say the least) ambivalent history
of introducing non-native species (e.g., the cane toad).
Needless to say, not all Australians can or should be constituted as operating
under national paranoia. In fact some dramatic efforts have been made to
Â�establish a counter-discourse. The ‘We are all Boat People’ campaign attempts
to subvert the notion of the spatial manager (who determines who is a legitimate
presence and who is a ‘queue jumper’) by contesting the orientation of national
monuments and icons. Since 2001 campaigners have engaged in a number of
163 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, pp. 30, 85 and 90. Keating was Labour Prime Minister
of Australia between 1992 and 1996 and a supporter of Mabo.
164 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annan
dale, NSW: Pluto Press, 1998), pp. 32 and 36–38.
54

‘culture-jamming’ activities, including projecting an image of an eighteenth-

century tall ship onto public buildings (e.g., the Sydney Opera House) along
with the caption ‘boat people’.165 However, as Hage has noted, tolerance is in
reality simply the flip side of an acknowledged sovereign power to decide – in
this case, to include as opposed to exclude: ‘Both […] are practices confirming
an image of the white Australian as a manager of national space.’166 The ‘Boat
People’ campaign is an index of settler Australia’s capacity to recognize itself
– its own alterity – in the figures of those who are subject to the camp. Yet,
as Hage has indicated, such recognition is simply sovereign discrimination in
another guise. It also inadvertently plays on the criminalization of asylum (the
illegitimate ‘queue jumper’) by suggesting an equivalence with the ‘theft’ of the
land by the colonizer. Such ambivalent expressions of solidarity are perhaps
inevitable in a nation that is, as Hage says, both ‘an unfinished Western colonial
project’ and ‘a land in a permanent state of decolonization’ – and thus required to
accommodate diverse understandings of the past as well as competing national
wills.167 Nigel Jamieson’s comment – ‘I’m sad to say that the Tampa and deten
tion centres are the defining icons of the beginning of the twenty-first century
in Australia’ – therefore needs to be read alongside Perera’s observation that
the Tampa incident had ‘a distinctly nineteenth-century feel’.168 Jamieson was
involved in designing portions of the opening ceremony for the Sydney Olympic
Games; thus, according to Gilbert and Lo, he played a key role in ‘staging the
nation’ as it sought to define itself for the new millennium.169 Settler Australia’s
present collapses into its past, revealing the ongoing influence of the camp as a
colonial institution. Yet the figure of sovereignty (characterized by the capacity
to decide on matters of inclusion and exclusion) persists even where a counter-
discourse of reciprocal relations is advanced.
It is therefore striking (to say the least) to read, in the context of Rau and
Young, the words of Wadjularbinna, a Gungalidda elder, alongside those of
Angel Boujbiha, an Algerian Berber detained in Villawood detention centre.
Wadjularbinna writes:
Our religion and cultural beliefs teaches us that everyone is a part of us and
we should care about them. […] As a black woman I recognize the racism and
arrogance that is projected against the refugees – because that same racism
and arrogance has been directed against us for over 200 years.170
165 <www.boat-people.org/index.html>. Accessed 6 April 2009.

166 Hage, White Nation, p. 91.
167 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 94.
168 Nigel Jamieson, quoted in Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmpoli-
tanism: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), p. 202. Perera, ‘A Line in the Sea’, p. 1.
169 Gilbert and Lo, Performance and Cosmpolitanism, p. 202.
170 Wadjularbinna, ‘A Gungalidda Grassroots Perspective on Refugees and the Recent Events
in the US’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002), §§ 2, 6 and 9. Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/
vol1no1_2002/wadjularbinna.html>. Accessed 18 December 2008.
55

Postcolonial Asylum
Compare this with ‘The Interview’, a poem written by Boujbiha at about the
same time as Wadjularbinna’s statement:
Question: Why did you leave Algeria?
Answer: Because I am Berber.
Question: Why did you choose Australia?

Answer: Because I am an indigenous.171
Both are speaking from a context of what Hage has called ‘ethnic caging’, a term
that he uses to refer to the detention of asylum seekers, but that, he makes clear,
in fact constitutes ‘a message directed at the ethnic wills inside Australia itself’.
Hage argues that ‘governmental national will is engaged in a constant struggle
to eradicate not otherness as such, but the capacity of otherness to constitute
itself into a national counter-will’.172 By contrast, although recognition does
not entail equivalence, Wadjularbinna’s articulation of common experience is
a reminder of the obligation that precedes presuppositional, colonial law, and
exposes the persistence of imperial practices, albeit reconfigured, that consti
tute the camp dispositif.
171 Angel Boujbiha, ‘The Interview’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002). Available at <www.borderlands.
net.au/vol1no1_2002/boujbiha_poems.html>. Accessed 18 December 2008.
172 Hage, White Nation, pp. 114 and 110.
56

chapter 2
Horizons of Perception
By directing our gaze we also avert our eyes.

Tara Polzer and Laura Hammond1
In/visible relations
Through the Wire, Pip Starr’s documentary of the 2002 protests at Woomera
IRPC, vividly describes how visibility is framed by the camp dispositif. During
the protests, demonstrators ruptured the perimeter fence and mingled with
the detainees – a moment that, for Suvendrini Perera, embodied a form of
political communitas where ‘[e]veryone is, joyously, un-Australian’.2 Starr’s
documentary emphasizes, however, a more contingent understanding of how
(citizen) demonstrator and (non-citizen) detainee appear to one another in the
camp dispositif. Starr employs what I would call striated framing, frequently
foregrounding the metal and chain-link fences that surround the camp, which,
contra Perera’s syncretic community, draws attention to the exclusionary forces
that shape the dispositif.
The documentary is accompanied by the voiceover of an anonymous asylum
seeker explaining why he claimed asylum in Australia:
In such a dictator government [sic], like Iranian government, you have to

believe what they believe. You have to believe what Ayatollah believes. I don’t
– I believe what I believe. In Iran protest is illegal – you disappear or they kill
you, and no-one knows what has happened to you.3
1 Tara Polzer and Laura Hammond, ‘Invisible Displacement’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 21/4
(2008), p. 417.
2 Suvendrini Perera, ‘What is a Camp?’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002), §§ 62–63. Available at
<www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html>. Accessed 12 January 2009.
3 Pip Starr (dir.), Through the Wire (Australia: Oceania Indymedia, 2004). Available at
<www.archive.org/details/through_the_wire>. Accessed 24 February 2009.
57

Postcolonial Asylum
As this point the camera zooms in on a chain-link fence in the foreground, which
is divided into adjacent subsections, beyond which the demonstrators are seen
approaching the compound where the detainees are penned by a steel fence.
The visual effect is one of multiple striation, in which the camera is separated
from the protesters by two sections of chain-link fence at right angles to each
other, and from the detainees by a further inner barrier. As the words ‘you
disappear’ are spoken the film cuts to a bare-chested detainee pleading with the
demonstrators from behind the inner metal fence. His words are not included
on the soundtrack, however, and the conjunction of this silent, striated image
and the anonymous, non-diegetic voiceover problematizes Perera’s diagnosis
of communitas: in Starr’s film (dis)appearance is regulated by the divisions
imposed by the camp.
In this chapter I will examine how the forces that associate visibility and
voice are encapsulated in the camp dispositif and also how infrahuman subjects
can articulate their own appearance in such a way that reconfigures political
relations. Initially, via a reading of Melanie Friend’s book of photographs of UK
Immigration Removal Centres, Border Country (2007), and also the Gatwick No
Border camp protest, my examination will challenge the suggestion that Jacques
Rancière’s work is a necessary supplement to the absence of a consideration of
the visual in Agamben; rather, Agamben’s work on the camp as keno-aesthetic
provides an important frame for reading spaces of detention as politicized
spaces of interruption and protest. Based on Engin Isin and Kim Rygiel’s efforts
to qualify Agamben’s camp topography, I will then consider three different
horizons of perception in which the camp dispositif is a Â�discernible presence:
Christoph Schlingensief’s installation of a temporary detention centre in the
centre of Vienna; Pawel Pawlikowski’s film Last Resort, which deals with the
dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK; and Caryl Phillips’s ‘Northern Lights’, the
final section of Foreigners: Three English Lives, which retells the story of David
Oluwale and, I believe, also speaks to the contemporary context of asylum desti
tution. This diverse selection of material is intended to test Rancière’s assertion
that ‘[p]olitical activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or
changes a place’s destination’ and to consider the extent to which the aesthetics
of detention are complicit in the promulgation of inclusive exclusion.4
The purpose of the 2002 Woomera demonstration was, as one demonstrator
said, ‘to see and be seen’.5 Later in the documentary Starr presents an encounter
through the wire between a young female demonstrator and a male detainee
(see Figure 3). As she listens to his agitated, inaudible speech she covers her face
with her right hand, placing her left lightly on the steel fence. The image power
fully conveys that invisibility is a relationship between those with the capacity
to choose to see (or not), and those without. The focus of this chapter is the
4 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and
London: Minnesota University Press, 1999), p. 30.
5 Quoted in Dan Bousefield, ‘The Logic of Sovereignty and the Agency of the Refugee:
Recovering Politics from “Bare Life”’, York Centre for International and Security Studies,
Working Paper, 36 (2005), p. 12.
58

Figure 3â•‡ Still from Pip Starr’s documentary of the Woomera protests, Through the
Wire (2004). Available at <www.archive.org/details/through_the_wire>.
manner in which asylum seekers appear or disappear in the camp dispositif. For
Rancière, there is a direct correspondence between visibility and speech that
is revealed when the conventional ordering of power (which he characterizes
as ‘police’) is disturbed to create politics (characterized by dissensus). Politics is
founded on a wrong, an incommensurability that is antagonistic to the estab
lished perceptible order of those who have a part and those who have no part.
The ‘symbolic distribution of bodies’ falls into two categories – ‘those that one
sees and those that one does not see, those who have logos – memorial speech,
an account to be kept up – and those who have no logos’.6 Where policing,
as Rancière says, is the managed distribution, organization and appearance of
bodies in space (as opposed to the powers of law enforcement), politics resists
this by challenging the ‘partition of the perceptible’ and establishing another
order where those who have no part constitute themselves as speaking beings.
Politics is a ‘wrong count’: a count (tabulation) of those who count (belong) that
includes those who do not count (are illegitimate) and thus have no ‘ac/count’
– no investment in society, and thus no voice.7 For Rancière political action is
chiefly determined by its form; dispute creates a gap for the appearance (a key
idea, denoting the insertion of inappropriate objects into the visual field) of that
which has no place, what he calls subjectification. Aesthetic disruption, ‘makes
visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where
once there was only place for noise’.8
6 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 22.

7 Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 29, 10 and 22.
59

Postcolonial Asylum
The protest of the French sans-papiers illustrates Rancière’s association of

visibility and speech. The sans papiers were disenfranchised migrants who,
Étienne Balibar says, ‘manifested their will to leave behind obligatory clandes
tinity’ by rejecting the appellation ‘clandestine’ and assuming a label, ‘sans
papiers’, that prefigured in its form and content that to which they aspired.9 In
March 1996, 324 irregular immigrants occupied the Church of Saint Ambroise in
Paris, in protest at the punitive Pasqua laws of 1993, which introduced a range
of repressive measures including visa restrictions, expanded police enforce
ment powers, increased scope for detention and, most notoriously, revoked
the automatic right to French citizenship by virtue of birth. This left the undocu
mented parents of French-by-birth children abandoned by the law in Agamben’s
sense (without legal status but not legally deportable).10 The effect of the Pasqua
laws was to shift the ground on which many long-term resident immigrants
stood, making illegal those who had previously been deemed legal presences.
The protesters were evicted after four days, but subsequently occupied the
Church of Saint Bernard three months later. A number of protesters also under
went hunger strikes. By occupying churches the sans papiers challenged the
spatialization of sanctuary. However, the action that most effectively articulated
the iniquities of Pasqua, as well as catching the attention of the French public,
was their symbolic renaming.
Naming has long been identified as a strategy of resistance in postcolo
nial studies; it forms the basis of Bhabha’s claim for a brand of postcolonial
dissensus: ‘[n]o name is yours until you speak it.’11 The san- papiers protest
disrupted the allocation of appearance and speech by the police order, making
politics act on the police. Mireille Rosello argues that the appellation ‘sans
papiers’ was a response to the hegemony of ‘clandestine’, which effectively
deployed all immigrant bodies in a singular space of contingent belonging.
‘Clandestine’ functions as a fetish, concealing the impossibility of inscribing
illegality in the visual order (Rosello asserts that it can also be ‘associated with
other concepts or elements, for example clandestinity and invisibility’),12 and
obscuring the absence of material reality by invoking a narrative of illegality.
In contrast, ‘sans papiers’ represented ‘a new authoring principle’.13 What was
authored was not simply a semantic victory, however, but the inauguration
of politics in the Rancièrian sense. Their protest directly intervened in the
symbolic distribution of bodies by the police order: the sans-papiers manifesto
10 Christian E. O’Connell, ‘Plight of France’s Sans-papiers Gives a Face to Struggle Over
Immigration Reform’, Human Rights Brief, 4/1 (1996). Available at <www.wcl.american.
edu/hrbrief/04/1oconnell.cfm>. Accessed 26 May 2009.
11 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture [1994] (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. xxv.
12 Mireille Rosello, ‘Representing Illegal Immigrants in France: From Clandestines to
L’affaire des sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard’, Journal of European Studies, 28/1–2 (1998),
p.â•›â•›139.
13 Rosello, ‘Representing Illegal Immigrants’, p.â•›â•›139.
60

declared that ‘[f]rom now on […] it is not only our faces but also our names
which will be known’.14 In addition, the san-papiers included asylum seekers
and long-term residents who had been made illegal, revising the hegemony of
‘clandestine’, that subsumed all under a dominion of contingent presence, in
favour of a reconstituted sense of the relationship between those who have a
part and who have no part, demonstrated by Balibar’s expression of thanks to
the sans-papiers for having ‘recreated citizenship among us’.15 It is important
to point out that the sans-papiers protests were followed in 1997 by the Debré
laws, which cancelled the automatic renewal of ten-year residency permits and
increased powers of surveillance. Nonetheless, they demonstrated that the ac/
count of those of no ac/count can emerge when politics is made to act on the
police order and recast the horizon of perception.
Gorgoneion
Before commencing with an examination of various horizons of perception

within the camp dispositif, I want to argue that Agamben’s description of the
camp does offer, contrary to some recent critical opinion, a space of political
action in the Rancièrian sense – that is, he presents the camp as a space of
critical interruption. Isin and Rygiel follow Rancière in criticizing Agamben for
depoliticizing the space he describes, and are part of a trend in recent readings
of Agamben oriented towards qualifying his prescriptions on the ban and the
camp. Vicki Squire has suggested that Agamben’s limitations are a conse
quence of his founding principles: that in privileging sovereign biopower as
the basis of his analysis he fails to take account of the resistance that, Squire
says, precedes and exceeds it; and by focusing on ‘the refugee’, he expresses
an implicit fidelity to the territorial frame he wishes to subvert.16 Thus, the
ultimate effect of Agamben’s analysis is to consolidate the forces he wishes
to expose and supplant. William Walters suggests that Agamben is too preoc
cupied with ‘mechanisms of capture’, to the extent that his formulation of the
camp obscures the potential for resistance.17 Indeed, in light of Isin and Rygiel’s
dissection of abject spaces, Agamben’s conclusion, in Homo Sacer, that ‘it is not
the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of
the West’, seems somewhat insufficient to describe the way the citizen and
the rightless can occupy the same space.18 Isin and Rygiel argue that the new
14 Quoted in Teresa Hayter, Open Borders (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 143.
15 Étienne Balibar, ‘What We Owe to the Sans-papiers’, in Len Gunther and Cornelius
Heesters (eds) Social Insecurity (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2000), p. 42.
16 Vicki Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),
pp. 152 and 150.
17 William Walters, ‘Acts of Demonstration: Mapping Territory of (Non-)Citizenship’, in
Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (eds), Acts of Citizenship (London and New York: Zed
Book, 2008), p. 184.
61

Postcolonial Asylum
political landscape is comprised of multiple abject spaces that silence and

obscure inhabitants, and which they read as spaces of resistance.19 Whereas
Agamben, say Isin and Rygiel, ‘cannot imagine spaces of exception that serve
against abjection’, following a Rancièrian sense of two worlds within one, they
describe the emergence of new spaces ‘nestled within existing and recognisable
spaces’.20 These new spaces are both ubiquitous and diffuse, neither here nor
there yet everywhere, and create spaces of exception within the norm.
Isin and Rygiel divide abject spaces into three forms with distinct operational
foci: the frontier, the zone and the camp. Frontiers (for example, the ‘offshore
border’ discussed in Chapter 1) regulate the mobility of people in contexts
where law is suspended; zones are exceptional spaces that place inhabitants
under ‘suspended rules of freedom’. They are always ‘nestled within state and
city territories’, such as designated centres for induction, detention, or removal,
and as such they are in effect the internal incarnation of the border.21 Both
frontiers and zones are designed to interrupt the ability of subjects to enact
their rights. By contrast, camps, from Woomera to Guantanamo, suspend rights
through internment. The difference between frontier and zone, and camp,
relates to their relationship with the citizenship-making process; frontiers and
zones prevent claims to citizenship from being made, whereas the camp strips
away any vestige of citizenship status. There is, however, a significant degree
of overlap between these spaces: Isin and Rygiel state that detention centres
can be examples of both zones and camps; furthermore, they suggest that the
‘prison-like conditions’ of Woomera resembled the ‘heavily policed spaces’
of certain frontiers.22 Effectively, their description identifies camps, zones
and frontiers as parts of the dispositif, in that they constitute ‘a patchwork of
overlapping spaces nestled within each other of greater and lesser degrees of
rights and rightlessness, abject spaces and spaces of citizenship’.23
While Isin and Rygiel confirm that ‘the camp’ (as defined by Agamben) is not
simply an external space, but governed by a ‘logic of […] immanence’, and even
commend his assiduity in recognizing the emergence of spaces of exception in
‘benign spaces’ such as airports or cities (in fact, the relevant comment from
Agamben here refers to the ‘zones d’attentes of our airports and certain outskirts
of our cities’, emphasizing the limited extent to which he is able to perceive the
presence of the camp nestled within the city), they assert that Agamben cannot
conceive of the camp as a space within the city because, ‘his conception of the
Macmillan, 2006), pp. 183–184 and 185.
20 Isin and Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces’, p. 184; Engin F. Isin and Kim Rygiel, ‘Of Other Global
Cities: Frontiers, Zones, and Camps’, in Barbara Drieskens, Franck Mermier and Heiko
Wimmen (eds), Cities of the South: Citizenship and Exclusion in the Twenty-first Century
(London: Saqi Books, 2007), p. 177.
21 Isin and Rygiel, ‘Of Other Global Cities’, p. 186.
62

city […] is trapped in the camp’ – that is, in the all-pervading logic of the excep
tion that precludes other forms of political presence.24 As such, his prescription
for politics, in which the nations of Europe enter into ‘a relation of reciprocal
extraterritoriality’, in fact describes the actions of those states who engage
extra-territorial strategies as means of exclusion (e.g., the Sangatte agreement;
the Pacific solution).25 While the exception has an all-pervading logic in works
like Homo Sacer, framed within the fragmented and heterogeneous dispositif,
the logic of the exception is not required to be a continuous force, just as, as
Bigo acknowledges, it represents less a moment or decision fixed in time than
a form of governmentality.26
The validity of these criticisms is demonstrated by Squire’s account, following
Isin’s theory of acts of citizenship, of the 2007 Gatwick No Border camp. From
19 to 24 September, No Borders, a campaigning group advocating ‘freedom of
movement for all’, established a protest ‘camp’ at Gatwick airport in opposition
to the construction of a new detention centre (Brook House IRC, opened in
March 2009).27 The public invitation to participate in the camp protest describes
an acute sense of the governmental immanence and securitization that charac
terizes the management of asylum in the West: it calls Gatwick ‘a border in the
middle of Britain’; a place where people are ‘forcibly deported everyday, [made]
invisible, [and] treated as criminal for the “crime” of crossing the border’.28 Its
place in the dispositif is borne out by the proximity of the immigration-reporting
centre at Croydon and the ID interview centre at Crawley, as well as the border
posts at nearby Dover and Folkestone and the panoply of internal electronic and
biometric control deployed within the airport itself from where removals take
place.29 Squire calls this camp an act of solidarity; a ‘critical inhabitation of abject
spaces’ focused on the political within the everyday – the No Borders invitation
described the camp as a ‘tactics laboratory’, to investigate ‘how […] daily life,
from the need to work for survival to the welfare system, reinforce[s] these
borders’.30 Squire suggests that the Gatwick No Border camp interrupts the
place of Agamben’s camp in the territorial framing of the political community,
enacting a ‘post-territorial conception of political community’ in the everyday
that transforms ‘the turbulence that precedes sovereign power into a politics
that exceeds it’.31 As Isin and Rygiel have shown, however, arguments for extra-
24 Isin and Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces’, p. 183; Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 175 [my emphasis]; Isin
and Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces’, p. 184.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End (Notes on Politics), trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare
Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 25.
26 Didier Bigo, ‘Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance’, in David Lyon (ed.), Theorizing
Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (Cullompton and Portland, Oreg.: Willan Publishing,
2006), p. 50.
27 <http://noborders.org.uk>. Accessed 15 January 2009.
30 Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, pp. 159 and 163. <http://noborders.org.uk>.
Accessed 15 January 2009.
63

Postcolonial Asylum
territoriality must take into account the deterritorialization of sovereignty that

mimics extra-territorial forms. Also, as I will show, the examples of Schlingen
sief’s container, Last Resort and Phillips’s retelling of the death of David Oluwale,
demonstrate how the logic of exception persists in abject spaces – either in
terms of the aesthetic of internment and striation, which marks frontiers and
zones, or the emphasis on the body (and its dis/appearance) in these spaces – all
of which is encapsulated in the camp dispositif.
Thus, while I think the criticism that Agamben’s argument doesn’t account
for new spaces of resistance is valid, and has led to the emergence of vital
scholarship on new expressions of resistance, it is unwise to dismiss entirely his
emphasis on the camp. Rather, retaining ‘the camp’ in the term camp dispositif
(in preference to ‘abject spaces’, or Bigo’s ban-opticon) underlines the crucial
element of lived experience of the dispositif – with its rigid restrictions on
movement and social relationality and persistent assaults on well-being and
dignity. Isin and Rygiel suggest Agamben essentializes the camp at the expense
of examining ‘all of its material, experiential and diverse forms’.32 While I
acknowledge the necessity of (and indeed welcome) their efforts to describe the
multiple manifestations of exclusion, it is in the camp (wherever and however it
materializes) that the experience of the ban in the asylum system is most forceful.
As I discussed in Chapter 1, Agamben’s discussion of the presuppositional
nature of the law is essential for an understanding of deterritorialized sover
eignty. Where Isin and Rygiel’s efforts to convey the potential for resistance
in abject spaces lead them to dismiss Agamben’s account of the exception, I
suggest they miss a crucial quality of resistance in his description of the camp.
Criticism of Agamben often misses important parallels between his own work
and that of Rancière. For example, the police order operates on the same
presuppositional basis as the law under the exceptio; Rancière argues that the
configuration of parts and the lack of them are defined by a presupposition.33
By contrast, politics opposes the police presupposition in that parties in dispute
appear to each other through dissensus – prior to the dispute they exist only in
the consensus-defined horizon of perception.
In particular, Agamben has been accused of ignoring the visual dimensions
of the exception. Arjun Chowdhury accuses him of missing the fact that ‘[t]he
law is an optic, through which biopolitics operates’.34 However, I suggest that
Agamben’s analysis of the camp, as it intersects with his analysis of the law, does
present a means of interrogating the asylum regime that pays explicit attention
to the aesthetics of the camp, and thus of detention. I suggest that, where his
identification of the law as fundamentally empty, and consequently presuppo
32 Isin and Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces’, p. 184.

34 Arjun Chowdhury, ‘The Colony as Exception (or, Why Do I Have to Kill You More
Than Once?)’, Borderlands, 6/3 (2007), § 15, available at <www.borderlands.net.au/
vol6no3_2007/chowdhury_once.htm>. Accessed 1 February 2009. See also Peter Nyers,
‘In Solitary, in Solidarity: Detainees, Hostages and Contesting the Anti-policy of Deten
tion’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11/3 (2008), pp. 333–349.
64

sitional in its operations, corresponds with his reading of the aesthetics of the
camp as curiously lacking a centre, his argument does intervene in the question
of the aesthetics of the exception, and propose how the camp can be a site of
political subjectivization.
Agamben’s work on the aesthetics of the camp forms part of his reading
of the figure of the Muselmann in Auschwitz. In the camp jargon, Muselmann
referred to those whose extreme degradation led them to concede utterly to
the rule of the camp that posited them as inhuman; so called after the literal
meaning of ‘Muslim’ in Arabic, that is, one who submits unconditionally to God’s
will.35 Their condition, although absolute, was essentially one of process: ‘the
Muselmann in some sense marked the moving threshold in which man passed
into non-man.’36 In this there is a parallel with the situation of the asylum
seeker who, even outside detention, is subject to the rule of the exception and
functions in effect as a deterritorialized border, a constantly re-enacted (there
fore always becoming) reminder of the force of exclusion.
Although it is a precarious activity to attempt to make the extermination
camp speak to the context of asylum detention, there are parallels between
the Muselmann and the asylum regime that make such a course worth pursuing.
Agamben’s affirmation that the Muselmann is exemplary in incarnating the point
where human slides into inhuman is a crucial step beyond the limit-concept
between politicized and depoliticized life, which he says is the condition of
bare life. Yet there is countless testimony of asylum seekers who equate their
reduction to mere zoē with de facto dehumanization. Furthermore, biopower
and necropower do converge in both the asylum seeker and the Muselmann.
Agamben develops Wolfgang Sofsky’s assertion, ‘the Muselmänner document the
total triumph of power over the human being’, to describe this confluence of
necro- and biopower in the ‘third realm’ of the Muselmann, which is ‘the perfect
cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed
and all embankments flooded’. In this there is an anterior resonance of sover
eignty’s abolition of boundaries – thus the absolute rule of unaccountable sover
eignty can be read in microcosm in the figure of the Muselmann. Agamben’s
reading of the death camps explicitly focuses on the contemporary exception and
its ‘paradoxical tendency […] to turn over into its opposite’. Whereas ordinarily
the exception and the norm remain publicly separate, ‘secretly institute[ing]
each other’ and thus ‘opaque’, once they demonstrate ‘their complicity, as
happens more and more often today, they illuminate each other, so to speak,
from the inside’. Thus, for Agamben, the ‘extreme situation’s lesson is […] that
of absolute immanence, of “everything being in everything”’.37
Such complicity is realized in the immanence of sovereignty, where there
is no longer any outside to speak of. Thus it can plausibly be stated that the
35 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 45.
36 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 47.
37 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 48, 49 and 50.
65

Postcolonial Asylum
manner in which both asylum seeker and Muselmann embody a form of limit
situation analogous to the state of exception creates a context for reading
Agamben’s work on Auschwitz as a treatise on the camp that is also applicable
to asylum detention in the contemporary camp dispositif.
The space occupied by the Muselmann is one of kenosis, characterized by
emptiness: Agamben defines the camp as ‘a series of concentric circles that, like
waves, incessantly wash up against a central non-place, where the Muselmann
lives’. While he qualifies his description of the space occupied by the Muselmann
as principally applicable to camps that doubled as carceral and exterminatory
(e.g., Auschwitz), the coincidence of norm and exception in the asylum regime
creates a similarly keno-aesthetic.38 The aesthetics of asylum detention incorpo
rate both the kenomatic and presuppositional aspects of the ban. The Detained
Lives report notes that ‘UKBA publishes virtually no statistics on length of deten
tion’ in IRCs.39 This invisibility of the detained is complimented by a corre
sponding invisibility of the law that detains them, as indicated by the words of
an anonymous woman detained while seeking asylum in the UK:
I have been beaten in England, detained in a country in Europe. […] they want
to kill me. […] they don’t protect me … the law in England, where is it? I don’t
see it being practised here.40
The result is a site where detainee and law fail to appear to each other, but
where, in keeping with the fetishization of emptiness that characterizes the
exception, the law’s enforceability is sustained. Rather than a Foucauldian
panoptic system, then, the camp in the dispositif is instead better understood as
keno-optic, an emptiness of sight.
The writing of asylum seekers detained in Australia presents particular paral
lels with Agamben’s depiction of the camp as a series of concentric circles. In
a poem called ‘My Name is Asylum’, Angel Boujbiha describes a similarly labile
space occupied by a central lacuna:
The centre is circled by wire

[…]
1 is the wire for closure
2 is the coiled barbed wire
3 is the protection for 1 and 2
4 is the razor wire on the top of 3
5 is the high fence.41
38 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 51–52 and 51.

39 London Detainee Support Group, Detained Lives: The Real Cost of Infinite Immigration Deten-
tion (January 2009), p. 7.
40 Quoted in Imogen Tyler, ‘“Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum’, European
Journal of Cultural Studies, 9/2 (2006), p. 189.
41 Angel Boujbiha, ‘My Name is Asylum and Other Poems’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002). Avail
able at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/boujbiha_poems.html>. Accessed 18
December 2008.
66

The enumeration of serried barriers creates the impression of a topoÂ�graphy

that is entirely made up of boundaries – to the extent that, as Agamben says of
the Muselmann in the camp, they collapse and ‘all embankments [are] flooded’
by the immanence of sovereignty. The wires, as in Agamben’s description
of Auschwitz, encircle a ‘central non-place’: here, that lacuna is embodied
by ‘asylum’, Boujbiha’s assertion of a camp self, demonstrating that ‘asylum
seeker’ is an identity created as absence. Boujbiha’s is not the only example of
this kind of detention landscape. In a collection of letters written by detainees
in Australian detention centres, an anonymous asylum seeker writes: ‘Here is
always dark and foggy. We can not [sic] see some metres away and everything
is fence, fence, fence.’42 The fences are both physical and conceptual: it is,
ultimately, the ‘higher fence’ demarcating the threshold of infrahumanity that
separates Boujbiha from Australia.
The anonymous letter writer’s contention that the fence is an assault on
sight corresponds with the statement by ‘Daniel’ in the Detained Lives report,
describing life in detention as ‘dark life’.43 Visibility is certainly a problem for
the Muselmann, one that has a severely detrimental effect on relational possi
bilities. Agamben notes that ‘[w]hat no one wants to see at any cost […] is the
“core” of the camp, the fatal threshold that all prisoners are constantly about
to cross’. He continues:
The entire population of the camp is, indeed, nothing other than an immense
whirlpool obsessively spinning around a faceless centre [which] bears the true
likeness of man. According to the law that what man despises is also what he
fears resembles him, the Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone
in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face.44
‘The face’ of the other is the central tenet of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical
thinking, according to which ‘the relation to the face is straightaway ethical’.45
The face signifies a point of exteriority, exceeding the self, encountered in the
presence of the other. It is in the encounter with the ‘face’ (which is a kind of
ethical sum, as opposed to simple visibility that is equated with knowledge and
thus desubjectification) of the other that one discovers real responsibility as
that which is for the other, whose face is a disturbance to me, and who I cannot
account for but whose proximity accounts for every ethical relation in me. This
effectively describes that which, Agamben says, the Muselmann makes unbear
able: exposure to the exclusion that resides within definitions of man, citizen and
so on. The camp distorts the face of the other, making recognition either impos
sible or intolerable, as the cases of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solen Young illustrate.
42 Meaghan Amor and Janet Austin (eds), From Nothing to Zero: Letters from Refugees in
Australia’s Detention Centres (Melbourne, London, Oakland and Paris: Lonely Planet Publi
cations, 2003), p. 43.
43 London Detainee Support Group, Detained Lives, p. 21.
44 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 51 and 52.
45 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillipe Nemo, trans. Richard A.
Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 87.
67

Postcolonial Asylum
Because the camp thus seems to ‘capture’ the visible and the invisible, I
suggest that camp aesthetics are apotropaic by design; constructed and
ordered to deflect harm (i.e., exclude) by absorbing sight within itself. E. H.
Gombrich refers to the Greek myth of the Gorgon to account for his theory of
the apotropaic function of decorative art:
Having slain the fearful monster Gorgo […] Athene cut off her head and
henceforth wore the Gorgoneion as a protective spell on her body and on her
shield. With its hideous grin and its serpents as hair, the sheer sight of this
head (like that of the Medusa’s) turned every living thing into stone.46
Agamben also invokes the Gorgon myth, quoting Primo Levi’s description
of the Muselmann as ‘he who has seen the Gorgon’, and declaring the ‘impos
sibility of gazing upon the Muselmann’.47 Alfred Gell writes, after Gombrich,
that apotropaic motifs such as the gorgoneion work by ‘ensnaring [the] gaze’,
paradoxically drawing vision within itself in order to maintain the invisibility of
the centre.48 An apotropaic strategy is thus essentially one of inclusive exclu
sion, and consequently well suited to describe the aesthetic operation of the
camp in the dispositif. What the gorgoneion articulates are the shifting subject
positions between asylum seeker/detainee and sovereign regarding in/visibility
and its relation to necropower. The gorgon’s gaze produces death. Exposure
to the gorgoneion exposes the viewer to necropower; in the context of asylum
the visibility of the asylum seeker thus potentially exposes the complicity of the
normal situation in necropower. To protect the rule of the exception, which
must preserve the illusion that it is exceptional, the asylum seeker must be both
seen and not seen, or seen only in a certain, carefully framed way (i.e., as illegiti
mate). The asylum seeker acts as a kind of gorgoneion borne by the sovereign,
petrifying the gaze of those who look upon her/him and thus preventing vision
from penetrating to the empty centre of sovereign power. The enforceability
of exclusion is captured within the figure of the asylum seeker, concealing the
reality of sovereignty’s abolition of the outside and maintaining the illusion of
a norm characterized by the link between nation and nativity when in fact the
exceptio has become the rule.
Camp keno-optics are very clearly depicted by the photographer Melanie
Friend, who visited and photographed the exteriors and interiors of Dover,
46 E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study of the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford:
Phaidon, 1979), p. 257.
47 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 53, 50.
48 Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p.
189. Gell applies Gombrich’s idea to Marquesan tattooing, in which the designs worked
by a combination of a ‘rubric of closure’ which seals off ‘the skin ego’ and a ‘rubric of
multiplicity’ ‘which depend[s] on the multiplication of the subject, the creation of a […]
screen of “others” who are also “self”’. Gell, Wrapping in Images, p. 190. This dual defen
sive strategy of closure and replication has a number of parallels with the aesthetics of
the camp, which both encloses and creates a ‘screen of others’ whose multiplicity bears
witness to deterritorialized sovereign rule.
68

Figure 4â•‡ Melanie Friend, ‘The Visits Hall, Lindholme Immigration Removal Centre (IRC)
(near Doncaster), April 2006’, from Border Country. © Melanie Friend 2007.
Colnbrook, Harmondsworth, Lindholme, Campsfield, Haslar, Yarl’s Wood and

Tinsley House IRCs between 2003 and 2006. Friend’s collection, Border Country,
exhibits a powerful sense of the apotropaic and keno-aesthetic design of deten
tion. It opens with a series of four images of the moat surrounding Dover IRC,
taken in August 2005. In an accompanying essay Friend draws attention to the
site’s history; built as a citadel during two periods of national threat – the
Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the conflict in
Crimea during the 1850s – the site passed to the prison service in the middle
of the twentieth century and since served as a borstal, Youth Custody Centre
and Young Offender’s Institute, before becoming an IRC.49 This heritage bears
witness to the inter-related forces of defence and exclusion that inform its
current incarnation. Notably, however, this history does not resolve itself in
the consciousness of those who maintain the moat. Friend recalls conversing
with a gardener who cared for the moat, which is ‘mown regularly to prevent
the growth of long grass, which could conceal the attempted escapees, and
partly for visual order (that English love of an immaculate lawn, perhaps)’. He
suggests that ‘perhaps the multiculturalism of their workplace had “rubbed
off”’ on himself and his colleagues, given that many ‘chose to holiday in far-off
destinations – that summer one was off to the Dominican Republic, another to
Mexico, a third to Thailand’.50 Despite their role in ensuring the site’s imperme
ability, none of the gardeners is impressed by the fact they are complicit in the
49 Melanie Friend, Border Country (Winchester: Winchester Gallery, 2007), p. 57.

50 Friend, Border Country, p. 57.
69

Postcolonial Asylum
detention of people who had requested sanctuary. Instead they are engaged in
the preservation of the norm, applying a typically English love of orderliness,
especially in outdoor spaces.
Here we can see how the apotropaic function of the camp works unimpeded:
detention, by ‘fixing’ the unsettling mobility of the asylum seeker who
breaches sovereign boundaries, in effect beheads the gorgon (the threat of the
‘undeserving’ vagrant moving, like the ‘deserving’ tourist, in the Â�deterritorialized
lines coveted by sovereignty), reinforcing the hierarchy of mobility that Bauman
has said produces a caste system of global flows. The detainees remain unseen
as themselves, perceived instead in terms of a ‘safe’ sense of the exotic that
can coexist peaceably with that most ‘English’ of scenes, the immaculately kept
lawn.
The most striking aspect of Friend’s photographs, however, is the total
absence of human figures. Neither guards nor detainees are visible (as it were,
sovereign and detainee failing to appear to each other or the viewer), instead
presenting as empty a series of buildings purposely built to accommodate
people (see Figure 4). It is worth noting that it was the Nationality, Immigration
and Asylum Act (NIAA) 2002 that redesignated detention centres as IRCs, in an
attempt to increase public confidence in government’s ability to remove failed
asylum seekers, a message that is reinforced by the emptiness of the build
ings. The absence of people creates a void that the eye seeks to fill, drawing
the viewer’s gaze in to seek out evidence of lived presence. In particular, the
internal images of various public areas – communal but unpopulated – give
the impression of relational spaces implicitly remade as non-relational. The
visiting spaces are sparse, even sterile, and the recurrence of numbered desks,
a system of coloured chairs to specify visitors and detainees, closed-circuit
television (CCTV) cameras, lists of ‘centre rules’, and access keypads indicate a
carceral aesthetic. This presents a contrast with efforts to soften the environ
ments: the seating arrangements are informal, with easy chairs arranged around
low tables, and several visiting areas have dispensing machines for refresh
ments and stacked piles of children’s toys. The sense of regulation is insistent,
however, enclosing any residual sense of lived presence in the carceral aesthetic.
Although informal, the seating arrangements are regular and symmetrical. In
several images particular attempts to domesticate the space are juxtaposed
with a reassertion of institutional control: in the Visitor’s Centre at Campsfield
IRC framed prints of Van Gogh’s sunflowers and some coloured lithographs on
the left of the image are counterbalanced by a warning notice about assaults
on centre staff on the right; in the Visitors’ Hall at Lindholme a coloured poster
listing the word ‘welcome’ in twenty-eight different languages contrasts with a
summary of the centre’s race relations policy on the opposite wall.51 The latter
in particular illustrates Liz Fekete’s point that advances in public intolerance of
racism can mask its presence in other areas.52
51 Friend, Border Country, pp. 31 and 35.

52 ‘By making “deterrence” (of “economic migrants”), not human rights (the protection of
70

Friend’s camera could not penetrate to the centre of the IRCs, however: she
records that ‘[a]ccess to living quarters was denied’.53 As in Boujbiha’s poem,
the ‘central non-place’ is protected by a series of layers. In fact, Border Country
as a whole conveys a sense of carefully measured, guarded and recursive inter
mediary spaces. Friend describes the stringent security she encountered during
a visit to Colnbrook, which involved a fingerprint check and photograph at
reception, passage through ‘“the sterile area”, which acts as a secure buffer
zone between the Gatehouse (administration block) and the Centre (visits room
and detainee living quarters)’, followed by two further electronic fingerprint
checks, a metal detector and a ‘rub down’ search. 54 She observes there are
‘uncanny similarities to passing through airport security’.55 Despite penetrating
the various layers of security, including the ‘buffer zone’, the camera only
encounters a ‘false’ centre. The core of the camp, where the asylum seeker (re
Muselmann) resides, remains unseen.
It is worth observing that Friend includes two images of the ‘sterile area’
at Colnbrook: one looking towards Harmondsworth IRC, which is adjacent
to Colnbrook, and the other looking towards the Sheraton Hotel that serves
Heathrow airport. As such, the razor-wire-bounded ‘sterile area’, with its
resonance of quarantine, literally crosses the already fraught dialectic between
‘asylum’ and ‘hospitality’ in IRCs. Referring to the ‘asylum hotel’ debate of 2003,
where the UK government’s plan to accommodate newly arrived asylum seekers
in hotels provoked public ire, Sarah Gibson has described the incommensura
bility of the terms ‘asylum’ and ‘hotel’; for Gibson, the source of the contro
versy lies in the correspondence between ‘hotel’ and ‘nation’, in that ‘who is
welcomed and housed in the “hotel” is […] metonymic of who is housed within
the nation’.56 Friend observes that the security at Colnbrook resembles that at
nearby Heathrow. Following the deterritorialization of borders, those housed
in Colnbrook are, effectively, no longer in the UK (although still ‘held’ by asylum
law, thus incarnating Agamben’s sovereign ban); indeed, Friend records that a
female Nigerian detainee at Yarl’s Wood ‘talked of England being “out there”,
with the shopping malls, buses and street life. “This is not England!” she said’.57
The images in Border Country bear witness to the apotropaic and keno-
aesthetic function of the IRC, in which visibility is tightly policed and made to
articulate, however perversely, the acceptable face of sovereign power. Photog
refugees), the guiding principle of its asylum policy, a government committed, on the one
hand, to dismantling institutionalised racism has, on the other, erected new structures
of discrimination and, in the process, provided the ideological space in which racism
towards asylum seekers becomes culturally acceptable’. Liz Fekete, ‘The Emergence of
Xeno-racism’, Race and Class, 43/2 (2001), p. 24.
54 Friend, Border Country, pp. 58–59.
56 Sarah Gibson, ‘Accommodating Strangers: British Hospitality and the Asylum Hotel
Debate’, Journal for Cultural Research, 7/4 (2003), p. 373. The setting of Last Resort
anticipates this debate.
71

Postcolonial Asylum
raphy is only one-half of the work, however. Accompanying the collection is a

CD of detainees recounting their experiences in detention. Border Country, taken
as a whole, constitutes a ‘dialectic of recorded voices and still photographs’.58
Whereas the photos convey the enforceability of sovereign power, the record
ings introduce ‘an emotive and expressive counterpoint to the controlling and
de-individualizing structures of the centres’. For Alex Hall, Border Country ‘opens
the possibility for speech and discussion, creating a space where detainees can
comment on the structures, systems and institutions that surround them’.59
The resonance with Rancière, the correspondence between visibility and voice,
is immediate; yet here Friend’s work also intersects most forcefully with what
Agamben says about the Gorgon and the Muselmann. Although he quotes Levi’s
remark that the Muselmann is ‘he who has seen the Gorgon’, Agamben in fact
questions exactly what this means by asking, ‘what has the Muselmann seen, and
what, in the camp, is the Gorgon?’60
Foremost, the Gorgon represents the ‘anti-face’: ‘[t]he prohibited face, which
cannot be seen because it produces death’, and as such constitutes a ‘non-face’.
Yet as Agamben notes, this impossibility of seeing is, equally and contempo
raneously, ‘absolutely inevitable’. He refers to the countless examples of the
Gorgon in Greek art, which always, contrary to the tradition of painting human
figures in profile, appear ‘as a flat plate, without a third dimension – that is,
not as a real face but as an absolute image, as something that can only be seen
and presented. The gorgoneion, which represents the impossibility of vision, is
what cannot not be seen’. Thus far the gorgoneion adheres to the terms of the
apotropaic sovereign. Its power to attract the gaze is equal to its power to
resist the debilitating consequences of being seen; the gorgoneion is the asylum
detainee turned into ‘absolute image’, a pure signifier of total jurisdiction. But
Agamben takes things further. Following François Frontisi-Ducroux he refers
to a parallel between the ‘frontality’ of the Gorgon image and ‘apostrophe, the
rhetorical figure by which the author, rupturing narrative convention, turns to
a character or directly to the public’. The impossibility of seeing articulated
by the Gorgon contains ‘an apostrophe, a call that cannot be avoided’.61 The
gorgoneion thus has a dual potential – not only can it affect apotropaic control
over vision; it also, like Border Country’s conjunction of image and voice, opens
the possibility for speech of a kind.
This raises the further question of the nature of this speech. Border Country
runs counter to the tendency, identified by Liisa Malkki, to depict the refugee
as speaking through silence.62 The detainee voices in Border Country counteract
the silencing that Malkki argues is the consequence of repeated attempts to
represent the displaced. But at the same time these voices are mediated by

61 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 53, 53–54 and 54.
72

the keno-aesthetic of the images that accompany them. There are limits that
persist; emptiness remains the mediating factor. Agamben says that Levi’s
designation of the Muselmann is insufficient: the Gorgon does not refer to an
object or event, but to ‘the impossibility of seeing that belongs to the camp
inhabitant, the one who has “touched bottom” in the camp and has become a
non-human’.63 Agamben’s ultimate designation of the Muselmann is ‘the untes
tifiable’, the embodiment of the paradox of bearing witness ‘to something it is
impossible to bear witness to’.64 He notes that testimony ‘contains a lacuna’:
The value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its centre it contains
something that cannot be borne witness to. The ‘true’ witnesses, the ‘complete
witnesses’, are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness.65
Detainee testimony is thus subject to the same keno-aesthetic as the IRC, consti
tuting a fundamental and impenetrable emptiness. But, rather than consolidate
sovereign power, this lacuna is the source of testimony’s value. The keno- is
reconfigured because as an apostrophe the asylum seeker-as-gorgoneion does
testify to the aporia s/he represents:
That at the ‘bottom’ of the human being there is nothing other than an impos
sibility of seeing – this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human
being into non-human. That precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing
is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human
beings cannot turn away – this and nothing else is testimony.66
The Gorgon transforms human into non-human – this is the message artiÂ�Â�
cuÂ�Â�Â�Â�lated by the Muselmann, and also by the voices that accompany Friend’s
IRC photographs. The rupture affected by the opening of the possibility for
speech, which is turned ‘directly to the public’, is thus a call to recognize that
the monstrous Gorgon is not, as sovereignty would have it, the threat of the
asylum seeker but necropolitical sovereignty itself. As the example of Mahzer
Ali’s protest demonstrates, exhibiting the bare life of the detainee also reveals
the machinations of the power that detains him.
Horizon of perception 1: the camp in the city
In June 2000, in protest at the Austrian government’s coalition with Jörg Haider’s
right-wing Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria) (which
provoked EU sanctions against Austria), German film and theatre director Chris
toph Schlingensief confined, with their consent, twelve asylum seekers in a
modified container installed in central Vienna, and over the course of one week
63 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 54. My emphasis.

73

Postcolonial Asylum
invited the public to vote them out, Big Brother-style, via a specially constructed
website. Around 80,000 Austrians participated on the understanding that
those voted out would be deported, whereas the winner would receive 30,000
Austrian shillings and marriage to an Austrian citizen. The project, which was
simultaneously an installation, event and play, was alternately called Ausländer
Raus! (‘Foreigners Out’, which was proclaimed on a huge banner above the
container) and Please Love Austria.
Schlingensief’s decision to install the container, as a mock detention centre,
in Herbert-von-Karajan Platz, also draws the project into relation with Isin and
Rygiel’s recasting of Agamben’s camp topography as a series of interconnected
abject spaces. Schlingensief’s container, as the camp in the centre of the city,
displays features of the frontier, zone and camp. Isin and Rygiel affirm that the
camp ‘functions as spectacle’, in that it displays to the citizenry the consequence
of losing their status in the political community, whereas frontiers make visible
the way the dominant state utilizes abjection for its own purposes.67 Just as
zone spaces are also city spaces, inhabited by citizen and abject living alongside
each other, the container, nestled in the centre of Vienna (zone), is concerned
with how spaces are constituted by their inhabitants. It is both the spectacle of
bare life at the heart of the contemporary politics (camp) and a protest at the
way states deploy the abject – that is, deploy regimes of dis/appearance – to
sustain the horizon of perception (frontier). It is directly engaged with the way
in which putting the abject on display in fact exposes the complicity of the
citizenry in sovereign practices.
Schlingensief’s project deliberately manipulated the boundaries of percep
tion and participation. In a documentary film of the project by Paul Poet, Schlin
gensief calls the container ‘a machinery to disrupt images’, aligning him with
Rancière’s definition of political activity as whatever shifts a body from the
place assigned to it.68 The container was a challenge to what Rancière calls
consensus, a configuration of democracy as simultaneous total presence and
absence and thus a ‘determined regime of the perceptible’.69 The echoes of Big
Brother, a very recent phenomenon in 2000, in Schlingensief’s project present
a sharp contrast between the prospect of celebrity and ignominy (or worse)
for those involved in Schlingensief’s competition. When entering or leaving
the container, the contestants, disguised by wigs and sunglasses, covered their
faces with newspapers in a pose reminiscent both of paparazzi photographs
and of criminals in court. This played on the media’s role in simultaneously
reifying and criminalizing asylum seekers: on one level, then, Schlingensief’s
container created a mode of dissensus in relation to the state’s monopoly on
in/visibility, disrupting sovereignty’s preference for absolute control in the (non)
appearance of asylum seekers. However, this reading is disturbed by the silence
of the asylum seekers themselves. In Poet’s documentary they are never inter
67 Isin and Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces’, pp. 198 and 193.

68 Paul Poet (dir.), Ausländer Raus! Schlingensief’s Container (Austria: Monitorpop, 2005).
74

viewed (although many members of Schlingensief’s company were, as well as

commentators and Schlingensief himself), and their silence creates a problem
atic absence in relation to Rancière’s suggestion that troubling the image leads
to a release of speech. The project’s principal apostrophic function seems less
the ironic foregrounding of asylum seekers, and more the way it implies shifts
in the distribution of sovereign power through space. The public’s active partici
pation in voting the immigrants out (of the country) vividly dramatizes that
sovereign power to decide on matters of exclusion is not concentrated or local
ized but dispersed throughout the accumulated perceptions (and hostilities) of
the populace, disrupting sovereignty’s preference for clandestinity in the (non)
appearance of its own operations.
Haider’s FPÖ protested that the ‘Ausländer Raus!’ banner incited violence,
one of a number of ironic turns during the event (on the fourth day anti-fascist
activists stormed the container in protest at the ‘detention’ of those inside).
Schlingensief’s appropriation of right-wing rhetoric was not simply satirical,
but played a far more complex role in questioning the construction of authen
ticity through action, and action through authenticity. Silvija Jestovic reads the
project as exemplifying the ‘hyper-authentic’, where ‘“real” people are expected
to perform their own authenticity’.70 As a play the container called on Austrians
to perform their de facto role in the consensus organization of national space,
interpolating them to a mode of appearing to themselves as police by virtue of
their investment in a rule governing the appearance of bodies. Consensus
presupposes the ‘disappearance of any gap’; it is, Rancière says, a process of
identification where community identity is associated with the elimination of
wrong.71 Schlingensief’s container throws open this process of identification to
one of subjectification, disrupting the field of experience based on identifica
tion with the nation. But the protestors were not alert to this; at best, theirs is
an example of ‘well-meaning consensus’. By appealing to consensus, both they
and the FPÖ critics miss the play on perception and participation that reveals
their own complicity in the organization of national space. Consensus estab
lishes totalizing authority in the same manner as deterritorialized sovereignty.
Rancière asserts the synonymy of exclusion and consensus because consensus
is ultimately ‘the presupposition of all parties’. Just as Hardt and Negri posited
the elimination of the outside, the elimination of wrong in consensus elimi
nates exclusion, where those without a part cannot have a part. Exclusion
thus equates with ‘the very invisibility of the partition’.72 Armin Thurnher, an
Austrian journalist interviewed by Poet, suggests that in demanding the asylum
seekers’ release the protesters were demanding a ‘clean Austria’ – that is, they
were articulating a desire to remove the camp from the line of sight and restore
the horizon of perception.73
70 Silvija Jestovic, ‘Performing Like an Asylum Seeker: Paradoxes of Hyper-authenticity’,

Research in Drama Education, 13/2 (2008), p. 160.
71 Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 102 and 108.
72 Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 119 and 116.
73 Poet, Ausländer Raus! Schlingensief’s Container.
75

Postcolonial Asylum
Consequently, Ausländer Raus! and the accompanying documentary are more

concerned to dramatize national narcissism than make asylum voices audible.
The core tension is in fact in the way the container’s resonance with both the
contemporary detention centre and the historical concentration camp disrupts
how Austria appears to itself through the lens of asylum. The conflicts that
the project provoked frequently turned on Schlingensief’s German origins.
During one angry encounter an Austrian woman shouts repeatedly, ‘Foreigners
in, Piefkes [a derogatory Austrian term for Germans] out!’. Her outrage at the
perceived ill-treatment of the twelve asylum seekers spills over into an antip
athy for Schlingensief, a reaction more akin to worrying than caring in Ghassan
Hage’s spectrum of affective responses to the nation. Hage describes caring as
an emotional investment in the nation’s capacity to distribute hope; worrying,
by contrast, is a ‘narcissistic effect’ based on the fear that national belonging is
contingent.74 The camp resonances (both of biopolitical forces and the histor
ical Nazi death camps) produced by the container move the woman in Poet’s
film from a position of caring (foreigners in) to one of worrying (Piefkes out!)
that expresses an urgent desire both to displace historical complicity and to
exorcize the fear of abandonment provoked by the reminder of the nation’s
past exclusion of ‘unwanted others’. Thus the main disruption caused by Schlin
gensief’s container is to expose the presence of the camp in the governmental
organization of space, both as a physical presence in the heart of Vienna and
as an affective response on the part of every Austrian interpolated into a role
in his play.
Didier Fassin has made a similar point in relation to the Red Cross transit
camp in Sangatte. The centre operated between 1999 and 2002 as a tempo
rary refuge outside Calais for asylum seekers on the way to Britain. Although
only equipped to house 300 persons, once the UK became increasingly active
in restricting access to its borders, as many as 1,500 people were resident in
Sangatte. Coupled with the fact that residents were accommodated in tents
erected in a huge warehouse, Fassin notes that Sangatte increasingly attracted
comparison with the internment and concentration camps of the Second World
War.75 This rhetoric was adopted by both Smaïn Laacher, the camp’s official
historian, who referred to the ‘Camp of Sangatte’, and Nicholas Sarkozy, who
as Minister of the Interior called it a ‘symbol’.76 While Fassin is careful not to
equate Sangatte with either Auschwitz or Guantanamo, which are the poles of
Agamben’s discussion, or with the Second World War French transit camps at
Drancy and Chateaubriand, he notes that ‘the permanence of the camp structure
itself is revealing’. The common thread is that the camp represents ‘a specific
response to problems of public order by instituting [a] small territor[y] of excep
tion’; thus, while Sangatte residents were free to come and go in the camp,
74 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society
(London: Merlin, 2003), p. 3.
75 Didier Fassin, ‘Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies
in France’, Cultural Anthropology, 20/3 (2005), pp. 364–365.
76 Fassin, ‘Compassion and Repression’, p. 378.
76

‘the memory it disturbs tells us a profound truth […] less about the centre
than about its inmates’.77 Sangatte is a reminder of the sovereign’s capacity to
make a distinction between those who are wanted and unwanted, and thus its
origins as a place of compassionate care for destitute asylum seekers bleeds
into the paranoid nationalist’s insecure sense of the contingency of belonging
that underpins the most repressive asylum policies.
Horizon of perception 2: the camp and the dispersal system
The above examples illustrate how the camp dispositif creates and polices
horizons of in/visibility within the national imagination. The camp (as both
detention centre and materialization of the ban) is the point of orientation
and the lens through which the nation views itself, but which must remain
itself unseen – its exposure provokes outrage but, as with the protestors at
Schlingensief’s container, this is principally an urge to cleanse the visual field
and restore the horizon of the invisible. Like the operations of sovereign power
through deterritorialization, then, camp aesthetics work through concealment.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s film Last Resort (2000) is also concerned with the way
sovereignty controls horizons of perception, but where Schlingensief exposed
the confluence of perception and participation, Pawlikowski’s film disrupts the
relation of in/visibility implicit in what Ghassan Hage has called the ‘field of
whiteness’.78 Following Rancière’s definition of politics as that which reconfig
ures relationships, I suggest that through a combination of striated framing and
play on tropes of spectacle (CCTV; internet pornography) Last Resort examines
the conversion of a key space in the British national imagination, the seaside
resort, according to the camp aesthetic, and disrupts the camp dispositif’s
capacity (incarnated by ‘white’ as an aspirational category) to act as an unobtru
sive visual frame.
Last Resort tells the story of Tanya and Artiom, a Russian woman and her
son who travel to the UK for a new life with Tanya’s fiancé, Mark. When Mark
fails to meet them at the airport Tanya falsely claims political asylum, and the
pair are dispersed, according to the IAA 1999, to a ‘designated holding area’,
Stonehaven, a dilapidated coastal resort town (and a thinly disguised incarna
tion of Margate).79 Here she develops a brief relationship with the local amuse
ment arcade manager Alfie, who has also sought refuge from his past, and who
helps smuggle Tanya and Artiom out of Stonehaven so they can return home.
The setting of an accommodation centre for dispersed asylum seekers within a
coastal town thus refers to a doubling of the zone and the frontier in Isin and
Rygiel’s formulation. This coincidence of dispersal and detention indicates the
77 Fassin, ‘Compassion and Repression’, p. 379.

dale, NSW: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 57.
79 Pawel Pawlikowski (dir.), Last Resort (UK: Artificial Eye, 2000).
77

Postcolonial Asylum
conflation of movement and stasis, subjecting the frontier and zone to a logic
of internment that is framed, I will argue, by the striations associated with the
camp (as immanent, rather than localized).
Pawlikowski furnishes the film with an acute sense of place. Lingering
panoramic shots of the bay and its out-of-season entertainments describe
a place whose topographical marginality is matched by its relegation in the
national culture. Yet the shabby beauty Pawlikowski finds in stark images of
tower blocks and shuttered amusement venues suggests a depressed nostalgia
indicative of ‘post-imperial melancholia’.80 This is emphasized by the fact that
the setting for the main action, Margate’s derelict Dreamland funfair, featured
in Lindsay Anderson’s 1956 film O Dreamland as a metaphor for national disil
lusionment with the post-war New Jerusalem. Using Brighton as a case study,
Rob Shields has extensively mapped the successive reterritorialization of the
seaside as a key place in the national imagination. From the medicalized beach
of the Regency period, through the regulated Victorian ‘pleasure zone’, and,
post-First World War, a place of potential sexual adventure and violence, he
describes the beach as a physical and social liminal zone after Van Gennep, and
therefore as a place of spectacle (of bodily display and concealment; rooted in
the carnivalesque) and potential transition (of moral values and behaviours; of
class boundaries).81 More recently, as the IAA 1999’s introduction of dispersal as
a strategy for managing asylum claimants played on anxieties over the spread of
multiculturalism, towns such as Margate changed from sites of carnival release
to ‘the new frontier for the defender of exclusive national culture and “rights
for whites”’.82 In 2002 residents of Saltdean, a coastal suburb near Brighton,
protested at the proposed accommodation of asylum seekers in a local hotel;
Pawlikowski faced similar expressions of unease two years earlier when local
councillors objected to him filming in Margate (which had accepted approxi
mately 3,000 asylum seekers). In 2006 the Margate Exodus, a restaging of the
biblical narrative using a mostly local (indigent and immigrant) cast, focused
attention on Margate as a place of aspiration and dispossession.83 A series of
events were staged on a single day, including the burning of Anthony Gormley’s
Waste Man, a twenty-five-foot statue made of 30 tonnes of household materials
erected in the Dreamland funfair. Scenes from the day were included in a film of
the Exodus story, directed by Penny Woodcock and starring Bernard Hill, which
was shown on British television the following year. Ostensibly signifying the
burning bush in the Exodus narrative, Gormley’s sculpture was also a separate
work that hailed (literally, in the sense that the statue’s raised arm called for
recognition) the viewer’s attention to the way the beach has been used histori
cally as a site of waste management, or rather for managing waste humans.
80 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? [2004] (London and New York:
81 See Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London and
New York: Routledge, 1991).
82 Les Back, ‘Falling from the Sky’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37/3 (2003), p. 343.
83 Penny Woolcock (dir.), Exodus (UK: Soda Pictures, 2007).
78

Whereas previously it has been a place of (managed) heterogeneity, then,

the unstable beach has been transformed as a point of vulnerability in the
embattled national sensibility.84 Following Victor Turner, Shields asserts that
the holidaymakers’ experience of a socially unifying liminality made the beach a
site of potential communitas, a state of relational transition experienced in the
limen stage between separation and reaggregation in Van Gennep’s schematic.85
However, although Les Roberts has argued that Last Resort dramatizes the
emergence of communitas between Tanya and Alfie in a series of overlapping
zones of transit and transition, other critics have been more sceptical.86 for
Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, the film is a road movie preoccupied with
‘hiatus rather than progression’;87 according to Steven Allen, it closes off the
liminality of the beach.88 I suggest that Last Resort dramatizes this foreclosure
of the beach’s limen status as the incursion of the camp dispositif, commensurate
with sovereignty’s appropriation of the in-between that sustains itself by the
capacity to make distinctions between who does and does not belong. Turner
calls communitas a principle of heteroglossic ‘anti-structure’: where structure
‘is all that holds people apart [and] defines their differences’; ‘total, unmedi
ated relationship between person and person […] which nevertheless does not
submerge one in the other but safeguards their uniqueness in the very act of
realizing their commonness’.89 While the dispositif determines the horizon of
the perceptible, ordering the appearance of the asylum seeker while remaining
concealed as an organizing force, in communitas subjects become visible to
each other as harbingers of new possible configurations. It is therefore signifi
cant that in Pawlikowski’s film the beach is appropriated by the camp dispositif
as a place of spectacle, transition and resistance to bodily regulation.
Rosemary Sales argues that UK asylum legislation in the 1990s created
categories of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ within the concept of citizenship
that were focused on access to work and welfare.90 In April 2000, as laid out
in the IAA 1999, the Home Office began issuing asylum seekers with vouchers
instead of cash, leading to the identification and isolation of asylum seekers
as a separate group.91 In addition, the simultaneous introduction of compul
84 See Ralph Grillo, ‘“Saltdean Can’t Cope”: Protests against Asylum-seekers in an English
Seaside Suburb’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28/2 (2005), pp. 235–260; Fiachra Gibbons,
‘Meet Me in Margate’, Guardian, Friday Review (9 March 2001), p. 2.
85 Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 89.
86 Les Roberts, ‘“Welcome to Dreamland”: From Place to Non-place and Back Again in Pawel
Pawlikowski’s Last Resort’, New Cinemas, 1/2 (2002), p. 87.
87 Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the
European Road Movie (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 146.
88 Steven Allen, ‘British Cinema at the Seaside: The Limits of Liminality’, Journal of British
Cinema and Television, 5 (2008), p. 55.
89 Victor Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY
and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 47 and 274.
90 Rosemary Sales, ‘The Deserving and the Undeserving? Refugees, Asylum Seekers and
Welfare in Britain’, Critical Social Policy, 22 (2002), p. 459.
91 Liz Fekete, ‘The Emergence of Xeno-racism’, p. 30.
79

Postcolonial Asylum
sory dispersal and extended powers to detain asylum seekers illustrates how,
in a context of deterritorialized sovereignty where the camp can materialize
anywhere within the dispositif, the liminality of asylum seekers is deployed to
prevent the development of communitas, which should ultimately lead to a
successful reaggregation with society. Having been separated out, they are
restricted to a state of disaggregation-as-norm, which is reflected in the film’s
style. Pawlikowski employs a combination of close-up shots of characters’
faces, and wide shots of (mostly) empty town- and seascapes. The effect is
one of disorientation: whereas the close ups create a sense of claustrophobia,
disturbing the sense of place provided by the wide shots, the emptiness of the
latter interrupts and cauterizes the intimacy established by the close-ups.
Last Resort is marked by the same striated framing used in Starr’s Woomera
documentary. Sharp perpendiculars and diagonals frequently dissect the screen,
often dividing characters. During Tanya’s immigration interview the open lid of
her suitcase cuts diagonally to the right of the screen during close-ups of her
face, and across the left of the screen during close-ups of her interviewer. The
camera then cuts to a wider shot with the viewer looking in on the interview from
another room, across an intervening corridor where Artiom and another man
wait. The perspective is interrupted by two layers of glass (in the foreground the
window is clearly inlaid with a cross-hatched mesh), and beyond the interview
room further rooms and finally an external window are visible. The arrangement
of variegated perpendiculars (the thick black window frames, the thin mesh on
the glass and the blinds in the interview room) creates a strong sense of enclo
sure and disaggregation, which is perpetuated throughout the film by a series
of ‘found’ motifs – chain-link fences, elaborate road-markings and metal shop-
front shutters. These striated motifs are recursive: the serrated patterns of the
seating in the Bingo hall where Tanya and Alfie have their first night out recalls
both the diagonal pattern on the outside of the tower block where Tanya and
Artiom live and the serried ranks of chairs in the airport lounge, indicating that
the striation affecting Tanya and Artiom is endemic.
In Last Resort Pawlikowski allows the landscape to articulate the absence
of communitas in its own terms. However, he also mingles documentary style
with a slightly abstract, unreal quality that has variously been called ‘traducive
realism’, ‘poetic realism’ and ‘mythic British realism’ (the last is Pawlikowski’s
own term) and which demonstrates his interest in the deliberate framing of
images.92 This is evident in the prominence of CCTV as another key motif in
Last Resort. During their first attempt to leave Stonehaven Tanya and Artiom
92 See John Orr, ‘New Directions in European Cinema’, in Elizabeth Ezra (ed.), European
Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 309; Alice Bardan, ‘“Welcome to
Dreamland”: The Realist Impulse in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort’, New Cinemas, 6/1
(2008), p. 50. ‘[I]n a world,’ Pawlikowski has said, ‘where video cameras are omnipresent
and where everything is being filmed all the time, it is essential that filmmakers concen
trate on the film-making as opposed to recording’. Pawel Pawlikowski, ‘The Burning
Question’, in Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins (eds), Imagining Reality: The Faber Book
of Documentary [1996] (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 389.
80

are shown walking up along the seafront, the arrangement of grid-like road
markings and the strong perpendiculars of the streetlamps imposing a striated
aesthetic on what might otherwise have been indicative of ‘smooth’ space. The
camera then cuts to a CCTV image of them that pans out to reveal a huge bank of
monitors, some split-screen, observed by a uniformed guard. Having discovered
that trains out of Stonehaven are suspended (the use of the Beach Boys’ ‘I Get
Around’ as a diegetic soundtrack is an ironic comment on the striated framing
of their encounter with the station attendant, who is initially concealed by an
overhanging ceiling and who speaks to them from behind a steel shutter), they
are picked up by a police car, presumably on the basis that they were seen
via CCTV. This is one of several escape attempts, and the oppressive sense of
confinement adds to the film’s sense of heightened reality – it is unlikely that
the police would take quite such an active interest in the movements of one
immigrant family, but it allows Pawlikowski to play on the subversion of the
liminal space of the beach by actual and Rancièrian police. The fact that the
restrictions on movement experienced by Tanya and Artiom are replicated by
the striated framing of the film corroborates Rancière’s description of ‘police’ as
‘the configuration of the perceptible’.93 The CCTV motif in Last Resort shows the
revision of the beach from a site of potential communitas to a kind of ‘carceral
archipelago’: to borrow Edward Soja’s term, ‘urban incarceration’, which, Soja
says, consists of ‘the unprecedented merging of architecture, urban design and
the police apparatus’, is a description that also encapsulates the mis-en-scène of
Last Resort.94
A key element of the beach was the way it allowed resistance to govern
mental rule over the body. The opportunities for display and sexual licence
increasingly marked the beach in the national imaginary since the nineteenth
century, a fact reproduced in Last Resort through the cyber-porn business run
by local impresario Les. However, the film also comments on Shields’s point
that the beach operated according to an economy of the body that ‘impose[d]
a “critical distance” between reflection and corporeal participation’, such that
distinguish middle- and working-class activities (e.g., the theatre and the football
match).95 In Last Resort Les persuades Tanya to strip for an online audience who
participate remotely in the performance by issuing instructions, transforming
the beach from a place where the regulated discharge of transgressive impulses
in the national imagination reinforced the social order, to a place that caters for
the sexual fantasies of a global audience. While this arrangement in one sense
deepens the ‘critical distance’, it also collapses the privileged place of the beach
in the national imagination, allowing the incursion of ‘othered’ desires across
the new frontier of national homogeneity.
That Tanya’s appearance via the webcam recalls the earlier CCTV images

94 Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000),
p. 301.
95 Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 96.
81

Postcolonial Asylum
further links this negotiation of distance and proximity (participation) in the

mis-en-scène of the film with her disaggregated state of frustrated liminality.
Turner insists that communitas is part of the dialectical process of social life,
with the successive experience of opposing forces creating balance in the social
order.96 While in the beach of the national imagination this dialectic is centred
on the body, in Last Resort the female migrant’s body is absorbed in Agamben’s
biopolitical dialectic, which produces the camp by the sublation of homo sacer
(constituted as all body and no agency) and sovereign (as total agency without
a body). Last Resort thus dramatizes the reproduction of horizons of in/visibility
in a national space regulated by the camp dispositif, and invested in the perpetu
ation of a disaggregating nomos. Pawlikowski’s use of striated framing does
not only, however, signify the incursion of the ban; it also can be read as an
aesthetic rendering of Rancièrian dissensus, creating a space for the appearance
of those of no ac/count. In the police (or consensus) order people are ‘always
both totally present and totally absent at once’.97 They are trapped in a structure
of the visible where total visibility makes appearance impossible. Appearance,
Rancière says, splinters reality, reconfiguring it as a site of incommensurable
Â�
wrong by introducing contentious objects into the field of perception. Thus
where Pawlikowski’s striated framing describes a place subject to the exclu
sionary discretion of the ban, it also describes the potential emergence of
multiple worlds within one world. This is most evident in the way the film
introduces incommensurability into the field of whiteness.
The film’s engagement with whiteness is most strikingly described by the
near-identical opening and closing scenes of the film, which show Tanya and
Artiom being mechanically conveyed backwards through an airport (signified by
the diegetic soundtrack). The repetition powerfully underlines their absence of
agency, and experience of frustrated communitas and re-aggregation, but also
resonates with a universalizing discourse of the female migrant. In each scene
Tanya and Artiom are composed as Madonna and child (see Figure 5). Liisa
Malkki has described how displaced women are often depicted with children,
conveying that ‘[t]his is not just any woman; she is composed as an almost
Madonna like figure’.98 Terence Wright has also noted the frequency with which
photographic images of refugees suggest biblical themes. Wright asserts that
media images of refugees can be grouped in certain ‘image types’, which corre
spond to biblical themes: ‘Old Testament’ images of destitution that correspond
with the expulsion from Eden; and ‘New Testament’ images invoking the iconog
raphy of the ‘mother and child’ and the biblical family’s flight to Egypt.99 The
framing of Tanya and Artiom as biblical archetypes effaces the specific history of
96 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure [1969] (New York: Aldine de
Gruyte, 1995), p. 97.
Refugees in Exile (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 11.
99 Terence Wright, ‘Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees’, Visual Studies,
17/1 (2002), pp. 57–58.
82

Figure 5â•‡ Still from Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000).
their displacement, and also implies that ‘understanding’ is only possible when
they are deployed within an ordered configuration of the perceptible.
The depiction of Tanya as Mary emphasizes Pawlikowski’s interest in white
ness as a field of power. Richard Dyer has described how the iconic Mary
discloses the ambiguity of ‘white’ as a subject position. As an exemplar of virtue
she establishes, according to Dyer, a ‘dynamic of aspiration’.100 Thus, where
Mary articulates the tenets of white as a field of power – disavowal of the body,
invisibility and the denial of material reality – she also implicitly confesses to
the fundamentally aspirational quality of ‘white’ as an unattainable, and thus
always insecure, ideal. Where Tanya performs her whiteness in the opening
and closing scenes of Last Resort, then, ‘white’ as aspirational and contingent
is drawn into proximity with her problematic status as an ‘accidental’ asylum
seeker. She becomes a point of incommensurability: where, as Steve Garner
has said, whiteness is ‘a kind of absence […] produced by social relationships’,
Tanya’s ambivalent whiteness unsettles the privileged invisibility of the field of
whiteness.101
100 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997),
p. 17.
101 Steve Garner, Whiteness (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 34.
83

Postcolonial Asylum
Dyer and Garner describe whiteness as a framing position.102 By framing the

film with the near-identical shots of Tanya as Mary, however, Pawlikowski inverts
this, instead framing whiteness as a field of power complicit in the aesthetic
operations of the dispositif. The striated framing, which articulates the foreclo
sure of communitas and the conversion of the beach to a space of endemic
disaggregation, also disrupts the ‘smooth’ neutrality of whiteness. During
close-ups of characters’ faces the camera is frequently placed behind windows
or glass screens, creating tension between the intimacy of the close-up shot
and the disaggregation suggested by the deployment of barriers. When Tanya
is taken to register for her maintenance vouchers, the camera is positioned
within the building and we view her entrance through a glass door. Once she
is inside, however, the camera retreats behind a further layer of glass between
her and the immigration clerk. Pawlikowski’s striated framing thus refuses to
allow whiteness and deterritorialized sovereignty to fulfil a common impulse to
base power in invisibility.
As I have shown, Tanya’s whiteness is an ambivalent quantity, interposing
between the conventional othering of the asylum seeker and the intersection
of whiteness and nationality in what Garner has called the re-emergence of the
colour line in asylum discourse, through the ‘culture-coding’ praxis of xeno-
racism. As noted above and in Chapter 1, the beach (in the UK and Australia)
has become a key site for this kind of political narcissism. Discourse on asylum
is, Garner argues, concerned with white Europeans’ capacity to order social and
psychological boundaries.103 By inhabiting what are in effect competing but
equally aspirational categories (of white and asylum seeker), Tanya’s whiteness
can thus be read as reconfiguring this intersection of white and nationality.
The opening scenes of the film, which show Tanya and Artiom’s arrival, are cut
with scenes of Alfie preparing for work. As he prepares to leave, Alfie settles an
argument between two immigrant neighbours in the hallway, ordering both to
return to their flats. His authority here establishes him as the kind of ‘national
spatial manager’ Hage describes, albeit uncharacteristically open to migrants.
Yet, as this is intercut with Tanya’s arrival, the implied proximity forms the
basis of the film’s efforts to question the way whiteness, as Sara Ahmed says,
becomes like itself.104
Tanya’s conflation of aspirational categories throw the contingent nature of
the working-class national spatial manager (Alfie is shown shadow-boxing in a
flat sparsely decorated with boxing memorabilia) into sharp relief. Just as the
beach once facilitated the transgression of class boundaries, in Last Resort it
shows how the provisional whiteness of the working classes resembles that of
white Eastern Europeans (exposing the contingency within what Gilroy calls ‘the
peculiar synonymy of “white” and “European”’).105 That Stonehaven is marked
102 Dyer, White, p. 44; Garner, Whiteness, p. 34.

103 Garner, Whiteness, p. 153.
104 Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8/2 (2007), p. 155.
84

by post-imperial melancholia is evident in the ironic sign over the closed

fairground Artiom sees from the window of their flat: ‘Dreamland welcomes
you.’ By making this speak for the aspirations of new immigrants, as well as the
disillusionment of post-war Britain, Pawlikowski puts two worlds into one. As
the title Last Resort suggests, ‘Dreamland’ is a place of contingent, aspirational
belonging that afflicts all its residents. When Alfie tells Tanya that Stonehaven
is ‘full of people like me: fuck-ups’, he identifies with a category of provisional
belonging based on exclusion from elsewhere. In fact, given that Tanya’s asylum
status is ‘accidental’, Alfie represents the real refugee in the film.
It is significant that both are shown to experience their contingency through
their bodies: Tanya via her brief involvement in internet pornography (when
Tanya initially declines to work for Les she earns money by selling blood,
emphasizing her ‘bare life’); Alfie through boxing and his past imprisonment for
violent assault. Dyer has described how whiteness as a field of power depends
in part on disavowal of the body (as a signifier of material reality). In particular,
he argues that the paleness of Mary (the vessel of the incarnation) in much
religious art creates a sense of white as transcendent, as something that is in
but not of the body, whereas non-white can always be reduced to the corpo
real.106 This returns us to the final shot of Tanya as Mary. The shot ends with a
total ‘whiteout’ as Tanya and Artiom are conveyed out of a tunnel – signifying
less their entry into bright future than whiteness’s capacity to absorb itself
(and its contingent embodiments). As Dyer concedes, the apparent instability
of whiteness is its strength, perpetuating as it does the sense of aspiration
that constitutes it as a field of power – ‘enthrall[ing] people who have any
chance of participating in it’.107 Last Resort dramatizes how sovereignty orders
the horizon of visibility by appropriating the provisionally white asylum seeker
to conceal its own material reality. But the film also stages a tenuous form
of dissensus, which, before the final whiteout restores the order of total in/
visibility, indicates the existence of heterogeneous but related worlds of aspira
tion and dispossession.
Horizon of perception 3: the camp and asylum destitution
The examples of Last Resort and Schlingensief’s container illustrate how the
camp dispositif does not refer simply to detention. Both dramatize the dispositif
in a series of what Isin and Rygiel call overlapping abject spaces, but also demon
strate that these spaces are to a large extent governed by that which Isin and
Rygiel downplay in their reading of Agamben: the logic of the ban, evident in
the variations on the camp’s logic of internment and striation in the zone recon
figured as frontier (Herbert-von-Karajan Platz) and the frontier reconfigured as
a zone (Margate). Detention and dispersal as strategies within the dispositif are
106 Dyer, White, p. 14.

107 Dyer, White, p. 20.
85

Postcolonial Asylum
thus equally implicated in the enforcement of sovereign rule through inclusive

exclusion. But there is another facet of this strategy that is at the same time the
most cynical and the most indebted to controlling the horizon of perception:
enforced destitution.
In the UK, under section 95 of the IAA 1999, asylum claimants receive finan
cial support, subject to strict conditions, which is withdrawn twenty-one days
after a final decision on their claim. Where refused claimants are not able to
return home, and to avoid breaching Article 3 of the European Convention
on Human Rights (ECHR), section 4 of the 1999 IAA (amended by the Nation
ality, Immigration and Asylum Act (NIAA) 2002 and the Asylum and Immigration
(Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act (A&I(ToC)A) 2004) provides basic accommo
dation and £35 per week in the form of vouchers. This again is dependent on
the claimant meeting one of five criteria: they are taking reasonable steps to
leave the UK (in the form of signing an agreement to return voluntarily); there
are physical impediments to travel; they have no viable route of return; their
case being subject to judicial review; they have submitted a fresh claim based
on new evidence. Relatively few asylum seekers whose section 95 support is
withdrawn apply for section 4 (‘hard case’) support, however, because of the
commitment to voluntary return. In 2005 the UK government refused 44,700
asylum claims and granted section 4 support to 10,235 applicants.108 Given the
well-documented difficulties associated with returning failed asylum seekers to
their country of origin, such a disparity indicates that large numbers of failed
claimants remain in the UK without either state support or legal access to
employment.
At the time of writing, UKBA do not keep records of the size of the destitute
asylum seeker population, but a recent estimate for 2009 suggested between
300,000 and 500,000 people fall into the gap between section 95 and repatria
tion.109 This official blindness, coupled with the fact that many destitute asylum
seekers count on their clandestinity as a survival strategy, makes this in effect
a hidden group. Despite UKBA denials, both service providers and independent
observers describe destitution as a policy tool.110 The Labour government even
admitted that section 4 is an intentional ‘“regime” whose precise purpose is to
emphasize the precarious and temporary nature of the failed asylum seeker’s
stay in the UK and the immanence of their departure’.111 Coupled with the
108 Hannah Lewis, Destitution in Leeds: The Experiences of People Seeking Asylum and Supporting
Agencies (Leeds: Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, 2007), p. 54.
109 Diane Taylor, Underground Lives: An Investigation into the Living Conditions and Survival Strat-
egies of Destitute Asylum Seekers in the UK (Leeds: Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum
Seekers (PAFRAS), 2009), p. 6. This figure is based on research by the London School of
Economics. ‘[T]he destitute asylum seeker population is usually invisible. Statistically it
does not exist’. Taylor, Underground Lives, p. 9.
110 See Taylor, Underground Lives, p. 9. See also Independent Asylum Commission, Fit for
Purpose Yet?: The Independent Asylum Commission’s Interim Report (London: Independent
Asylum Commission, 2008). Refugee Action, The Destitution Trap: Research into Destitution
Among Refused Asylum Seekers in the UK (London: Refugee Action, 2006), p. 13.
111 Sheona York and Nancy Fancott, ‘Enforced Destitution: Impediments to Return and
86

emphasis on invisibility and silence surrounding destitute asylum seekers, this

consolidates the impression that asylum politics is predicated on forming an ac/
count of those who have a part and those who have no part: in a 2006 White
paper, Fairer, Effective, Transparent and Trusted, the Home Office committed to
implementing by 2014 a system able to ‘count everyone in and out’.112
The nature of destitution (even section 4 support constitutes less that the
received definition of poverty) contributes to the silence surrounding the issue.
The daily pressures of destitution, including significant mental health issues
as well as basic subsistence, militate against an emerging logos – although this
does not mean of course that such a logos does not exist. Rancière insists that
‘politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always
indissolubly the account’.113 Caryl Phillips’s ‘Northern Lights’, an imagining of
the life of David Oluwale, provides, I believe, just such an ac/count. Oluwale was
a Nigerian who arrived in the UK in 1949 and spent twenty years incarcerated
or destitute in Leeds until, following a campaign of police abuse, his body was
discovered in the River Aire in April 1969. Although it is important to be wary
of anachronistically appropriating Oluwale’s story – Kester Aspden has called
him an ‘abstraction […] a serviceable vessel’ for others to pour their concerns
into – there is an accretion of parallels between Oluwale and the contemporary
asylum context surrounding Phillips’s and several other recent retellings.114 In
February 2009, during the press night of The Hounding of David Oluwale, a stage
version of Aspden’s book of the same name, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in
Leeds, fifteen suspected illegal immigrants were discovered in a lorry delivering
cocoa powder to Slough.115 Oluwale himself had arrived as a stowaway sixty
years earlier and was incarcerated for twenty-one days as a result. Phillips’s
novel, A Distant Shore, features an African asylum seeker who is drowned in a
Northern canal by a racist gang. Phillips was working on this novel at the same
time as ‘Northern Lights’, and while it may not be deliberate the echo is sugges
tive.116 These parallels become more than just circumstantial, however, when
the record of Leeds as a city of immigration is taken into account.
In ‘Northern Lights’ Phillips provides a history of Leeds immigrants.117 Begin
ning with the Roman occupation of Loidis, he catalogues waves of Viking,
Access Section 4 “Hard Cases” Support’, Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality
Law, 22/1 (2008), p. 20.
112 Home Office, Fair, Effective, Transparent and Trusted: Rebuilding Confidence in our Immigra-
tion System (July 2006), p. 8.
114 Kester Aspden, Nationality: Wog – The Hounding of David Oluwale (London: Jonathan Cape,
2007), p. 8. Aspden notes that despite the ‘Remember Oluwale’ tags sprayed around
Chapeltown, home to many of Leeds’ black residents in the 1970s, as a Nigerian Oluwale
himself was excluded by the predominantly Caribbean population of the city.
115 Clare Brennan, ‘The Hounding of David Oluwale’, Observer, Review (8 February 2009), p.
18.
116 Conversation between Caryl Phillips and the author.
117 Caryl Phillips, Foreigners: Three English Lives (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), pp. 176–181,
194–199 and 209–216.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Norman, Industrial age economic, Irish and Eastern European Jewish migrants
arriving in and contributing to the city’s growth: interspersed throughout his
retelling of Oluwale’s story, Phillips’s narrative of historical immigration presents
Leeds as a city of ‘foreign-founders’.118 Its recent history as a ‘regional hub’
for asylum seekers consolidates this version of the city: in 1999 it hosted the
first groups of Kosovan refugees; since the implementation of dispersal in 2000
Leeds has the third largest asylum seeker population outside London; in 2004 it
hosted one of several pilots of the infamous section 9 of A&I(ToC)A 2004, which
stipulated that children of destitute asylum seekers should be removed into
care; in 2006 it hosted a pilot of the New Asylum Model.119 Leeds has been the
focus of several investigations into asylum destitution; one recorded that there
were 331 destitute asylum seekers in the city in 2008, although this referred
only to those who sought local agency support and as indicated above such
figures cannot be assumed to be complete.120 The continuity suggests a form
of what Homi Bhabha calls continua, a series of incommensurable but aligned
scenes that generate a sense of ‘unsatisfaction’, and therefore that Phillips’s
version of Oluwale’s story has the capacity to speak to the contemporary situa
tion of destitute asylum seekers.121
Almost nothing of Oluwale’s own account was recorded, beyond a few lines in
court proceedings. However, Rancière argues that disagreement occurs essen
tially over what speaking means, and thus is clearly not only to do with words.122
Fundamental to the definition of speech in the police order is whether or not
speech is recognized as such, or as simply inarticulate noise. Aspden refers to
many occasions where Oluwale’s speech was not understood, which was often
given as justification for the categorization of Oluwale as savage and subhuman.
He appears in both Phillips’s and Aspden’s accounts as an evasive, oddly formless
subject: Aspden notes that even the most basic details such as the correct
spelling of his name and date of birth are uncertain. In Phillips’s polyphonic
account Oluwale emerges in various incompatible incarnations: sometimes as
articulate and softly spoken; elsewhere ‘bouncy […] and slim’; in the words of
Eric Dent, a staff nurse at High Royds psychiatric hospital where Oluwale was a
patient for nearly ten years, he was ‘built like a miniature Mr Universe and […]
“like a savage animal”’. According to Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker, who, along
with Sergeant Ken Kitching, was accused of Oluwale’s manslaughter: ‘Oluwale
was a small, chunky man, filthy in his personal habits. […] His language was
dirty, and […] when Oluwale became excited he would set up a high-pitched
118 Bonnie Honig, quoted in Peter Nyers, ‘Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protec
tion in the Anti-deportation Movement’, Third World Quarterly, 24/6 (2003), p. 1075.
119 Lewis, Destitution in Leeds, p. 10.
120 Dave Brown, More Destitution in Leeds: Repeat Survey of Destitute Asylum Seekers and Refugees
Approaching Local Agencies for Support (London: Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, 2008),
p. 6.
121 Homi Bhabha, ‘Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in Gregory Castles (ed.), Postcolo-
nial Discourses (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 44.
122 Rancière, Disagreement, pp. x–xi.
88

screaming noise.’123 Lack of speech means a lack of subjecthood. Instead, as

Aspden observes, his intangibility was both cause and consequence of his place
as the object of the police order: ‘He appeared to the world mainly through
the lens of public authorities: as prisoner, patient or welfare claimant, rarely as
someone with feelings, or human needs beyond the most basic.’124
The most basic detail about Oluwale, his name, was never properly settled.
He appears in the records as variously Oolle, Allowala, Alliwala, Oluwuala,
Olewala, Oluwole, Oluwuale.125 The mangled attempts at a phonetic spelling,
which also seem to suggest in some cases the strange noises Oluwale was
reported to make (Oolle, Oluwuala), underline Rancière’s assertion that ‘[w]
hoever is nameless cannot speak’. Yet, as Rancière also says, ‘[p]olitics acts on
the police. It acts on the places and on the words common to both’.126 Phillips
does not ventriloquize Oluwale; instead he presents dissensus as a form of
speech that disrupts the visual field. Leeds is presented as a city strewn with
monuments to the police order of in/visibility – Armley Jail; High Royds Hospital;
Millgarth Police Station – yet Phillips presents Oluwale’s tenacious presence in
the city centre between April 1968 and April 1969 as a refusal to submit to the
partition of the perceptible: ‘after twenty years you refused to leave your city.’127
As such, his refusal to be invisible acts upon the city as both a place and a word
in the police order.
In Phillips’s story Oluwale transforms Leeds city centre from a place of police
consensus into a place of appearance. Aspden describes how the centre was
organized according to the police order. Millgarth, the station where Ellerker
and Kitching were based, was ‘a place designed to keep you in, or keep you out’;
furthermore, the eastern, western and southern boundaries of the Millgarth
subdivision approximately coincided with the central area of Leeds where
Oluwale slept out.128 Leeds had its own city police force since 1836, a source of
tremendous pride to its officers until it was absorbed into the West Yorkshire
Metropolitan Police in 1974, a fact that both determined and legitimized the
abuse of Oluwale who was routinely beaten and several times abandoned at the
city’s outskirts in the middle of the night. Aspden describes Oluwale as ‘a police
problem – he offended the ideal of the salubrious urban environment’. Drawing
on the origins of police in polis (city), Aspden in effect argues that the police
as state apparatus and as the partition of the perceptible coincided: whereas
policing ‘is all about making and maintaining clean, orderly cities’, Oluwale was
‘matter out-of-place’.129 The level of control Millgarth police officers held over
the city centre was total, and based on a style of high-visibility policing, estab
lishing a horizon of perception in which Oluwale was a disorderly presence.
123 Phillips, Foreigners, pp. 168, 186, 234 and 235.

124 Aspden, Nationality: Wog, p. 8.
125 Aspden, Nationality: Wog, p. 38; Phillips, Foreigners, p. 238.
126 Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 23 and 33. Emphasis in the original.
127 Phillips, Foreigners, p. 176. My emphasis.
128 Aspden, Nationality: Wog, pp. 126 and 136.
129 Aspden, Nationality: Wog, pp. 148, 168.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Phillips concurs: ‘[a]t night the city centre […] became very much the Leeds
of the authorities and of the policemen.’130 It is significant that Ellerker and
Kitching tended to use the restrictions on antisocial behaviour laid out in the
Leeds Corporation (Consolidation) Act 1905 to charge Oluwale rather than the
national vagrancy laws. The Leeds Act provided wide-ranging powers to deal with
(rather vaguely defined) ‘disorderly conduct’: Aspden notes that, according to
the local procedure course, ‘disorderly conduct was “owt that’s not orderly”’.131
Oluwale was thus dealt with by a combination of ‘violence and […] Leeds law’
by a police culture that resembled the sovereign in the exception to the extent
that it relied on its unique capacity to decide on what stood within the order.132
Polis and police thus combined in a form of police territoriality in which
the horizon of perception was rigidly enforced. Phillips emphasizes how this
extended beyond the management of the city centre. Oluwale’s first stay in
High Royds, between 1953 and 1961, where he was subjected to electroconvul
sive therapy, is described as a disappearance. Oluwale simply vanished to those
who knew him; but he also disappeared to those detained with him. One of the
voices Phillips reproduces is that of a former High Royds patient who claimed
to have little memory of Oluwale despite the fact he was the hospital’s only
black patient.133 Phillips contests this configuration of police order by estab
lishing Leeds as place of dissensus, with a heritage of multiple foreign-founders
who, despite their disenfranchisement, ‘refused to go anywhere’, and including
Oluwale in this tradition.134 Oluwale’s refusal to be hounded out of the city can
thus be read as a political act of the kind Isin and Greg Nielsen advocate within
abject spaces. Acts of citizenship disrupt habituated practice and open up the
question of what constitutes the citizenry. Distinct from citizenship practices,
such as paying taxes, citizenship acts, ‘break with the repetition of the same’; they
effect ‘rupture[s] in the given’.135 Crucially, acts invoke everyday deeds – even
the most basic, such as finding a place to sleep at night – as political, creating
a sense of new, as-yet-unrealized formations of belonging. Equally crucial is the
fact that, according to Isin, acts precede both actors and the scene of action – in
a sense combining Rancière’s assertion that, prior to a dispute, political subjects
exist only within the consensus (that is, not at all) with Levinas’s prescription
that ethics comes before all – an act carries both an irreducible ethical weight
and the capacity to disrupt the horizon of perception.136 A key element of
Isin’s argument is missing in Oluwale’s case, however. Isin insists that acts of
citizenship are dialogical, creating others. Oluwale’s protest (which, although it
130 Phillips, Foreigners, p. 221.

133 Phillips, Foreigners, pp. 200, 203.
135 Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen, ‘Introduction’, in Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen
(eds), Acts of Citizenship (London and New York: Zed Book, 2008), p. 2; Engin F. Isin,
‘Theorizing Acts of Citizenship’, Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship, p. 25.
136 Isin, ‘Theorizing Acts of Citizenship’, p. 37. Isin and Nielsen describe acts as ‘simultane
ously political, ethical and aesthetic’. Isin and Nielsen, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.
90

challenges the horizon of perception, does not invoke a Levinasian ‘third party’
signifying a sense of co-citizenry) is thus perhaps closer to what William Walters
calls ‘an act of demonstration’, which reveals injustice by refusing the identity of
citizen (Oluwale’s ‘chosen’ itinerancy) but where ‘the identity of the subjects at
the heart of the protest is left relatively open […] in a way that opens space for
other political possibilities’ (his appearance through disappearance).137
Nonetheless, Isin’s assertion that acts ‘create a scene by involving actors
who remain at the scene […] rather than fleeing it’, demonstrates how Oluwale
disturbs the horizon of perception by reordering the distribution of the sensi
ble.138 Phillips’s Oluwale reconfigures Leeds centre as a place of dispute by
deliberately and persistently making himself visible: ‘He would always hide in
doorways so he was easy to find.’139 One of his regular sleeping places, the
Bridal Shop on the Headrow, was the only illuminated doorway on the street.
For Phillips, Oluwale’s habitual return to the city centre was not only expedi
ence, for lack of anywhere else to go, but also a defiant refusal to submit to
the police order that had sought to remove him from the horizon of percep
tion since his first incarceration as a stowaway in 1949. It was ‘as though he
was challenging them to remove him from the city’ – a place that, despite its
disdainful treatment of him, was still his: ‘he still possessed his city of Leeds on
the banks of the River Aire. David still had his city.’140 By recasting Leeds as a
place of appearance, Oluwale made politics act on the city in the police order of
place and words. ‘Northern Lights’ closes with a series of vistas: Ellerker’s house
in Horsforth, from the back of which is a ‘a panoramic view of the city of Leeds’;
Warehouse Hill by Leeds Bridge, where ‘the city was born’ and where Oluwale
entered the river; and Killingbeck Cemetery, also boasting spectacular views of
the city, where Oluwale is buried.141 This topography suggests a confrontation
of incommensurable horizons of perception, with Warehouse Hill the focus of
a disputed count, tracing a line from west to east through the centre of Leeds,
now home to a new generation of destitute immigrants. Phillips’s ac/count of
the life of Oluwale also traces therefore the (dis)appearance of that new genera
tion of the camp dispositif that lies nestled within the city, reconfiguring the
city as a place for the appearance of those habitually obscured in the horizon
of perception. Recently, Leeds city centre witnessed a similar confrontation of
gazes that challenged the constitution of the city as a place of (dis)appearance:
when The Hounding of David Oluwale was being staged at the West Yorkshire
Playhouse a giant portrait of Oluwale was hung from the building, which stands
directly opposite the former Millgarth Street station – effectively, as in Phillips’s
retelling, staring back at his abusers and out into the city he claimed as his
own.142
137 Walters, ‘Acts of Demonstration’, p. 194.

138 Isin, ‘Theorizing Acts of Citizenship’, p. 27. My emphasis.
140 Phillips, Foreigners, pp. 219 and 218.
141 Phillips, Foreigners, pp. 249, 255, 244 and 259.
142 I am grateful to Andrew Warnes for alerting me to this.
91

chapter 3
Be/held: Ban and Iteration
She is both the law and its transgression.

Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Lecture1
Be/held
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses famously opens with the miraculous trans
formation of two immigrants into figures of the divine and diabolical as they
fall from the exploded fuselage of a jumbo jet. Their descent inaugurates an
extended reflection on what is perhaps the most insistent question posed by
migrant experience in postcolonial studies: by what means does newness arrive
in the world?2 Echoing Rushdie, Graeme Millar’s 2006 audio-visual installation
Beheld was inspired by accounts of migrants who have fallen to their deaths
from the undercarriage of aircraft. These include Mohamed Ayaz from Pakistan,
who fell from a Boeing 777 into a Homebase car park in Richmond in 2001,
and Alberto Vazquez Rodriguez and Michael Fonseca, Cuban teenagers who fell
into a field in Surrey near Gatwick airport.3 Miller took recordings of ambient
sound and photographs of the sky above the ten locations where migrants had
previously fallen. The images were then transferred to ‘ten fragile glass bowls
of sky’.4 Visitors to the installation were encouraged to handle the bowls, which
activated the sound recordings. The absence of the bodies that marks each
site as the subject of several incursions (of the immigrants themselves; deter
ritorialized sovereign power; or Millar’s camera and the viewer’s gaze) also
1 Toni Morrison, ‘The Bird is in Your Hand’, in Nobel Lectures: Twenty Years of the Nobel Prize
for Literature Lectures (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2007), p. 201.
2 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses [1988] (London: Vintage, 2006), p. 8.
3 Les Back, ‘Falling from the Sky’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37/3 (2003), p. 344.
4 Graeme Millar, Beheld (2006). Available at <www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/project.
php?id=90>. Accessed 26 March 2009.
92

establishes a sense of border-consciousness often far away from the recognized

border, in the most prosaic locations. Whereas in Rushdie’s novel the descent of
Gibreel and Saladin is the basis for multiple ‘fusions, translations [and] conjoin
ings’, Millar’s fallen migrants are banned subjects, forced to undertake lethally
dangerous journeys by the state’s reproduction of illegality.5
The tactile nature of Millar’s project raises difficult questions about relation
ality and proximity, and about the choice to engage (or not) with those who
are abandoned to necropower but nonetheless held by the law. Most signifi
cantly, in challenging how we should interpret how those who are subject to
the sovereign ban are held in its grip, it revises the way the ban reproduces
asylum seekers as abject.
Agamben’s description of the sovereign ban, to be subject to which does
not mean simply to be excluded but to be ‘abandoned […] exposed and threat
ened on the threshold [between] life and law’, presents us with a vision of law
and sovereignty that can comfortably operate within the indistinct space of the
threshold.6 Étienne Balibar has described how, by adopting a strategy of inclu
sive exclusion of immigrants, the state is set in contradiction with itself. Balibar
is speaking specifically of France, but his point can be extended to the wider
context of the camp dispositif. Essentially, he says, the state’s goal is to perpet
uate rather than eradicate illegality through its policies of immigration control,
thus justifying the use of repressive measures. Illegality is first produced by the
state that refuses to include immigrants and then capitalizes on the subsequent
‘insecurity syndrome’, consolidating its power base by reiterating, through the
legislative, discursive and institutional elements of the dispositif, the abject
condition of the asylum seeker.7
In the tactile engagement that it encourages between the visitors and the
fallen migrants, Beheld replicates the double-voiced asylum claim by establishing
a principle of polyphony in the discourse of the ban, challenging the way asylum
seekers are held by the law’s vested interest in their exclusion. To be held thus
becomes a hybrid construction, a single phrase belonging simultaneously to
two grammars – one of exclusion through inclusion, the other even more
conflicted and problematic but that invokes through proximity an altogether
different sense of responsibility for the other. The linguistic emphasis is impor
tant: Bakhtin emphasized that double-voicedness will always resist thematiza
tion and ‘is prefigured in language itself’ as a phenomenon in a ‘process of
becoming’.8 Robert Young has said that ‘authoritarian discourse is undone’
5 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p. 8.

8 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagina-
tion: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), p. 326.
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Postcolonial Asylum
at the point where the hybrid is ‘politicized and made contestatory’.9 This is
because authoritarian discourse insists on its singularity, which is, as we have
seen, the ultimate motivation behind sovereignty’s appropriation of difference
and is achieved through the reproduction of the ban. In this sense, Be-held and
‘I am an asylum seeker’ represent counter-appropriations of contradiction as a
means of resistance as well as, as described in Chapter 1, a tool of sovereignty.
The double-voicedness of the asylum claim replicates this use of contradiction
in the iterative sense described by Derrida, ‘which links repetition to alterity’.10
Where Beheld presents a means of undermining the ban as it is articulated in
language then, it also holds out the prospect that postcolonial theories of
re-iteration, when framed by the discourse of the ban, can also provide a means
to oppose presuppositional sovereignty.
Reproduction is a central operation of the camp dispositif: just as the law
produces illegality, it also places restrictions on its subjects’ capacity to repro
duce themselves relationally. Irene Gedalof has observed that serial asylum
legislation in the UK has in part been directed at restricting access to ‘the
“stuff” of cultural production – food, housing, clothing, health care, education,
family life’.11 With a particular focus on texts from the UK, in this chapter I
will investigate how the configuration of law and life in the sovereign ban can
be resisted by forms of iterative self-staging. First, building on the colonial
heritage of the exception explored in Chapter 1, I will argue that Bhabha’s
re-reading of Frantz Fanon’s colonial world view as a prescription for inter
stitial resistance must in turn be read through Zygmunt Bauman’s reading of
the manipulation of ambivalence in relations between the global and the local
in order to examine the extent to which an iterative sensibility, such as that
posited in Derrida’s theory of hospitality, which links repetition and alterity,
constitutes a viable response to the sovereign reproduction of illegality. I will
then demonstrate, through a reading of Kate Adshead’s play The Bogus Woman,
that the normative staging of ‘the refugee’ as male compounds the effect of the
ban, which significantly reduces the availability of iterative strategies to woman
asylum seekers. In relation to Derrida’s hospitality theory, in which the inver
sion of host and guest seems to preclude the engagement of woman asylum
seekers in modular resistance through iterative acts, I will look at how strate
gies of iterative self-staging in Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things and Leila
Aboulela’s novel Minaret comment on the putative incommensurability, within
the concept of ‘home’, of ‘woman’ and ‘refugee’. Finally, I will argue that it is
through an integration of postcolonial studies with the discourse of the ban
that we can trace in the new politics espoused by both Bhabha and Agamben
a complementary sense of iterative dissatisfaction. I will develop this approach
9 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 21 and 22.
10 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982),
p. 315.
11 Irene Gedalof, ‘Unhomely Homes: Women, Family and Belonging in UK Discourses of
Migration and Asylum’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33/1 (2007), p. 84.
94

in a reading of Misha Myers’ Plymouth-based ‘Way from Home’ project, in

which asylum seekers living in the city were invited to transpose a map of a
typical journey taken by them in their home town over a map of Plymouth. The
resulting restaging of place invokes, I suggest, the kind of disjunctive sensibility
that is essential to both Bhabha’s and Agamben’s sense of iteration as a viable
response to the ban.
Bogus women
The manner in which the asylum claim splits along its axis as a request and a
demand, articulating both subjugation to the sovereign decision and disruption
of it, could also be said to resemble Bhabha’s claim that what emerges from the
interstices (which is, after all, ‘the place of utterance’)12 is negotiated, antago
nistic and performative. However, relating the asylum claim to Bhabha’s sense
of the interstitial enunciation leads us to an earlier instance of minoritarian
demand: Fanon’s insistent question, in Black Skin White Masks, ‘What does the
black man want?’. Bhabha suggests this is, ultimately, the colonial subject’s
‘desire for recognition’:
As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-

now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else.
I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue
something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human
world – that is, a world of reciprocal relations.13
For Fanon, conflict (in the form of the demand) is a necessary element of
recognition – like Rancière, he advocates real politics as taking possession of
a subject position. Bhabha reads this desire as a return to identity performed
through iteration, consolidating the notion of a postcolonial dissensus that can
contest the camp dispositif. Yet it is also essential to ask to what extent Bhabha’s
argument regarding overlapping domains of difference can account for sover
eignty’s deterritorialization, where sovereignty has a hand in the domain and
in the overlap as well. His vision of a new politics is couched in terms of ‘going
beyond’, ‘being in the “beyond”’, which does not take account of the asylum
seeker’s investment in the status quo of sovereign power as a potential provider
of refuge.14 As Spivak has said, the step beyond postcolonial discourse also
anticipates restrictions within it.15
Bhabha proposes that Fanon misses the opportunity implicit in his own
argument to ‘shift the Manichaean boundaries’ of colonial space and, as a
12 Bhabha, The Location of Culture [1994] (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 52.
13 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks [1952], trans. Charles Lam Markman (London:
Paladin, 1970), p. 155.
14 Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 6 and 10.
15 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The New Subaltern’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural
Studies Reader, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 235.
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Postcolonial Asylum
corollary, colonial consciousness. Fanon’s Manichaeanism, Bhabha observes, is

expressed in his compartmentalization of colonial space into incommensurate
settler and native zones, defined by their capacity to rationalize waste; in the
gleaming settlers’ town, ‘the garbage-cans swallow all the leavings, unseen,
unknown and hardly thought about’.16 By contrast, the native zone can only
produce a kind of human excess, an accretion of bare life (‘It is a world without
spaciousness; men live on top of one another, and their huts are built one on
top of the other’), without rationalization or order. (‘They are born there, it
matters little how or where; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.’)17
Bhabha reads in Fanon’s description a proposal for interstitial resistance that,
he suggests, Fanon himself did not fully realize: because denial, the refusal
of recognition, is always also ‘a half-acknowledgement’, it generates a species
of recognition that crosses, or perhaps more accurately, transgresses the rigid
divisions of human and infrahuman space, making the dislocated colonial
subject ‘an incalculable object, quite literally difficult to place’.18
Bhabha’s reading of Fanon has inspired some of the most trenchant criticism
of his ‘ludic’ position. E. San Juan suggests that Bhabha’s dehistoricizing, decon
textualizing appropriation renders ‘inutile’ Fanon’s ‘praxis-oriented voice’, and
conversely reifies colonial Manichaeanism in his efforts to hypostatize disloca
tion.19 In terms of Bhabha’s relevance to asylum discourse, it is important and
necessary to accommodate both his critical insights and his critic’s concerns.
Bhabha’s emphasis on the narcissism of colonial relations, and corresponding
reading of this in(to) Fanon, can highlight a similar narcissism and effect of
splitting in both the way asylum seekers are framed by sovereign power (as
the necessary other) and in how they represent themselves to sovereign power
(threatening to bring the object of their desire into crisis); whereas the deferred
nature of his argument – San Juan accuses Bhabha of advocating an enuncia
tive practice of ‘uninterrupted […] performance, never achieving the closure
of énoncé or the sentence’ – becomes problematic in relation to the asylum
claim, which sovereign power conspires to leave frozen in a state of permanent
temporariness.20 Thus, where Bhabha argues that Fanon’s rigid Manichaean
division of space precludes the creative possibilities Bhabha himself sees in the
act of crossing boundaries, his own argument does not account for the fact that
the defining feature of Fanon’s settler zone – its capacity to compartmentalize
and deal with waste – has become a feature of the contemporary deterritorial
ized global landscape.
Zygmunt Bauman has characterized the colonial legacy in globalization
as a crisis of the human waste disposal industry. The inevitable outcome of
modernity, he argues, is the production of ‘wasted humans’, who could once
16 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [1961], trans. Constance Farrington
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 30.
17 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 30.
18 Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 88 and 89.
19 E. San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 27–28.
20 San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory, p. 26.
96

be dealt with through the channels of colonization (a global solution to local

problems); but in a ‘full’ planet the orientation of the solution is inverted –
the global problem of increased refugee flows now requires local solutions.
Consequently, the boundary becomes crucial in determining what is waste, or
rather what is to be included or excluded. To counter the ensuing ambiva
lence, which sovereignty insists on wielding for itself but cannot tolerate being
subject to, immigration officers become the ‘frontline troops in the modern
war against ambivalence’.21 The production of ‘illegality’, and thus of ‘waste
humanity’, which must be properly dealt with by Western asylum systems, is
a contemporary manifestation of Fanon’s rationalizing settler zone, expanded
across multiple national borders; and the camps (IRCs, dispersal zones and so
on), as products of public anxiety over waste management difficulties, repre
sent the absorption of the native by the settler zone: dumping sites for human
waste that has somehow found its way into the space of the nation.
Bauman’s description of Western approaches to asylum as akin to a human
waste disposal industry has a significant bearing on the application of strate
gies of iterative resistance (linking repetition to alterity) to the contemporary
moment. This is especially the case in terms of how ideas and variations of
‘home’ are reproduced in contexts of displacement. A corollary of the repro
duction of asylum seekers as ‘human waste’ is the deliberate restriction of
their capacity to act as social, cultural and relational reproducers: for example,
under section 8 of the IAA 1999, asylum seekers were granted the right to seek
work six months after making a claim. This was abolished in July 2002, as the
government sought to emphasize the distinction between asylum processes
and labour migration channels – indeed, the NIAA 2002 introduced the concept
of ‘managed migration’, consolidating the separateness of asylum seekers
as a specific migrant group based on enforced non-productivity. The Labour
government retained some discretion, permitting those whose claims were
not resolved after twelve months to apply for permission to work (in accord
ance with the EU directive on minimum standards of reception, which duly
came into force in February 2005). A case in the EWHC, in December 2008, has
since declared this policy ‘unlawfully overboard’.22 Nonetheless, at the time of
writing, failed asylum claimants are still denied the right to work, and, coupled
with the stringent conditions attached to ‘hard case’ support for those whose
claim is exhausted (effectively, under section 4 of the IAA 1999, dependent on
an agreement to return home), tens of thousands are left vulnerable to exploi
tation and destitution.
Section 4 explicitly prohibits providing cash to asylum seekers whose claim
is refused and appeal rights are exhausted, as the support is intended to be
temporary and limited. Only self-catering accommodation and luncheon or
21 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004),
pp. 6 and 29.
22 House of Commons Library Standard Note SN/HA/1908, Asylum Seekers and the Right to
Work. See Tekle v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] EWHC 3064.
97

Postcolonial Asylum
supermarket vouchers are provided, as well as access to primary health care.

Clothes, travel expenses to attend reporting appointments, and secondary
health care are not covered by section 4, consolidating the impression that the
UK government is invested in a policy of restricting asylum seekers’ capacity to
act as social reproducers. In fact, because many failed asylum seekers are too
afraid to go home they are left without any access to public support, leading
the Joint Committee on Human Rights to accuse the government of ‘practising
a deliberate policy of destitution’.23
A similarly restrictive approach has been applied to the family life of asylum
seekers. The A&I(ToC)A 2004 acquired notoriety when it included provision, in
section 9, to withdraw the welfare support given to failed asylum seekers and,
where they refused to leave the UK voluntarily, to remove their children into
care. Section 9 was perhaps the most invidious example of the government’s
attempts to intervene in asylum claimants’ capacity to act as social reproducers:
during drafting of the bill, the then Minister for State, Beverley Hughes, informed
the House of Commons that ‘[t]he proposals are not intended to make all families
destitute. They are intended both as a deterrent but also an incentive’.24 A
combined report by Barnado’s and the Refugee Children’s Consortium declared
section 9 ‘incompatible’ with Article 8 of the ECHR, which ensures the right to
private and family life (in addition to breaching Article 3 and the prohibition
on inhuman or degrading treatment).25 The justification for section 9 is a clear
example of how, in the camp dispositif, contradiction produces illegality. David
Blunkett, the Home Secretary at the time, declared during the debate on the
Queen’s Speech that, ‘[i]n every circumstance in which parents make decisions
and are held responsible – whether it is parents who engage in unlawful action,
parents who neglect or abuse their children, or parents who are no longer
in receipt of benefits as a result of their actions – we have to take steps’.26
The Barnado’s/Refugee Children’s Consortium highlighted Blunkett’s pairing of
child abuse and immigration decisions as one of the starkest examples of the
misrepresentation of asylum seekers and the government’s policy of fetishizing
asylum – the policy is presented as a consequence of parental failings, which
the government must intervene to alleviate, concealing its own role in placing
children at risk in the first place.27
Because the fetish inspires a constant impulse to reproduce itself, its deploy
ment in asylum contexts demonstrates how reproduction is made abject by
states intent on proscribing access to their asylum provision. Section 9
was passed into law in 2004, and a pilot scheme involving 116 families was
23 Joint Committee on Human Rights, The Treatment of Asylum Seekers, Tenth Report of
2006–07, HL 81-I/HC 60-I, 30 March 2007, para. 120.
24 Beverley Hughes, quoted in The End of the Road: Families and Section 9 of the Asylum and
Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004 (Barnado’s/Refugee Children’s Consortium,
2005), p. 4. My emphasis.
25 The End of the Road, p. 17.
26 David Blunkett, quoted in The End of the Road, p. 11.
27 The End of the Road, p. 11.
98

Â�
introduced in Leeds, Manchester and London. Local authorities complained that
it created conflict with the stipulation in the Children’s Act 1989, to provide for
all children in need. In the end, only one family left the UK voluntarily under the
pilot scheme; a further three signed up for voluntary repatriation, but thirty-
two (over 25 percent) disappeared ‘underground’.28 This failure meant that the
section 9 pilot was not rolled out across the country and provision was made
in section 44 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 to repeal it.
However, as with the Australian government’s willingness to excise the entirety
of its territory from its own migration zone in the wake of the Tampa crisis,
section 9 demonstrates the excessive lengths to which sovereignty will go to
enforce control of its borders.
These features of asylum discourse in the UK reflect the problematic nature
of the family in asylum and refugee discourse more widely. The family occupies
an unstable position between public and private: representing on the one hand
a microcosm of the nation’s public incarnation within private space and on
the other, where the family is synonymous with the aggregation of ‘women-
and-children’, oppositionally sited as passive and other against the presump
tion that the normative refugee is individual and male (and capable of greater
agency). This presumption is original to the concept of ‘the refugee’ put forth
in the 1951 refugee convention, which made no provision for persecution on
the basis of gender or sexual orientation in its five criteria for refugee status,
and is still prevalent today. In 2008, nearly sixty years hence, the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) commented that ‘gender, displacement
and other factors combine to amplify discrimination against women and girls’.29
In this and in the following section, I will examine the application of polyphony
in asylum discourse and of acts of iterative resistance to the Â�experiences and
28 Inhumane and Ineffective – Section 9 in Practice: A Joint Refugee Council and Refugee Action
Report on the Section 9 Pilot (London: Refugee Council/ Refugee Action, 2006), p. 3. This
report notes the irony that, as the s9 pilot was introduced, the government was also
working to implement ‘Every Child Matters’, a programme to support the well-being of
every child in the UK. Inhumane and Ineffective, p. 6.
29 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Handbook for the Â�Protection of Women
and Girls (January 2008). Available at <www.unhcr.org/protect/PROTECTION/47cfa9fe2.
pdf>. Accessed 24 April 2009. Although as this book was being prepared for publica
tion, refusal rates for gay and lesbian asylum seekers in the UK were in the region of
90 percent, there were also signs of improvement, in terms of acknowledgeing that an
individual’s sexuality can lead to persecution of the kind covered by the 1951 Convention.
The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition’s programme for government promised to
end the deportation of asylum seekers whose claim is principally based on their sexual
orientation or gender identity; and in May 2010 the Supreme Court heard a challenge to
the law that permits gay asylum seekers to be returned to their country of origin if they
face homophobic persecution, on the basis of the ‘Anne Frank’ principle (which contends
that an individual would be safe from persecution if they concealed an aspect of their
identity). HM Government, The Coalition: Our Programme for Government (May 2010), p.
21. Afua Hirsch, ‘UK Policy on Gay and Lesbian Asylum Seekers Challenged in Supreme
Court’, Guardian (9 May 2010). Available at <www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/09/
supreme-court-gay-lesbian-asylum-seekers>. Accessed 14 May 2010.
99

Postcolonial Asylum
representation of female asylum seekers. I will argue that the (hetero) norma
tive representation of the refugee as male colludes in the introduction of a form
of negative polyphony into representations of women who claim asylum, which
suggests an incommensurability between the terms ‘woman’ and ‘refugee’. In the
next section I will examine how this implied incommensurability forecloses the
possibility for iterative self-staging among female asylum seekers. It is possible
to argue that, despite the construction of the normative refugee as male, there
is room for a re-visioning of the 1951 Convention that acknowledges gender-
specific experience. In the UK in 2008 the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal
(AIT) issued guidance that a Moldovan woman who was trafficked for prostitu
tion constituted a member of a specific social group (i.e., former victims of
sexual trafficking).30 The 1951 definition is not challenged, but re-imagined to
account for experiences it was previously blind to. However, this ‘re-visioning’
retains the conventional incorporation of women into international refugee law
as socially or culturally constructed (and thus apolitical) beings. Deciding to
read the abuse and forced displacement of women’s bodies in new ways is
one thing, then; fundamentally to alter the guiding assumptions behind the
grammar of gender in refugee law remains another matter. Any discussion of
the capacity to disrupt normative asylum configurations, whether in the legisla
tive context or in the wider discourse of asylum, must therefore attend to the
limits as well as the effectiveness of such iterative re-staging.
Jacqueline Bhabha has observed that in the UK women’s and children’s
asylum claims are often subsumed within the principle claim of the male head
of household. The aggregation of women and children is attributable, she
suggests, to a combination of normative (the adult male paradigm in refugee
law), institutional-ideological (a male-centred view of persecution) and proce
dural factors inherent in the UK asylum system.31 The Independent Asylum
Commission’s (IAC) 2008 report Fit for Purpose Yet? has also noted the possible
presence of a ‘male bias’ in the same system, which it suggests may be in part
a consequence of the lower number of asylum applications in the UK from
women (roughly 30 percent of applications in 2005 were from women).32 Yet,
at a global level, Bhabha notes that, while in every developed state male asylum
seekers significantly outnumber females, in every single developing country
of asylum neighbouring the refugees’ country of origin women and children
refugees substantially predominate.33 Thus if the institutional bias is a matter of
visibility, the global trend suggests that Spivak’s famous proclamation, that the
30 Robert Thomas, ‘Consistency in Asylum Adjudication: Country Guidance and the Asylum
Process’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 20/4 (2008), p. 511. See SB v. Secretary of
State for the Home Department (PSG – Protection Regulations – Reg 6) Moldova CG [2008]
UKAIT00002 (AIT).
31 Jacqueline Bhabha, ‘Demography and Rights: Women, Children and Access to Asylum’,
International Journal of Refugee Law, 16/2 (2004), pp. 227–228.
32 Independent Asylum Commission, Fit for Purpose Yet?: The Independent Asylum Commis-
sion’s Interim Report (London: Independent Asylum Commission, 2008), p. 72.
33 Bhabha, ‘Demography and Rights’, p. 232.
100

female subaltern is always more deeply in shadow than her male counterpart,
pertains also to the new subaltern.
The IAC report does not only attribute this institutional bias to the ratio
of applicants, however; it also notes a common lack of childcare facilities for
mothers attending substantive interviews.34 Under the new asylum model
(NAM), introduced in 2007, the substantive interview is the main opportunity
for an asylum applicant to make their case. Quoting a submission to the IAC
from the Scottish Refugee Policy Forum (SRPF), the IAC report states that inter
views were often held with children present, which negatively affected the
quality of decision making, increasing distraction for the woman and the case
owner, and inhibited the disclosure of traumatic experience that may be crucial
to the claim. Here we have a very direct illustration of how the asylum system,
in its blindness to the specific needs of female applicants creates a space for
their disappearance (the IAC report notes that ‘it has been argued that women
are rendered “invisible” in the asylum process’).35 The implicit message articu
lated by the absence of childcare facilities, which the SRPF suggests impacts
negatively upon the decision-making process, is that to be a mother is not
merely irrelevant to, but actively incompatible with, being a refugee.
The above is just one example of how women in the asylum system find
the effects of the ban are compounded by inattentiveness to their particular
needs as mothers; conversely, however, an excessive emphasis on the biological
and cultural reproductive capacities of woman asylum seekers also adversely
affects their reception. Along with the questions of biopolitics, ‘human waste
disposal’ and the (re)production of infrahumanity, the generative capability of
the woman asylum seeker is one of the main ambits through which the body,
in Paul Gilroy’s words, ‘circulates uneasily’ in contemporary discussions of
belonging and collectivity.36 The issue of asylum seekers in Ireland who gave
birth to an Irish citizen child is a case in point. Until January 2003, when the Irish
Supreme Court ruled that it was no longer a valid route to citizenship, giving
birth to a child in Ireland (which made the child an Irish citizen) also automati
cally conferred citizenship on the parent. This led to a widespread suspicion
that women were circumventing the asylum system by procreating in order
to remain in the country – ‘child-bearing against the State’, in Eithne Luibhé
id’s evocative phrase.37 In effect, these women were accused of subverting the
role women’s reproductive capacity has historically played in nation-building.
Luibhéid suggests that the state’s response was forcibly to display asylum
seekers’ reproductive and sexual activities, drawing the private life of the body
into the political arena, and silencing and racializing the women suspected of
procreating for passports, as the discussion of childbearing made it possible
34 Independent Asylum Commission, Fit for Purpose Yet?, p. 73.

Penguin, 2000), p. 24.
37 Eithne Luibhéid, ‘Childbearing Against the State?: Asylum Seeker Women in the Irish
Republic’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (2004), pp. 335–349.
101

Postcolonial Asylum
covertly to circulate the aggregation of biology, culture and nationhood that

is part of raciology. Asylum seeker women become, effectively, ‘modern-day
Sarah Bartmanns’.38
Luibhéid’s observation, raising as it does issues of forced display and the way
bodies are racialized, sexualized and read, identifies also the key concerns of
Kate Adshead’s one-woman play, The Bogus Woman, in which the black female
body is presented as the locus of dispute regarding sanctuary. The Bogus Woman
tells the story of an unnamed African journalist forced to flee her country for
criticizing the government and the abuses she suffers as part of her experi
ence of seeking asylum in the UK, including in detention in Campsfield IRC
during the riots of 1997. The play was inspired by the events in Campsfield, in
which detainees protested at the violent treatment of a Ghanaian detainee. In
an attempt to deter future protests the government prosecuted a number of
detainees, the ‘Campsfield Nine’, although the trial collapsed after seventeen
days. Adshead based her script on the trial transcript, as well as documentary
material provided by the Refugee Council and the Medical Foundation for the
Care of Victims of Torture, weaving together the voices of forty-eight characters
into a single polyvocal narrative. It was initially devised as a short play for The
Red Room in London in 1998, and developed through performance until its
premiere in Edinburgh in 2000.
The play’s title bears witness to the way the culture of disbelief surrounding
asylum fetishizes the female body and constructions of femininity. Indeed,
encoded in The Bogus Woman is a reference to the success of the right-wing print
media in the UK in establishing synonymy between ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘bogus’,
implying also a contradiction in the notion of a woman asylum seeker: either
a woman, transgressing against the normative-male construction embedded in
discourse on sanctuary, cannot be considered a deserving refugee in the same
way as a man, or to claim asylum is to transgress against some essential notion of
womanhood. This sense of the narrowness of the definition has been observed
by Bruna Irene Seu in relation to ‘the gendered representation of refugees as
professional beggars and scroungers, “the woman with the baby”’.39 Using data
gathered from eight semi-structured focus groups, Seu noted that when asked
to discuss their experiences of refugees, many participants preferred not to use
the term ‘refugee’, in favour of variations on the image of a woman begging
with an infant. ‘Refugee’ therefore is subject to a dual re-contextualization as
both beggar and mother. In contrast to a tendency in visual media towards
images of Madonna-like migrant mothers with their children (a trend that began
38 Luibhéid, ‘Childbearing Against the State?’, pp. 338, 341 and 343. Bartmann was a Khosa
woman who was enslaved in the early nineteenth century and forced to display her
body in travelling exhibits around Europe. She had a condition called steatopygia, which
produced an enlargement of the buttocks, as well as sinus pudoris, an enlargement of
the external labia common among Khosan women. On her death in 1815, her skeleton,
brain, and preserved genitals were displayed in France until 1974.
39 Bruna Irene Seu, ‘The Woman with the Baby: Exploring Narratives of Female Refugees’,
Feminist Review, 73 (2003), p. 158.
102

with Dorothea Lange’s famous picture, ‘Migrant Mother’, of Florence Owens

Thompson and her children in 1936 in Nipomo, California),40 which depict an
orderly, recognizable, non-threatening presence – one that concurs with the
stereotyped associations of domesticity and an essentialized femininity – the
refugee-mother-as-beggar represents the guest as threat or enemy, the hostile
flavour within Derrida’s neologism, ‘hostipitality’. The mothers who use their
children as an incentive to give transgress against a core value associated with
both motherhood and the woman-as-welcome, namely that they are themselves
givers, introducing disorder into the iconography of the family and thus into
the home itself. The dual incarnations of the mother and child image in very
different contexts is evidence of a split in the rhetoric of hospitality; the female
migrant is made to signify both the idealized refugee, as an icon of suffering,
and the abuse of hospitality.
This trend within discourse on woman asylum seekers reflects splits in
the wider discourse of labelling refugees; Roger Zetter has observed how the
‘fractioning’ of ‘refugee’ into increasingly limited (and pejorative) subcategories
represents a politicized attempt to reconstruct discourse around asylum as a
discourse of refusal. Within much asylum and refugee discourse, then, ‘refugee’
and ‘woman’ are only considered compatible if framed by certain orderly forms
of representation; where the female migrant presents a counter-will to that of
the sovereignty of the host, a split forms between the two terms ‘refugee’ and
‘woman’. The woman asylum seeker comes to embody the exception, where
she is both the law (of sameness) and its transgression.
The Bogus Woman articulates how the discourse that casts the woman asylum
seeker as the embodiment of the ban focuses on the body. The woman’s narra
tive is punctuated with accounts of sexual abuse, which creates an impression of
contiguous (non-specified African and British) contexts of sexual violence: she is
raped by government militia in her home as her mother, husband and child are
killed, subject to invasive examinations by medical staff in Campsfield and daily
strip searches, observed in the shower and forced into prostitution when she is
made destitute. She is several times referred to as ‘black meat’, compounding
Luibhéid’s observation that the woman asylum seeker is a contemporary Sarah
Bartmann as well as identifying her as, like Joy Gardner, a racialized homo sacer.
The accumulation of incidents of abuse overwhelms the woman’s efforts to
make her body also a tool of protest, when she undergoes a hunger strike. As
a consequence of the riots, the woman reports the implementation of a ‘new
rule’, ‘[t]he daily body search’.41 In an effort to counter the subsequent feeling of
violation, she has a shower but is disturbed by a guard watching her. He ‘almost
| loses his skin | when I scream’, a moment of hyperbole that counterpoints her
own self-inflicted wounds as a response to this invasion:
40 See Terence Wright, ‘Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees’, Visual
Studies, 17/1 (2002), pp. 53–66.
41 Kate Adshead, The Bogus Woman (London: Oberon Books, 2009), pp. 57, 123 and 64.
103

Postcolonial Asylum
Shame is like a fire.

In the shower
I tore at my own flesh
pulling at my check
to rip skin
from bone
clawing my own breasts,
banging my skull
against the cracked tiles.42
The woman’s somatic alienation echoes that described by Fanon, as ‘an amputa
tion, an excision, a haemorrhage’; subject to the white gaze, the black body is,
Fanon says, wholly dislocated from the self, ‘surrounded by an atmosphere of
certain uncertainty’.43 The woman’s dislocation from her body thus comes to
stand for the certain uncertainty that permeates life in detention.
The failings of NAM and the iniquities of section 9 bear out Adshead’s asser
tion that, always viewed through the optic of their (sexualized and racialized)
bodies, asylum seeker women are denied recognition as mothers. As with the
women accused of childbearing against the Irish state, immigrant fertility is
viewed, if at all, as a source of threat. In The Bogus Woman one guard misin
terprets an embrace between the woman and one of the Campsfield Nine, and
warns,
Turn a blind,
and
we’d have
enough
little black monkeys
in a blinking,
to sink
all Kidlington.44
The caution is an implicit reference to the fear that the UK would be ‘swamped’
by immigrants propagated by the right-wing media and the government. This
assumption that asylum seeker women possess an excessive sexuality equates
with the perception of them as transgressive. In The Bogus Woman the woman’s
claim to have been raped and to have conceived the day after giving birth to
her baby is deemed incredible; her cell-mate Mary is deported despite having a
British partner and young son.
Jacqueline Bhabha, Susan Kneebone and Thomas Spijkerboer all assert that
normative views of ‘proper’ behaviour colour the reception of women’s asylum
claims in asylum determinations. Writing of the UK, Bhabha suggests that where
women conform to a specific ‘victimology’ – ‘the weak Muslim woman […]
the female victim of brutal tribal norms’ – they are more likely to be awarded
42 Adshead, The Bogus Woman, p. 65.
43 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 79 and 78.
104

status; Kneebone, similarly, observes that, in the Australian system, ‘good

woman’ claims, i.e., those that arise from the woman’s role as wife/mother/
sister, are most likely to be accepted.45 Regarding credibility determinations
in the Netherlands, Spijkerboer argues that fixed notions of the appropriate
level of emotional display in communicating their stories significantly affects
credibility by linking deviation from the norm with implausibility. Thus, female
applicants who leave their families behind are not simply judged to have failed
to conform to the norm, but deemed incredible. In terms of emotional display
when discussing, for instance, sexual violence, a deficit is seen as evidence of
implausibility, whereas a surfeit suggests playacting. Such expectations, Spijker
boer suggests, are specific to women.46 These examples, from the UK, Australia
and the Netherlands, ought to be read as a counterpoint to the controversy
surrounding childbearing among asylum seekers in Ireland, illustrating sover
eignty’s capacity to subvert its own norms (i.e., the ‘good woman’ is equated
with motherhood) in its own interests.
This conditioning of plausibility in relation to standards of female behav
iour extends also to the female body. The woman’s story in Adshead’s play
is not deemed credible because it presents inconsistencies with the condi
tion of her body: her reference to injuries indicating sexual violence, ‘bruising
and lacerations | to the anus and vagina’, is contradicted by the presence
only of injuries ‘consistent with a barroom brawl’.47 Thus, while Didier Fassin
and Estelle d’Halluin have correctly pointed out the increasing prevalence of
articulate bodies in asylum seeker testimony, for women asylum seekers the
body is a less reliable witness.48 Kneebone has observed that the emergence of
45 Bhabha, ‘Demography and Rights’, p. 231; Susan Kneebone, ‘Women Within the Refugee
Context: “Exclusionary Inclusion” in Policy and Practice – The Australian Experience’,
International Journal of Refugee Law, 17/1 (2005), p. 10.
46 Thomas Spijkerboer, Gender and Refugee Status (Dartmouth: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 56 and 64.
48 See Didier Fassin and Estelle d’Halluin, ‘The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as
Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers’, American Anthropologist, 107/4 (2005), pp. 597–608.
In fact, UKBA’s Human Provenance Pilot, which proposed to employ DNA testing to deter
mine asylum claimants’ nationality via their ethnic origins, indicates that asylum seekers’
bodies are being used by the state against their own interests. The process combined
analysis of mitochondrial DNA (passed on via the maternal line) and Y chromosomes from
the paternal line, with isotope analysis of hair and fingernail samples to check levels of
isotopes found in the region they claimed to hail from. Although the Human Provenance
Pilot was suspended in mid-2010 following widespread criticism, the suggested link
between biological material, ethnicity and nationality is, to say the least, alarming. The
scheme was condemned by Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA fingerprinting, as ‘naïve
and scientifically flawed’, and neglectful of the fact that people’s ethnicity does not
prevent them from moving from place to place. Such, then, is the hostility towards unreg
ulated movement implicit in this new test, that it effectively cannot properly comprehend
the nature of its subject. Henry Porter, ‘A Deeply Flawed DNA Test’, Guardian (2 October
2009). Available at <www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/oct/02/
dna-test-asylum-seekers>. Accessed 16 October 2009. John Jarvis, ‘Asylum Seekers DNA
Pilot Scheme Dropped’, Journal (25 May 2010). Â�Available at <www.journal-online.co.uk/
article/5904-asylum-seekers-dna-pilot-scheme-dropped>. Accessed 25 May 2010.
105

Postcolonial Asylum
new kinds of persecution in the latter half of the twentieth century, including
systematic rape, has challenged the post-Second World War basis of the refugee
definition in ideological differences, but without prompting change in the insti
tutional bias towards the normative refugee as male. Exclusionary inclusion
is exacerbated in the case of woman asylum seekers, she argues, by interna
tional refugee law’s habitual assumption that women’s activities are private and
apolitical.49 Spijkerboer also argues that the construction of what is a political
act, and what constitutes persecution, in refugee determinations, excludes
experiences of sexual violence or the obtrusion of the State in women’s repro
ductive capacities. Affective acts, such as non-compliance in China’s one-child
policy, are considered non-political. Persecution is determined as physical, but
directed at the mind of the victim rather than their body: ‘when directed at the
body, it is considered private violence’, as in the case of sexual violence, and
not therefore extant at the level of state action.50 As both Adshead’s play and
its contemporary epitexts demonstrate, despite the overwhelming number of
instances where women are subject to forced displacement, then, the ingrained
association of women with their bodies, and the concomitant polarization of
the physical and the political, conspire to exclude women from the construction
of ‘the refugee’.
Re/producing ‘home’
As with the emphasis on the sexualized body and reproductive capacity, the
prevalence of associations between ‘family’ and ‘home’ are key to the way
woman asylum seekers are simultaneously included and excluded in asylum
discourse, where domestic metaphors proliferate, from the house as metonym
of the nation to Bauman’s description of the management of mobile popula
tions as waste management. This prevalence fixes the female domestic migrant
worker in a contradiction, within the construction of ‘woman’ as metonym of
the home, between ‘domestic worker’ as creator of order within the home,
and ‘migrant’ as the displaced waste product of globalization. Domestic work
takes place at a site of constantly reproducing discourse on human value; it is
an essential part of the reproduction of social relations. The implication of a
continuous process is tremendously significant in terms of describing the place
of the female migrant in the domestic economy. Gedalof has taken exception
to the construction of home as a space of being, associated with the women
whose reproductive work sustains it, opposed to the mobility and fluidity of
spaces of becoming associated with public life, political activity and citizen
ship. Instead, she argues for a complex renegotiation of this binary logic that
recognizes home as a space of becoming, ‘produced through a constant process
of adjustment, transformation, negotiation, redefinition – a never-ending,
49 Kneebone, ‘Women Within the Refugee Context’, pp. 9 and 7.

50 Spijkerboer, Gender and Refugee Status, pp. 65 and 101.
106

ongoing work to reproduce the appearance of stability and fixity that is part of
the imagined community’.51 Similarly, Sara Ahmed has criticized the association
of home with being as the purification and excision of desire from the space
of the home; rather, Ahmed suggests that ‘[t]here is already strangeness and
movement within the home itself’; as the Nation ‘requires the proximity of “stran-
gers” within that space […] [as] a mechanism for the demarcation of the national
body’, so the ‘home’ needs to be thought of, in Gedalof’s words, as a ‘space of
dissonance where a counter-discourse may emerge that refines the equivalence
of belonging with stasis’, and which plays host to a constant process of repro
duction: not a rejection of women’s central place in social reproduction, but
rather how reproductive work is defined.52
Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things effectively illustrates the relationship
between social reproduction (hospitality, relationality) and their abject forms in
the shadowy world of black market immigrant labour. The film follows Okwe,
a Nigerian migrant without permission to be in the UK, and Senay, a young
Turkish asylum seeker. Neither has permission to work; nonetheless, both are
employed in a London Hotel (‘The Baltic’): Okwe as night receptionist and Senay
as a hotel maid. Okwe also works during the day as a taxi driver and, along with
Juliette, a British woman working as a prostitute in the hotel, Ivan, the Russian
doorman, and Guo-Yi, a refugee working in a nearby hospital crematorium, the
film has been rightly commended for its portrayal of the clandestine labour that
sustains the British service economy (Senay also finds work in a sweatshop and
Okwe is at one point required to disguise himself as a hotel cleaner to steal
medicines). In addition, the film mixes elements of the thriller genre, in terms
of Okwe’s discovery of a human heart in a hotel bathroom, and the subse
quent revelation that Juan, the Spanish kitchen manager, has been involved in
trafficking the kidneys of irregular migrants in exchange for new (European)
identities (dramatizing Agamben’s assertion of the biopolitical nature of citizen
ship: when Okwe investigates why a Somali man submitted to a transplant in
the hotel, the man’s father-in-law tells him, ‘He is English now’).53 Okwe, who
was a doctor in Nigeria, is eventually blackmailed into operating on Senay, but
turns the tables on Juan by drugging him and taking his kidney instead. The film
ends with Okwe and Senay at the airport, about to leave the UK with their new
identities – she to New York; he returning to his daughter in Nigeria.
While the conflation of the two forms, socio-realism and thriller, is a little
jarring, leaving a sense of two distinct halves to the film rather than a fully
integrated whole, it also very effectively illustrates how the reproduction of the
51 Irene Gedalof, ‘Taking (a) Place: Female Embodiment and the Re-grounding of Commu
nity’, in Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Ann-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller (eds),
Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (New York and Oxford: Berg,
2003), p. 101.
52 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London and New
York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 87–88 and 100. Emphasis in the original. Gedalof, ‘Taking
(a) Place’, pp. 101 and 93.
53 Stephen Frears (dir.), Dirty Pretty Things (UK: Miramax, 2002).
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Postcolonial Asylum
clean, glittering surfaces of modern life (the ‘pretty things’ of the title) relies
on the unseen, repetitive work of those categorized as ‘waste humanity’ (the
‘dirty’). The title Dirty Pretty Things demonstrates how the film is framed by
forms of abject reproduction. When Okwe confronts Juan about the human
heart, Juan justifies a policy of silence that also efficiently describes how hospi
tality and waste management intersect in the environment of the hotel: ‘The
hotel business is about strangers. And strangers will always surprise you. They
come to hotels in the night and do dirty things. In the morning, it’s our job to
make things look pretty again.’54 By concentrating on scenes in either the hotel
or the hospital crematorium, Frears consolidates the correspondence between
the reproductive work within the hotel and waste management as the disposal
of bodies. Indeed, in one scene, Guo-Yi’s greeting to Okwe in the crematorium
– ‘welcome to my hotel!’ – makes this correspondence explicit.55 The repetitive
work of cleaning the hotel and disposing of the guests’ (who as citizens are also,
in a sense, hosts to the immigrant staff) waste precludes alterity by refusing to
acknowledge the proximity of strangeness within the hotel.
Nonetheless, the clandestine characters do attempt to unsettle this recur
sive process and introduce alterity to repetition. Kevin Foster has observed the
absence of conventional family structures in Dirty Pretty Things, which antici
pates the interventions into asylum seeker families in the section 9 legislation.
These are replaced by a series of improvised, quasi-familial arrangements –
such as Okwe sharing Senay’s flat, the semi-sibling relationship between Okwe
and Guo-Yi and, to a lesser extent, Senay and Juliette – that demonstrate the
migrants’ aptitude to act as social and cultural reproducers.56 Sarah Gibson
argues that, in revealing how the service economy of ‘illegal’ migrants makes
possible the home of the host, Dirty Pretty Things presents a Derridean inversion
of hospitality.57 The aspect of Derrida’s interventions in the ethics of hospitality
that has perhaps the most resonance for postcolonial studies is his disruption
of the order of precedence between host and guest: because the power to
welcome is only realized in the presence of a guest, the host ‘comes to enter
his home through the guest – […] enters from the inside as if he came from the
outside’.58 The guest is invested with the host’s potential to define the nature
of the welcome, making the home as place of sovereignty also into a place of
différance. However, the film also makes clear that Okwe and Senay’s ability to
utilize iteration as a strategy of resistance is definitely gendered. Okwe very
effectively incarnates Derrida’s formulation of the guest who is host to the host.
The opening scene of the film shows him at the airport in his capacity as a taxi
54 Frears, Dirty Pretty Things.

56 Kevin Foster, ‘Migrants, Asylum Seekers and British Identity’, Third Text, 20/6 (2006),
p.â•›â•›689.
57 Sarah Gibson, ‘“The Hotel Business is About Strangers”: Border Politics and Hospitable
Spaces in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things’, Third Text, 20/6 (2006), pp. 700–701.
58 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 125. Emphasis in the original.
108

driver greeting new arrivals to the UK; he tells one group of travellers, with a
combination of irony and resourcefulness, ‘I’m not here to meet you in partic
ular, but I am here to rescue those who have been let down by the system’.59
In his role as the hotel’s night receptionist, he is also charged with welcoming
guests (who, whether they are British citizens or tourists, represent the ‘host’
in relation to Okwe’s clandestine status) across the threshold. Okwe effectively
demonstrates the sense of conjunctive difference, the host’s ‘difference with
itself’ that is at the heart of Derrida’s notion of chez soi, to be ‘at home with
one’s self’, which marks the condition of the host.60 What hospitality repro
duces, then, is its own self-contradiction, the inevitable transferability between
host and guest. In effect, his status as a ‘normative’ (male) migrant guarantees
his invisibility, enabling him to act as surrogate host. By contrast, Senay, whose
reproductive work must be kept invisible so as not to unsettle the veneer of
recursive sameness, is subject to surveillance whenever she enters the hotel –
as each of the maids arrives for their shift, they are required to present their
faces clearly to a security camera in the hotel entrance.
The contrast in Okwe and Senay’s experiences of in/visibility is underlined by
the fact that one of Okwe’s duties is to monitor and change the security tapes
that record Senay’s arrivals. This is most evident in the scene where representa
tives of the fictionalized ‘Immigration Enforcement Directive’ (IED), suspicious
that Senay has broken the terms of her asylum by working in the hotel, arrive
just before the early morning shift change to verify the identity of the maids
checking in for work.61 They are entirely unfazed by Okwe’s presence as recep
tionist, despite his irregular status. Thus, whereas he is free to face the IED
officers, Okwe and Ivan are forced to conspire to draw Senay away from the
hotel security camera before she is discovered. I suggest that it is because she
is a woman that Senay’s place in the asylum system, especially regarding (repro
ductive) work, is, in a sense, unreconciled, whereas Okwe’s ‘normative’ status
allows him, paradoxically, to remain undetected and on display.
This disparity also echoes a problematic aspect of Derrida’s hospitality theory.
Derrida’s conflation of host and guest depends upon there being something
anterior to the host that guarantees the welcome. Crucially, this is the point for
Derrida where hospitality is marked by sexual difference. Following Levinas, he
declares that ‘the hospitable welcome par excellence […] is the Woman’.62 While
Derrida’s work scrupulously evades binaries – the host and guest, for instance,

60 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki, 5/3 (2000), pp. 4 and 7. See also Jacques Derrida,
The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Braultand and Michael
B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 9–10.
61 The fictionalization of the rather sinister IED adds to the film’s slightly confused
approach to the specifics of the asylum process in the early 2000s. Senay is referred to
as an asylum seeker, and as having ELR status (‘exceptional leave to remain’, at the time
equivalent to temporary refugee status).
62 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 36. Emphasis in the original.
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Postcolonial Asylum
exist in a reciprocal relationship, reproducing themselves through the presence

of the other – here his thinking seems to accommodate a problematic associ
ation of home with an incarnation of the feminine. The originary welcome,
defined as ‘Woman’, guarantees ‘chez soi’, the home and the state of being at
home with oneself. If we recall Levinas’s contention that it is the stranger who
disturbs the chez soi, we have to ask, what then for the woman who is also a
stranger? Although Derrida insists that he refers not to ‘empirical women’ but to
‘the dimension of femininity’ within ethics, such a formulation recalls a problem
atic gendered construction of home founded on stasis and sameness, which is
seen in the necessary invisibility of Senay’s reproductive work in the hotel.63
The final act of the film, in which the thriller elements are foregrounded at
the expense of the socio-realist concerns (even the film’s most direct comment
on the situation of irregular migrants – Okwe’s announcement that, ‘we are
the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cars, we clean
your rooms and suck your cocks’ – seems contrived in comparison with its
earlier portrayal of immigrant life),64 culminates in a fantasy of escape in which
Okwe’s active agency and Senay’s passivity are reinforced. When she agrees to
sell her kidney for an Italian passport and visa to America, Okwe undertakes to
rescue her, first by agreeing to perform the operation himself, then devising
an elaborate plan to replace Senay with Juan, providing a fantasy of justice
and freedom in which the waiting patient receives their kidney and Okwe and
Senay are able to leave the UK. For much of the final third act, Okwe’s dynamic
presence (moving unimpeded through the city, stealing medicines and equip
ment from the hospital, preparing for the operation) contrasts markedly with
Senay, who is for the most part confined to a room in the hotel and wears only
a dressing gown, until she is rescued by Okwe. Her passivity and victimhood are
underlined by the fact that Juan insists that they have sex to ‘clinch the deal’.
As it presents iteration as a strategy of resistance, then, Dirty Pretty Things also
reproduces the assumptions of the normative refugee as male.
The implications of Derrida’s feminized hospitality are not straightforward.
It suggests that the masculine, colonial presupposition of the host-as-sovereign
is always preceded, and therefore undermined, by the feminine originary
welcome; 65 yet the extent to which this suggests that the woman-as-guest can
participate in the postcolonial implications of Derrida’s inversions, however,
is potentially proscribed by the problematic association of ‘home’ and ‘being’
with an incarnation of the feminine. I contend that Derrida’s reading of Levinas
leads to a consideration of the place of ‘the woman’ in the welcome that, for
all his qualifications, is problematically proximal to the equation of home (and
therefore woman) as being, or stasis. It has been widely recognized that one
of the principle reproductive functions of the female domestic worker is to
63 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 44.

65 Derrida remarks that the host is always ‘male in the first instance’, following the logic
that the host’s sovereignty extends to his mastery of the family. Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’,
pp. 13–14.
110

enable her female employer to enter into a full mode of citizenship. As Kristen
Hill Maher has observed, the traditionally subordinated female role ‘is gradu
ally being shifted from one group of women to another, from citizens to
migrants’.66 Rather than interrupt the sovereignty of the host-employer, the
reproductive work of the migrant female domestic worker reproduces it. In
light of this, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s comment that
this compounds ‘the invisibility of the migrant woman and her work’,67 presents
us with a troubling resonance with Levinas’s assertion that the ‘Woman’ is ‘the
other whose presence is discreetly an absence’.68
Notions of home and reproduction, and the tensions within normative
versions of ‘woman’ and ‘migrant’, are also negotiated in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret.
Najwa, the daughter of a highly ranked Sudanese politician, is forced to claim
political asylum in the UK following a coup in which her father is executed,
and becomes a domestic worker in the home of a wealthy Egyptian–Sudanese
family. Her reduced experiences as a refugee contrast greatly with the cosmo
politan life of privilege she had previously enjoyed, but also lead to an increased
interest in Islam, a source of solace that also inspires a burgeoning romantic
relationship with the devout brother of her employer.
Minaret opens on the threshold of a home. As Najwa approaches the flat
of her employers for the first time she reflects that, ‘I’ve come down in the
world. I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn’t much room
to move’.69 Najwa’s presence enables her employer Lamya to study for her
PhD, and Lamya’s mother, Dr Zeinab, to travel abroad on business. Within
this restricted space, then, Najwa’s engagement in domestic reproduction
articulates a tension between Gedalof’s revisioning of the home as a space of
dissonance and counter-discourse, and Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s observa
tion that Western individualism, of the sort exhibited by Lamya and Dr Zeinab,
compounds the invisibility of migrant women’s work.70 This tension is apparent
in the way Najwa relates to the two most significant spaces in her life in London:
her workplace and the Regents Park Mosque. ‘Home’ and ‘Islam’ emerge as
sites where the novel’s investigation of iteration and inversion as strategies
available to female refugees and asylum seekers is played out. The minaret
of the Regent’s Park mosque serves as a fixed point of orientation; on several
occasions, Najwa is able to fix herself in the disorienting space of London by it,
signifying the consolidating effect of her emerging religious faith in the ‘empty
space is called freedom’.71
66 Kristen Hill Maher, ‘Globalized Social Reproduction: Women Migrants and the Citizen
ship Gap’, in Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir (eds), People Out of Place: Globalization,
Human Rights and the Citizenship Gap (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 139.
67 Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, ‘Introduction’, in Barbara Ehrenreich
and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the
New Economy (London: Granta, 2003), p. 4.
68 Levinas, quoted in Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 36.
69 Leila Aboulela, Minaret (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 1.
70 Ehrenreich and Hochschild, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.
71 Aboulela, Minaret, p. 175.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Throughout Minaret Najwa is obsessed with noting instances where sameness

and difference collide, particularly the inversion of circumstances in which she
finds herself, as a domestic servant in a wealthy Sudanese household, in a
similar position to that of servants and migrant workers she encountered in
Khartoum (the housemaid she nicknamed ‘Donna Summer’ and the Eritrean
lifeguard at the American club pool in Khartoum). It is in the mosque and the
home of her employers that the tension between Najwa’s desire for communal
identification and iterative restaging as a strategy of resistance are played out.
On the one hand, Najwa find that her domestic and religious activities allow
her to lose herself. Regarding Lamya, she states, ‘This is my aim, to become the
background to her life’, an ambition that recalls the absolution she experiences
at prayer times in the mosque: ‘I realize in the middle of the prayer that I don’t
know who is next to me on the other side, whose arm is brushing my right arm,
whose clothes are brushing my clothes.’72 Similarly, her work reproduces the
home of her employers, expunging difference; she notes with satisfaction that
through domestic work ‘[t]he days follow a rhythm’.73 As in the Tajweed class
in the mosque, where she learns proper Quranic pronunciation, Najwa values
repetition as a pathway to being-as-stasis. Domestic reproduction is therefore
presented not as the process of constant adjustment imagined by Gedalof, but
as the reproduction of sameness.
However, the confluence of Najwa’s roles in the mosque and her employer’s
home also demonstrates the possibilities inherent within iterative stagings
of these places. The mosque Najwa encounters is a distinctly feminized space.
Thus, the repetitive action of praying, as it draws her into a sense of community
with the women around her, also recasts the conventionally masculine space of
the mosque as one in which female experience is central. Najwa’s relationship
with Tamer also establishes her as the threatening guest – the one who does
not ‘respect […] the order of the house’.74 That which is the basis of her affinity
with sameness – the faith she shares with Tamer – in fact becomes the basis of
the intrusion of alterity into the home.
Minaret thus illustrates the fundamental instability of the notion of reproduc
tive work as reproducing sameness. In fact, it is apparent that, within the camp
dispositif, this ‘sameness’ is variously deployed to create disjuncture between
normative understandings of both ‘woman’ and ‘migrant’. Implicit in the values
of multiculturalism is the presumption that the migrant woman’s repetitive
sameness (associated with non-Western, traditional values) threatens to disrupt
the space of tolerant, forward-thinking multicultural society. Multiculturalism,
Irene Gedalof argues, requires ‘a stable sense of predetermined identity’ before
it can accommodate difference; thus, where hospitality demands that the guest
conform to the order of the household, in this case a sense of progressive
72 Aboulela, Minaret, pp. 65 and 79.

tions, 2006), p. 97.
112

tolerance of difference, the non-cosmopolitan woman asylum seeker, in her

role as cultural reproducer, presents a particular threat: she stands, ‘in her
ignorant sameness, for the limits of difference that cannot be absorbed without
shaking the stability of identity’.75 Yet, where migrant women deviate from
certain required forms of female ‘sameness’, they also threaten to introduce the
unhomely into the home.
These questions of sameness and the (un)homely rest most clearly on Najwa’s
decision to wear the hijab. When she first ventures out in London wearing a
headscarf she notes that ‘[a]round me was a new gentleness. The builders who
had leered down at me from scaffoldings couldn’t see me anymore’.76 The hijab
releases her from the pressure of the gaze, effacing her in the public scene
just as she aspires to eliminate otherness within the home of her employer.
Yet Najwa also begins to wear the hijab as a point of protest, to distinguish
and separate herself from Anwar, her atheist boyfriend. Seyla Benhabib has
described how wearing the hijab can constitute a form of democratic iteration,
where ‘every repetition is a form of variation’, imagining iterative acts as a way
for the disaggregated citizen to revise the terms of their belonging. She refers
to l’affaire du foulard, or the scarf affair, when three scarf-wearing Muslim girls
were excluded from school in 1989, for violating the principle of secularization
in the French education system. She reads the girls’ decision as ‘a conscious
political gesture’, reproducing them as French citizens with a distinctive and
complementary Muslim identity. As an iterative act, their gesture resignifies
modes of French citizenship; but furthermore, as Benhabib asserts, it also
‘resignif[ies] the wearing of the scarf’77 – removing it from arguments about
female modesty and sexual repression and relocating it as an act of conscience.
Najwa’s decision to adopt the hijab is not politically motivated; furthermore,
her comment on first wearing a head scarf in front of Anwar – that ‘[i]t was like
the day in Selfridges when I had tried on that skimpy black dress and walked
out of the changing room to twirl in front of him’ – acknowledges that hijab
occupies a place in the register of the male gaze. But it also articulates a refusal
to reproduce sameness. Although the hijab ‘tidies’ her naturally unruly appear
ance, the ordered self Najwa discovers in the mirror is not a consolidation of
herself, but ‘another version of myself’.78 It is significant that Aboulela locates
this episode, which takes place in 1991, between the events in 2004 when
her relationship with Tamer is discovered and when she loses her job. Najwa
appears, not as the invisible reproducer of the home, but as a threat to the
order of the home, as the guest(-worker) who ‘might be an assassin’, puncturing
her fantasy of being unobtrusively ‘part of a family […] I know them in intimate
ways while they hardly know me, as if I am invisible’.79 While it provides an
75 Gedalof, ‘Unhomely Homes’, pp. 88–90.

77 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), pp. 179, 189 and 191.
78 Aboulela, Minaret, pp. 248, 245 and 246.
79 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Perfectibility, Responsibility’, p. 94; Aboulela, Minaret, p. 83.
113

Postcolonial Asylum
experience of invisibility in public, then, Najwa’s adoption of the hijab also

signifies her troubling presence in the home of her secular employers.
Minaret explores the difficulties involved in reproducing a positive sense of
disruption and disorder in a discourse that is so heavily in debt to domestic
metaphors of order and disorder. Najwa’s relationship with the home turns on
the tension between her determination to understand reproductive work as
the repetition of order and the insistent occurrence of repetition as iteration.
It is significant that the book begins and ends on a point of threshold, with her
arrival at the flat, and then preparing to undertake the Hajj, situating Najwa
on the threshold of indistinction that constitutes the ban. Minaret demon
strates how the woman asylum seeker or refugee is reproduced in terms of the
ban – included inasmuch as she incarnates the law of the host (the feminized
welcome) and simultaneously excluded as the law’s transgression that intro
duces the unhomely into the home.
Continua
So far I have traced a series of iterative acts and contexts, from the way the
asylum claim simultaneously confirms and disrupts the authority of the sover
eign host to the sovereign’s revision of reproduction as abjection (producing the
asylum seeker as ‘illegal’ and ‘waste humanity’) and the implication of this for
women asylum seekers in particular. Derrida’s theory that hospitality contains
its own contradiction offers a possible response to the sovereign insistence
that the guest reproduce without deviation the order of the home; yet in the
context of the work done by asylum seekers and other migrants, illegal or
otherwise, this strategy is revealed as contingent upon how the subject and
their work are gendered. Up to this point I have focused on that which can limit
the effectiveness of iterative acts; this is not to suggest, however, that there is
no useful application of iteration. In the remainder of this chapter I will consider
how Homi Bhabha’s theory of vernacular cosmopolitanism, which establishes a
‘continua’ between different stagings of sovereign power, can provide a means
to speak that does not necessarily involve speaking the law.
Bauman’s characterization of contemporary global politics as preoccupied
with the management of ‘waste humans’ indicates how Achille Mbembe’s
distinction between the colony (characterized by an emphasis on territoriality,
‘civilising’ and productivity) and the postcolony’s emphasis on unproductivity
as an extension of necropower (appropriating and prohibiting the potential
to act as a demonstration of state power) collapses in the camp dispositif.80
Â�‘Unproductive’ shifts as a designation for the subjects of sovereign power
from the postcolony to the former colony that is host to asylum claimants – as
demonstrated in the UK by the prohibitions on asylum seekers finding paid
employment.
80 Achille Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, Africa, 62/1 (1992), p. 14.
114

The nexus of productivity and unproductivity in which asylum seekers are

caught is documented by Tina Gharavi’s eight-hour digital installation Asylum
Carwash (2007), which depicts in real time a full working day for the employees
of ‘Frankie’s Carwash’ in South Shields. The work was commissioned for the
Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens by Tyne and Wear Archives, and
was inspired by the decision of the owner, Frankie Khan, to employ asylum
seekers. Gharavi said that the film was about ‘our hypocrisy over illegal migrant
labour’.81 The timing of the work to coincide with the bicentenary of the aboli
tion of the slave trade draws attention to the situation of those deprived of the
right to work (and subjected to the dangers of black market labour or destitu
tion), together with a particularly historicized consciousness. The installation
was opened on 30 August 2007 by Malawian poet Jack Mapanje, who wrote a
poem to mark the occasion:
Opening Tina’s ‘Asylum Carwash’ project
At Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens
The other night was the easiest part; you
Needed only to cite the slave trade abolition
Bicentenary and invoke the composer of
‘Amazing Grace’ that the globe reveres
More than the slaves he brutalised before
He suitably repented – and the job’s done.82
Mapanje scorns the triteness of simply remarking on the association between

the Atlantic slave trade and its modern incarnations; while obvious and neces
sary, the connection can be made cheaply. Rather, he invokes a sense of a
collective problem: ‘The greatest challenge for all’ is
whether we are listening or merely

Taking ‘Asylum Carwash’ as another ‘Amazing
Grace’ in the atlas of our abolition of slaveries!83
Mapanje suggests that the nexus of productivity and unproductivity that is the
asylum carwash merges with a historicized sensibility to ask difficult questions
about the nature of the postcolonial ‘we’. What Mapanje gestures towards is
a Bhabhaian continua, the acknowledgement through contiguity of a responsi
bility indelibly marked by incommensurability, disruption and what Bhabha calls
‘unsatisfaction’.84
81 Asylum Carwash also formed part of a travelling exhibition, delivered through the Engaging
Refugees & Asylum Seekers project; a partnership project between National Museums
Liverpool, Salford Museums and Art Gallery, Tyne and Wear Museums and Leicester
City Museums Service. Available at <http://vimeo.com/12666872>. Accessed 19 October
2010. Tina Gharavi, ‘Backing for Carwash Boss’, Shields Gazette (20 February 2008).
82 Jack Mapanje, ‘Upon Opening Tina’s “Asylum Carwash”’, in FWords (Leeds: Peepal Tree
Press, 2007), p. 18.
83 Mapanje, ‘Upon Opening Tina’s “Asylum Carwash”’, p. 19.
84 Homi Bhabha, ‘Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in Gregory Castles (ed.), Postcolonial
Discourses (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 44.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Bhabha’s notion of continua is developed in his reading of Adrienne Rich’s

poem ‘Eastern War Time’, which presents multiple scenes of displacement and
necropower:
I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating
[…]
â•…â•…â•…â•…â•›I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin
A river in Mississippi. […]
I am standing here in your poem. Unsatisfied.85
For Bhabha, Rich’s iterative staging of enunciation avoids ‘historical paral

lelism’; rather, by means of its ‘parallaxal shift[s]’ it provides a ‘realignment of
memory and the present as an “atlas of the difficult world”, that articulates a
defiant and transformative “dissatisfaction”, a dissonance at the heart of that
complacent circle that constitutes “our fellow city dwellers”’. Like Mapanje’s
rejection of the facile compilation of an ‘atlas of the abolition of slaveries’ in
favour of interrogating the postcolonial ‘we’, Bhabha reads in each ‘I’ an irreduc
ible singularity that nonetheless can be contiguously related to the rest. This
is achieved through continua, an ‘iterative agency’ committed to a stance of
‘unsatisfaction’. As Bhabha says, ‘[t]he subject of “unsatisfaction” […] keeps
setting new, disjunctive scenes of repetition for the recognition, perhaps
misrecognition of the speaking “I”’.86 He insists that ‘unsatisfaction’ should not
be confused with lack, but rather represents a praxis of dissensus that disrupts
the fixed sense of proximity and distance that constitutes a ‘we’ in collusion
with the sovereign nation; instituting a ‘process of “unanticipated transforma
tion” of what is local and what is global’.87
While Bhabha has been criticized for espousing a ‘global unhomeliness’, a
total rejection of postcolonial identity politics in favour of a wholly materialist
position would occlude the way that identification is fundamental to asylum
seekers’ material circumstances. His description of continua allows the tension
between the demand that the singularity of each asylum narrative is acknowl
edged and the desire to establish reciprocal relations, to be worked through.
Where this notion of continua-as-dissensus is also apparent in Agamben,
however, such a play on the global and the local does not lead back to the
shadow of global unhomeliness so much as to a sense of politics constituted as
both responsibility and recognition.
In Homo Sacer Agamben lists a series of apparently disparate figures who are
commonly, he suggests, avatars of both the sovereign ban and the new politics
that will displace it. Agamben’s list, which can be subdivided into three principle
pairs – Flamen Diale, the Roman category of priesthood, whose remit was a life
of uninterrupted celebration, and the homo sacer; the person of the Führer in the
Third Reich and Primo Levi’s Muselmann, the archetypal camp inhabitant; and
85 Quoted in Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. xix.

86 Bhabha, ‘Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 44, 45 and 44.
87 Bhabha, ‘Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, p. 48.
116

a terminally ill biochemist who makes himself the subject of his own experi
ments and the neomort waiting for her/his organs to be transplanted – could
be read as evidence of a reductive tendency, dehistoricizing each subject in
order to drive home the comprehensive nature of the ban. Yet, in the manner
that it generates a subject of ‘unsatisfaction’, his strategy significantly resem
bles Bhabha’s. Each pairing establishes a new, recursive–disjunctive staging
of the coincidence of inclusion and exclusion. Between Flamen Diale and homo
sacer there is a coincidence of public and private roles: whereas every detail
of the Roman priest’s life was absorbed by his public role, the homo sacer was
a subject whose political presence was subsumed utterly within his biological
life – defined solely by what might be done to sustain or extinguish that life,
and thus Agamben’s archetypal subject of the ban.88 In both the Führer and the
Muselmann Agamben observes a coincidence of law and life, in the former’s
efforts to make his life and the law’s enforcement coincide absolutely and the
abjection that makes latter’s life indistinguishable from that enforcement: ‘[h]
ere a law that seeks to transform itself entirely into life finds itself confronted
with a life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law.’89 Between the neomort
and the self-experimenting biochemist there is a coincidence of substitution, an
act of standing in that places the body at the threshold between life and death
in which death stages a transfer to life. These disjunctive scenes of repetition
create a sense of contingent relation that challenges the singularity of sovereign
rule and describes how the threshold can function as a place of resistance even
in an age of deterritorialized sovereignty. In keeping with Bhabha’s postcolonial
dissensus, then, Agamben posits the (mis)recognition inherent in continua as
the proper response if we are to avoid, as Mapanje suggests, simply cataloguing
an atlas of necropower.
One of the key benefits of continua is that its availability is not proscribed
by gender. Following Julia Kristeva’s assertion of the need for feminist thinking
to ‘bring out the singularity of each woman, and beyond this, her multiplici
ties, her plural languages, beyond horizons’, Elaine Aston has read a similar
call to recognize ‘the singularity of each person, alongside the multiplicity
of a person’s identifications’ in Adshead’s The Bogus Woman.90 The woman in
Adshead’s play repeatedly imagines that telling the history of her people will
make ‘a hole in the sky’, which will allow her to contact her ancestors and
deceased family. Aston observes that the image suggests a fluid state of trans
ference. Kristeva’s call to acknowledge the singularity and multiplicity within
88 Agamben’s insistence that in Flamen Diale it was not possible to isolate private and
public, makes a clear distinction between his own argument and that of Arendt, whose
rigid distinction between private life and public action determines the ‘ontological trap’
which Rancière suggests is the basis of Agamben’s own depoliticised reading. Jacques
Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103/2–3
(2004), pp. 298–302.
90 Julia Kristeva, quoted in Elaine Aston, ‘The Bogus Woman: Feminism and Asylum Theatre’,
Modern Drama, 46/1 (2002), pp. 17 and 18.
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Postcolonial Asylum
individual woman, surpassing any notion of universal womanhood, corresponds

with the way continua acknowledges the singularity of each asylum narrative
within any formulation of reciprocal relations between citizen and non-citizen.
Adshead’s play can thus be read as staging a scene of unsatisfaction, one whose
polyphony – that, Aston notes, requires the performer to ‘double as the centre
and the margin’, although, crucially, ‘the centre is performed from the margin’
– constitutes a series of recursive–disjunctive occurrences of, as Bhabha says,
the recognition and misrecognition of the speaking ‘I’.91
Misha Myers’s ‘Homing Place’ project presents a key example of how continua
establishes a recursive–disjunctive staging of the coincidence of inclusion and
exclusion, and consequently a sense of dissonance within the constitution of
‘home’. ‘Homing Place’, a Plymouth-based, practice-led research project that
investigates the impact of the performative on inhabitation, comprises two
separate endeavours: ‘way from home’, and ‘VocaLatitude’. In ‘way from home’
Myers invited asylum seekers and refugees to transpose a map of a route they
commonly took in the place they originally called home, on to a map of a route
they often took in Plymouth. The mapmaker then used this document as the
basis for a guided walk around the city, in which Plymouth landmarks and places
of significance for the mapmaker were substituted for places of significance in
their former home. In ‘VocaLatitude’ local Plymouth residents collaborated with
refugees and asylum seekers in producing a series of songs attached to specific
points on a circular walk round the city, creating in effect a ‘song map’. Both
projects were then reproduced as websites, with interactive maps and mp3 files
of the guided walks and (in the case of ‘VocaLatitude’) songs, allowing users to
follow the routes themselves remotely, or in situ, using the maps.92 As both
projects interrogate how place is inhabited performatively, they examine how
reproducing a place in terms of the multiple different experiences it accommo
dates and associations it provokes constitutes a strategy that can both critique
the logic of inclusive exclusion and inaugurate a hospitality that is empowering
to host and guest.
Myers calls ‘way from home’ an ongoing project.93 She describes the method
ology of ‘Homing Place’, which produces a series of singular but relatable
‘events’, in terms that align it with Bhabha’s description of continua: ‘[w]hile the
mechanisms themselves could be applied in different places and contexts, the
material that they generate is specific to particular places and times, and each
response to the invitations they propose expresses a particular Â�experience and
perception of place.’94 Both ‘way from home’ and ‘VocaLatitude’ could be repro
duced anywhere and produce distinct but related Â�expressions of the places
91 Aston, ‘The Bogus Woman’, pp. 18 and 12.

92 <www.homingplace.org/>. Accessed 28 July 2009.
93 Misha Myers, ‘Journeys To, From and Around: Founding Home in Transition’, in Graham
Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen (eds), Art in the Age of Terrorism (London: Paul Holberton,
2005), p. 213.
94 Misha Myers, ‘Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement’, in Research in Drama
Education, 13/2 (2008), p. 174.
118

they describe. In fact, ‘Homing Place’ anticipates similar projects that engage in
mapping asylum seekers’ experiences onto urban space. Liz Margree’s TRODDEN,
a ‘walking play’ devised in 2007, invites participants to follow a downloadable,
recorded guide round Leeds city centre (Margree playing a composite of several
real-life asylum stories).95 TRODDEN attempts to articulate the disorientation
of displacement, and effectively conveys how the intrusive quality of traumatic
memory is related to walking in a strange city.
In 2008 Myers’s walking praxis was adopted and adapted by participants
in the Loughborough-based Sense of Belonging exhibition. Guided walks
around Loughborough, Leicester and Nottingham were followed by post-
walk discussions and a series of workshops out of which a range of work was
produced that reflected on the walks as a means of making place. This included
Nottingham-based photographer John Perivolaris, who took a series of walks
around Nottingham with Thaer Ali, a Kurdish artist and asylum seeker, in which
Ali mapped his displacement onto the city. Ali’s perspective fundamentally
altered Perivolaris’s own view of Nottingham, which he had photographed for a
separate project only months previously: whereas he had formerly appreciated
the route as constituting a series of places of transit from the outskirts to the
city centre, it became indelibly inscribed by the events of Ali’s narrative and the
experience of sharing this.96
Perivolaris’s walk with Ali demonstrates how Myers’s methodology exposes
our affective (and suggestible) relation to place, giving rise to what Maggie
O’Neill calls a ‘politics of feeling’.97 The potential to invoke a politics that can
oppose the ban is most evident in the moment when Ali describes how a wall
in Sneinton Market reminded him of a wall he had seen in Kurdistan in 1985, of
similar dimensions, against which he had seen a thirteen-year-old boy summarily
executed by a group of soldiers. The Nottingham wall, innocuously situated next
to a fast food outlet, was marked by a rough ‘X’ in white paint.98 As Ali’s memory
and present associations create a sense of dissonance within the space of the
city they also intersect with the indistinct relation between life and death, which,
Agamben says, is lived by those subject to the ban (see Figure 6).99 Sneinton
market is a place where specifically immigrant transactions mingle with other
forms of social reproduction, where Afro-Caribbean food shops and Bosnian
barbers sit alongside a primary school and a weekly market. Ali’s narrative thus
introduces the force of sovereign necropower to this space of multiple, recur
sive social reproduction. Crucially, Ali gives the executed boy’s name, Ferman,
95 <www.unlimited.org.uk/shows/trodden.php>. Accessed 28 July 2009.

96 Conversation between John Perivolaris and author.
97 Maggie O’Neill in association with Sara Giddens, Patricia Breatnach, Carl Bagley, Darren
Bourne and Tony Judge, ‘Renewed Methodologies for Social Research: Ethno-mimesis as
Performative Praxis’, Sociological Review, 50/1 (2002), p. 74.
98 <www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/global_refugees/image_makers.html>. Accessed 28
July 2009.
99 It is worth noting that Abas Amini, who sewed shut his eyes, ears and mouth in 2003,
also lived in Sneinton.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Figure 6â•‡ John Perivolaris’s photograph from Walking with Thaer (2008). Available at
<www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/global_refugees/image_makers.html>. © John
Perivolaris 2008.
120

creating a singular memorial in this space of reproduction and exchange that

becomes, in effect, the materialization of the threshold of the ban.
The ‘Homing Place’ projects, TRODDEN and Perivolaris’s walks with Ali
constitute a form of continua, each staging a distinct, recursive–disjunctive
sense of ‘unsatisfaction’ with life lived under the ban, which also demonstrate
a contiguous, relatable investment in deliberately inducting the ‘city dweller’
into the experiences of the banned subject. The ‘Homing Place’ projects, for
example, demonstrate how the emergence of voice in a place (in terms of site-
specific songs, or super-imposed narratives) creates a space for appearance – in
Rancière’s terms, the collusion of memories and present associations traces a
course of practised dissensus along the route described by the (song) map. In
the case of TRODDEN, the embodying act of walking the route opens up the
possibility for chance encounters that would introduce alterity to the recorded
script. Although Perivolaris’s photographs do not provide a means for the walk
to be repeated, or altered (rather constituting themselves a variation on Myers’s
original methodology), they advocate a challenge to the constitution of the ‘we’
of citizenship by introducing simultaneous recognition and misrecognition into
the city. Near the end of the walk, Ali took Perivolaris to the street, parallel
with Sneinton market, where he was accommodated by the Salvation Army after
receiving leave to remain in the UK. He relates how one night he dreamt of the
bombing raids he endured during the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war and was woken
in the early hours by sounds of gunfire. Immediately he was ‘transported back
to Iraq’, yet the realization soon followed that the violence was between rival
Nottingham gangs. This overlayering of contexts of violence, in which Kirkuk
and Nottingham intersect, forms a scene of unsatisfaction, a parallaxal shift
in which the misrecognition of place ushers in, first, a sense of how the ban
underwrites belonging in both places and also posits this as a stage in which to
revise what we understand by belonging. The final image is a portrait of Ali at
the Broadway cinema, chosen because it is ‘a place of connection’, ending the
walk with a gesture towards reciprocal relations.100
The iterative realignment of memory and the present in ‘way from home’,
and the collaborative nature of the ‘Homing Place’ projects overall, also presents
a compelling example of how continua can be employed as a strategy for
restaging the production of ‘home’. Myers describes the walkers in the ‘Homing
Place’ projects as ‘percipients’, invoking ‘a particular kind of participant whose
active, embodied and sensorial engagement alters and determines a process
and its outcomes’. The walk (as a performative engagement with the way the
city is conceived) is, Myers says, ‘produced by the gesture of the body’, in the
collaboration between a remembered and an improvised route;101 situating it at
the same juncture of bio- and necropolitics elaborated by Agamben and enacted
by Thaer Ali. Yet it also describes how the walking praxis presents opportuni
ties for the body to engage in iterative agency. At one point during Sejojo’s
100 <www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/global_refugees/image_makers.html>.
101 Myers, ‘Situations for Living’, pp. 173 and 174.
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Postcolonial Asylum
‘way from home’ walk he reaches a set of traffic lights where he performs a
re-visioning of the place: ‘In my home they don’t, we don’t have traffic lights,
so let’s just cross.’102 While the hesitation over ‘they’ or ‘we’ indicates the point
of threshold Sejojo occupies here, by crossing the road according to the behav
ioural norms of Baraka (his home town in the Democratic Republic of Congo),
rather than of the UK, he embodies the alterity his walk introduces into the
city. Thus the walks involve choices and negotiation, an experience of place
that can be recovered by users of the interactive ‘way from home’ website,
which allows users to range over the maps at will, recreating the improviza
tion of place in the original walk but also staging a realignment of the familiar
and the unfamiliar that is distinct to their own experience: as Myers says, users
‘become the stranger and the countryman simultaneously’.103 Each percipient
who follows one of the ‘way from home’ walks, whether it is the original guide
or a subsequent walker, is cast as simultaneously host and guest, enabling a
critical examination of the reality of inclusive exclusion but also inaugurating a
sense of Derrida’s hospitality-as-inversion – in which the guest (guide) reveals
the (changed) city to the host (countryman), opening the door for their own
rediscovery of place (as host).
It must be said that while it utilizes mapping and is invested in recasting
place, ‘way from home’ is not principally concerned with how place is repre
sented. Rather, as I indicated above, it is more concerned with practices of
inhabitation, and thus with the relationships that reside within (as well as with)
a given place. As such, it overturns sovereignty’s emphasis on territoriality.
Whereas conventional mapping is associated with the imposition of a singular,
totalizing authority upon a place by the erasure of what was there before,
Myers’s ‘conversational mapping’ reflects ‘the poly-vocality of landscape’.104
Where they are transposed onto the map of Plymouth, the asylum seekers’
narratives do not simply replicate colonial cartographic practices. Instead, they
acknowledge a kind of multiple associational occupancy of place, creating ‘two
worlds within one’ and thus making the city a space of Rancièrian dissensus
and appearance. In the first walk Myers undertook, with Ramazan, a Kurdish
Iraqi, on the same day the invasion of Iraq began in 2003, multiple, poignant
resonances emerged: on Ramazan’s map, Plymouth’s Royal Citadel, a military
fortification, corresponded to one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Mosul, which
would be bombed two days later; Plymouth itself was one of the departure
points for soldiers posted to Iraq.105 Ramazan’s walk demonstrates the link
between voice and visibility in the emergence of politics – as he highlights the
unforeseen intimacies between his old and new homes, transcending distance
and national boundaries, he also suggests a way to articulate the complexities
and contradictions involved in saying ‘we’.
102 <www.wayfromhome.org/sejojotranscript.html>.
103 Myers, ‘Journeys To, From and Around’, p. 224.
104 Myers, ‘Situations for Living’, p. 176.
122

The ‘Homing Place’ projects, especially ‘way from home’, present a realized
methodology for enacting the iterative agency described by Bhabha and invoked
by Agamben. The play of the familiar and the unfamiliar that they establish
engages both the potential for productive resistance in Derrida’s hospitality
theory and Rancière’s theory of dissensus. ‘Home’ becomes a site of dialogic,
rather than adversarial, contest, in which divergent experiences of place find
equality of place in the continua. As such, they represent an effective strategy
for staging resistance to the way sovereignty produces the asylum seeker as an
illegal subject, within the confines of the ban, signifying the most abject forms
of reproduction (‘human waste’). Myers observes that because the mapping
strategy devised through ‘way from home’ naturally introduces alterity through
repetition, it challenges the way immigration officials use even the slightest
inconsistency or deviation in the repetition of claimants’ narratives to justify
refusing their claim.106 Following the initial series of walks, the walking method
ology was repeated on several occasions in Plymouth: Myers records that during
Refugee Week in 2005 and 2006 asylum seekers accompanied public officials
(including police officers) on tours of the city, challenging the criminalization of
asylum seekers by having the two associated together in public; she also notes
that the process was taken up by one asylum support worker as a means of
counselling traumatized clients.
The most striking evidence of continua is in Sejojo’s walk, which charts his
productive involvement in the life of the city as a series of landmarks corre
sponding to his contribution to life in Baraka. Significantly, several of the
Plymouth landmarks are instrumental elements of the camp dispositif, yet
they are remade by Sejojo as monuments to positive contribution of asylum
seekers: the police station (which he calls the gendarmerie) corresponds to
the Albert Casanova Ballard, a swimming pool in Baraka named after a man
whose ‘aim was to promote talent and ability [and] encourage […] youth to be
better citizens’; the social security office corresponds to his primary school,
because both are places where knowledge is acquired (he notes that he often
acts as an interpreter for other refugees and asylum seekers during their social
security interviews).107 The Duke of Cornwall Hotel is marked as having special
significance because it is where Sejojo attended drama classes, as well as a
meeting for people who wished to start their own business, and which led
to him opening his own shop. As Myers states, ‘the walk was an empowering
realization of Sejojo’s achievement and his contribution to the economic and
cultural life of the city’.108 Where the ban places asylum seekers in a relation of
inclusive exclusion, Sejojo’s restaging of place invokes the kind of disjunctive,
dialogic sensibility that is essential if a problematized ‘we’ is to speak to the law
without reproducing its violence.

107 <www.wayfromhome.org/sejojotranscript.html>.
123

chapter 4
Allow Me My Destitution
The law nourishes itself on the exception and is a dead letter without it.
Giorgio Agamben1
Parasitic reading and reading parasites
In a short film by Nick Broomfield and Marc Hoeferlin for Amnesty International,
Ashfin, a destitute refused asylum seeker, describes his liminal existence:
[I]f you don’t have acceptance paper from Home Office then you do not exist
anymore as human being, your existence is gone. [...] They put me to death
without committing any crime. Nobody seemed to care and it was like my life
is meaningless because my name is asylum seeker. It just didn’t make sense to
me that, in a country where they call themselves civilized, they put innocent
man to death without any crime [sic]. 2
Still Human Still Here, made for Amnesty’s campaign on behalf of destitute
asylum seekers, gives a compelling sense of the deprivations and injustice
created by section 4 of the IAA 1999. But it also presents a problem of recep
tion: just as Ashfin’s case raises questions of how asylum seekers are welcomed
in the UK, the matter of how to receive his testimony is, I think, almost as
problematic. Bearing witness is an act of reception; therefore, does the listener,
whether to oral or written accounts, play the role of host to the testimony, and,
if so, how should that testimony be received? Such considerations begin to
bring together an ethics of hospitality with an ethics of reading, which prompts
the question, when faced with an account of refused hospitality, what might
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 27. My emphasis.
2 Nick Broomfield and Marc Hoeferlin (dirs), Still Human Still Here (UK: Amnesty, 2007).
124

be the responsibility of the reader as host? This problem is compounded by

the terms Ashfin uses to represent his situation: ‘you do not exist anymore as
human being’; ‘my life is meaningless because my name is asylum seeker’. Such
statements are common in asylum seekers’ narratives and testimonies, to the
extent that the problem of reading asylum seeker narratives is one of how to
read a vocabulary of bare life. In particular, Ashfin’s claim, ‘they put innocent
man to death without any crime’, problematizes the question of responsibility,
casting doubt on who is responsible for his persecution and placing the listener
to his testimony in uncomfortable proximity with those who ‘put him to death’,
condemning him to a realm of necropolitics; it emphasizes the crucial point of
difference that the reader/receiver is a political subject, privy to the rights of a
political subject that are denied to the ‘inhuman’, ‘dead’, ‘non-existent’ asylum
seeker.
In this chapter I want to consider the extent to which Agamben’s theories
provide modes of resistance to sovereign power in the asylum regime, and
describe a new politics of community via strategies of reading, and concomi
tant questions of response and responsibility. The question of responsibility infers
an undecidable; how is it possible to assume responsibility for another, what
would such an act look like, and, given the resonances of reception, how does
this apply to the act of reading – what action does or should reading asylum
narratives provoke? Such questions address the nature of the relationship
between literature and the law, and between an ethics of reading and an ethics
of hospitality. Following J. Hillis Miller’s investigation of an ethics of reading
in ‘The Critic as Host’, I intend to examine Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ as a
text that assumes or prefers a particular (each word is significant) reading, and
that points, contrapuntally, towards an appropriate practice for reading asylum
seeker testimony. ‘Bartelby’ is set in the offices of a Wall Street solicitor in the
middle of the nineteenth century; it concerns the eponymous Bartleby, who
arrives one day and proceeds to do an extraordinary quantity of work as a
scrivener, or copyist. Gradually, however, his increasingly irregular behaviour
begins to unsettle everyone around him, culminating in his forced removal from
the office.
‘Bartleby’ is neither a postcolonial text nor a narrative of asylum; however, it
has in recent years been subject to several divergent interpretations, by readers
as exemplary as Hardt and Negri, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Agamben, as
well as Hillis Miller, all of whom are drawn to Bartleby’s idiosyncratic expres
sions of resistance.3 ‘Reconstellating the text’, in this instance, allows its very
3 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard
University Press, 2000); Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bartleby: or, the Formula’, Essays Critical and
Clinical [1993], trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York:
Verso, 1998); Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Giorgio
Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or on Contingency’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy,
trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999);
J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University
Press, 1990).
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Postcolonial Asylum
different uses to be drawn out; in other words, reading Bartleby, as one who
is both literally and hermeneutically displaced, presents an opportunity to
reflect on the politics of representing the displaced person.4 It is important
to establish that I am not interested in straightforward analogy as a means of
consolidating parallel readings; there are many key points in ‘Bartleby’ that in
fact contradict an attempt to describe him as the archetypal refugee (even if an
‘archetypal’ reading were desirable). Rather, I contend that tracing a practice
of reading through Melville’s story – especially in terms of key words ‘assume’,
‘prefer’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘particular’, which appear in the narrative –
points towards a reading practice that can realize the unavoidable respon
sibility within the undecidable aporia that is articulated by asylum seeker
narratives.
A final key term in my argument, although not taken from Melville’s text, is
‘parasite’. A common feature of negative rhetoric about asylum seekers takes
the form of their denigration as parasites upon the host nation. In ‘The Critic as
Host’ Miller develops an idea of ‘parasitic’ reading from a consideration of the
prefix ‘para-’, whose Indo-European root ‘*per-’ signifies ‘by the side of, along
side, past, forward […] to one side, aside, amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered,
improper, wrong’.5 For Miller, it is a word that ‘calls up its apparent “opposite”’:
something at once inside a domestic economy and outside it, something

simultaneously this side of the boundary line, threshold or margin, and at the
same time beyond it […] A thing in ‘para’ is, moreover, […] also the boundary
line itself, the screen which is at once a permeable membrane connecting
inside and outside, confusing them with one another, allowing the outside in,
making the inside out, dividing them but also forming an ambiguous transi
tion between one and the other.6
Parasitic reading occurs at and is occupied with the border. Such reading is
concerned therefore with a series of ‘threshold utterances’. It is notable that,
as well as ‘in front of’, ‘against’ and ‘near’, Miller also lists ‘before’ among the
meanings of ‘para-’; he imagines reading as a chain, to which ‘there is always
something earlier or something later […] which […] keeps the chain open,
undecidable’.7 As he is at the same time the ‘intolerable incubus’ and (in the
words of Emmanuel Levinas, and the narrator of the story) ‘the one for whom I
am responsible’, Bartleby incarnates the threshold character of the parasite and
its undecidability.8 Melville’s tale is, as Miller has identified in a separate essay
on ‘Bartleby’, principally about the impossibility of assuming Â�responsibility
4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and
London: Routledge, 1988), p. 241.
5 Oxford English Dictionary, vii, N–POY (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 473.
6 J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, in David Lodge and Nigel Wood (eds), Modern Criticism
and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Pearson, 2008), p. 404.
7 Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, pp. 404 and 406.
8 Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby’, in Billy Budd and Other Stories [1853] (London: Penguin, 1986),
pp. 36 and 38.
126

without first being able to explain Bartleby.9 It is plausible therefore to connect

the undecidability of Bartleby with the undecidable in reading, and, as shall be
seen, the undecidable figure of the asylum seeker.
Simon Critchley has suggested that Miller’s ethics of reading is too narrowly
textual, and consequently legalistic, in its interpretation of ethical relations: ‘[e]
thics is first and foremost a respect for the concrete particularity of the other
person in his or her singularity, a person who is not merely an example of the
law [as Miller describes the text], but rather the condition of possibility for an
experience of the law’.10 However, as I will show, a parasitic reading practice
can in fact lead to that which Critchley suggests is precluded in Miller’s textual
emphasis: an ethics of relationality that acknowledges the other’s singularity
and points towards Fanon’s ‘world of reciprocal relations’.11 As Critchley makes
clear, to miss the connection between ethics and deconstructive reading is
to miss what is essential to both; as such I will read ‘Bartleby’ against what
Levinas has called the ‘said’ in order to examine the ‘saying’ of the text, reading
Melville’s text in spite of the impossible analogy between Bartleby and ‘refugee’,
as committed to an ethics of alterity. Critchley makes it clear that the distinc
tion between ‘said’ and ‘saying’ is relational: whereas the said refers to the
concrete, the identifiable meaning of an utterance, the saying refers to ‘the fact
that these words are being addressed to an interlocutor’ and thus fundamen
tally is characterized by exposure to the other, which inaugurates a concomi
tant responsibility. It is in the saying that ‘ethics interrupts the context of the
world’.12 What interruptions, then, and what responsibilities, are inaugurated by
the saying of asylum seeker narratives before the law?
Before addressing this question it is worth noting briefly the connotations
of ‘before’. To come before can mean to appeal to an authority; or to precede
or be anterior to, which has a significant resonance with the condition of the
asylum seeker, who is first a refugee (that is, according to Article 14 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on leaving her/his country) only to
become an asylum seeker on entering the host country. Thus it relates to the
double-voicedness of the asylum claim, which brings into crisis that for which
it professes a desire. Finally, it also relates to the figure of the parasite. The
parasitic resonance of ‘before’, where ‘para-’ signifies the boundary, connects
the parasite with Agamben’s sovereign who, within the suspension of law that
is the state of exception, remains as ‘being-outside and yet belonging’.13 This is
important because it brings together the parasite with the figure of the sover
9 ‘[S]torytelling and ethics are […] inextricably related’. Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p.
142.
10 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2nd edn (Edinburgh:
11 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks [1952], trans. Charles Lam Markman (London:
Paladin, 1970), p. 155.
12 Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, pp. 7 and 48.
13 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, Ill. and London: Univer
sity of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 35.
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Postcolonial Asylum
eign and the homo sacer. For Agamben homo sacer, who in Roman law can be
killed but not sacrificed, most succinctly embodies this extreme relation of life
and the law. Sovereign and homo sacer are, importantly, organized in symmetry
by Agamben: ‘the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are poten
tially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act
as sovereigns.’14 Both find their place in the social order defined by their exclu
sion – thus both, like the parasite, have their ‘being-outside and yet belong’.
The figure of the parasite, then, as it negotiates proximity and distance, is the
permeable membrane through which extremes of power and powerlessness are
transferred. As the paradox of sovereignty inheres in the sovereign’s capacity
to be both within and without the juridical order, the parasite thus provides a
means to subvert the ban by occupying the same threshold territory.
The concept of law that I engage with here is based on Derrida’s idea of ‘force
of law’, or enforceability, the force that goes before the law and guarantees
its application.15 However, Jessica Whyte suggests that Derrida conspires to
perpetuate the ascendancy of the law even while he exposes its violent tenden
cies, ‘revealing law’s lack of ground, only to leave this groundless law in place’.16
Whyte argues that Agamben succeeds where Derrida fails in overcoming the
presuppositional foundation of law because of his insight into the exception
as inaugurating law’s being, and his belief that the ban can be overturned by
exposing its presuppositional structure. My argument thus works across the
line of distinction between Derrida and Agamben (Agamben himself is careful to
distinguish between his own project and deconstruction, despite his professed
admiration for it);17 but also traces a common thread, which is their comple
mentary sense of a parasitic element in the law.
This emerges most overtly in Agamben and Derrida’s respective readings of
the parable ‘Before the Law’ in Kafka’s The Trial, which describes ‘a man from
the country who begs for admittance to the Law’.18 The doorkeeper contin
ually defers permission, however, and describes a series of additional, even
more powerful doorkeepers waiting beyond him. Many years pass with them
arranged so, and when the man begins to fail in health the doorkeeper asks
him why he is so persistent; the man replies: ‘[e]veryone strives to attain the
Law’, and asks in turn why no one else had attempted to gain admittance other
than himself. The doorkeeper responds: ‘No one but you could gain admit
tance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now

15 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Drucilla
Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility
of Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 5–6.
16 Jessica Whyte, ‘Its Silent Working Was a Delusion’, in Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron
18 Franz Kafka, The Trial [1925], trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1982), p. 235.
128

going to shut it.’19 The man from the country is not simply excluded by the law,
but abandoned by it, literally exposed on the threshold of what is outside and
inside the law. He thus shares with the exceptio and the parasite the properties
of the threshold.
For Agamben, Kafka’s parable represents the sovereign ban ‘in an exemplary
abbreviation’.20 A sense of the parasitic element in law is also available in Derri
da’s reading. Notably, he observes that the exact nature of the latter is unspeci
fied: ‘[I]n Kafka’s story one does not know what kind of law is at issue – moral,
judicial, political, natural, etc. What remains concealed and invisible in each law
is thus presumably the law itself.’21 Derrida’s observation introduces an implicit
sense of the parasite that also admits something of a sovereign presence:
Before the law, the man is a subject of the law in appearing before it. This is
obvious, but since he is before it because he cannot enter it, he is also outside
the law (an outlaw). He is neither under the law nor in the law. He is both a
subject of the law and an outlaw.22
Like Arendt’s summary of the refugee in the 1951 Convention, the man from
the country is suspended ‘in para’: his place before the law is as an applicant;
yet the law (moral or judicial) is especially designed for him alone. As such, like
the sovereign and the homo sacer, he equally maintains a state of ‘being-outside
and yet belonging’, as a parasite.
When applied to asylum seekers before the law it becomes clear that the
parasite – and parasitic reading – represents a condition of undecidability
before the law that corresponds with Agamben’s characterization of the
sovereign decision, localized at a threshold of indistinction between inside
and outside, as occupying ‘the position of an undecidable’.23 In what follows
I will elaborate upon this idea of parasitic reading through Melville’s ‘Bartleby’,
before applying it to several literary works by asylum seekers. In particular I will
focus on accounts of failed and detained asylum seekers; reference to ‘narra
tives’ here includes testimony of what led them to claim refugee status as well
how they were treated subsequently. Of course, different contexts of telling do
have a significant bearing on how personal testimonies are framed; a juridical
forum will have a very different influence on the framing of a narrative from
a therapeutic context. Nor do I wish simply to elide the differences between
literary narratives and personal testimony. However, as Gillian Whitlock has
observed, asylum seekers ‘give testimony tactically’ and thus operate within
19 Kafka, The Trial, p. 237.

20 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 49. Agamben has called The Trial a ‘prophetic book’ regarding
the emergence of the camp as a ‘zone of indiscernibility’ between political and biological
life. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End (Notes on Politics), trans. Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 123.
21 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, trans. Avital
Ronell and Christine Roulton (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 191–192.
22 Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, p. 204.
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Postcolonial Asylum
‘different and contradictory networks simultaneously’; in Marita Eastmond’s

succinct phrase, ‘[r]efugees are in the midst of the story they are telling’.24 The
difference between ‘life as experienced’ and ‘life as text’ is not so easily deline
ated when life depends to such a degree on the reception of the narrative. The
place of the literary, and of reading practices, within such contexts is therefore
more open – perhaps more undecidable – than a strict adherence to generic
boundaries would permit.
Dead letters
Asylum seekers’ complex relationship with the narratives they tell presents
important parallels with an equally complex relationship with paper. In the
modern nation state, Derrida says, paper (actual paper and its electronic
successor) ‘becomes the place of the self’s appropriation of itself, then of
becoming a subject in law’. Paper facilitates entry into citizenship: ‘“Home”
presupposes “papers”’; by contrast, ‘[t]he “paperless” person is […] a nonsub
ject legally’.25 Derrida has in mind the French sans papiers, but the implications
of paperlessness extend also to asylum seekers, who are ostensibly part of a
juridical process (and therefore before the law) but excluded from political
belonging. Papers confirming the right to remain are what every asylum seeker
waits to receive; many arrive paperless, having been unable to bring or advised
against bringing identifying documents with them.
‘Paperless’ thus signifies a condition of unbelonging; as an anonymous, desti
tute asylum seeker observes in Gaylan Nazhad’s short film, Welcome to England,
‘Human rights and freedom are available only on paper. They are not for us’.26
Derrida has said ‘the war against “undocumented” or “paperless” people testi
fies to [the] incorporation of the force of law […] in paper’.27 It is at this point
that we can begin to address directly some of the questions surrounding the
implications of ‘before the law’, as well as the relationship between law and
literature. Derrida argues that if it is to be enforceable ‘the law as such should
never give rise to any story. To be invested with its categorical authority, the law
must be without history, genesis, or any possible derivation’.28 Law’s enforcea
bility depends on there being nothing before the law; its antipathy to narrative,
however, belies what Derrida describes as a fundamental resemblance between
legal and literary narratives: ‘Is not what holds us in check before the law […]
24 Gillian Whitlock, ‘Letters from Nauru’, in Gillia Whitlock and Kate Douglas (eds), Trauma
Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 157–158. Marita Eastmond, ‘Stories
as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research’, Journal of Refugee Studies,
20/2 (2007), p. 251.
25 Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2005), pp. 58 and 60.
26 Gaylan Nazhad (dir.), Welcome to England (UK: Bafilm Production, 2008).
27 Derrida, Paper Machine, p. 60.
130

also what paralyzes and detains us when confronted with a story: is it not its
possibility and its impossibility, its readability and unreadability?’29 The law
intersects with literature, then, at a point of différance, where readability does
not oppose unreadability. Unreadable refers here to the impossibility of a defin
itive reading; we are thus returned to Miller’s notion of the aporia of reading.
Force of law implies enforceability and calculation – the possibility of making a
calculable decision. In contrast, both justice and literature are, as Derrida has
said, ‘an experience of the impossible [and] incalculable’. In Derridean terms, a
decision is only such by virtue of the presence of the undecidable – without ‘the
ordeal of the undecidable’ there is simply a mechanical process.30 By aligning
the aporia necessary for a just decision with the undecidable or unreadable in
literature we can begin to discern the shape of an ethics of reading.
All this has a direct bearing on how to read both ‘Bartleby’ and asylum narra
tives. According to Deleuze, Bartleby is ‘the man without references’.31 The
narrator observes that ‘[w]hile of other law-copyists I might write the complete
life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done’. That is, he is paperless,
without the legitimizing documents that connect him to accepted modes of
citizenship. He arrives, we are told by the narrator, ‘one morning […] upon
[the] office threshold’ and proceeds to do ‘an extraordinary quantity of writing’.
Bartleby’s relationship with the documents he produces is fundamental to the
unsettling effect he has on those around him. The first instance of his famous
‘I would prefer not to’ occurs when he is asked to ‘verify the accuracy of his
copy,’ which we are told is an indispensible element of the job.32 Bartleby unset
tles paper’s legitimizing function, creating a devastating imprint of doubt in a
system that depends on verification. He undermines the entire edifice of paper
as a support to a legitimized existence; all the documents Bartleby produces
potentially contain a fault, or, to return to one of the various meanings of
‘para-’, are irregular. The paperless parasite thus makes irregular the system of
regularization founded on paper.
Within recent legal discourse on the infamous section 55 of the NIAA 2002,
there is a striking resonance with Melville’s text. Section 55(1) absolved the
state of responsibility for providing material support for an asylum claimant
deemed not to have made their claim ‘as soon as reasonably practicable after
the person’s arrival in the United Kingdom’. This was initially taken to mean
immediate application upon arrival at port of entry, although this was later
expanded slightly to allow three calendar days after arrival. In order to avoid
a breach of a claimant’s ECHR rights, section 55(5) stated that section 55(1)
did not prevent the Home Secretary from acting in accordance with the duty
to observe Convention rights. Ostensibly a policy designed to deter the abuse
of the asylum system by economic migrants, section 55 was the cause of wide-

30 Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, pp. 16 and 24.
31 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby: or, the Formula’, p. 74.
32 Melville, ‘Bartleby’, pp. 11 and 12.
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Postcolonial Asylum
scale destitution and deprivation among asylum seekers in the UK in 2003.33

In that year 14,760 cases, nearly 30 percent of all asylum applications, were
referred for a decision regarding the provision of support under section 55;
of these, 9,410 received a negative decision. The culture of refusal reached
such a peak that towards the end of 2003 the Home Office was refusing to
support 200 claimants per week.34
The scale of the destitution crisis placed massive strain on voluntary sector
agencies who stepped into the gap opened up by the government’s refusal to
offer support, and was the subject of a number of legal test cases. In R (on the
Application of Q and others) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, one of
the first test cases for the NIAA 2002, the Attorney General argued that ‘an
individual cannot contend that he has acted reasonably where he has been
misled or misinformed by a professional advisor’, a principle that ‘precluded any
asylum seeker from relying on information, advice or instructions given by the
agent facilitating his or her entry as rendering it “not reasonably practicable” for
the asylum seeker to claim asylum at the port of entry’.35 The Attorney General
argued that, should asylum seekers be ‘entitled to pray in aid what they have
been told by facilitators in order to justify failure to seek asylum at the port of
entry, section 55 would become a dead letter’.36 The resonance with ‘Bartleby’,
who we are told in the postscript once worked as clerk in a Dead Letter office,
and with Agamben’s assertion that the law without the exception is a dead
letter, is immediate. Thus, at the margins of these very different texts (legal;
literary; political-philosophical) there is a point of overlap that indicates their
complementary concerns with the question of responsibility for the individual
exposed to vagrancy.
The main concern raised by these test cases was whether or not the refusal
of state aid engaged Article 3 of the ECHR (‘no one shall be subjected to torture
or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’). The legal principles
involved, however, were elusive and complex, dependent on an insecure inter
pretation not only of the applicability of Article 3, but also the threshold at
which it was engaged.37 As Keith Puttick notes, critics of the legislation were
concerned that section 55(5) was ‘cosmetic’, and, in practice, asylum decision
makers would, having determined that section 55(1) applied, by default refuse
33 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, s55 1(b). Available at <www.opsi.gov.uk/
Acts/acts2002/ukpga_20020041_en_1>. Accessed 13 August 2008.
34 Refugee Action, The Destitution Trap: Research into Destitution Among Refused Asylum Seekers
in the UK (London: Refugee Action, 2006), p. 18. Refugee Council, Hungry and Homeless:
The Impact of the Withdrawal of State Support on Asylum Seekers, Refugee Communities and
the Voluntary Sector (Refugee Council, 2004), p. 12.
35 R (on the Application of Q and others) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2003]
EWCA Civ 364, para 38.
36 R (on the Application of Q ), para 39. My emphasis.
37 Peter Billings and Richard A. Edwards, ‘R (Adam, Limbuela and Tesema) v. Secretary of State
for the Home Department: A Case of “Mountainish Inhumanity”?’, Journal of Social Security
Law, 13/4 (2006), p. 171.
132

to concede that any legal obligations to assist were engaged.38 In the case of
Q, Collins J judged that it was not necessary to wait until inhuman treatment
had occurred, only that there was a ‘real risk’; this was rejected by the Court
of Appeal in favour of a condition ‘verging on’ the degree of severity required
to engage Article 3 (a term that conjures an unintentional echo of Rancière’s
description of the dispossessed as on the ‘verge of politics’).39 Following Q,
the conjoined cases of R (on the Application of Adam, Limbuela and Tesema) went
before the House of Lords. In the leading judgment on Limbuela, Lord Bingham
established that the de facto inevitability of destitution as a result of section 55
did cross the threshold of degrading treatment, and thus engaged Article 3, the
key being the phrase, in section 55(5), ‘avoiding a breach’, which required the
Home Secretary to act pre-emptively.40
The judgement of the House of Lords, and the intensity of the protests
against section 55, prompted the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to
relax the interpretation of what constituted a ‘reasonable’ time in which to
apply for asylum. Section 55 was effectively dropped as a legislative tool in
June 2004 (although not repealed), to be invoked only in the case of long-term
resident immigrants who apply for asylum to extend their stay. Nonetheless,
in 2007 the Joint Committee on Human Rights noted that 895 asylum seekers
were refused welfare support under section 55 in 2006, and thus exposed to
destitution.41 While, at the time of writing, the crisis instigated by section 55
has abated, the Home Office continues to devise ways of curbing access to the
process of claiming asylum, latterly in terms of restricted space rather than
time. In October 2009 the asylum screening unit in Liverpool stopped taking
initial claims for asylum, leaving the UKBA headquarters in Croydon as the only
place in the UK where a person can legally claim asylum.
The central question raised by section 55 was thus one of responsibility for
the stranger’s potential destitution, which is the principal moral problem facing
Melville’s narrator. As a threshold issue, section 55 engaged with the same
question of the parasite posed by Bartleby’s paperless arrival on the threshold
of the narrator’s office. Both literary and legislative texts are also concerned
with how the stranger presents himself/herself. Section 55, and the argument
of the Attorney General in support of it in Q, demanded that asylum seekers
engage proper and legitimate grounds for the manner in which they arrive. To
arrive clandestinely, and to invoke the advice of the agent who facilitated their
arrival, is unacceptable; that is, to be, like Bartleby, ‘without references’ is to
be contrary to the law. Although Bartleby himself is not initially considered
38 Keith Puttick, ‘Asylum Support and Limbuela: An End (Finally) to Section 55?’, Immigra-
tion, Asylum and Nationality Law, 18/3 (2004), pp. 189–190.
39 Billings and Edwards, ‘Mountainish Inhumanity’, pp. 172–173.
40 Billings and Edwards, ‘Mountainish Inhumanity’, p. 178. See R (on the Application of Adam,
Limbuela and Tesema) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] UKHL 66 per Lord
Bingham at [7].
41 Joint Committee on Human Rights, The Treatment of Asylum Seekers, Tenth Report of
2006–07, HL 81-I/HC 60-I, 30 March 2007, para. 91.
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Postcolonial Asylum
unacceptable because he does not have references, his unyielding expressions

of preference also raise the issue of legitimate forms of self-representation.
Bartleby does not actively refuse anything, yet the result of his passivity is the
total negation of the enforceability of the law, although not its abrogation.
Despite being well within what is legally right, the narrator is powerless to
impose upon Bartleby, who is ultimately subject to the law (as his incarceration
in the Tombs demonstrates) but also undoubtedly outside it. Bartleby refuses
the power of the sovereign exception by demonstrating his facility for negoti
ating the threshold. Thus, although it remains intact the law (the ban) is, in a
sense, made a dead letter.
Bartleby’s prior employment among dead letters has an important relation to
his occupation as scrivener; as Miller has observed, ‘an unverified copy is a dead
letter. It is of no more use than a blank sheet of paper’. Bartleby’s Â�preference
not to verify his work makes it resemble a key aspect of the parasite, and thus,
curiously, to resemble himself. Miller comments that it makes each copy ‘into
words that have meaning but have been drained of their efficacy […] neither
words nor nonwords’.42 The description recalls the parasite, which ‘calls up
its apparent “opposite”’. As the parasite straddles the boundary of inside and
outside, meaning and non-meaning, so as to in fact incarnate that border, Bartleby
as parasite makes everything he has contact with – including the law, as he is
charged with reproducing it – resemble the parasite. Just as he neutralizes the
law by remaining immoveable before it, he negates the apparatus of the law by
introducing doubt – the prospect of irregularity – into the arena of the scrivener.
The ‘irregularity’ of paper as a support to identity is also commented on
by Zairean poet and refugee, Dieudonnée-Marcelle Makenga, in her poem ‘A
Story, a Tale’. Makenga’s poem invokes various different resonances of ‘paper’
that reveal how, like in ‘Bartleby’, papers as a ‘support to existence’ can fail
to communicate their purpose, and become dead letters. Makenga presents
certain key words and phrases in bold. At first, she waits patiently in the hope
that the ‘papers’ will confer legitimacy: ‘I am a foreigner so must be patient.’43
In the next instance, however, it is presented as a demand, ‘papers’, creating an
echo that perpetually reminds her (‘That’s all I hear | throughout the day’) of
her status as ‘a foreigner’.44 The demand for ‘papers’ marks the point of slippage
between paper as a support to writing and a support to existence. Her disillu
sionment with the process of asylum is presented alongside the problematiza
tion of papers that facilitated her journey: the guidebooks that described the
‘country of liberty’ (invoking the UK’s sense of itself as historically receptive
to refugees) become just ‘glossy magazines | [that] had deceived me’.45 The
final line of the poem is a simply stated repetition of ‘papers’, again in bold,
42 Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, pp. 157 and 159.

43 Dieudonnée-Marcelle Makenga, ‘A Story, a Tale’, in Jennifer Langer (ed.), The Bend in the
Road: Refugees Writing (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 1997), p. 75. Makenga is a
member of the London-based Exiled Writers Ink collective.
44 Makenga, ‘A Story, a Tale’, p. 76.
45 Makenga, ‘A Story, a Tale’, p. 76.
134

yet the simplicity belies the extent to which the word, by Makenga’s insistent
foregrounding, has been made to articulate as comparable the fictions of the
nation’s mythologized public self and the role of paper in identity construction.
She traces in effect the same neutralizing of documentation that Miller reads
in ‘Bartleby’. Makenga’s papers, as revealed by the paperless parasite, do not
confer legitimacy, but rather are a series of dead letters.
Kalumnia and formula
As a parasite, Bartleby invokes his apparent opposites; that is, in various ways
he is something of an impossible object. He is ‘a vagrant’, ‘who refuses to
budge’; a guest who receives hospitality by refusing it (the narrator even offers
to take Bartleby into his own home, which Bartleby declines) and forces his host
from his place of work – ‘[s]ince he will not quit me, I must quit him’; he is a
copyist who produces unique works.46 The unsettling of Bartleby’s profession is
of particular relevance; having already refused to verify his copy, Bartleby makes
the law reflect his own situation as irregular and singular by reproducing but
refusing to confirm the law by his labours. The law-copyist who refuses to copy
renders the entire edifice of the law unstable and potentially unreliable, consoli
dating a sense of singularity before the law that is incompatible with the law’s
enforceability. I use ‘singularity’ here in the sense employed by Agamben of
‘being such as it is’, a state ‘neither particular nor general, neither individual nor
generic’.47 Bartleby himself states that he ‘is not particular’; when the narrator
returns to his old offices to evict Bartleby the narrator cannot evict him in
the face of his expressed neutrality that not only opposes but has a disabling
effect upon the enforceability of the law (here represented by the host – the
narrator has by this point accepted responsibility for Bartleby, making this an
instance where the formula, or its variation ‘I am not particular’, addresses the
law/s of hospitality as much as juridical law).48 Singularity, being such as it is –
summarized by Agamben as ‘whatever being’ – is crucially defined by the kind
of neutrality or non-particularity Bartleby articulates. It is, Agamben writes, the
politics of a being ‘mediated not by any condition of belonging […] nor by the
simple absence of conditions (a negative community […]), but by belonging
itself’.49 Bartleby states ‘I like to be stationary. But I am not particular’.50 His
singular stance, singular in defiance of the enforceability of law, is also singular
in defiance of any form of affiliation. Rather, he remains paradoxically neutral
but possessing enormous potential – incarnating, as well as the threshold
character and undecidability of the parasite, belonging itself.
46 Melville, ‘Bartleby’, p. 37.

47 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community [1993], trans. Michael Hardt (London and
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 1.
48 Melville, ‘Bartleby’, pp. 40–41.
49 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 85.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Bartleby, then, asks questions regarding the nature of ethical belonging

about which it is impossible to make a finite decision. I have already referred to
Miller’s assertion that ‘Bartleby’ is about the impossibility of assuming respon
sibility unless the object of responsibility can be summarized or decided upon.
Yet, when introducing his narrative, the narrator observes that:
[w]hile of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby
nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full
and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature.
Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except
from the original sources, and in his case those are very small.51
Again, Bartleby appears to the reader as something of an impossible object – in

this case via an account of what cannot be accounted for. Bartleby is a ‘loss to
literature’ whose story is nonetheless told. This presents us with a particular
series of parallels with asylum seeker narratives as they are placed before the
law. Asylum seekers’ testimonies are framed by a need to make a calculable
decision. Yet in cases like that of Ashfin, where asylum applications are rejected
but the applicant is not removed, the figure of undecidability persists. Like
that of Bartleby, the narratives of many failed asylum seekers who have not
been returned to their home country also in a sense account for what cannot
be accounted for; describing the impossible situation of those who cannot
remain but cannot be returned, who have no acknowledgeable presence yet
are nonetheless present.
What Bartleby is at the same time describing, resisting and incarnating is
kalumnia, a false self-accusation. The kalumniator, like homo sacer, is a figure
drawn from Agamben’s reading of Roman law: ‘In Roman law, in which prosecu
tion had a limited role, slander (calumnia, in old Latin kalumnia) represented
so serious a threat for the administration of justice that the false accuser was
punished by the branding of the letter K (the initial of kalumniator) on his
forehead.’52 Agamben presents Josef K as a kalumniator, one who falsely accuses
himself (albeit at the implicit behest of the law), and reads this as the ultimate
significance of Kafka’s parable – that it is ‘an invitation to self-accusation, to
allowing oneself to be captured in the trial’. 53 The doorkeeper invites the man
from the country, in effect, to enter a position of aporia before the law by
accusing himself, and therefore to be absorbed into the exceptio – into the law
that is ‘made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself’.54 In the
face of this, Agamben reads self-accusation as a strategy that can deactivate the
accusation, which is law’s chief mode of address to being:
For if the accusation is false and if, on the other hand, accuser and accused
coincide, then it is the fundamental implication of man in the law itself that
52 Agamben, ‘K’, in Clemens, Heron and Murray, The Work of Giorgio Agamben, p. 13.
53 Agamben, ‘K’, p. 21.
136

is called into question. The only way to affirm one’s innocence before the law
[…] is, in this sense, to falsely accuse oneself.55
This recalls Hannah Arendt’s pronouncement of the paradox of the 1951 Refugee
Convention, that only as an outlaw can a refugee gain protection from the law.
Since its inception, then, ‘the refugee’ has been forced to accept a role as kalum-
niator, which has seen its full flowering in the contemporary asylum seeker.
Yet Agamben’s reading of ‘Before the law’ opens the possibility for dissent
while acknowledging the sinuousness of sovereign strategies to reconvene
border and marginal spaces as sites of oppression. Self-slander seeks to deprive
the law of the terms by which it is enforceable (accusation, presupposition,
biopolitics), and thus break its hold over life; self-slander undermines the law’s
presuppositional structure and locates the force of law paradoxically not in
enforceability, but in implication and appropriation. Its object, to build on
Agamben’s adaptation of Derrida’s phrase, is to create a condition of force of
law. Despite this, Agamben acknowledges that such a strategy is self-defeating
inasmuch as it affirms the law’s capacity to turn accusation into judgement ‘by
transforming the implication itself into a crime and making self-slander into
its own foundation’. In this fashion, the kalumniator illustrates the apotropaic
nature of the law that is operative under the ethos of the camp dispositif, taking
into itself and thus deflecting the potential harm of the false accusation, making
‘the subterfuge of the self-slander into its own eternal justification’.56
The only option, in these circumstances, is for the man from the country to
remain at the threshold of the law. Agamben notes that he succeeds where Josef
K fails (in surviving the trial) because he ‘dedicates himself to “the long study of
door-keepers”’.57 As Anton Schütz has said, the man from the country survives
because he perpetually engages the doorkeeper of the law in an ‘extended,
indeed life-long, conversation […] The point here is of course the man’s stead
fast refusal to give the law any other role in his life’.58 While this does represent,
in one sense, a successful ‘deactivation’ of the law, it does so at a price. The
man from the country remains at the threshold, called not to citizenship but
to self-accusation and capture – which is law’s true relation to life. Agamben’s
reading of the priest’s final words to Josef K is in accordance with the parable of
the doorkeeper as kalumniator: ‘“The court wants nothing from you. It receives
you when you come and dismisses you when you go.” That is: “the court does
not accuse you, only accommodates the accusation that you level at yourself”.’59
What ultimately makes it impossible to summarize Bartleby or to take respon
sibility for him is his famous formula, ‘I prefer not to’. According to Deleuze,
Bartleby’s formula acts as a ‘limit-function’ on language, delineating the limits
55 Agamben, ‘K’, pp. 15–16.

56 Agamben, ‘K’, p. 16.
57 Agamben, ‘K’, p. 21.
58 Anton Schütz, ‘The Fading Memory of Homo Non Sacer’, in Clemens, Heron and Murray,
The Work of Giorgio Agamben, p. 127.
59 Agamben, ‘K’, p. 14.
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Postcolonial Asylum
of what language can and cannot express.60 In other words, it voids itself of
all referents. Curiously, but, I think, significantly, there is a resonance here
with Agamben’s description of the refugee as a limit concept that ‘breaks the
continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality’.61 Just as Bartleby’s
limit-function, for Deleuze, is to call into question what language can refer to,
Agamben’s refugee figure, as a ‘limit concept’, disturbs the referents of the
nation. Yet whereas for Deleuze the formula is devastating because it ‘hollows
out an ever expanding zone of indiscernibility or indetermination between
some nonpreferred activities and a preferable activity’, for Agamben it has a
more positive effect.62
When read within the context of the state of exception where the enforce
ability of law is defined by exceptions to the rule, Bartleby’s formula can be seen
as part of a process identified by Agamben that ‘show[s] law in its non-relation
to life and life in its non-relation to law’ – in other words, which can potentially
resolve the problem of biopolitical abuses in the formulation of the exception.63
For Agamben, ‘truly political action […] severs the nexus between violence and
law’, opening a space in which to ask what might be ‘a possible use of law after
the deactivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life’.
This action, crucially, is voiced: ‘To a word that does not bind, that neither
commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an
action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end.’
64
Bartleby’s formula (in essence, ‘says only itself’, ‘I prefer not to’) refers to
nothing beyond its own neutrality. Deleuze observes that ‘[i]t means only what
it says, literally’.65 But, crucially, the formula says something very particular
about itself – it is, in Agamben’s words, ‘a formula of potentiality’.66
In this way Bartleby’s parasitic phrases, which call upon that which is opposite,
can be thought of as polyphonic in the same manner as the asylum claim, in that
they undo the singularity of authoritarian discourse. That Agamben’s notion
of a word that says only itself is not incommensurate with the hybridity of the
double-voiced utterance is demonstrated by his understanding of potentiality.
Agamben follows Aristotle’s notion that potentiality is defined most purely
by its negation; the potential to act is distinguished from actuality by the poten
tial not to act. In other words, it is double accented: the object of pure potenti
ality contains within itself and is articulated by impotentiality. Aristotle’s image
for this is the writing tablet on which nothing is written, which for Agamben
directly connects it with Bartleby: ‘a scribe who does not simply cease writing
60 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, pp. 68 and 70–71.

62 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 71.
63 ‘The sovereign law is defined by its capacity to transgress itself with respect to aliens’.
Prem Kumar Rajaram, ‘Disruptive Writing and a Critique of Territoriality’, Review of Inter-
national Studies, 30 (2004), p. 222; Agamben, State of Exception, p. 88.
64 Agamben, State of Exception, p. 88. My emphasis.
65 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 68.
66 Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or on Contingency’, p. 255.
138

but “prefers not to”, is the extreme [example] that writes nothing but its own
potentiality to not-write.’67 Bartleby possesses the capacity to write (the narra
tor’s supposition that his eyesight is failing being only a speculative response
to Bartleby’s cryptic, ‘Do you not see the reason for yourself?’),68 but most
completely inhabits or comes into that capacity by refraining from doing so –
he is, as Agamben says, ‘in full possession of the act of writing in the moment
in which he does not write’. Crucially, Bartleby’s potentiality is described by
Agamben as ‘potentiality as such’ – that is, related to his definition of whatever
being.69 As such it is a gesture towards the contested nature of belonging itself. If
this is related to Miller’s assertion that Bartleby’s unverified copies are in effect
blank sheets of paper (‘dead letters’), Agamben’s reading of the potentiality of
Bartleby’s statement thus brings Melville’s narrative into proximity with the
concerns of certain asylum seeker narratives that also articulate a condition of
being and belonging through their opposite. Just as Bartleby’s ‘I prefer not to’
encapsulates his potentiality in a negation, the trend in asylum seeker narra
tives to work with motifs of effacement – of speaking through not speaking,
presence configured as absence – becomes a vocabulary of (im)potentiality in
relation to belonging.
Zuhair Al-Jezairy is an Iraqi who worked as a journalist before seeking asylum
in the UK. His short story ‘In Hiding’ describes the process of preparing to
leave Iraq. Al-Jezairy’s narrator is told by the agent arranging his departure: ‘[a]
s from now, you are no longer who you are. Forget who you are and assume a
new identity. You are a Jordanian merchant by the name of Nadhim Kamal.’70
The agent’s strange, estranging instruction – ‘you are no longer who you are’
– acknowledges the incommensurability within the refugee subject; ‘you’, the
subject, are no longer privy to all that which has made ‘you’ a subject – profes
sion, citizenship, nationality, family and friends, a name. To leave clandes
tinely involves the erasure or denial of every identifying feature. The process
of adopting ‘the role of the other person’ is painstaking and strained. Facing
himself in the mirror, he repeats: ‘“You are not you, you are a Jordanian merchant
named Nadhim Kamal!” I bit my lips to take a grip on the rebellious scream
within me, against this self-denial.’ The mirror becomes a point of engagement
with the other he is to become, ‘to chase away what remained of me’. The
story ends before the narrator has left Iraq; having begun his journey under the
assumed name, he spends a final night hidden among friends and, emboldened
by alcohol, declares to the mirror: ‘I am no-one but myself!’71 This reads at
first as a simple declaration of defiance, an assertion of selfhood against the
restraints imposed by the circumstances of his exile. Yet, reading this expres
sion of a singular self – I am no other, I am only myself – in terms of singularity

69 Agamben, ‘Bartleby’, pp. 247 and 266.
70 Zuhair Al-Jezairy, ‘In Hiding’, in Langer, The Bend in the Road, p. 48. Like Makenga,
Al-Jezairy is part of the Exiled Writers Ink collective.
71 Al-Jezairy, ‘In Hiding’, pp. 50 and 51.
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Postcolonial Asylum
as ‘being such as it is’, neither particular nor general in the sense that Bartleby’s
neutrality articulates a form of unaffiliated belonging itself, enables us to read ‘I
am no-one but myself’ as a statement of double-accented potentiality. That is,
‘I am no-one’ – I have no affiliations, I am bare life – nonetheless, as a consequence
of the first condition, ‘I am myself’. It is a rebuke to the imposition of kalumnia
upon the asylum seeker. The phrase, like Bartleby’s ‘I prefer not to’, expresses
potentiality by reference to impotentiality. Like the scribe who is ‘in full posses
sion of the act of writing in the moment in which he does not write’, Al-Jezairy’s
narrator retains the capacity to be himself – a subject, without the markers of
political subjecthood – even when that self is split, as Bhabha says, ‘along the
axis on which it turns’.72
‘Let me become the echo of a name to you’
There are, admittedly, three potential problems posed by the above analysis.
First, Agamben has called ‘the coming politics’ ‘a struggle between the State
and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever
singularity and the State organization’.73 This reflects a similar problem
regarding the place of the asylum seeker in relation to anti-nationalist, cosmo
politan postcolonial theory. Nathalie Peutz has observed among refugees in
the United States who have been detained or deported for violating US laws
a trend in which the ‘“outlawed immigrants” […] claimed to desire “the law”
of the state that imprisoned, detained and excluded them’, as the law is ‘what
they needed to redefine themselves as law-abiding’.74 If Agamben’s theory is to
be applicable to the asylum seeker, how are we to reconcile, within an ethical
reading practice, a declaration of whatever being as a refusal of all forms of
nation state belonging with the fact that a claim for asylum is a request to be
accommodated within the borders of a political identity?
A second problem lies in Agamben’s bringing together of ‘whatever being’
with belonging; the coincidence of being as such and belonging as such is poten
tially problematic as it suggests a mode of belonging that is marked by stasis.
Such a formulation would deny Stuart Hall’s point that identity is a process
of production, and exclude the subject of whatever being from the mobility
associated with full citizenship – the freedom to cross borders without inter
ruption, to have an evolving sense of past and future self and to continually
redefine oneself within the secure boundary of a legitimate political subjec
tivity – characterized by a mode of belonging as becoming.75 The inverse of this
72 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture [1994] (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.â•›â•›63.
74 Nathalie Peutz, ‘Out-laws: Deportees, Desire and “The Law”’, International Migration, 45/3
(2007), pp. 183 and 189. Peutz notes that the deported immigrants often expressed an
implicit distinction between ‘law’ and ‘justice’ (e.g., natural law). ‘Out-laws’, p. 187.
75 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Difference’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 222.
140

for the asylum seeker is a mode of negated being – or non-being, perhaps.

Nonetheless, to apply Agamben’s theory of whatever being to the narratives
of asylum seekers, because of this coincidence of being and belonging, risks
perpetuating rather than resolving this exclusion. As discussed above, both
postcolonial diaspoetics and refugee discourse are marked by a problematic
inclination to essentialize, overwriting ‘the refugee’ or ‘the asylum seeker’ in
the symbolic mode. To what extent, then, can Agamben’s idea point towards a
plausible mode of belonging for the asylum seeker that also releases them from
the custody of stasis and the symbolic?
Finally, there is the problem of application: how to draw Agamben’s ideas
beyond their ontological focus. For Alexander Cooke, Agamben’s reading of
Bartleby’s potentiality lingers ‘at the level of possibility’. Cooke is critical of the
valorization of Bartleby’s formula, and asserts the importance of the fact that
it is not spoken into a vacuum: its effectiveness is a consequence of its place
within the narrative as a whole, and as such it ‘does not possess a force that
is sufficient on its own to enact the rupture of the law’.76 Cooke’s argument
departs from the trend among critics to ascribe to Bartleby’s formula a seemingly
unlimited disruptive potential. In doing so, I think, he underplays the uncanny,
shifting quality so clearly evidenced by Bartleby, but nonetheless his insistence
that the formula should be read as part of a larger whole is important. It is,
fundamentally, spoken before the law, and the resulting dynamic is crucial to
its interpretation. Cooke also argues that Agamben’s reading of potentiality
does not properly acknowledge the relevance of actuality.77 The question that
follows from this is: is Bartleby’s formula actualized in being spoken before
theâ•›â•›law?
Despite these problems, I contend that Agamben’s ‘whatever being’ can in
fact make available a formulation of belonging to asylum seekers whose claims
remain undecided, or who exist in a limbo between refusal and return, when
it is read in conjunction with a notion of being in ‘para’. The usefulness of
Agamben’s theory is in realizing the potentiality-within-impotentiality that
determines the asylum seeker as an illegitimate presence, and, contrary to
Cooke, it seems to me that actuality is implicit in this; what matters is that
the move towards actuality, which would negate impotentiality, is withheld (to
reiterate the play on being ‘held’ by the sovereign ban). The effect of Bartleby’s
refusal to copy, as identified by Miller, of making ‘neither words nor nonwords’,
can be applied also to a formula that acts to void language of all referents. In
this sense, Bartleby’s act of speaking before the law is another dead letter.
Contrary to the presuppositional relation between sovereignty and language
(where, as Agamben says, ‘[t]o speak [dire] is, in this sense, always to “speak
the law”’),78 and akin to the trend in asylum seeker narratives for employing a
76 Alexander Cooke, ‘Resistance, Potentiality and the Law’, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical
Humanities, 10/3 (2005), p. 87.
77 ‘[I]t is not sufficient to describe beings according to a potentiality without some possi-
bility of a relation to actuality’. Cooke, ‘Resistance, Potentiality and the Law’, p. 88.
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Postcolonial Asylum
vocabulary of bare life, it is as if in speaking Bartleby had not spoken (before) the
law. Here kalumnia interpolates a rethinking of community.
Whatever being confounds the repressive impulses of nation state defined
belonging – the sovereign’s capacity to decide by making distinctions between
citizen and other – but nonetheless allows for a precise formulation of what it
means to belong. It is important to point out that such a formulation, albeit
couched in terms of a disavowal, does not entail a negative construction. As
Jenny Edkins has observed, ‘[t]he community of whatever singularities is not
based on a sharing of properties […] but neither is it an absence of such shared
properties, “a negative community”. It is a community of singularities who share
nothing more than their singularity, their being-as-such or their “whateverness”
as such’.79 This recalls Bhabha’s continua, the ‘iterative agency’ of ‘contiguously
and contingently related’ singularities.80 What is common to asylum seekers
left in the limbo of the sovereign decision is precisely this; not a negatively
constructed community, but one whose construction as negative by biopolitical
determinations (that is, as parasites in the pejorative sense) conversely realizes
its mode of belonging as that which is in ‘para’, characterized by the threshold
and the undecidable.
This is illustrated by the Iranian poet Mohsen Soltany-Zand, who was
detained for four years in Villawood detention centre in Australia. In ‘Don’t Cry
for Me’ he addresses a visitor to the detention centre:
allow me my destitution.
Don’t cry for me
let me become the echo of a name to you.81
Soltany-Zand insists that he should not be disturbed by an intrusive sympathy;

rather, he should be recognized as existing in ‘para’, at a threshold of proximity
and distance (from the reader, from the mode of citizenship that he desires and
that his exclusion ensures) that he himself incarnates. Soltany-Zand’s demand
to be allowed his destitution recalls the seeming perversity of Bartleby, whose
refusals provoke the narrator to increasingly extravagant offers of hospitality,
culminating in the invitation to share his home. Like Soltany-Zand, by the end
of the tale Bartleby has become no more than ‘the echo of a name’ to the
narrator; however, in this case as an attempt to remedy the latter’s sense of
thwarted responsibility. His final exclamation, ‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!’ casts
the scrivener as ‘a valid synecdoche for all mankind’, as if ‘to say the one thing
is to say the other’.82 The double exclamation affirms the ruling hegemony by
79 Jenny Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds), Giorgio
Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 73–74.
80 Homi Bhabha, ‘Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in Gregory Castles (ed.),
Â�Postcolonial Discourses (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), pp. 45 and 46.
81 Mohsen Soltany-Zand, ‘Don’t Cry for Me’. <http://www.stickylabel.com.au>. Accessed
21 July 2008. Please note that the website originally provided the texts of the poems
cited, but no longer does so.
82 Melville, ‘Bartleby’, p. 46; Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, pp. 163 and 173.
142

configuring Bartleby as a Bakhtinian organic hybrid, enfolding him in a sense

of pathos that negates his singularity. However, as Miller asserts, the attempt
to account for Bartleby signifies the narrator’s failure to take responsibility,
connecting once again the impossibility of describing Bartleby with the impos
sibility of making a decision about him. Rather, Bartleby’s name becomes an echo
of his undecidable condition as a para-site, transmitted between the poles of his
identification as the ‘intolerable incubus’ and the one for whom I am responsible.
In another poem, ‘When it Rains’, Soltany-Zand again addresses a visitor from
outside the detention centre in such a way that problematizes the threshold
between asylum seeker and citizen:
I have no control over the will and desire to see you
You come and go as you wish.
[…]
I had no will and control over this friendship and never will
You even stole my lonely life.83
Soltany-Zand’s poem starkly illustrates his disenfranchised state, in contrast
to his visitor. Lines such as ‘[y]ou even stole my lonely life’ recall Ghassan
Hage’s insight that inclusivity is simply the flip side of the sovereign’s power to
exclude.84 Yet, despite this, he nonetheless institutes an inversion that recalls
Derrida’s ethical hospitality, where the guest is invested with the power of the
host to determine the nature of the welcome. As Rajaram has observed, ‘[t]he
subject is hostage to the other, to the demand and call of the exiled other upon
whose body his [i.e., the subject’s] very being is constituted’.85 Soltany-Zand’s
poem demonstrates how asylum seeker and citizen are mutually constitutive
– the exclusion and incarceration of one guaranteeing the citizenship of the
other. In effect, he draws the citizen–subject across the threshold and into the
detention centre – both are subject to the same exclusion; one directly, the
other, because their belonging depends on the exclusion of the first, identifying
them by proxy with the excluded.
This conflation of the citizen and asylum seeker in detention is answered by
another of Soltany-Zand’s poems, ‘True Freedom’, which describes a fantasy of
total freedom of movement – ‘I am running; east, west, north, south | […] |
There is no fence anymore’ – in contrast to the reality of his life in detention.86
But the fantasy cannot help acknowledging that he is unable fully to counter
the debilitating effects of exclusion upon memory – there remains ‘a fence that
limits all memory’,87 a statement that is echoed by Angel Boujbiha, a fellow
detainee in Villawood detention centre:
83 Mohsen Soltany-Zand, ‘When it Rains’. <http://www.stickylabel.com.au>. Accessed 21
July 2008.
85 Rajaram, ‘Disruptive Writing’, pp. 224 and 226.
86 Mohsen Soltany-Zand, ‘True Freedom’. <http://www.stickylabel.com.au>. Accessed 21
July 2008.
87 Soltany-Zand, ‘True Freedom’.
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Postcolonial Asylum
My name is asylum
I was born here
Here in the detention centre
[…]
I was born detained
But not to be detained
I have 850 days.88
Soltany-Zand’s and Boujbiha’s predicament is to be cut off both from their

former selves and from that which they wish to become – a recognized citizen
of the host nation. Similarly, Himzo Skorpan describes the estranging experi
ence of calling, from London, the number of his former home in Bosnia:
At the other end of the line, in my house, I heard an unknown voice saying that
I wasn’t there. I asked him if he knew what had happened to me, where I was,
and he said that he had moved in recently and that he didn’t know. […] And
this is the way things are: I am not really here, and over there, I am no more.89
Rajaram has identified how detaining asylum seekers constitutes a form of

‘temporal confinement’.90 Essentially, this is the logical extension of what Enrica
Rigo has described as a condition of ‘indefinite temporariness’ imposed on all
migrants to facilitate ‘the continual redefinition of the relation between citizens
and foreigners’.91 This kind of temporal border-living is especially pertinent to
the backlog of ‘legacy cases’ in the UK. When it was introduced in 2007 the
New Asylum Model was charged with expediting the asylum decision-making
process, and clearing by 2011 a backlog of between 400,000 and 450,000 cases
that had remained unresolved for ten years or more and were clogging up the
system. However, in 2009 it was reported that over 200,000 of these cases
lingered in a lived experience of indefinite temporariness.92
Soltany-Zand bears witness to the persistent influence of the border on the
migrant subject and its impact on the relation between citizens and foreigners.
But, just as he has shown, in ‘When it Rains’, how the citizen-reader is both
implicated in and shares in the condition of the detained asylum seeker, in ‘True
Freedom’ Soltany-Zand describes how this identification can cut across or even
erase altogether the wire fence:
You, who are reading this,

Come with me,
88 Angel Boujbiha, ‘My Name is Asylum and Other Poems’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002). Avail
able at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/boujbiha_poems.html>. Accessed 18
December 2008.
89 Himzo Skorupan, ‘Neither Here Nor There’, in Langer, The Bend in the Road, p. 12. Skorpan
is also a member of the Exiled Writers Ink group.
90 Ramjaram, ‘Disruptive Writing’, p. 223.
91 Enrica Rigo, ‘Citizenship at Europe’s Borders: Some Reflections on the Post-colonial Condi
tion of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement’, Citizenship Studies, 9/1 (2005), p.â•›â•›15.
92 Alan Travis, ‘Asylum System Not Coping with Backlog of Cases, Says Watchdog’, Guardian
(23 January 2009), p. 13.
144

Me and you make ‘we’

Together we can all escape,
I know that I can never forget,
But come and run with me93
Here we have in effect a statement of Levinasian ethics. ‘Me and you make “we”’
recalls Levinas’s references to the ‘third’, that element of the encounter with the
other that looks outwards to a relation to humanity as a whole. Levinas states
that the third party embodies the relationality between the self and the other,
and thus inaugurates justice, equated with the ethical within the Â�political:
as Critchley says, ‘[a]t the level of justice, I and the other are co-citizens of
a common polis’.94 Responsibility for the other is for Levinas an absolute that
mitigates the singularity of the self. In responsibility, the self experiences ‘itself
in exile’.95 Alterity becomes (turns into, is appropriate to) the subject, and vice
versa.
Nonetheless, justice speaks not of discharged responsibility but the end of
infinite responsibility. Critchley notes that Levinas does not conceive of justice
as the apogee of responsibility but its limit or end. It occurs in the moment
when the I is no longer defined by a relationship of infinite responsibility to
an other, but feels itself to be ‘an other like the others – that is, one of a
community that can demand its rights regardless of its duties’.96 Justice is the
point where the self’s affirmation in alterity (Levinas’s description of substitu
tion or the state of ‘being hostage’ of the other, ‘despite-me, for-another’, ‘the
very fact of finding oneself while losing oneself’, describes simultaneously a
kenomatic and pleuromatic response: filling the lost self with the burdens of
the other, finding oneself in a mode of alterity)97 is overtaken by a mode of
political belonging that resembles Rancièrian dissensus, founded in a commu
nity of demanded rights, where rights express the inherent alterity in the polis:
articulating, as Rancière says, ‘the rights of those who have not the rights that
they have and have the rights that they have not’.98 Yet Levinas also insists that
justice is ‘held in check by the initial interpersonal relation’ (i.e., the encounter
with the other).99 When Levinas asserts that ‘language is justice’, then, it refers,
like the double-voiced Bakhtinian hybrid, to what is spoken in the aporia of the
‘we’, which is, as Michael Dillon attests, ‘continuously reconfigured’.100
93 Mohsen Soltany-Zand, ‘True Freedom’.
94 Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 232.
95 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence [1981], trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2004), p. 103.
96 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 231.
98 Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly,
103/2–3 (2004), p. 302.
Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 90.
100 Levinas, quoted in Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 225; Michael Dillon, ‘The
Scandal of the Refugee: Some Reflections on the “Inter” of International Relations’,
Refuge, 17/6 (1998), p. 38.
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Postcolonial Asylum
There are problems inherent in Levinas’s ethical philosophy that I will

address in Chapter 6. Nonetheless, by representing the ethical within the polit
ical, Soltany-Zand draws upon an explicitly Levinasian concept of responsibility
in which the encounter with the other provokes wider questions of justice and
its relation to humanity. He brings together the citizen-reader and non-citizen
asylum seeker in a relationship of solidarity – a ‘we’ that is the precursor to a
community ‘unfenced’ by biopolitical determinations. Significantly, this occurs
through the agency of Soltany-Zand himself – it is his invitation (‘come with me’)
that allows the citizen-reader to escape, inverting the terms of a conditional
hospitality that Derrida has called ‘the hospitality of the invitation’, where ‘the
host remains the host’.101 His inversion of the invitation remakes this relation
between migrant and citizen into one that is in ‘para’ – no longer merely subject
to the sovereign decision in the flux of the exception, but rather oriented
around the simultaneity of proximity and distance that the parasite incarnates.
As I have already said, Miller describes the parasite as both that which crosses
the boundary and also the boundary itself. Soltany-Zand’s invitation institutes
therefore a kind of whatever being that can accommodate the aporetic ‘we’.
Soltany-Zand’s poetry frequently addresses a visitor who comes to stand
(by proxy) for the state that is detaining him, which allows him to redefine his
relationship with the sovereign state through a human relation. Such a slippage
recalls Derrida’s ethics of hospitality, which consistently conflates the nation
state’s responsibility towards immigrants with the host’s responsibility towards
a guest. Responsibility, for Derrida, cuts across collective and individual cases:
referring to the history of colonial violence in Australia, he asserted that ‘[w]
e inherit a language, conditions of life, a culture, which is, which carries the
memory of what has been done, and the responsibility, so then we are respon
sible for things we have not done ourselves’. Although he denies that this
should be interpreted as ‘a very old conception of collective responsibility’,
nonetheless ‘we are responsible for something Other than us’.102 Yet Soltany-
Zand also addresses a reader. And, as such, his writing can be seen to realize
the relationship between an ethics of reading and an ethics of hospitality that
can be observed in relation to both host and guest, and to nation state and
immigrant. This is possible because he does not prescribe a series of measures
to overturn the nation state, but rather describes a condition of perfectibility.
In this sense, then, he describes a link between what Catherine Mills has
called Derrida’s ‘weak[ly] messianic’ idea of ‘an ongoing engagement through
the undecidable decision’ and its opposite, Agamben’s ‘strong[ly] messianic’
form-of-life.103 In the context of an asylum seeker’s request to be admitted by
tions, 2006), p. 102.
102 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Perfectibility, Responsibility’, p. 102.
103 Catherine Mills, ‘Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life’,
Contretemps, 5 (2004), p. 56. Available at <www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/
mills.pdf>. Accessed 1 August 2008.
146

the host nation, whatever being is an impossibility, a point of disjuncture –

just as in Derrida’s ethics of hospitality, a pure or unconditional hospitality is
impossible, an unrealizable relation (and, in a geopolitical climate that creates
refugees in need of protection, perhaps it would even be undesirable to attain
a state in which there was no host with the capacity to provide that protection).
At most, Derrida can imagine the ‘possible happening of something impossible
that makes us think what hospitality […] might be’. Impossible, then, in the
Derridean sense of something that bears the trace of a possibility: ‘I cannot
think of a conditional hospitality without having in mind a pure hospitality.’ In
Derrida’s formulation, conditional and unconditional forms of hospitality do
not simply exist in a binary; rather, they are ‘absolutely heterogeneous but
indissociable’.104 Similarly, Soltany-Zand’s invocation of a kind of impossible
whatever being (his assertion, ‘I can never forget’, indicates that he is not free of
associative affiliations) contains its own possibility as a gesture towards a mode
of belonging within the host nation but not subject to the sovereign division
of inside and outside – that is, a gesture that takes back the boundary in which
the asylum seeker is confined.
As I have said, Soltany-Zand’s awareness of the reader draws together an
ethics of reading and an ethics of hospitality. The place of the reader within
such a gesture in para is at the point where the act of reading is, in Miller’s
words, ‘undecidable’.105 He is exhorting the reader to assume Derrida’s state
ment that ‘we are responsible for something Other than us’.106 The nature of
this responsibility is, in effect, that of the undecidable; whereas usually responsi
bility is associated with ‘the concept of freedom, decision, action’ – the respon
sible decision – Derrida notes that for a decision to be distinguishable from
mere automation it must contain an element of the undecidable: a moment of
total indecision, from which the subject can proceed to act. Thus the decision
contains its possibility within its own impossibility: ‘my decision should not be
mine, it should be, as impossible, the decision of the Other, my decision should
be the Other’s decision in me, or through me, and I have to take responsibility
for the decision which is not mine.’107 A responsible decision, therefore, is in
the invitation to a responsible decision by the other: ‘You, who are reading this,
| Come with me, | Me and you make “we”.’
Preference and assumption
The protest in Soltany-Zand’s poetry is not oriented towards the total repudia
tion of power relations: in asking to be allowed his destitution Soltany-Zand
recognizes another’s authority. Rather, it looks towards what Jenny Edkins and
Véronique Pin-Fat have called ‘properly political power relations’, based on
104 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Perfectibility, Responsibility’, pp. 102 and 98.
105 Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, p. 406.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Agamben’s description of ‘a life that can never be separated from its form, a life
in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life’, what he
calls ‘form-of-life’.108 Edkins and Pin-Fat describe form-of-life as an extension of
Foucault’s conceptualization of power as relational and entailing resistance.109
They contend that bare life is essentially a life without power relations of any
sort; sovereign power maintains itself by denying the political subjectivity of
those designated as having only bare life, and thus no capacity to resist – it is
a ‘relation of violence’.110 Properly political power relations, by contrast, recon
cile power and potentiality. The translators of Agamben’s essay on form-of-
life indicate that ‘the English term power corresponds to two distinct terms in
Italian, potenza and potere’; Edkins and Pin-Fat note that Agamben uses potere,
which ‘refers to the might or authority of an already structured and centralized
capacity, often an institutional apparatus such as the state’, to describe sover
eign power; potenza, however, ‘can often resonate with implications of potenti
ality as well as with decentralized or mass conceptions of force and strength’.111
The association of potenza/form-of-life with potentiality thus describes a mode
of political belonging that can resolve the abuses of biopolitical sovereignty.
A proper challenge to sovereign power does not therefore involve escape,
but the reinstitution of right relations – engaging with power through ‘a life
of power’ characterized by ‘potentialities and possibilities’ – hence Soltany-
Zand’s request, ‘allow me my destitution’, speaks to sovereign power and those
implicated in it (the visitors), but also remodels relations between migrant and
citizen as implicated in potentiality by reference to impotentiality.112
Edkins and Pin-Fat suggest two strategies for attaining a life of power:
first, the refusal to collude in the distinctions that characterize the activity of
sovereign power; secondly, following Agamben and, perhaps paradoxically, the
assumption of a condition of bare life: ‘that is, the taking on of the very form
of life [as distinct from form-of-life] that sovereign power seeks to impose.’113
Essentially, the first strategy is that of the parasite, who both occupies inside
and outside, and is the permeable membrane connecting and confusing them.
But if, as Agamben says, ‘[t]he fundamental activity of sovereign power is the
production of bare life’, how can a bare life lead to form-of-life?114 Edkins and
Pin-Fat refer to the conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which advocates a
108 Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations
of Violence’, Millennium: The Journal of International Studies, 34/1 (2005), p. 9; Agamben,
Means Without End, pp. 2–3.
109 ‘For Foucault power relations and freedom occupy the same moment of possibility.
Resistance is inevitable whenever and wherever there are power relations. Without
power relations there is no possibility of resistance and no freedom’. Edkins and Pin-Fat,
‘Through the Wire’, p. 10. See Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Paul Rabinow
(ed.), Essential Works, iii, Power (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 326–342.
110 Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, p. 9.
111 Agamben, Means Without End, p. 143; Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, p. 9.
112 Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, pp. 12–13.
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transformation of the ‘biopolitical body that is bare life […] into the site for the
constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare
life and a bios that is only its own zoē’:
If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare exist
ence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it we
will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined
by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and
jurisprudence.115
The assumption of bare life is thus aligned with a process of transformation; it

is, as Edkins and Pin-Fat tell us, predicated upon the refusal to make a distinc
tion between inside and outside, and therefore an act in para.116 But to what
extent is an assumption also an act of will, and thus a decision, and how then to
reconcile a decision with a simultaneous undecidable?
These considerations return us to Melville’s ‘Bartleby’, in which ‘assumption’,
after ‘prefer’ and ‘particular’, is one of the key recursive terms. Both Agamben
and Deleuze insist that Bartleby does not or cannot make a decision: quoting
Philippe Jaworski, Deleuze notes that ‘Bartleby does not refuse, but neither
does he accept’;117 for Agamben, a decision is impossible for Bartleby because
it implies an act of will, which is incommensurate with the formula, ‘I prefer
not to’.118 An emphasis on will – the narrator’s ‘you will not?’ – opposes or
neglects potentiality. It is, however, perhaps insufficient simply to state that
Bartleby cannot make a decision. The narrator informs the reader that when he
challenges Bartleby for a reason why he did not write the response is ‘he had
decided upon doing no more writing’.119 He decides to become the scribe who
ceases writing, the emblem of potentiality. Agamben’s observation, ‘if potenti
ality were always only the potential to do or to be something, we would never
experience it as such; it would exist only in the actuality in which it is realized’,
recalls Derrida’s comment on the undecidable in the decision: ‘[t]here is no
decision or responsibility without the trial of aporia or undecidability.’120 Bartle
by’s formula and intransigence do therefore constitute a decision inasmuch as
they initiate an entry into a condition of indecision. He articulates his capacity
to decide by the undecidable.
This does not, however, explain the extent to which Bartleby’s undecidability
– the para-siting of the ‘intolerable incubus’ and the one for whom I am respon
sible – makes possible a responsible decision. Can we read the narrator’s assump

117 Philippe Jaworski, quoted in Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 70.
118 Agamben refers to the three instances where Bartleby produces a variation on the
formula, stating ‘I prefer not’: ‘if Bartleby then renounces the conditional [would], this
is only because doing so allows him to eliminate all traces of the verb “will,” even in its
modal use’. Agamben, ‘Bartleby’, p. 254.
120 Agamben, ‘Bartleby’, p. 250; Derrida, Paper Machine, p. 128.
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Postcolonial Asylum
tion that his dealings with Bartleby were responsible in relation to Edkins’ and
Pin-Fat’s advocating of an assumption of bare life as a means of installing properly
political power relations? Assumption here operates in several senses. It can
mean ‘the action of taking to oneself; reception, adoption’, thus connecting it
with responsibility and hospitality (and also, through ‘reception’, with an ethics
of reading). This can also have an excessive quality: ‘the action of laying claim
to a possession, unwarrantable claim, usurpation’; or ‘a taking too much upon
oneself’.121 The narrator lays all his authority as host on an assumption, ‘[w]
ithout loudly bidding Bartleby depart – as an inferior genius might have done
– I assumed the ground that depart he must; and upon the assumption built all
I had to say’, which satisfies both his desire to have behaved appropriately and
his desire to exercise his authority as host: ‘[i]t was a beautiful thought to have
assumed Bartleby’s departure’.122
Yet ‘assumption’ does not have the capacity to trump Bartleby’s ‘preference’.
The narrator concedes:
But, after all, that assumption was simply my own, and none of Bartleby’s.
The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he would quit me, but
whether he would prefer to do so. He was more a man of preferences than
assumptions.123
As Miller has noted, ‘Bartleby makes every assumption vulnerable to a perma

nently disabling suspension’.124 In other words, the function of the preference
is to render the state of indistinction, the refusal to distinguish between inside
and outside, that Edkins & Pin-Fat state is the precursor to the assumption of
bare life. Bartleby’s expressions of preference are, as has already been said, acts
in ‘para’. The narrator cannot assume responsibility for Bartleby; the formula
does not allow it. Yet Bartleby’s refusal to accept hospitality does not abrogate
the narrator’s responsibility towards him. The parasite/Bartleby thus blurs the
distinction between host and guest, just as Soltany-Zand describes the relation
between migrant and citizen as in ‘para’. The responsible decision, as Derrida
has said, ‘must be the decision of the other in me’;125 responsibility thus involves
accommodating the other (the incalculable, the undecidable) before a decision
is made. It requires acknowledgment of the transferability of the position of
host and guest, as parasite to each other.
This is as applicable to a practice of ethical reading as to the hospitable
relationship, as is demonstrated by Mehmet al-Assad, an Iranian asylum seeker
detained, like Soltany-Zand and Boujbiha, in Australia. Al-Assad exhorts the
reader to ‘please observe through the wire’ as he sews his feet, heart and lips
together in protest, because,
121 Oxford English Dictionary, i, A–B (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 517.
122 Melville, ‘Bartleby’, pp. 30 and 31.
124 Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 167.
125 Derrida, Paper Machine, p. 128.
150

that which you are denying us

we should never have
had to ask for.126
The conflation of text and body here provocatively unsettles the reader’s sense
of what they are being invited to read. Al-Assad presents himself as embodying
the undecidable that makes possible the ethical decision, in a gesture similar to
that of Angel Boujbiha and Ashfin, who adopt ‘asylum’/‘asylum seeker’ as their
name. He does this by directly implicating the reader; the polite but insistent
call to ‘please observe through the wire’ is, as Edkins and Pin-Fat have said, a
call ‘to recognize our radical relationality’:
Al Assad does not let us forget that we are implicated in the distinctions that
are made. We are denying entry to the asylum seeker: it is with us, not with
sovereign power, that the responsibility for hospitality lies. Both citizen and
refugee are their own bare life.127
Like Bartleby, who neither consents nor refuses, al-Assad neither asks for the
recognition of the host, nor is he silent: his statement, ‘that which you are
denying us | we should never have | had to ask for’, is thus, like Bartleby’s
formula, both a statement of potentiality and a statement in ‘para’. As such,
it connects fundamentally an ethics of reading with an ethics of hospitality,
in which the ultimate undecidability of the text and the shifting position of
reader and text as parasite to each other resonate with the unstable relation
ship between host and guest that characterizes the destabilization of sovereign
power. Al-Assad’s readers know themselves, through reading his parasitic text,
as also in ‘para’ – like the sovereign and homo sacer, they have their ‘being-
outside and yet belong’.
It would be a rather bald claim to assert that asylum seekers who invoke
a vocabulary of bare life achieve a quantifiable improvement in their material
circumstances in doing so. Neither al-Assad’s poem nor the writing of Soltany-
Zand, Boujbiha and Al-Jezairy institutes any change in their position before the
law. In the next chapter I will discuss how a strategy based on a shared sense
of narratability inaugurates the sense of relation that deliberate kalumnia can
only invoke as an absence. But by introducing the aporia of the undecidable
into discourse predicated on making a calculable decision, these kalumniators
do facilitate a reading practice that opens up an ethical experience of respon
sibility. Miller describes how Bartleby’s silent demand that the narrator take
responsibility for him that frustrates every offer to do so is analogous with the
experience of reading:
On the one hand the story demands to be read, with an authority like that of
Bartleby himself over the narrator. Imperiously, imperatively, it says, ‘Read
126 Mehmet al-Assad, ‘Asylum’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002). Available at <www.borderlands.net.

au/vol1no1_2002/alassad_asylum.html>. Accessed 1 August 2008.
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Postcolonial Asylum
me!’ On the other hand it cannot be read. It demands an impossible task,

and the reader remains paralyzed by the text, called upon to act but unable
to act.128
Similarly, narratives such as al-Assad’s demand attention but also embody an

absence (‘I who speak am nobody, am dead, am silenced’), thus creating the
conditions of an undecidable. Like Bartleby, in speaking (before the law) they
articulate their own silence. Reading asylum seeker narratives, therefore, is to
receive an invitation by the other to make a responsible decision, but one that
also recognizes the impossibility of doing so; possible only insofar as impos
sible, decidable only insofar as undecidable; in these narratives asylum seekers
present themselves as the other whose decision resides within any ethical
decision.
128 Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 175.
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chapter 5
Terms of Hospitality
The law as such should never give rise to any story.

Jacques Derrida1
The receding refugee
In 1951 Hannah Arendt declared that the emerging concept of ‘the refugee’ in
international law was the harbinger of a crisis in the polis. ‘Man’, she said, ‘can
lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his
human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity’.2 She
predicted the refugee, as a ‘positive vanguard’, would inaugurate the dissolu
tion of the state–nation–territory trinity. Yet, as Daniel Warner has observed,
this triune formation persists ‘in a dysfunctional level’.3 Arendt’s criticism,
that the refugee exposes the rights of man as a concept in fundamental crisis,
remains pertinent.4
However, the terms of this crisis are in fact encoded in the term ‘refugee’
itself. The appropriation of recognition is central to the emergence of a culture
of refusal in Western attitudes to asylum. It is acknowledged that, although the
definition of the refugee is declaratory rather than constitutive (that is, a person
is recognized because s/he is a refugee rather than becoming one because s/he
1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, trans. Avital
Ronell and Christine Roulton (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 191.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (San Diego, New York and London:
Harvest/ Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 297.
3 Daniel Warner, ‘The Refugee State and State Protection’, in Francis Nicholson and Patrick
Twomey (eds), Refugee Rights and Realities: Evolving International Concepts and Regimes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 255–256.
4 See Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, in Ron H. Feldman (ed.) The Jew as Pariah: Jewish
Identity and Politics in the Modern Age [1943] (New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 55–66.
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Postcolonial Asylum
is recognized), de facto power to recognize is discretionary and resides with

the state.5 International law has never made explicit provision for a right to
be granted asylum, and it is widely held that the concept of refuge contained
within ‘refugee’ has suffered significant erosion as the circumstances to which it
is applied have diverged from the context in which it was formed. Daniel Stein
bock has noted the authors of the 1951 Refugee Convention were ‘legislating
about past events’ (i.e., the Nazi persecutions of 1933–1945);6 Jerzy Sztucki has
called it a ‘Cold War product’ and ‘Eurocentric’.7 Although the 1967 Protocol
waived both the temporal and geographical limitations of the original agree
ment, it did not affect the substance of the definition of the refugee or redress
its limitations (such as its silence on persecution on the basis of gender or
sexuality).8 Rather, from the 1960s onwards the global orientation of displaced
people towards the West has led Western nations to retreat from the principles
of the 1951 Convention by qualifying the terms of eligibility for asylum.9 Sztucki
lists a number of variant phrases introduced since 1951, including, ‘good office
refugees’ in 1957, ‘refugees who do not come within the competence of the
UN’ in 1959, and, subsequently, the concept of temporary protection, such as
temporary protection visas [TPVs] in Australia and temporary protected status
in the US.10 Although the use of TPVs in Australia, introduced in 1999, was
discontinued in 2008, in 2003 the UK government limited each initial grant of
refugee status to five years (and also introduced alternative forms of protection:
‘humanitarian protection’ and ‘discretionary leave’, vexed categories applied to
claimants whose case has been dismissed but who the courts accept cannot be
returned to their home).11 At the time of writing, it is proposed that additional
periods of temporariness will be imposed on refugees from July 2011, under
sections 39 and 44 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009.
5 Warner, ‘The Refugee State and State Protection’, pp. 70–71. Guy S. Goodwin-Gill and
Jane McAdams, The Refugee in International Law, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), p. 414.
6 Daniel J. Steinbock, ‘The Refugee Definition as Law: Issues of Interpretation’, in Francis
Nicholson and Patrick Twomey (eds), Refugee Rights and Realities: Evolving International
Concepts and Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 19.
7 Jerzy Sztucki, ‘Who is a Refugee? The Convention Definition: Universal or Obsolete?’, in
Francis Nicholson and Patrick Twomey (eds), Refugee Rights and Realities: Evolving Interna-
tional Concepts and Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 55–56.
8 Sztucki, ‘Who is a Refugee?’, p. 60.
9 The 1951 Convention states that, ‘a person may be recognised as a refugee owing to a
well-founded fear of being persecuted for reason of race, religion, nationality, member
ship of a particular social group, or political opinion’.
10 Sztucki, ‘Who is a Refugee?’, p. 64. Significantly, in contrast to the atrophy it has been
subject to in Western European states, other geopolitical groupings have expanded the
definition on several occasions. These include the 1969 Organization for African Unity
Convention, the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees made by participating Central
American nations, and the 1992 UNHCR-sponsored Fourth Arab Seminar on ‘Asylum and
Refugee Law in the Arab World’. Sztucki, ‘Who is a Refugee?’, pp. 60–61.
11 Once this five-year period has elapsed the refugee can apply for indefinite leave to
remain (ILR), subject to UKBA discretion.
154

Following the award of refugee status, refugees will be required to apply for a
period of probationary citizenship leave before they are allowed to apply for
naturalization. Under this rule recognized refugees will need to wait at least six
years before achieving permanent residence – eight if they do not participate in
approved voluntary community activities.12 While this could be read as simply
in accordance with the fluid nature of many refugee-producing contexts, some
of which do improve over time, it also exposes the claimant to a condition of
perpetual conditionality. Deterritorialized sovereignty, by its appropriation of
contradiction, acts as much through the fragmentation and qualification of the
concept of refuge and its attendant terminology as it does through its incur
sions into the ‘inter’.
The effect is a schism in the terminology applied to displaced persons
knocking at the gates of Europe; no longer refugees, but asylum seekers, as
Matthew Gibney has described: ‘Everywhere it seems that [refugees] have been
replaced by “asylum seekers” – mere pretenders to the title of refugee.’13 This
is the aporia of sanctuary, and commensurate with this successive rearticula
tion has been the successive atrophy of a schedule of rights previously afforded
to the refugee by the host nation; a trend, identified by Frances Daly, ‘towards
making those who seek asylum fall within various categories of partial or
non-citizenship’.14
Bridget Hayden’s affective concept of ‘the refugee’ as ‘a relational term’
marks a distinction between those who move voluntarily and involuntarily that
is predicated on ‘the sense of responsibility and either pity or empathy we feel
for them’.15 While it is important to bear in mind Ghassan Hage’s observation
that a sympathetic response to asylum seekers is as much the sentiment of
a national ‘spatial manager’ as an unsympathetic response, Hayden’s concept
poses a challenge to the depersonalized and decontextualized construction of
asylum seeker–state relations propagated in a culture of refusal.16
Hayden describes how the refugee definition is based on the assumption of
relationship between a world of sovereign nation states and ‘the refugee’ consti
tuted as an individual; crucially, however, the latter is in turn based on a western
valuation of the individual (a singular human) and the person (a cultural category
describing ‘selfhood’) as coterminous and synonymous with autonomy. Thus,
12 Refugee Council, Refugee Council Briefing on the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act
(London: Refugee Council, September 2009). Available at <www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/
policy/briefings/2009/bci_act.htm>. Accessed 16 October 2009.
13 Matthew J. Gibney, ‘A Thousand Little Guantanamos: Western States and Measures to
Prevent the Arrival of Refugees’, in Kate E. Tunstall (ed.), Displacement, Asylum, Migration:
The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 140.
14 Frances Daly, ‘The Non-citizen and the Concept of Human Rights’, Borderlands, 3/1 (2004),
29 paras. Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm>.
Accessed 6 August 2006.
15 Bridget Hayden, ‘What’s in a Name? The Nature of the Individual in Refugee Studies’,
Journal of Refugee Studies, 19/4 (2006), p. 478.
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Postcolonial Asylum
where the asylum seeker demonstrably lacks autonomy, they are ‘deprived of a
fundamental aspect of what we consider our humanity’, leaving them open to
abstraction constituted by lack rather than personhood.17 This process allows
deterritorialized sovereignty to replicate itself at the levels of state, society and
individual, as composed relationally: thus, ‘the conflict between universal, yet
individual, right and national sovereignty is between two of the same type of
individual.’18 In this conflict the asylum seeker – lacking autonomy, configured
solely in terms of their relationship to the state and expressed primarily in
terms of the exception – becomes an abstraction.
Hayden’s concern that defining ‘the refugee’ should not de-historicize or
deracinate leads to a prescription for refugee discourse in which ‘the recogni
tion of refugees is the recognition of mutual bonds of humanity and need’.
Consequently, it is necessary to establish a relationship based on ‘truly listening
to the displaced themselves’ and which rejects the category of ‘the refugee’ in
favour of a study of the forces and processes that produce refugees.19 That is,
new attention must be paid to how asylum seekers narrate their experiences,
and how, subsequently, they are defined.
Asylos/Asylao
‘Refugee determinations’, as Jenni Millbank rightly points out, ‘involve the

most intensely narrative mode of legal adjudication.’20 Refugee status depends
on the claimant’s ability successfully to present herself/himself as subject to
a well-founded fear of persecution as defined in the 1951 Refugee Conven
tion. Refugee determinations therefore place significant emphasis on narrative
– on the claimant telling a convincing story, often supplemented by country
guidance or expert evidence.21 The high currency of narrative is thus matched
by an emphasis on adjudication as credibility determination, a process that Audrey
Macklin, who served as a member of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board
for the Ottawa/Atlantic and Montreal regions, notes is fraught with uncertainty:
because the decision maker was not present when the events took place, and
consequently must rely on ‘whatever fragments of her life [the claimant] puts
before us’.22
Asylum decisions are extremely difficult to make. Adjudicators are under
pressure to afford protection where it is required, but also to protect the process
17 Hage, White Nation, pp. 473–474 and 481.
18 Hayden, ‘What’s in a Name?’, p. 484.
19 Hayden, ‘What’s in a Name?’, pp. 484 and 485.
20 Jenni Millbank, ‘“The Ring of Truth”: A Case Study of Credibility Assessment in Particular
Social Group Refugee Determination’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 21/1 (2009), p. 2.
21 Robert Thomas, ‘Assessing the Credibility of Asylum Claims: EU and UK Approaches
Examined’, European Journal of Migration and Law, 8 (2006), p. 81.
22 Audrey Macklin, ‘Truth and Consequences: Credibility Determination in the Refugee
Context’, in Realities of Refugee Determination on the Eve of the New Millennium (Haarlem:
L’Association internationale des juges aux affaires des réfugiés, 1999), p. 137.
156

itself, and the concept of sanctuary, from abuse. Robert Thomas quotes Sedley
LJ to the effect that, because it requires negotiating the particular elements
of an individual case and the general circumstances of the country they are
fleeing, coupled with the adjudicator’s sense of the plausibility of the claimant’s
account, determinations ‘must usually be taken on the basis of incomplete,
uncertain and limited evidence’.23 For this reason asylum determinations in the
UK operate under the lower standard of proof, where ‘a reasonable degree of
likelihood’ of persecution is demonstrated, allowing ‘a more positive role for
uncertainty’.24 Unlike in criminal or civil case law, where it is conventional for
stories to be presented by two parties, asylum adjudications rely on a single
narrative. Thus, to avoid the question of what is reasonable proof becoming a
‘meaningless word game’, Gina Clayton argues that the process must combine
fact-finding and evaluation: adjudication requires a holistic approach, ‘as a
public law enquiry into the need for protection rather than as an exercise in
proving facts to a standard’.25 Adjudicators are thus faced with an unenviable
task, one that is complicated by language and cultural barriers, the effects
of trauma, possibly unreliable evidence and the claimant’s unfamiliarity with
a foreign legal system, and exacerbated by the recent emphasis on speed of
processing. However, there is considerable evidence that a ‘culture of disbelief’
and ‘refusal’ persists among adjudicators, supplemented by governmental influ
ence, and, furthermore, of a chronic incommensurability between the concepts
of narrative understood by claimants and adjudicators, which, I contend, plays
into the hands of sovereignty characterized by the exception.26
In this chapter I will argue that, as an extension of the power to decide
on matters of inclusion and exclusion, sovereign power is consequently also
marked by the power to determine what constitutes a legitimate narrative.
Asylum determination processes across the world, of course, are not uniform.
However, there is a common emphasis on the interview as a technology of
adjudication. While I illustrate my argument with reference to the procedures
of a range of different nations, I will focus mostly on the example of the UK
where, at the time of writing, it is possible to speak of two principal stages: the
initial claim and, if rejected, the appeal. The first is decided by interview with
Home Office officials; the second, independent of government, by the Asylum
and Immigration Tribunal (AIT).27 While Home Office and Tribunal decisions
23 Robert Thomas, ‘Consistency in Asylum Adjudication: Country Guidance and the Asylum
Process’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 20/4 (2008), p. 491. Thomas notes elsewhere
that in the UK there are three principle categories under which an asylum claim may be
found to lack credibility: internal or external inconsistencies, and an assessment of the
‘apparent reasonableness or truthfulness’ of the claim. Thomas, ‘Assessing the Credi
bility of Asylum Claims’, p. 81.
24 Thomas, ‘Assessing the Credibility of Asylum Claims’, pp. 81–82.
25 Gina Clayton, Textbook on Immigration and Asylum Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), p. 425. I am grateful to Alwyn Jones for directing me to this point.
26 Independent Asylum Commission, Fit for Purpose Yet?: The Independent Asylum Commis-
sion’s Interim Report (London: Independent Asylum Commission, 2008), p. 20.
27 In 2010 the AIT moved from a single-tier appeals system, in which appeals against
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Postcolonial Asylum
may be said to operate under different frames (bureaucratic or legal–doctrinal),

they hold in common an antipathy to narratives that do not conform to the
strictures of the administrative or legal contexts.
Derrida’s comment, ‘the law as such should never give rise to any story’,
describes how presuppositional law cannot tolerate narrative modes that
disrupt the hegemony of legal discourse. Literature, for which we can read the
process of narrative creation is, Derrida says, a ‘strange institution which allows
one to say everything’, making it possible not only to synchronize (to affirm
hegemony, ‘to totalize by formalizing’) but to ‘break out of [franchir] prohibi
tions […] [t]o affranchise oneself [s’affranchir] – in every field where law can lay
down the law’.28 Following Agamben’s work on the presuppositional nature of
sovereign power, it is possible to argue that the inclusive-exclusion nexus is
closely related to the law’s antipathy towards any narrative that threatens, as
Derrida says, to ‘overflow the institution’. Tolerable narratives construct ‘the
refugee’ as, in Liisa Malkki’s words, ‘a knowable, nameable figure and as an
object of social-scientific knowledge’. As such, the asylum adjudication process,
based predominantly on interviews and legal hearings, can be characterized as a
‘technology of power’ – that is, as an extension of the camp dispositif.29
My proposition, therefore, is that asylum determinations, whose form and
function are determined by playing host to narrative, present a context that is
inhospitable to asylum seekers’ narratives. However, I will go on to argue that
narrative is also the means by which the sovereign exclusion can be challenged:
as Marita Eastmond has said, ‘[s]tories may […] illuminate the reaffirmation
of self, in order to contest over-generalized and de-individualizing images
promoted in a receiving society or camp situation’.30 In the second part of the
chapter I will read the production of asylum narratives in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s
By the Sea, through Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality. Gurnah explores
various forms of interrogation, silence and narratability in order to suggest that
an emphasis on the self as narratable might be utilized against the pervasive
influence of the camp dispositif as the deterritorialized manifestation of sover
eign influence.
Derrida’s notion of hospitality circulates around the ambivalence he reads,
following Emile Benveniste, in the terms ‘hospitality’, ‘host’ and ‘guest’. Benven
iste describes how the Latin compound *hosti-pet- refers to ‘he who personi
fies hospitality’. Hospes refers to ‘guest-master’, while the term *potis follows a
Tribunal decisions must go to the High Court, to a unified two-tier system, in which
appeals against Home Office decisions are made to a dedicated First-tier Tribunal, and
onward appeals to the Upper Tribunal.
28 Derek Attridge, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of
Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 36.
29 Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of
Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995), p. 498.
30 Marita Eastmond, ‘Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research’,
Journal of Refugee Studies, 20/2 (2007), p. 254.
158

trajectory that takes in what Benveniste calls ‘the mysterious –pse of ipse’, that is,
‘himself’ to signify the sense of master. Hostis in Latin corresponds to the Gothic
gasts – but whereas the latter signifies ‘guest’, the former signifies ‘enemy’.
Benveniste describes how, originally, hostis implied a reciprocal relationship of
gift-exchange somewhat like North American potlatch, but subsequently and
mysteriously ‘assumed a “hostile” flavour and henceforth it is only applied to
the “enemy”’.31 Benveniste states that, consequently, hospes retains the ancient
hostis, but in a composition with *pot(i)s to indicate ‘the one who receives is not
“master” of his guest’.32 Thus the roots of hospitality articulate its potential
to enact an inversion in the hospitable relationship. As Derrida confirms in his
reading of Benveniste, hospitality ‘remains forever on the threshold of itself’.33
Hospitality signifies an aporia; it is its own threshold, and can only realize itself
by exceeding itself. As W. Gunther Plaut has said, hospitality is a variant of
asylum but one that gestures to a concept that pre-dates its juridical circum
scription today.34 Plaut also observes an ambivalence in the term ‘asylum’,
similar to that which Derrida finds in ‘hospitality’, a double-voicedness that
speaks of contradictory modes:
The word [asylum] is younger than its concept and practice. It has its origin
in the Greek […] verb asylao, meaning to violate or lay waste. The adjective
asylos/asylon represents the opposite, namely, inviolable.35
Just as hospitality signifies an aporia marked by resistance, reception, sanctuary

and threat, asylao and its conjugations conjure both the stranger’s potential
to violate that is at the heart of the state’s ontological crisis regarding asylum
seekers and simultaneously a sense of the sacred, of an obligation that cannot
be derogated.
In a poem written following a storytelling workshop with asylum seekers
in Leeds, Jack Mapanje makes a clear link between the sovereign’s power to
determine who is a ‘legitimate refugee’ and what is a permissible narrative.
Mapanje appeals, on behalf of his asylum seeker companions, to a nameless
power (implicitly implicating the reader in the formations of sovereignty) to
‘define her separately […] define him differently’, against the homogenizing
taxonomy of each migrant as ‘another | Castaway’ or ‘economic émigré’. To
define is, for Mapanje, an ethical responsibility, to be discharged ‘gently’ and
with a nuanced understanding of trauma:
31 Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (London:
Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 71, 74 and 78. Derrida refers to this ‘strange crossing
between enemy and host’, in Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki, 5/3 (2000), p. 13.
32 Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, p. 78.
33 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, p. 14.
34 W. Gunther Plaut, Asylum: A Moral Dilemma (Westport, Conn. and London: Praeger, 1995),
p. 11.
35 Plaut, Asylum, p. 11.
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Postcolonial Asylum
[…] If you must, define us

Gently, how do you hope
To see the tales we bear
When you refuse to hear
The whispers we share?36
Traumatic narratives are a burden to be shared; that is, they demand a relational
response. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub attest to the fact that ‘[t]estimo
nies are not monologues’: there must be a witness and a listener for testimony
(essentially dialectical) to take place in a therapeutic context. The listener’s role
is, in effect, to bear witness for the witness by participating (unobtrusively) in
the ‘re-externalization’ of the traumatic event through narrative, which can only
occur ‘when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to
another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside’.37 This process does
not so much break the traumatic event’s grip on the subject as frame it within
a therapeutic process of narrative construction.
Furthermore, traumatic narratives contain silences and ellipses, moments
of the indescribable, which must be attended to as an essential element of the
testimony rather than, as they are received in legal contexts, evidence of its
illegitimacy.38 Where a holistically consistent, isotropic way of telling is the de
facto expectation of the adjudication process, however, the ellipses of traumatic
narratives are rejected, and more frequently result in what Anthony Good has
called the ‘double silencing’ of the asylum claimant, whose voice is effaced by
that of their legal representative and, often, an interpreter.39 Of course, it is
equally true that asylum seekers without legal representation can be equally
vulnerable. A similar point can be made in relation to UK efforts, since 1998
but accelerated since the introduction of the New Asylum Model, to ‘fast-
track’ asylum decisions. On the one hand this potentially alleviates the stress
of waiting for a decision; on the other it reduces the time available to make a
considered decision. The larger point relates to the way credibility determina
tion is frequently inhospitable to the way asylum seekers tell their stories.
Narratability has been widely acknowledged as a central element of selfhood
in postcolonial studies, from the association of voice and agency in the process
of decolonization to Stuart Hall’s insistence on thinking about (postcolonial)
identity as ‘a “production” which is never complete, always in process and
always constituted within, not outside, representation’.40 Definition and narra
36 Jack Mapanje, ‘After Celebrating Our Asylum Stories at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds’,
Beasts of Nalunga (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2007), p. 32
37 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis
and History (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 70 and 69.
38 See also Halleh Ghorashi, ‘Giving Silence a Chance: The Importance of Life Stories for
Research on Refugees’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 21/1 (2007), pp. 117–132.
39 Anthony Good, Anthropology and Expertise in the Asylum Courts (New York and Abingdon:
Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), p. 21.
40 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Difference’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 222.
160

tive are thus mutually constituting activities; the self is defined in telling of
itself. This ontological axiom acquires a particular urgency in the context of
the asylum regime, however, where, as Eastmond has observed, ‘[r]efugees are
in the midst of the stories they are telling’;41 a remark that alludes both to the
recursive nature of the traumatic experiences suffered by many asylum seekers
and to the absolute primacy of the story in an asylum claim. Paradoxically,
asylum narratives are all too often framed in a manner that is antithetical to the
law’s insistence on narratives that are sequentially coherent and subordinate
to the need to extract general legal principles. As such they are antithetical to
the performative aspect of narratives and identities that Hall describes. Legal
discourse requires a synchronized presentation of fact, event and person, and
cannot comprehend a mode of representation in which meaning is linked to
process. The law imposes its identity on the narrative and the narrating subject;
as Good observes, based on his first-hand experience of acting as an expert
witness on behalf of Tamil asylum seekers in the UK, where cultural difference
is introduced to determination proceedings it is far more likely to be seen
in terms of assessing credibility than appreciating alternative world views.42
Robert Thomas has similarly suggested that ‘the decision-maker’s own presence
of self’, although ‘unarticulated’, is ‘implicit’ in the decision-making function.43
The judgment of Laws LJ in Limbuela is a case in point, where the fragility of the
legal principles involved (i.e., article 3 of the ECHR) left ‘uncomfortable scope
for the social and moral preconceptions of the individual judge’.44
Perhaps most crucially, the currency of asylum narratives (which rests, in
part, on their capacity to convince by horrifying) is subject increasingly to deval
uation as decision makers begin to suffer compassion fatigue: as Good has said,
‘“[m]erely” to have a spouse or parent killed before one’s eyes […] counts for
little on the prevailing scale of persecution assessment’.45 In asylum determi
nations a relativized understanding takes the place of a relational reception of
asylum narratives.
Despite the requirement for a lower standard of proof in UK asylum tribu
nals, the aporia inherent in asylum determinations can be appropriated by the
decision maker to cultivate refusals. Many factors can influence a claimant to
withhold information: the fallibility of memory; a reluctance to speak of experi
ences of torture or rape, especially female claimants in the company of men;
fear of authority figures. Neither late nor prompt disclosure is guaranteed to
be received as evidence of credibility, however; a decision maker may perceive
41 Eastmond, ‘Stories as Lived Experience’, p. 251.

42 Good, Anthropology and Expertise, pp. 11–12.
43 Thomas, ‘Assessing the Credibility of Asylum Claims’, pp. 84 and 85.
44 Laws LJ quoted in Peter Billings and Richard A. Edwards, ‘R (Adam, Limbuela and Tesema) v.
Secretary of State for the Home Department: A Case of “Mountainish Inhumanity”?’, Journal
of Social Security Law, 13/4 (2006), p. 172.
45 Good, Anthropology and Expertise, pp. 3–4. See also Didier Fassin and Estelle d’Halluin,
‘The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers’,
American Anthropologist, 107/4 (2005), pp. 597–608.
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Postcolonial Asylum
that either indicates mendacity. A late disclosure could suggest the claimant is
trying to improve upon a weak case; alternatively, an immediate willingness to
disclosure could be seen as incommensurate with the symptoms of trauma.46
Just as sovereignty appropriates contradiction to consolidate its own rule, an
asylum process predicated on refusal can appropriate the tolerance of uncer
tainty designed to accommodate asylum narratives in order to discredit them.
Moreover, Macklin has shown the ease with which a decision can be covertly
made by disavowing the possibility of making one. Credibility determination is
‘not about “discovering” truth [but] about making choices’.47 In this way asylum
is linked most fundamentally to the expression of sovereignty, following Carl
Schmitt’s famous dictum on the sovereign decision.48 Yet, as Macklin shows,
the power to exclude rests also in not deciding, by ruling that ‘the claimant
has simply failed to discharge her burden of proof’.49 In the same way that
sovereignty fetishizes emptiness to disguise its own kenomatic constitution,
this technique holds up the insufficiencies in the claimant’s narrative to cover
the lack of genuine grounds for refusal and subverts the requirement to make
a decision, where that decision would contradict the culture of refusal, by
feigning its impossibility (where a de facto decision – that the case cannot be
decided upon – has be made). This is not to suggest that a ruling of insufficient
evidence always indicates mendacity on the adjudicator’s part, but Macklin’s
experience as a decision maker demonstrates that disavowal has been used to
justify refusal. In a study of the asylum processes in Canada, Australia, the UK
and New Zealand, Millbank has observed a tendency among all asylum tribunals
to refer to a putative ‘ring of truth’ in claimants’ testimony. Here plausibility also
acts as a fetish, allowing the decision maker to disavow their role in the process:
rather, ‘the story itself [is] the active agent in the adjudication process’.50 Such a
notion suits sovereignty’s instinct to conceal its operations.
Although narrative meaning emerges in the telling, because legal discourse
is rule rather than relationally oriented, a claimant’s efforts to control the
production of meaning falters on the law’s doctrinal bias. Rather, as observed
by Katrijn Maryns (writing of predominantly interview-based Belgian asylum
procedures) and Marco Jacquemet (writing of data gathered in a UNHCR regis
tration office in Tirana, Albania between 1999 and 2000), asylum claimants’
narratives are frequently subject to entextualization. Jacquement, quoting R.
Bauman and C. Briggs, defines entextualization as ‘the process of rendering
discourse extractable’.51 Entextualization thus refers to a process whereby
narratives of displacement are themselves displaced across social, geographic
46 Thomas, ‘Assessing the Credibility of Asylum Claims’, p. 82.

47 Macklin, ‘Truth and Consequences’, p. 140.
48 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George
Schwab (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 5.
49 Macklin, ‘Truth and Consequences’, p. 135.
50 Millbank, ‘The Ring of Truth’, p. 5. Emphasis in the original.
51 R. Bauman and C. Briggs, quoted in Marco Jacquement, ‘The Registration Interview:
Restricting Refugee’s Narratives’, in Mike Baynham and Anna de Fina (eds), Dislocations/
Relocations: Narratives of Displacement (Manchester: St Jerome, 2005), p. 201.
162

and generic boundaries. Extraneous meanings are ‘unilaterally imposed’ by

institutional forces, a process that both replicates and extends the violence of
the original displacement.52
The experience of displacement is thus compounded by institutional entex
tualization. Maryns links this process to the way time and place feature in
institutional and asylum seeker discourse. Whereas legal procedure requires
a high level of chronological exactitude, Maryns observes that the disorienta
tions of clandestine travel and detention can lead to confusion about time. By
contrast, place serves as a concrete point around which to orient displacement
narratives.53 She gives the example of a transcript from a Belgian determination
hearing in which the claimant describes living in a Guinean refugee camp:
I be there na camp. So I be there na camp. […] I de now go came in Guinea.

[…] when we came in Guinea. For there now. I they left me. They de go so
they […] didn’t take me. […] so I be there na bush now. All the time there be.
Say […] come in Guinea.54
The account is non-linear, offering a sense of time through a series of adverbs

whose purpose is less to provide chronological order than to emphasize a sense
of place: ‘I be there na bush now’. The claimant’s focus on place over time is
a consequence of the fact that place (the need for a place of refuge) is by far
the most urgent context for the asylum seeker; by contrast, deterritorialized
sovereignty, so as to retain control over place, is focused on time: the displace
ment narrative must be made to conform to an ordered chronological frame,
to permit a decision to be made (and therefore affirm decidability as a sovereign
characteristic).
Time is thus a key means of controlling place. Saulo Cwerner has described
how ‘time politics’, the expression of state power through temporal relations,
have shaped recent developments in asylum in the UK. In particular, the
emphasis on processing speed can be read as an attempt to regain control over
the movements and narratives of displaced peoples that have grown beyond the
state’s control.55 The title of Cwerner’s paper, ‘Faster, Faster and Faster’ plays
on the 1998 Government White Paper, Fairer, Faster and Firmer, which promised
to increase efficiency by speeding up the processing of asylum claims. Initiatives
proposed in the White Paper, and subsequently introduced in the IAA 1999,
included the policy of dispersing claimants around the UK while their claims
were processed and, conversely, housing ‘fast tracked’ claimants in reception
centres, deploying asylum claimants in space (dispersed or contained) in the
service of time, or, more accurately, speed.
52 Katrijn Maryns, ‘Displacement in Asylum Seeker’s Narratives’, in Mike Baynham and Anna
de Fina (eds), Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement (Manchester: St Jerome,
2005), p. 179.
53 Maryns, ‘Displacement in Asylum Seeker’s Narratives’, p. 185.
54 Maryns, ‘Displacement in Asylum Seeker’s Narratives’, p. 186. Emphasis in the original.
55 Saulo B. Cwerner, ‘Faster, Faster and Faster: The Time Politics of Asylum in the UK’, Time
and Society, 13 (2004), p. 73.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Other proposals in the 1998 White Paper and included in the 1999 Act were
the introduction of a decreased time for submitting an asylum application; a
standardized, decreased period for substantiating evidence post-application
interview; and a streamlined, one-stop appeals system, with stringent deadlines
by which negative decision could be appealed. In effect, the IAA 1999 operated
under the assumption that a more rigorous policing of the time of asylum claims
would enhance the authority of asylum decision making. Cwerner also cites the
reintroduction of a ‘white list’ of presumed safe countries, from which it would
be unreasonable to seek asylum, in the NIAA 2002, as compounding the influ
ence of time politics; effectively, this created a scenario whereby decisions were
instantaneous, as presupposing the illegitimacy of a claim from a country on the
white list ‘reduc[ed] decision time to zero’.56
Fairer, Faster and Firmer purported to link justice and time; by making the
system faster and firmer, it would become fairer. A cumbersome and overly
complex system had allowed both ‘genuine applicants’ and the taxpayer to
suffer, ‘whilst abusive claimants and racketeers have profited’.57 However,
subsequent developments in UK Asylum policy demonstrate that, in fact, time
politics continue to articulate, principally, sovereign power. The replacement
of ILR with a maximum five-year period of protection in the first instance illus
trates how asylum seekers are subject to what Enrica Rigo has called ‘indefinite
temporariness’. 58
The new asylum model (NAM), introduced throughout the UK in 2007, was
designed to further streamline the unwieldy decision-making process. Under
NAM (operative at the time of writing) a single caseworker is responsible
for the claimant from application to decision. Following the asylum applica
tion (whether port of entry or in-country), the claimant is subject to an initial
screening interview where they are asked to provide identification details but
not any information regarding the grounds for their claim. Based on this infor
mation they are ‘segmented’ into one of five categories: third-country cases
(where the applicant is deemed to have claimed or been able to claim asylum
in another EU country before reaching the UK); children and unaccompanied
minors; potential ‘non-suspensive appeal’ (applicants from a designated ‘safe
country’ and who do not have the right to appeal); detained fast track (where
it appears the case can be decided very quickly) and general case work. Claim
ants are assigned a caseworker and subjected where applicable to dispersal
or detention. They are then given a substantive asylum interview, to establish
whether they qualify for protection according to the 1951 Convention and to
56 Cwerner, ‘Faster, Faster and Faster’, pp. 78–79.

57 Home Office, Fairer, Faster and Firmer: A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum
(London: Stationery Office, 1998). Available at <www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/
document/cm40/4018/4018.htm>. Accessed 21 April 2009.
58 Enrica Rigo, ‘Citizenship at Europe’s Borders: Some Reflections on the Post-colonial
Condition of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement’, Citizenship Studies, 9/1 (2005),
p.â•›â•›15.
164

assess their credibility.59 Whether they are entered into the standard adjudi
cation process, or selected for detained fast tracking, has a dramatic impact
on an individual claimant’s experience. Compared with an eight- to eleven-day
interval between the screening and asylum interview (during which time the
caseworker would be constructing the case), under the detained fast track
system a claimant has their asylum interview the day after segmentation; a
decision is forthcoming within two or three working days (as opposed to thirty
days under the standard procedure); if this is negative, the claimant has two
days in which to lodge an appeal that will be heard within eleven days (all
the while they remain detained). Under the standard procedure, appeals take
between one and three months to be heard.
The emphasis on speed of processing under NAM demonstrates the incompat
ibility of therapeutic and legal narrative contexts. Because asylum caseworkers
are employees of the UKBA and not necessarily trained lawyers it is there
fore important not to assume that, while they may be guided by legislation,
they would necessarily take a legal doctrinal approach to decision making.60
However, a bureaucratic frame is in general just as likely as a legal one to insist
on an isotropic account, especially in the context of the screening interview in
which the claimant must be made to fit one of the five categories. Indeed, the
IAC report expressed concern that segmentation would lead to ‘claims being
pre-determined before they have been given substantive consideration’. Human
Rights Watch has called ‘Kafkaesque’, the situation whereby the information
needed to determine whether or not an individual should be entered into
detained fast tracking is only requested during the asylum interview, after they
have been screened and segmented.61 It would appear there is little room in
either interview for a relational approach.
Human Rights Watch has also highlighted how the detained fast track system
exacerbates the inherent gender inequalities in asylum determinations. Noting
that such speed of decision making is ‘inherently unsuitable for complex cases’,
involving either gender, a recent report into the detention of women asylum
seekers in the detained fast track system in Yarl’s Wood (where all women
detained for fast tracking are held) criticized the way fast tracking mitigates
against creating a secure environment for women to disclose traumatic experi
ence; this was further made difficult by the failure universally to implement
UKBA’s gender guidelines and the isolation from legal support in detention.62
The Human Rights Watch report notes that in 2008 only 4 percent of women
under the detained fast track system were granted asylum in the first instance,
with only a further 9 percent granted asylum on appeal. While the Home Office
has pointed to these figures as evidence that initial decisions are being upheld
59 Independent Asylum Commission, Fit for Purpose Yet?, pp. 14 and 23–24.
60 I am indebted to Alwyn Jones for directing me to this point, which was made in a presen
tation by Robert Thomas at the 2006 Society of Legal Scholars annual conference.
61 Human Rights Watch, Fast-Tracked Unfairness: Detention and Denial of Women Asylum
Seekers in the UK (London: Human Rights Watch, 2010), p. 34.
62 Human Rights Watch, Fast-Tracked Unfairness, pp. 10, 3 and 4.
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Postcolonial Asylum
on appeal, Human Rights Watch has followed the Council of Europe’s Commis
sion for Human Rights in observing the incompatibility of speed and quality of
decision making.63
Thus, while in its 2008 report Fit for Purpose Yet? the Independent Asylum
Commission commended NAM for improving the processing of asylum decisions,
it expressed concern at a persistent culture of disbelief among decision makers,
and, more broadly, the adversarial nature of the asylum process as a whole.64
Decision makers are required to take into account all aspects of the appli
cant’s behaviour when determining credibility, including that which suggests
an attempt to conceal information, mislead or obstruct. While this is designed
to promote efficiency and consistency, it is also indicative, despite the fact
that plausible reasons for delay or withholding information are several, of what
Thomas calls ‘the legislative disposition toward negative credibility assess
ments’.65
It is important not to paint Home Office officials as inherently antagonistic
towards asylum seekers, and to acknowledge the competing complex of values
an individual decision maker brings to bear on an individual case – as Thomas
suggests, sovereignty and ethics inevitably vie for prominence.66 Yet it is diffi
cult to read of recent restrictions on the right to appeal a negative asylum claim
and of the reduction in legal aid as anything other than part of a strategy to
discourage not only false claims but the total number of all claims – in other
words, as another facet of the new border doctrine. UK legal aid for asylum
seekers is at the time of writing limited to five hours per case. Not only does
this worsen the problem of developing a relational understanding of testimony,
it has led many law firms to cease representing asylum seekers on the basis
that it is insufficient time to make an effective case, exacerbating as well the
silencing of asylum seekers in legal discourse.
The transgressive step
The IAC has characterized the UK asylum process as adversarial. It is effectively

a contest over definition of a kind that resembles Derrida’s distinction between
a hospitality of invitation, conferred only on a recognized guest or foreigner,
and a hospitality of visitation that ‘consists in leaving one’s house open to the
unforeseen arrival’, or absolute other.67
63 Human Rights Watch, Fast-Tracked Unfairness, pp. 29–30 and 31.

65 Thomas, ‘Assessing the Credibility of Asylum Claims’, pp. 93 and 92.
66 ‘[H]ow much decision-makers assess the risk of persecution on return will depend on
how much weight and value they are personally willing to ascribe to the protection
of foreign nationals relative to that of maintaining legitimate immigration control’.
Thomas, ‘Assessing the Credibility of Asylum Claims’, p. 86.
67 Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
166

‘Foreigner’ is thus equated with legitimacy, rights and (limited) access. By

contrast, the absolute other is unknown and anonymous, and thus the theoret
ical recipient of a hospitality that does not ask for reciprocity or deference of
any sort. Here asylum issues and postcolonial issues intersect: the ‘coloniality’ of
conditional hospitality perpetuates the colonial structure – of the host/master –
in the home; absolute hospitality confounds the host’s sovereign right to define
the stranger, conferring instead an ‘unquestioning welcome’.68 By proposing a
form of welcome independent of the need for recognition, Derrida presents a
challenge to the effacement entailed in the distinction between ‘refugee’ and
‘asylum seeker’ and the process of credibility determination.
Derrida also calls absolute hospitality impossible, at most, the ‘possible
happening of something impossible which makes us think what hospitality […]
might be’.69 Impossible, then, in the Derridean sense of bearing the trace of
possibility. This contest of definition does not therefore entail the creation of
a binary division, rather a simultaneously ‘contradictory, antinomic and insepa
rable’ relationship between conditional and unconditional forms of hospitality.70
Nonetheless, the contest of definitions remains a defining issue. Sovereign
power is invested in keeping hospitality conditional, and thus the moment of
the stranger’s arrival at the border becomes a contest between the stranger’s
right to access, and the host’s right to deny it, ‘exercised’, as Derrida points out,
‘by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence’.71 The link
between sovereignty and hospitality is therefore recognition, defined by the
power to exclude; who crosses the threshold depends on who is recognized.
Yet this moment is also, crucially, one of undecidability. Derrida has made it clear
that a decision is only made possible by the presence of the undecidable – that
which distinguishes the decision from the mechanical application of a rule.72
This tension between the decision and the undecidable is, as will be shown,
fundamental to the contest in By the Sea.
Saleh arrives in the UK in 1995, following the post-election violence in
Zanzibar in that year. The novel’s first section describes his interview with an
immigration official at Gatwick airport, during which his presentation of himself
as absolutely other (and therefore eligible for unconditional hospitality) conflicts
with the immigration official’s determination that he remain subject to a condi
tional hospitality. I have already discussed how the asylum claim constitutes a
contest between illocutionary and perlocutionary interpretations. Saleh’s claim,

tions, 2006), p. 98; Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel
Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 23, 25 and 29. My emphasis.
70 Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 79. Emphasis in the original.
71 Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 55.
72 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, in Richard Kearney and M.
Dooley (eds), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London and New
York: Routledge, 1999), p. 66.
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Postcolonial Asylum
however, exposes the provisionality inherent within asylum provision. He begins:

‘I am a refugee, an asylum seeker. These are not simple words, even if habit
of hearing makes them seem so.’73 The complexity of these terms is certainly
belied by their familiarity; as Tony Kushner has described, popular discourse on
asylum often draws upon a distinction between ‘genuine refugees’ and ‘bogus
asylum seekers’, in which the latter is made to encapsulate a range of anxieties
that ‘undermine […] the illusion of belonging to an exclusive and comforting
nation-state’.74 The complex history of these terms, and their relation to modes
of hospitality, is therefore inverted, imposing the complexity and fragility of the
illusion of the nation state upon the new arrival. As Hayden points out, where
the state synchronizes itself with the individual, the asylum claimant acts as a
fetish for the state’s own anxious contingency. It is thus not simply in terms of
discharging the burden of evidence, then, that, as Phil Marfleet has said, the
asylum seeker ‘bears the main weight of definition’.75
This inversion is possible not least because the common perception that
‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’ represent opposite poles on a scale of legitimate
or illegitimate immigration is offset by a marked tendency towards slippage in
the terminology. As Roger Zetter has observed, recent years have borne witness
to a process of ‘relabeling’ both refugees and, by implication, the principles of
refuge, and deploying these labels as ‘instruments of control, restrictionism
and disengagement’.76 Refugee denominations are ‘fractioned’ into increasingly
specific, and restrictive, subcategories (‘“spontaneous asylum seekers” […]
“bogus asylum seekers”, “economic refugee/asylum seeker”, “illegal migrant”,
“trafficked migrant”, “overstayers”, “failed asylum seeker” […] “undocumented
asylum seeker/migrant”’) intended to ‘convey an image of marginality’.77 The
terms of hospitality are no longer sacrosanct; ultimately, everything indicates
an indefinitely temporary presence dependent on sovereign discretion. As the
conditional ‘asylum seeker’ supersedes ‘refugee’ in official and public discourse,
the nature and meaning of ‘refugee’ is also subsumed by a conditional concept,
as the reduction of asylum provision under NAM demonstrates.
The current vocabulary of asylum and immigration therefore constitutes a
complex terminology of unbelonging, within which a term’s potential to confer
legitimacy is always impermanent and increasingly limited. By invoking together
73 Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 4.

74 Tony Kushner, ‘Meaning Nothing but Good: Ethics, History and Asylum-seeker Phobia in
Britain’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37/3 (2003), p. 262.
75 Phil Marfleet, ‘Migration and the Refugee Experience’, in Ray Kiely and Phil Marfleet (eds),
Globalization and the Third World (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp.â•›â•›84–85.
76 Roger Zetter, ‘Refugees and Refugee Studies: A Valedictory Editorial’, Journal of Refugee
Studies, 13/4 (2000), p. 353.
77 Roger Zetter, ‘More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of
Globalization’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 20/2 (2007), pp. 183 and 184. See also Teresa
Hayter, Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls (London: Pluto Press, 2000),
p. 64 and Paul Baker and Tony McEnery, ‘A Corpus-based Approach to Discourses of
Refugees and Asylum Seekers in UN and Newspaper Texts’, Journal of Language and
Politics, 4/2 (2005), pp. 197–226.
168

the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’, Saleh’s statement is a request for recog
nition (admittance and hospitality) that also acknowledges and is framed by a
vocabulary of unbelonging. It gestures towards the inherent ambivalence of the
migrant’s assertion of identity, and also to the burden of definition that frequently
constitutes the host’s response to the stranger. By situating himself within this
shifting discourse, at the point of fracture between what constitutes legitimate
and illegitimate presence, Saleh presents himself as the absolute other.
The fact that ‘the British government had decided […] that people who came
from where I did were eligible for asylum if they claimed that their lives were
in danger’ means Saleh is attempting to insinuate a hospitality of visitation in a
context of invitation, and he employs several strategies calculated to help him
elude the terms of conditional hospitality.78 These strategies are enmeshed,
however, in the deep ambivalence of Saleh’s position and the irony that in order
to insinuate himself as a deserving recipient of hospitality he must be complicit
in his own effacement. For instance, as his sparse luggage is searched he insists,
‘[i]t was not my life that lay spread there, just what I had selected as signals of
a story I hoped to convey’. This ‘hermeneutics of baggage’ includes a casket of
incense called Ud al-qamari, a single reminder of his former life.79 Yet the confis
cation of this casket prompts Saleh to recount how it came into his possession
through Hussain, a Machiavellian Persian traveller who befriended Saleh in the
last days of British rule in Zanzibar. Hussein seduced both the wife and elder
son of his host, and the recurrence of this memory during Saleh’s interrogation
as potential guest of another host indicates his awareness of the ambivalence
of his strategy; that, by presenting himself as the other he carries the uninvited
other’s potential to, as Derrida says, disrupt the household.80
The most effective signal of Saleh’s anonymity is his silence. He recalls how,
before leaving for the UK, he was advised ‘to pretend I could not speak any
English. […] They will ask you your name and your father’s name, and what
good you had done in your life: say nothing’.81 By concealing the fact that he
can speak English, Saleh in effect makes himself nameless, relinquishing family
name in order to claim the new name of refugee/asylum seeker. His silence
deliberately insinuates him into the discourse of the refugee who, as Liisa
Malkki has said, is commonly constituted as speaking through silence.82 Later,
the novel’s other migrant character, Latif, acknowledges that ‘Without English
you are even more a stranger, a refugee […] more convincing […]. You’re just
a condition, without even a story’.83 By effacing himself, Saleh therefore effaces
the need for recognition, and attempts to force the implementation of Derrida’s
unquestioning welcome.
78 Gurnah, By the Sea, p. 10,

79 Gurnah, By the Sea, pp. 8 and 7.
81 Gurnah, By the Sea, p. 5.
169

Postcolonial Asylum
Saleh’s strategy constitutes a complex manoeuvre in which he sidesteps the

process of entextualization affected by the official interview by withholding his
narrative, and thus his own narratability. All that is left is thus the condition
of need he is seen to represent – the lack into which sovereignty pours the
negative image of itself. By refusing to narrate, he attempts to make the law’s
narrow margins of narrative tolerance work to his advantage. The condition he
appeals to is asylos, the inviolable; to be just a condition, whether equated with a
legal or ethical principle, would render his asylum claim irrefutably illocutionary.
It is in effect the method of the kalumniator, self-slander that, as Agamben says,
‘puts guilt into question’.84 Saleh is thus trying to reach beyond the biopolitical
determinations of belonging that put the law before all else and criminalize
asylum seekers. Like Kafka’s man from the country, Saleh’s silence and delib
erate emphasis on the fracture in asylum terminology are ‘nothing other than a
complicated and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt
the Law’s being in force’.85
Despite this, however, the immigration officer, Kevin Edelman, continues
to subject him to the terms of a conditional hospitality. In the face of Saleh’s
silence, he poses a series of questions that fixate on whether Saleh can demon
strate that he is knowable:
Reason for seeking entry into the United Kingdom? Are you a tourist? On
holiday? Any funds? Do you have any money, sir? […] Do you know anybody
who can offer a guarantee? Any contact address? […] Do you have any
documentation that might help me understand your circumstances? Papers,
do you have any papers?86
These questions constitute the interpellation of the stranger as a ‘legal subject’
within the figuration of conditional hospitality, whose alienating effect is to
make the foreigner ‘first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty
of hospitality is formulated’.87 Again, language is the site in which the contest
between stranger and host is played out. Just as Saleh’s silence is designed to
express his anonymity, the purpose of Edelman’s questions is to fix the stranger
within the legal language in which conditional hospitality is expressed.
Edelman also invokes his own family name to demonstrate hospitality by right:
‘My parents were refugees, from Romania. […] But my parents are European,
they have a right, they’re part of the family.’88 Edelman’s foreignness deter
mines the limits of hospitality, the key to belonging remains the possession of
a family name; in spite of his studied anonymity, because he is not part of the
European family, Saleh is only eligible for exclusion. By using his own immigrant
84 Giorgio Agamben, ‘K’, in Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron and Alex Murray (eds), The Work
of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, trans. Nicholas Heron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008), pp. 15 and 16.
170

heritage to illustrate the illegitimacy of Saleh’s claim to hospitality, Edelman

makes himself into the force of exception that acts in support of border sover
eignty; it situates him at the point of ‘being-outside, and yet belonging’, which
Agamben defines as the state of exception.89 Edelman summarizes the state of
exception as rigorously establishing sovereignty through contradiction, justi
fying exclusion by reference to inclusion, and underlines the subjective, sliding
definitions of belonging and unbelonging that characterize exceptionality.
Such limitations do not, however, represent a final decision. Derrida begins
the second part of Of Hospitality by asking, ‘[w]hat does it mean […] if, for the
invited guest as much as for the visitor, the crossing of a threshold always
remains a transgressive step?’90 This transgressive step involves a step ‘outside
the law’ (of regulated immigration), to the transcendent law of hospitality.
Derrida posits an inversion that resembles the exception, in that it is founded
on a contiguous and dependent relationship; the absolute law exists outside
and at the limits of the profane laws, but ‘the unconditional law of hospitality
needs the laws, it requires them. […] And vice versa, conditional laws would
cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not […] required […] by the law of
unconditional hospitality’.91 It is this relation of requirement that prevents the
apparently irresolvable conflict between absolute and conditional expressions
of hospitality from becoming a binary relationship. Rather, they ‘both imply
and exclude each other, simultaneously’. As a consequence, the impossibility
of an absolute hospitality ‘at the moment’ of arrival, which is ‘hospitable only
inasmuch as inhospitable’, makes us look again at the manner and the moment
of hospitality.92
This relation of requirement is expressed in the French term hôte, who is both
the one who gives and the one who receives hospitality. Derrida’s definition
Â� –
‘the hôte as host is a guest’ – substitutes for the host ‘the absolute precedence
of the welcome’.93 Here we can see how the colonial relation between hospi
tality and culture comes to experience a characteristically postcolonial reversal.
The power relations encoded within the hospitable relation of master–stranger,
read through the duality of the hôte, express how the host is only realized
through the guest.
Derrida also speaks of the urgency of making a responsible decision, where
urgency is defined as ‘the impossibility of waiting for the end of reflection’, that
is, for the question of hospitality to be resolved.94 In other words, there is
an urgency associated with acting to offer hospitality in spite of the presence

93 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 41–42 and 43.
94 Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Eliza
beth Rosenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 296. Emphasis in
the original.
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Postcolonial Asylum
of conditions. This urgency must always suffer interruption, because of the

relation of requirement and contradiction between conditional and uncondi
tional hospitality. This interruption is the crossing of the threshold – it is both
the transgressive, interrupting presence of the new arrival and the interruption
of conditional hospitality upon the ideal of unconditionality (and vice versa).
Edelman’s decision to admit Saleh is made possible (even imperative) by the
very conditionality of the hospitality he ascribes to. In spite of his questions,
there remains the urgency of the moment: as the paradox of the law/laws comes
up against the impossibility of waiting, a decision must be arrived at. Edelman’s
dependence on certain forms of identification (the structures of the regulated
border) is interrupted by Saleh’s refusal to comply. The notion of the transgres
sive step gives the lie, here, to the interpretation of this as a simple binary
relationship of the powerful and the powerless. Saleh’s insistent representation
of himself as the absolute other conversely exposes the limits of Edelman’s
power as host, indicating the state’s vulnerability to forms of movement that
subvert its basic tenets of identification and control.
Thus the moment of undecidability ‘is the condition or the opening of a
space for an ethical or political decision, and not the opposite’.95 Hospitality
always therefore involves a transgressive step; the undecidability of Edelman’s
situation, hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable, opens a space into which the
new arrival can be admitted, in spite of Saleh’s failure to provide the requisite
documentation. Therefore, we can see the paradox of urgency that Derrida
describes: while a decision to act according to the ideals of absolute hospi
tality remains impossible, it remains imperative to act; but while a conditional
hospitality is offered, it takes place in transgression of the conditions that are
applied.
Saleh is sent to a boarding house on the south coast, run by the domineering
Celia. Saleh’s removal to Celia’s care moves the question of hospitality away
from the border and into the home, but the contingencies of the border are not
resolved in the move to a dwelling place. Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller hold
that the house is frequently an analogy for the nation, as both are defined by
their limits; we are ‘at home’, in a dwelling place as in a nation, according to our
position in relation to a border or boundary. 96 Sarah Gibson has developed this
idea in relation to the hotel as a variation on the house; her reflections on the
hotel as a hospitable space centre upon the incommensurability of the words
‘asylum’ and ‘hotel’: whereas a hotel receives guests whose strangeness is
recognized (tourists), a space that accommodates those who are not Â�recognized
(asylum seekers) cannot be designated a hotel.97 Celia’s ‘hotel’ therefore partici
pates in the contest of definitions upon which the question of hospitality turns.
95 Derrida, Negotiations, p. 298.

96 Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, ‘Naturalization or “Culturalization”?’, in Rainer Bauböck
(ed.), From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe (Aldershot:
Avebury, 1994), p. 144.
97 Sarah Gibson, ‘Accommodating Strangers: British Hospitality and the Asylum Hotel
Debate’, Journal for Cultural Research, 7/4 (2003), p. 368.
172

The kind of welcome Saleh receives from Celia illustrates this kind of inter
ruption. Initially, Celia appears to refer to unconditional hospitality:
Now foreigners are everywhere, with all these terrible things happening in
their countries. It didn’t use to be like this. I don’t know the rights and wrongs
of it, but we can’t just turn them away, can we?98
Celia’s formulation of hospitality appears not to impose limits or conditions – ‘I

don’t know the rights and wrongs of it’ – but is in fact rooted in what Gibson
has called Britain’s ‘mythology of hospitality’:99
We didn’t discriminate against them when we helped them during the war.
We didn’t say you are Czech and that one is Roma, so we’ll help you but we
won’t help that one. We helped everybody.100
Hospitality is located within a discourse of national identity where the provi

sion of security remains in the gift of Britain as a (former) colonial power. The
discourse of the nation is thus crossed with that of hospitality. Further, her
claim that Britain did not discriminate in the provision of aid is interrupted
by her mistake in referring to another guest, a Roma called Georgy, as perse
cuted in his home country by Serbs rather than Czechs. Behind Celia’s appeal to
Britain’s altruistic past there lies a sense of racial hierarchy that recalls Edelman’s
invocation of his family name. Her casual mixing up of nationalities suggests a
view of other European peoples, in contrast to the British, as interchangeably
violent and disorderly, who she nonetheless includes within a notion of ethnic
homogeny; her irritation at being told of her mistake belies her call for toler
ance, as in fact nostalgia for what Paul Gilroy has called ‘the peculiar synonymy
of the terms “European” and “white”’.101
Just as Celia crosses an unconditional hospitality with the discourse of the
nation state, Saleh, as an asylum seeker, interrupts the mythology of hospitality.
The unquestioning welcome Celia appeals to is further undermined when she
insists that ‘you’ll have to learn some English’. Once again the contest is between
host and stranger in language. When Celia discovers Saleh is apparently unable
to speak English, she finds it impossible to remember his name, using instead
mocking nicknames: ‘Mr Naasahab’, ‘Mr Bashat’, ‘Mr Showness’, ‘Mr Showboat’.
Without English, his identity is effaced, but not in the manner that would entail
anonymity and entitle him to an unconditional welcome. Rather, Saleh says
that Celia’s ‘sharp look was a kind of recognition, and one which I had no
desire for’.102 As with Edelman, Saleh’s assertion of his anonymity encourages
not hospitality but the impression of illegitimacy. Yet the fact remains that here,

99 Gibson, ‘Accommodating Strangers’, p. 367.
101 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? [2004] (London and New York:
102 Gurnah, By the Sea, pp. 58 and 52.
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Postcolonial Asylum
as with Edelman at the border, Saleh is accommodated. The manner in which

Saleh is given place within the hotel therefore represents an interruption of
both conditional and unconditional forms of hospitality.
The necessary other
Whereas the behaviour of his hosts fixes Saleh in a context of illegitimacy, his
presence demonstrates a challenge to the kind of hospitality the host is able or
willing to provide. Yet, because it is unvoiced, Saleh’s challenge ultimately fails
to counteract his effacement within the asylum system; he describes himself
as ‘an involuntary instrument in another’s design, a figure in a story told by
someone else. Not I’.103 As with his earlier statement, ‘I am a refugee, an asylum
seeker’, Saleh’s ‘I’ is spoken as its own effacement, the ‘not-I’. He is faced with
the impossibility of speaking himself against the unspoken, implacable state of
exception that determines the narrative of exclusion into which he is inserted.
Saleh’s position is thus rather ambiguous. He remains an ‘involuntary instru
ment’, but has successfully insinuated himself into the role of (unwanted)
guest. Saleh’s problem is effectively how to bear witness to the impossi
bility of speaking. He asks: ‘Can an I ever speak of itself without making itself
heroic, without making itself seem hemmed in, arguing against an unarguable,
rancouring with an implacable?’104 His reference to the ‘not-I’ suggests Saleh’s
appreciation that enunciation is always, as Stuart Hall says, ‘positioned’ by a
rupture that splits the speaking subject and the spoken ‘I’.105 For Agamben,
this rupture inevitably speaks of silence. Because it is composed entirely of
discourse, the subject of enunciation cannot speak of itself:
In the absolute present of the event of discourse, subjectification and desub

jectification coincide at every point, and both the flesh and blood individual
and the subject of enunciation are perfectly silent. […] the one who speaks
is not the individual, but language; but this means nothing other than that an
impossibility of speaking has, in an unknown way, come to speech.106
Speech implicates silence; silence implicates speech. This double movement

constitutes, for Agamben, the conditions for a response to another’s narrative
that attends to the elisions and silences in testimony. In fact, silence is a neces
sary condition for speech. Saleh’s silence, conceived of as an article of speech,
then, moves from a gesture of simple self-effacement into the realm of the
assumption of bare life, out of mere negation and into a more active field of
reference: ‘every desubjectification […] bears witness to a subject.’107
103 Gurnah, By the Sea, pp. 68–69.

105 Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Difference’, p. 222.
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), pp. 116–117.
174

The manner in which he reveals that he can in fact speak English, in the office
of his caseworker, casts his silence as dissensus. When asked why he declined
to speak, he answers by paraphrasing Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’:
‘I preferred not to,’ I said, glancing at the brick wall through the window
opposite me.
â•… ‘What!’ she exclaimed, now unashamedly irritated.
â•… So then I knew she did not know the story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. The
brick wall made me think of it as soon as I walked into the room, and I was
certain that when I started to speak I would find a way to say that sentence,
to see if the brick wall made her think of it too.108
Saleh’s knowledge of Melville is a consequence of his colonial education, and

a covert sign of the complexity of his links to the UK, illustrating Cwerner’s
point that resistance to time politics is possible where the asylum seeker makes
visible the non-synchronous relationship between colonizer and colonized
that also establishes a bond in the present.109 The formula ‘I preferred not
to’ is a protest against his introduction to the condition and terminology of
unbelonging. Wilson Harris has said that in ‘Bartleby’ Melville ‘expresses a
profound dissatisfaction with the vocabulary of his age’.110 Similarly, in By the
Sea Bartleby’s formula is Saleh’s protest against the ‘overbearing weight of the
nuances [in language] that place and describe’ him as an illegitimate presence.111
Here the language of asylum has entered a condition of anomie. The exclu
sion of the asylum seeker from the category of refugee makes terms such as
‘asylum seeker’ represent a zone of anomie within the procedural vocabulary.
Saleh protests against this codification of belonging and unbelonging, in which
notions of border sovereignty are located at a point of threshold between
legitimate and illegitimate presence, and are inscribed in a language that is
both alienated and alienating, by applying to his own situation, and inhabiting,
the anomic condition of Bartleby’s formula. As a threshold utterance that, as
Deleuze has said, ‘creates a vacuum in language’, the formula corresponds with
Agamben’s summation of the state of exception as kenomatic.112 By invoking
Bartleby, Saleh is identifying and indicting the liminal vocabulary that locates
the refugee subject as Â�unwelcome. He engages the devices of the state of excep
tion, creating a vacuum in language, in order to illuminate the place of the
refugee within that vacuum.
There is a resemblance here between Saleh’s protest and that of the French
sans-papiers who, like Saleh’s use of Bartleby’s formula, resisted the imposition
109 Cwerner, ‘Faster, Faster, Faster’, p. 84.
110 Wilson Harris, The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed.
Andrew Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 78.
112 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bartleby: or, the Formula’, Essays Critical and Clinical [1993], trans. Daniel
W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 7; Giorgio
Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 6.
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Postcolonial Asylum
of a condition of illegitimacy by asserting instead a subjective selfhood that

chooses to represent its exclusion in the terms of that exclusion. The formula
contests the effacement of the refugee subject by deliberately occupying that
effacement, foregrounding exclusion through the anomic language of asylum.
In this sense, ‘I preferred not to’ invokes the ‘not-I’, the effaced I, as the most
eloquent summation of the voiceless condition of the asylum seeker.
At this stage it appears that By the Sea subscribes to the same mode of resist
ance to sovereignty discussed in the previous chapter, in which the asylum
seeker ‘negat[es] their negation’.113 In a move that is characteristic of his
fiction, however, Gurnah changes tack on the question of narratability. The
remainder of the novel explores expressions of relationality that are removed
from the refusals of Bartleby (and Saleh), which Hardt and Negri have called the
enunciation of ‘homo tantum, mere man and nothing more’, and lead towards
‘homohomo, humanity squared’, a culmination of relation and responsibility.114
For Agamben, the concept of responsibility is ‘irremediably contaminated by
law’. His criticism is founded in its Latin root, spondeo, which conveys a sense of
acting as guarantor, thus situating a contract at the heart of ethics.115 Instead
he offers a concept of non-responsibility, defined not by amorality but by an
acknowledgment of unassumability that, Catherine Mills says, ‘imposes itself
on the subject through […] apostrophic address’. Mills describes a problem in
Agamben’s thinking here, however, in that it neglects to consider a relational
heritage in an alternative root for responsibility, responso, which means to respond
to another’s address.116 Although Mills elsewhere acknowledges that relation
ality is implicit in the focus on enunciative positions in Agamben’s argument, her
criticism is, I think, valid.117 While Agamben can be credited with presenting a
politicized understanding of silence, this is at the expense of relations between
subjects. This absence in Agamben leads Mills to Adriana Cavarero’s work, in
which the key question is not ‘what is this “I”? but who am “I”?’118
I believe that Gurnah’s novel replicates the move Mills proposes, from
Agamben to Cavarero. Following the revelation he can speak English, Saleh’s
caseworker tells him of her now unnecessary plan to employ an interpreter,
who is in fact an acquaintance from Saleh’s past, Latif Mahmoud. As the two
meet and share their accounts, both of events in Zanzibar and what led them
to the UK, the question of the speaking subject and the reception of narratives

114 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard Univer
sity Press, 2000), pp. 203 and 204.
115 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 20 and 21–22.
116 Catherine Mills, ‘An Ethics of Bare Life: Agamben and Witnessing’, Borderlands, 2/1 (2003),
§§ 20 and 21. Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no1_2003/mills_agamben.
html>. Accessed 15 March 2009.
117 Catherine Mills, ‘Linguistic Survival and Ethicality: Biopolitics, Subjectification and Testi
mony in Remnants of Auschwitz’, in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics and Death:
Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2005), p. 211.
118 Mills, ‘Linguistic Survival and Ethicality’, p. 212.
176

becomes that of what Cavarero calls the necessary other; the one who invites
the subject to tell and whose act of listening confirms the self’s narratability.
Cavarero insists that both self and other are equally ‘narratable instead of
narrated’: ‘the familiar experience of narratability’, she explains, involves recog
nizing in the other a unique story to be told, ‘even when we do not know
their story at all’.119 In Cavarero’s prescription, Levinas’s irreducible ontological
alterity evaporates: she retains his understanding of the self as only ever realized
in relation to the other, but rejects the implication that the other can only be
encountered as a manifestation of alterity. Similarly, Cavarero’s apostrophe,
the reciprocal turning of (potential) narrators towards each other, ruptures
Agamben’s dialectic of subjectification and de-subjectification. By insisting that
the self is innately narratable, Cavarero recasts the enunciative act as one of
mutual subjectification between speaking subjects, of introducing the self into
the world: contrary to Agamben, for Cavarero the ‘I’ can articulate the ‘who’
that speaks it.
It cannot, however, achieve this in isolation. Existents only appear to
themselves through relationship with another existent, that is, in the mutual
acknowledgement of each other’s unique (potential) narratability. Although
Cavarero describes the narrating impulse as existing in actuality rather than
potentiality, she allows a qualification – the actuality of narratability is not
impeded, ‘even when it refrains from “producing”’ narratives.120 This links
her sense of an innately narratable self to Agamben’s idea of the potentiality
expressed in impotentiality – the potential not to tell of oneself does not under
mine but is an essential part of the existent’s narratability. Because Cavarero
does not insist on narration, only the potential to do so, silence loses none of
the force of expression afforded to it by Agamben.
Crucially, Cavarero’s relational theory offers a means to subvert the biopo
litical imperatives of sovereignty, through the acknowledgement of uniqueness,
‘only in relation’, bios is realized instead of zoē.121 This is because, for Cavarero,
politics is fundamentally relational. Counter to the alienating effect of a politics
that insists on defining, narratability subverts definition. As such, it presents
an alternative to the vexed relationship between definition and narrative that
persists in the asylum regime:
The ontological status of reciprocal appearance [comparizione] belongs to the
existents – distinct and plural, each one for and with another – of a living
context like life. Continuing to live as a unique existent, here and now, in flesh
and bone, this and not another, the who therefore avoids the usual language
of both ethics and politics. Constitutively altruistic, rather than by choice, the
ethics and politics of uniqueness indeed speak a language that does not know
general names.122
119 Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood [1997], trans. Paul A.
Kottman (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 34.
120 Cavarero, Relating Narratives, pp. 84 and 35.
121 Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. 85.
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Postcolonial Asylum
The ‘who’ of the enunciative act (its ‘flesh and blood’) conflates with the
subject of enunciation. In terms of asylum narratives, Cavarero’s theory privi
leges absolutely the uniqueness of the individual claimant beyond definitions
– ‘she is a unique existent that no categorization or collective identity can
fully contain’.123 Terms like ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’ disappear before the
irrefutable uniqueness of the individual existent that calls upon a relational
‘co-appearance’ with other existents, redefining the political topography of
inclusive exclusion in the process.
The story-sharing between Saleh and Latif that constitutes the majority of By
the Sea can be read as an extended engagement with narratability, as a viable
alternative to the contest over definitions that Saleh engages in with Edelman.
Despite their mutual mistrust and conflicting memories of past events (Latif
blames Saleh for the loss of his parents’ house as a security against unpaid debts),
each acknowledges the other’s innate narratability. Significantly, it is not until
the end of the novel, when Latif and Saleh have affirmed that co-appearance,
that Saleh tells the story of what led him to seek asylum. Furthermore, Gurnah
deliberately allows the interpretation of Saleh’s Bartleby-esque protest to be
revised. When he repeats the phrase to Rachel, his caseworker who has become
a friend, she dismisses it as ‘doing your Bartleby act again’; Bartleby’s protest
is revised as the action of ‘someone dangerous, someone capable of small,
sustained cruelties on himself and others weaker than himself, an abuser’.124
Given that, in this scene, Rachel has arrived as an unexpected guest of Saleh,
one of the numerous inversions of hospitable relations in the novel, it suggests
that the recognition involved in Derrida’s transgressive step is a process that
substitutes the sliding position of host and guest for a reciprocal co-appearance
of narratable selves.
Gurnah’s most explicit example of this is the narrative Latif tells Saleh of
his time as a student in Dresden in the 1970s. Initially he encounters suspicion
and incomprehension, but while in Zanzibar he has also been engaged in a
correspondence with Elleke, a German pen friend, whose letters provide him
with a sense of recognition, ‘like letters from a friend’.125 When Elleke discovers
Latif has arrived in the GDR, however, she reveals a deception: ‘Elleke’ is in fact
the invention of Jan, a young German inspired on a whim to invent a female
alter ego. What is significant about this relationship is that although Jan invites
Latif to his home, perpetuating a hospitality of invitation, he also offers to
provide Latif with an explanation for his unusual behaviour, interrupting and
inverting the dynamic of conditional hospitality in which the guest is required
to explain himself. When they arrive at the flat that Jan shares with his mother
(whose name is also Elleke), it is discovered that Latif has badly cut his foot, a
wound he initially did not feel owing to the numbing cold. As she washes the
wound, Elleke tells him, ‘I thought I would meet you, although I didn’t know

125 Gurnah, By the Sea, p. 118
178

it would be you’.126 Although Latif is not wholly unknown to his hosts – he has
after all been corresponding with them – he is offered a kind of recognition
that does not deny him the (im)possibility of anonymity – he is recognized
by his unknown otherness. Elleke draws a parallel between Latif’s arrival, and
Odysseus’s return to Troy disguised as a stranger. While washing the stranger’s
feet his former nurse Euryclea recognizes a scar on Odysseus’s foot, a moment
that Erich Auerbach has described as ‘the first duty of hospitality towards a tired
traveller’.127 This directive is clearly on Elleke’s mind as she declares, ‘Auerbach
does such wonderful things with that passage’, and asks if Latif has read him.128
Despite the perpetuation of aspects of an invitational-conditional hospitality,
then, the significance of the cumulative effect of these questions and references
is not to establish a contest but rather a sense of deepening recognition.
The fundamental moment of recognition occurs when Latif is invited to give
his name:
‘Asante,’ she said in Kiswahili, and then smiled. ‘I still remember a few words.
My dear friend, how should we call you? Shall we call you Ismail? Is that what
your friends call you?129
The reference to Melville echoes that of Saleh, but also inverts it: whereas the
latter is a covert reference to the complexities of the relationship between
colonial subject and colonial host, Elleke’s invocation is an open acknowledge
ment of this. The question ‘what is your name?’ is the basis of a conditional
hospitality; furthermore, her efforts to speak Kiswahili suggest a romanticizing
of her Kenyan experiences and a rather homogenized sense of Latif’s Zanzi
bari origins. Yet this is crossed by the manner in which the question is asked,
converted from the principal signifier of the authority of the sovereign host into
a reception of the new arrival in which recognition is pre-given (‘My dear friend’),
and where the new arrival is called on to define themselves (‘how should we call
you?’). Because, as Derrida says, the proper name ‘does not belong to language’,
and is therefore untranslatable, it can be characterized as the point at which
absolute hospitality is crossed by a conditional hospitality – an interruption that
nonetheless results in the recognition of the humanity of the guest. The inter
ruption here is the constitutively altruistic gesture that, Cavarero says, does not
know general names – only the name (the unique narratable identity) the other
chooses for herself/himself. Additionally, by speaking in English, Elleke and Jan
at least relinquish the sovereign host’s prerogative to ‘impose […] translation’
into the language of the host.130 The consequence of the host’s abdication of
sovereignty is the recognition of a shared humanity that does not suffer under
the threat of its sudden withdrawal. In the context of this welcome Latif is not
127 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1953), p. 3.
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Postcolonial Asylum
subject to a condition of indefinite temporariness; rather, their recognition of

him involves the acknowledgement of their common experience of displace
ment and alienation in Dresden – Latif as a foreign visitor and Elleke in the
troubled aftermath of the Second World War, when ‘Germans were expelled
from everywhere […] Dresden was a pile of rubble with thousands of refugees
crawling over it’.131
Significantly, this welcome is not an isolated experience for Latif. On his
arrival as a political refugee in Plymouth he notes that ‘no one molested me
or asked me to name myself’.132 This comes even closer to a hospitality of visita
tion; although he arrives without invitation, Latif’s presence does not provoke
anxiety or hostility, and the burden of definition is not made to weigh upon him;
when he does encounter a harbour policeman, his assertion, ‘I am a refugee’ is
met with the simple response, ‘From where?’.133 Thus, although the questions
persist, Latif’s description of himself as a refugee is not contested, in contrast
to the complex terminology of unbelonging and illegitimacy in which Saleh is
situated. When he learns that Latif has arrived from East Germany, the policeman
makes an attempt to speak to him in German, and invites him to relate the story
of his journey, limiting his own contribution to allow Latif to speak of himself
as the hero in his own story. According to Cavarero’s translator, the basis for
her work is Hannah Arendt’s insistence that it is only possible to know someone
‘by knowing the story of which he himself is the hero’.134 Although, predictably,
Latif’s subsequently encounters the same dismal racial prejudices as Saleh, the
manner of his arrival nevertheless indicates, within the neo-colonial dynamic
of hospitality, the possibility of an unconditional hospitality: one that interrupts
itself, offering glimpses of the realization of the impossibility of giving place to
the new arrival without fear of the loss of sovereignty. As Derrida has said, ‘this
division is the condition of hospitality’.135
131 Gurnah, By the Sea, pp. 136–137.

132 Gurnah, By the Sea, p. 137. My emphasis.
134 Paul A. Kottman, in Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. viii. See Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), p. 181.
135 Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice, Responsibility’, p. 81.
180

chapter 6
The Politics of Proximity
In the slide from ‘I’ to ‘we’, it may be difficult to distinguish between narcis
sism and political practice or to discern how violence moves from the discur
sive to the actual.
Elin Diamond1
Response-ability
It is perhaps true to say that the predominant focus of this book is also the
central concern articulated by postcolonial studies, from Fanon onwards:
what is the nature of my responsibility to the other? Although the majority of
countries today producing asylum seekers bound for the West are also former
European colonies, to suppose this is the end point of responsibility would
reduce a proper response to the other to a quantifiable, dischargeable duty.
Such a limited understanding of responsibility barely, if at all, impacts upon
how community, the constitution of a ‘we’, is understood, and instead leaves
intact the asymmetry of global power relations.
The focus of this final chapter, then, is this question of responsibility posed
by the presence of the asylum seeker. The difficulty of a responsibility that takes
into account, but also exceeds (or, in the sense advanced by Emmanuel Levinas,
fundamentally precedes) matters of context (e.g., the identity of a specific ‘I’ in
relation to a specific other, within a specific relationship of time and place), can
also point towards, I suggest, a way of contesting the captivity of the asylum
seeker in the ban. Where the ban inaugurates the end of the outside, Zygmunt
Bauman has shown how the openness of globalized societies has brought about
the end of a ‘material outside’: actions in one place have (potentially) a bearing
1 Elin Diamond, ‘The Violence of “We”: Politicising Identification’, in Tanelle G. Reinelt and
Joseph R. Roach (eds), Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2007), p. 403.
181

Postcolonial Asylum
upon the lives of people in all places.2 Furthermore, Gayatri Spivak formulates
‘the problematic of responsibility’ at a threshold, occupying ‘an intermediary
stage, caught between an ungraspable call and a setting-to-work’.3 The simulta
neous exclusivity and inclusivity of responsibility, ungraspable yet irresistible,
replicates the inclusive-exclusive threshold of the ban, but invests the threshold
with the potential for a more open response – what Rosalyn Diprose (building
on Levinas) has called ‘response-ability’, a ‘sensibility beyond’ the relational
norm.4
Response-ability is an acknowledgment of the inter-relatedness of responsi
bility for others and self-responsibility. A key element here is the importance
of affectivity, as the capacity to respond constitutes ‘what grounds responsi
bility and community’.5 As Sara Ahmed has observed, emotions ‘align individ
uals with communities’.6 Ahmed’s discussion of the affective economies within
which responses to the other circulate, accumulating affective value as they
do so, is an insightful summary of the way ‘the asylum seeker’ is incrementally
constructed as a figure of suspicion and threat, and conflated with terrorists
and other threats to the body of the nation.7 Yet it is also worth considering
Diprose’s assertion that the minimum requirement for responsibility is the self’s
exposure to an unanticipated future (‘[i]n assuming responsibility, the self risks
itself for a future’).8 As Judith Butler has said, what ‘other passages’ are there
from injury, or the perceived threat of injury, other than violence?
Butler imagines the question of response leading not to an intransitive
responsibility but to interdependency based on vulnerability: ‘One insight that
injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends,
people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on
anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away.’9 The dramatization
of vulnerability and proximity is a key feature of the recent so-called ‘verbatim
theatre’ productions, which mix dramaturgy with asylum seekers’ testimony
in a manner that treads an ambiguous line between truth and negotiation. In
the UK, Kate Adshead’s The Bogus Women (1998) was followed by Timberlake
Wertenbaker’s Credible Witness (2001), Sonja Linden’s Asylum Monologues (2006)
and Asylum Dialogues (2008) and Natasha Walter’s Motherland (2008); in Australia,
Shahin Shafaei’s Refugitive (2003), Don Mamouney’s Citizen X (2003), Ros Horin’s
2 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2007), p. 6.
3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Responsibility’, Boundary 2: An International Journal of Litera-
ture and Culture, 21/3 (1994), p. 23.
4 Rosalyn Diprose, ‘Responsibility in a Place and Time of Terror’, Borderlands, 3/1 (2004),
32 paras. Available at <www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no1_2004/diprose_terror.htm>.
5 Diprose, ‘Responsibility’, § 3.
6 Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text, 22/2 (2004), p. 119.
7 Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, pp. 119–123.
8 Diprose, ‘Responsibility’, § 14.
9 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York:
Verso, 2004), p. xxix.
182

Through the Wire (2004), Nigel Jamieson’s In Our Name (2004), Tony Kevin’s A
Certain Maritime Incident (2004) and Towfiq Al-Qady’s Nothing but Nothing (2005)
all showcased a concern to establish authenticity by reproducing the words
of displaced people. Although the methodology differs from play to play, they
share a common aim to induct audiences into something that at least feels like
a bona fide experience of displacement. But whereas the majority of recent
productions rely on highlighting the authenticity of their source material, Claire
Bayley’s The Container puts the audience even more directly into contact with
asylum experience.
The play is set entirely in a freight container carrying five people intent on
a new life in the UK. Perhaps mindful of Richard Schechner’s assertion that
‘the whole constellation of events’ that occur during the spectators’ occupancy
constitute the field of performance, Bayley’s play premiered inside a container
lorry at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007, and was subsequently restaged in a forty-
foot freight container outside London’s Young Vic theatre in 2009.10 The dimen
sions of the performing space necessarily imposed strictures on performers
and audience: the latter was limited to twenty-eight; the only lighting was
provided by the actors’ handheld torches; and beyond the concession of some
extra ventilation and the absence of the smell of human waste, the production
sought to achieve an experience of heat, confinement and disorientation that
was as close as possible to the real thing.11
The play began as a part of a creative arts project involving young
people in the Thames Gateway area, which took place in a specially adapted
freight container. As part of the project, pupils from a local school made a
Â�documentary about a group of African men who had recently been Â�discovered
inside a container and deported, including a reconstruction of the incident
in which all parts were played by the pupils themselves: Bayley felt this
was ‘the perfect environment’ in which to introduce her new play, which
was performed at a school in Pitsea.12 The stated aim of The Container was
to challenge negative perceptions of irregular migration in the UK, and the
response of one girl in the Pitsea audience confirmed Bayley’s sense that the
gulf between affect and perception could be bridged by thrusting the audience
into close proximity with the subject: ‘I felt like I went on that journey with them
[…] I’ll never feel the same way about immigrants now I know what some of them go
through to get here’.13 The emphasis on feelings here underlines how intimacy
is central to Bayley’s strategy to make audiences re-examine their attitudes to
immigrants. The play exploits the affective nature of citizenship as the deline
ation of bodies in space, to demand that the boundaries of inclusion should be
re-examined.
10 Richard Schechner, quoted in Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as
Cultural Intervention (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 22.
11 Stephen Moss, ‘The Container’s Captive Audience’, Guardian (7 July 2009). Available at
<www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/07/the-container>. Accessed 7 July 2009.
12 Clare Bayley, The Container (London: Nic Hern Books, 2007), pp. 4–9.
13 Bayley, The Container, p. 9. Emphasis in the original.
183

Postcolonial Asylum
Not all audience members were as receptive, however; one reviewer for the
Guardian summarized the play’s primary affect as, ‘as if I’d been sitting, well,
in a shipping container for an hour’.14 The play’s bold staging thus provokes
important questions about the efficacy of acts of substitution and the potential
for affective experiences to convey response to a more defined sense of respon-
sibility: does being moved (emotionally) by an experience lead to other kinds of
shift – in attitude, in political alignment – or even to moving (acting) on behalf of
the displaced? That is, can one form of substitution produce another, and what
then are the political and ethical implications?
Inevitably, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy is a key starting point for
this kind of investigation. For Levinas, substitution, the self made hostage to
the other, is the sum of ethical relations. He envisages a logic of ‘the sensi
bility of proximity’ that links substitution to responsibility; substitution is ‘the
basis of proximity’, which is in turn the basis for a ‘sensibility from the first
assimilated by responsibilities’.15 Responsibility is acknowledging that, in the
other’s presence (before the other, conveying Levinas’s sense that this relation
ship precedes any particular), I am utterly beholden; that, in a phrase Levinas
borrowed frequently from Dostoyevsky, ‘we are all guilty of all and for all men
before all, and I more than the others’.16 This responsibility is at once irreduc
ible, reflecting the other’s uniqueness, and intransitive; my responsibility is
strictly one way, and so absolute that I am responsible even for the other’s
responsibility. Consequently, it is, in effect, impossible to discharge – Levinas
speaks of the ‘never enough’ of proximity – yet it is the fundamental basis of
every properly ethical relationship. Responsibility lies in ‘the exposure of me to
the other, prior to every decision’, and is most fully realized in the face-to-face
encounter with the other.17 The face is not equated with visibility, with a human
face, however, but with the uniqueness of the other that it is impossible fully to
comprehend without violating. It is this ‘face’ of the other that interpolates the
self to acknowledge responsibility, and thus the other’s irreducible humanity.
The potential within Levinas’s philosophy to challenge the constitution of
‘we’ is vast, describing a relationship in which the self acquiesces entirely to the
other’s insistent call to recognize proximity conceived of as responsibility. Yet,
when it comes either to realising a dedicated programme of action in response
to the other, or in establishing a sense of a reciprocal relationship, Levinas’s
ethics are deeply problematic. A consideration of the difficulties in Levinasian
ethics will therefore be threaded through this chapter. These may be briefly
summarized as the question of proximity in relation to politics, representation
14 Natasha Tripney, ‘Authenticity Displaces Imagination in the Young Vic’s Container’,

Guardian Theatre Blog (17 July 2009). Available at <www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatre
blog/2009/jul/17/young-vic-container>. Accessed 24 July 2009.
15 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence [1981], trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2004), p. 10.
Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), pp. 98 and 96.
17 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, pp. 139 and 141.
184

and totalization. In spite of its potential to undermine the sovereign constitu

tion of the self, Levinas’s theory contains little or no proscription for action.
Indeed, proximity is an ‘extreme passivity’; not, Levinas insists, the ‘passivity of
inertia’, but an exposure in which the self is offered before the other without
limit or end.18 Of course, the core concern of Levinas’s work is to understand
the ethical obligations that precede any legislating morality. He describes an
anachronous responsibility precisely to subvert the self’s preference for elective
commitments and tendency to impose itself on any relationship; the other
always remains ‘the free one’. Yet in arguing that this relationship of proximity
‘cannot be reduced to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to
the simple “representation” of a neighbour’, he invokes a relational model that
lacks any clearly defined capacity to act upon the world it describes.19
In describing a relationship that cannot be reduced to representation,
Levinas forecloses the potential within art to bring about change in relations
with otherness. Proximity, he says, resists the work of art because representa
tion does not respect the irreducible nature of alterity.20 Finally, the other’s
irreducible otherness precludes the development of community, and the recip
rocal relations imagined by Fanon. For Levinas the other’s alterity is inviolable;
as Jill Robbens has succinctly put it, his reasoning assumes that ‘[t]o approach
the other armed with a concept such as community or dialogue […] would
destroy the alterity of the other in the guise of respecting him or her’.21 What
Levinas calls ‘illeity’ refers to ‘a way of concerning me without entering into
conjunction with me’: the self is perpetually hostage to the other, whose alterity
is similarly perpetual.22 Neither the self nor the other is permitted to become an
‘I’ that would be associated with totalization, but must always acknowledge the
alterity within any pronouncement of ‘I’. Yet in deconstructing this relationship
Levinas also seems to ossify it, closing down avenues in which the disenfran
chised can acquire agency.
In preceding chapters I have examined a range of different responses to the
problematization of ‘we’ that articulate something like a politics of proximity:
both Christoph Schlingenseif’s container in the centre of Vienna and Caryl
Phillips’s examination of the life and death of David Oluwale expose the liminal
spaces and presences nestled within the city; the example of reading Bartleby
shows how refusing hospitality – the host’s offer to come closer – can expose
its deficiencies, whereas Abdulrazak Gurnah tests this position in By the Sea and
finds a reciprocal recognition of the other’s innate narratability to be a more
suggestive organization of encounters with difference; the walking praxis of the
18 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, pp. 47 and 75.

19 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2004), pp. 39 and 100–101.
20 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 129–143.
21 Jill Robbens, Altered Readings: Levinas and Literature (Chicago, Ill. and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 5.
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Postcolonial Asylum
‘way from home’ project utilized substitution as a way of destabilizing affective

relations to place, as the guest became the guide. Here I will look at a variety of
instances where acts of substitution – situating oneself in the place of the other
– are presented as a way to overcome the strictures of the ban. In this chapter I
will examine the politics of proximity presented by examples of three different
forms of art: performance – in Shahin Shafaei’s performances in Refugitive and
Horin’s Through the Wire; film/video – in Michael Winterbottom’s In This World
(2002) and Mieke Bal’s video installation, Nothing is Missing (2006–2007); and
the literary novel – in Caryl Phillip’s A Distant Shore (2003). Although none of
these works ought to be seen as representative of their genre, each combines a
direct engagement with acts of substitution with a sense that form can reflect
the experience of displacement. Mieke Bal has suggested that moving images
and migration are linked by a ‘double work with movement’, in the inscrip
tion of experience in space and time;23 Phillips has described a deep affinity
between the experience of migration and the fractured narratives associated
with prominent ‘exilic writers’ such as Conrad, T. S. Eliot and Wilson Harris;24
similarly, Peggy Phelan’s description of performance as ‘[p]oised forever at the
threshold of the present’ recalls Enrica Rigo’s observation that migrant time
is often marked by an experience of ‘indefinite temporariness’.25 As such, a
consideration of the acts of substitution described by these works will also
allow for a consideration of their potential, as works of art, to prompt a shift
from response to responsibility.
The acts of standing in under consideration here convey a sense of their
potential to establish liberatory practices, but also provoke important ethical
concerns. Any consideration of substitution must bear in mind Sara Ahmed’s
salient warning that proximity, not distance, produces otherness.26 Even a
benevolent proximity risks compounding the representation of the refugee as
one who requires others to speak on her/his behalf. As acts that seek to challenge
the constitution of the citizen’s ‘we’, then, the danger in acts of substitution is
that they simply reproduce, implicitly or explicitly, the distinctions they aim to
subvert. It is therefore important to ask, is there a politics of proximity that can
enfranchise the displaced without thematizing displacement?
23 Mieke Bal, ‘Heterochronotopia’, Thamyris Intersecting, 19 (2008), pp. 36 and 45–46.

24 Caryl Phillips, A New World Order: Selected Essays [2001] (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 292.
25 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge,
1993), p. 27; Enrica Rigo, ‘Citizenship at Europe’s Borders: Some Reflections on the Post-
colonial Condition of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement’, Citizenship Studies, 9/1
(2005), p. 15.
26 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London and New York:
186

Metaxis
The ethical implications of ‘standing in’ are complex. For all its potential affec
tive power, in the ‘as if’ of The Container there is the risk that the experience
of displacement will be reduced to a spectacle by its interpretive frame, in
which the audience’s experience is the real focus. Julie Salverson has cautioned
against using empathetic staging merely to produce ‘aesthetics of injury’. What
is required, Salverson insists, is a performative mode that, in Levinasian terms,
bears witness to both the said (the ‘knowable’ and relatable elements, such as
the discomforts of occupying a shipping container) and the saying (that which
exceeds structures of knowing or the capacity to imagine oneself into the role
of another) of the other’s experience. It is essential to acknowledge the inevi
table gap between performance and subject (the unthematizable saying) and
therefore put representation itself into question.27 In this alternative practice,
testimonies remain open and unfixed, sustained by ‘a gap that holds the circle
of knowing open’.28 For Salverson, witnessing in theatre is as much about artic
ulating the nature of contact as about telling a particular story, and thus the
failure to convey all, the inevitable presence of the gap, is crucial: ‘[t]he goal is
relationship, not success.’29
Salverson investigates a dramatic praxis for conveying asylum seeker experi
ence that acknowledges an essential distance between performer, subject and
audience. In Augusto Boal’s theory of the theatre of the oppressed, this dynamic
is expressed in terms of empathetic and sympathetic dramatic gestures. Empathy
(from en, inside, and pathos, emotion) is associated with the passivity of what
Boal call aesthetic osmosis, an intransitive passage of ‘vicarious emotion’ from
the stage to the auditorium.30 Its mechanism recalls Levinas’s description of
the self as hostage to the other: osmosis juxtaposes a fictitious person (the
performer in the guise of the character) and a real person (the spectator),
making the latter surrender entirely to the former. The spectator ‘assumes
a “passive” role, delegating his ability to act’.31 For Levinas responsibility is
similarly intransitive. My responsibility is totally non-transferable; all relations
with the other are grounded in this prescription. Yet, because it is non-transfer
able, my responsibility makes me irreplaceable. This is the value and the limit of
Levinas’s argument – that ‘I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible’, but
27 Julie Salverson, ‘Transgressive Storytelling or an Aesthetics of Injury?: Performance,

Pedagogy and Ethics’, Theatre Research in Canada, 20/1 (1999), pp. 35–51. Available at
<www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/TRIC/bin/get6.cgi?directory=vol20_1/&filename=Salverson.
htm>. Accessed 16 October 2009.
28 Julie Salverson, ‘Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre and the Lie of the
Literal’, Theatre Topics, 6/2 (1996), p. 184.
29 Julie Salverson, ‘Taking Liberties: A Theatre Class of Foolish Witnesses’, Research in Drama
Education, 13/2 (2008), p. 246.
30 Augusto Boal, ‘The Cop in the Head: Three Hypotheses’, trans. Susana Epstein, Drama
Review, 34/3 (1990), p. 38.
31 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed [1979], trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia
Leal McBride (London: Pluto Press, 1998), pp. 113 and 103.
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Postcolonial Asylum
this makes me ‘a non-interchangeable I. I can substitute myself for everyone,

but no-one can substitute himself for me’.32 This intransitive proximity negates
the possibility of negotiation. The asymmetrical relation of Levinasian ethics
repudiates reciprocity: ‘reciprocity’, we are told, ‘is his [the other’s] affair.’33
The self’s admission of its otherness and concomitant responsibility for the
other produces no call to the other to belonging and participation, and thus to
a corresponding responsibility.
Boal’s prescription for negotiated performance is the sympathetic (sym,
with) rather than empathetic gesture, where both spectator and actor become
spect-actors: active agents in the negotiated representation of oppression. Here
the performer (e.g., of an asylum seeker’s testimony) does not surrender their
agency to the ‘character’; neither does the audience surrender their capacity to
act to the performer. Each refuses to allow another’s words or actions to stand
in place of their own, remaining invested in devising possible responses to
oppression. In practice, Boal suggests this may involve audience members inter
vening directly on stage, halting the action to propose alternative gestures. Boal
thus describes the play between the real and the imagined, performer and role,
performer and audience and between individual constructions of the meaning
of the performance. The spect-actor does not, however, remain bound to his
own interpretive frame (and thus propagate an aesthetics of injury). Boal calls
this process metaxis, ‘the total and simultaneous adherence to two different and
autonomous worlds’.34 Metaxis facilitates the active occupation of the real and
the aesthetic. It goes beyond the fallacy of empathetic surrender, which implies
that it is possible fully to inhabit another’s experience, sympathetically to share
the experience of oppression with the oppressed.
Metaxis (from Plato’s term, metaxu, meaning ‘middle ground’)35 is the
acknowledgement and occupation of the gap between knowable and unknow
able worlds. Thus both Salverson and Boal envisage ways of occupying the
threshold that are oriented towards relationship and action. This question of
engaging with the threshold is evident in two recent examples of Australian
verbatim theatre, both of which featured performances by Iranian actor and
playwright Shahin Shafaei: Ros Horin’s Through the Wire (2004) and Shafaei’s
Refugitive (2003). Refugitive depicts an asylum detainee (‘The Man’) on hunger
strike. The play features a single actor (Shafaei) and is an amalgamation of collec
tive experience, based on people Shafaei knew during his detention in Curtin
Immigration Detention Centre, Western Australia (Shafaei did not himself go
on hunger strike, but others in detention with him did). By contrast, among
the cases in Through the Wire, which is based on the accounts of four former
detainees (including the poet Mohsen Soltany-Zand) and the Australian women
32 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 101.

34 Boal, ‘The Cop in the Head’, p. 38.
35 Warren Linds, ‘Metaxis: Dancing (in) the In-between’, in Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mandy
Schutzman (eds), A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (London and
New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 114.
188

who befriended them in detention, Shafaei was the only actor to play himself.
The identification of Shafaei the actor with ‘Shahin’ the character was withheld
until the very end, yet in performance he spoke lines drawn verbatim from his
own testimony. This interplay of openness and concealment about the origins
of words and the identity of who is speaking them raises important questions
about the extent to which Shafaei’s own testimony (dis)appears within the gap
that holds open the circle of knowing during the staging of each performance.
As a theatre practitioner, Shafaei is heavily influenced by Boal’s prescrip
tion that the oppressed subject should create aesthetic images in order to
manipulate their social reality. This involves a process of double extrapolation,
first leaving behind the social reality to engage with its malleable image, and
then a second, inverse extrapolation, returning to the social reality armed with
the tactics to enforce change.36 In Refugitive, the composite narrative enabled
Shafaei to perform Boal’s double extrapolation; the inclusion of other people’s
stories enabled him to ‘experience the play as an image or frame’ that he was
able to ‘step into every night and then step out of after the performance’.37
For Shafaei, it was also crucial that members of the audience were able to
enter the aesthetic world of the play. To facilitate this, he peppered the play
with references to Australian popular culture: the Man compares the deten
tion centre manager to Homer Simpson, and himself to Russell Crowe in the
film Gladiator, creating an image that is at once comic and compelling, revising
the self-negating nature of the Man’s protest as heroic.38 The comic element
of the reference is as important as the heroic: Shafaei insists that his aim was
not to be confrontational (gladiatorial) but to involve the audience in ‘a human
story’ whose elements were inevitably politicized. These references constituted
metaxic gaps, allowing the audience to ‘step in and out’ of the narrative, and
multiplying the circulation of metaxis as they multiply the points of entry into
the story. His performance adhered to both the social world of asylum deten
tion and the world of the created image, performing a rebuke to the deploy
ment of exclusion through inclusion as the logic of detention.
Although the format of Refugitive did not make space for the kind of direct
interventions that are central to Boal’s workshops, Shafaei did devise a feature
that permitted the audience’s involvement in the spectacle.39 Each performance
was followed by a question and answer session with the audience, who were
asked to speak honestly about their responses to the play. This was a crucial
aspect of achieving metaxis, as by engaging in dialogue Shafaei was able to
perform his double extrapolation: during these sessions, he says, ‘I wasn’t
anymore the character on the stage, I had used my agency to re-claim myself
as a human’.40 Through the dialogue the manipulation of the aesthetic image in
the performance translated into a discussion of how to modify the social reality.
36 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 44.

37 Shahin Shafaei, email correspondence with the author.
38 Shahin Shafaei, ‘Refugitive’, Southerly, 64/1 (2004), p. 13.
39 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 155.
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Postcolonial Asylum
Audiences would frequently ask what they should do in response to the play,
to which Shafaei replied that they should discuss their concerns with friends
and with their political representatives, as well as make an effort to contact
detainees themselves: actions that ‘will chip away the wall that the Government
has made between society and Immigration centres’.41 Participating in Refugitive
was thus a step towards active social participation, consonant with Boal’s sense
of the drama as a preparation for engaging with the social world.
Despite Levinas’s well-known antipathy to representation, Tom Burvill argues
that this performative element of ‘inter-active human discourse’, more akin to
the saying than the purely mimetic said, exempts Refugitive (and also Through
the Wire) from Levinas’s objections.42 The staging of Refugitive demanded that
performer and audience face (appear before) each other if the horizons of the
invisible and inaudible are to be reconfigured. As he entered the gap between
performance and testimony, silently articulating his own experience of deten
tion through the vehicle of others’ narratives, Shafaei in effect disappeared in
order to appear, exposing, in a Rancièrian sense, the policing of perception.
In detention he was committed to a regime of invisibility and silence, often
isolated from other detainees (although at other times he was active in inter
preting for them) and refused access to the media.43
Refugitive most forcefully contests the police regime governing the appear
ance of bodies, however, by recourse to language. Reflecting on the pejora
tive framing of asylum discourse, the Man coins the phrase ‘refugitive’, which
both signifies and enacts a reconceptualization of ‘the Australian versions of
the word refugee’ as ‘queue-jumpers, illegal immigrants […] boat people’.44
Shafaei’s coinage of ‘refugitive’ resembles the self-naming protest of the French
sans-papiers. ‘Refugitive’ acts like an apostrophe, interrupting the criminalization
of seeking asylum, which the subsequent question and answer session consoli
dates as it draws the audience into response to a ‘call that cannot be avoided’.
The phrase is a collision of the ‘refugee’ and her/his criminalization, with the
prefix ‘re-’ suggesting process or change. ‘Refugitive’ thus is an enactment of
dissensus, of putting two worlds (the concept of sanctuary and its derogation)
together in one. Consonant with Rancière’s sense of the open-endedness of
politics, ‘refugitive’ does not attempt to resolve its internal contradictions,
remaining antagonistic both to itself and the police order and thus able to
measure the gap between having a part and having no part.
Refugitive was performed during 2003; the following year, Shafaei agreed to
play himself in Ros Horin’s Through the Wire. Given that he was required to voice,

42 Tom Burvill, ‘Politics as Ethics: Levinasian Ethics and Australian Performance Concerning
Refugees’, Research in Drama Education, 13/2 (2008), pp. 235–236.
43 ‘Government guidelines at the time stipulated the “journalists may not interview any
person who is detained under Australia’s immigration law, or photograph/film people
in detention in a way that they may be identifiable”‘. Rand Hazou, ‘Refugitive and the
Theatre of Dys-Appearance’, Research in Drama Education, 13/2 (2008), p. 181.
44 Shafaei, ‘Refugitive’, p. 12.
190

in character, words he had first spoken as testimony to his own experiences of

detention, the casting of Shafaei can be read as an explicit rejection of holistic
telling and a willingness to fail, gesturing instead towards what Roger Simon
and Claudia Eppert call a ‘double attentiveness’ to the said and the saying,
where the latter ‘invokes an undoing of the said’, not ‘speaking about […] but
to […] testimony’.45 Through the Wire presents a sustained, poly-vocal exchange
between Australia and ‘not-Australia’. Horin based her script on interviews
with four detainees (Daniel, Farshid, Mohsen and Shahin) and three Australian
women who befriended them (Doreen, Gaby and Susan). These voices, however,
circulate around the gap created by Shahin’s presence on stage.
Through the Wire makes space for the aporia of testimony by addressing the
fine line between empathy and sympathy, where a genuinely altruistic affective
response risks effacing the original testimony. This is evident in the perfor
mance of Wahid Dona, a Lebanese refugee who played the role of Farshid.
Commenting on his approach to the role, Dona said:
Words and words […] it does not matter to me what their origin is. I don’t
believe in psyching myself up in order to get into a certain emotional state to
tell Farshid’s story […] it’s like surfing to me. You go on the wave of the story
and hope you can ride it to the end! Just commit to the ride and don’t worry
where it wants to take you.46
It is worth noting that Dona auditioned against Farshid himself to play the
role. Perhaps conscious that he has literally taken the place of the one whose
testimony he is charged with delivering, Dona refuses to indulge in the kind
of empathetic response that would see his own experience of displacement
superimposed upon the testimony. But his refusal to ‘stand in’ for Farshid
doesn’t then inaugurate the kind of progression to a transitive relation that
Shafaei describes occurring in Refugitive. Like Shafaei, Dona also refers to an
Australian icon, in this case surfing, as a gesture towards metaxis, simultane
ously occupying the autonomous worlds of ‘Australia’ and ‘not-Australia’. Yet
his description of ‘riding the wave of the story’ also recalls the intransitive
osmosis condemned by Boal. His proximity to Farshid’s testimony is fundamen
tally passive, in Levinas’s sense of a total surrender to the other.
The staging of the play recalls Agamben’s description of the keno-aesthetics
of detention. Horin devised a format that moved between live action and
video recordings, with the actors delivering their live performances in front of
recorded versions projected onto a large screen behind them (see Figure 7).
The staging of Through the Wire thus constitutes a layering of modes of testi
mony around a central lacuna (the gap between testimony and performance,
between the said and the saying) akin to Agamben’s description of the camp as
concentric circles around a central non-place. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo
45 Roger I. Simon and Claudia Eppert, ‘Remembering Obligation: Pedagogy and the Witnessing
of Testimony in Historical Trauma’, Canadian Journal of Education, 22/2 (1997), pp. 179–180.
46 Wahid Dona, quoted in Kristen Karuth, ‘Refugees: Between Reality and Performance’,
Realtime, 67 (June–July 2005), p. 28.
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Postcolonial Asylum
note that this was a direct comment on the Australian government’s efforts to
prohibit media scrutiny of asylum seekers and control the horizon of percep
tion, and suggest that it created the conditions for a necessary critical distance,
preventing unproblematic identification, by splitting the spectator’s gaze.47 It is
also suggestive of the play between aesthetic and social realities in metaxis. The
use of simultaneous live and video performance in Through the Wire indicates an
attempt to establish metaxic, transitive relations within the performance, yet
the demands that the verbatim theatre form placed on Shafaei, repeating his
own words in performance, also frustrated this.
For Shafaei, the conflation of his roles as character, actor and source of the
testimony precluded metaxis, because he ‘was not fully able to separate the
two [aesthetic and social] worlds’. Although his training as an actor in Iran and
friendship with Horin facilitated his performances, nonetheless ‘the wave of the
story’ had a very personal momentum for Shafaei, who was then on a temporary
protection visa. He admits that, although ‘I could not be who I am, and still be
Figure 7â•‡ Heidrun Lohr’s

photograph of Shahin Shafaei’s
performance in Ros Horin’s
Through the Wire (2005).
47 Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions
in Australasia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 196.
192

on stage and part of an image that a director was creating […] there were
Â�
performances when I could not distance myself from the reality of my story
and my emotions would hit me hard and consequently would harm my perfor
mance’. ‘The exactness of the words’ of his testimony ‘br[oke] the frame of
the living image’, which is the condition of Boal’s metaxis.48 Because he was
performing his own testimony under another’s direction, Shafaei’s appear
ance in Through the Wire depended on his disappearance into the gap between
said and saying. When he could not engender this distance, the saying was
subsumed under the said.
Counter-intuitively, however, this frustration of metaxis did not simply repro
duce Shafaei as spectacle; rather, his disappearance into the said of his perfor
mance exposed the raw necessity of attending also to the saying. His surrender
to a process of desubjectification (becoming an image created by Horin, which
prevented him creating his own image of reality) demonstrates in practice
Agamben’s insistence that ‘every desubjectification […] bears witness to a
subject’.49 That is, what is unthematizable, even unspeakable (the saying that
cannot be pinned down as ‘said’), emerged despite the fact that Shafaei could not
engender the necessary distance between himself and his role. At the end of the
performance the actors would stand in a line with their backs to the audience;
pictures of the real detainees were then projected on the screen, with each actor
turning to face the audience as the face of his character appeared. This was the
moment when Shafaei the actor was identified with ‘Shahin’ the character. This
layering of faces around ‘a critical caesura between the related subjectification
of performer and refugee’ invested the gap with the unavoidable difficulty of
Levinasian ethics, that of accounting for the other.50 Shafaei’s (dis)appearance
in Through the Wire was thus most articulate in the failure to achieve metaxis,
sharpening the consciousness of the necessity of a performative context that
draws audience and performer into the same gap of the saying, facing each other
from an irreducible position of alterity (which prohibits easy identification) and
responsibility (which holds open the circle knowing). In both plays, then, Shafaei
was engaged in a process of appearance-through-disappearance that challenged
the assumption that an easy identification between audience and witnessing
subject can cross the gap between knowable and unknowable worlds.
The journey is the film is the journey
Shafaei’s performances in Refugitive and Through the Wire demonstrate the

necessity of attending to the gap that holds open circles of knowing. This is
equally as relevant to acts of ‘standing in’ in other forms, as demonstrated by
Michael Winterbottom’s film In This World, where the attempt to substitute the
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 112.
50 Gilbert and Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics, p. 197.
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Postcolonial Asylum
film for its subject closes the circle of knowing and obscures the inevitability
and necessity of failure in representations of the other.
In This World follows the journey of two Afghan migrants from Peshawar to
London. In preparation for making the film, Winterbottom and Tony Grisoni,
the film’s writer, travelled from London to Peshawar and then made the journey
in reverse overland as far as Istanbul, gathering material to construct their narra
tive. Here they tried as far as possible to follow the route taken by migrants,
using the same means of transport. They then returned to Peshawar and filmed
a repeat of the journey using two non-professional actors, Pashtun refugees
Jamal Udin Torabi and Enyatullah Jumaudin. Once the film was completed,
Jamal made the trip again to claim asylum in the UK. In This World is without
doubt a powerfully affective film that trains an indefatigable gaze on the lethal
dangers and deprivations irregular migrants endure to get to Europe. However,
an examination of its context of production reminds us of Butler’s contention
of the necessity to distinguish between ‘the inhuman but humanizing face’ (i.e.,
exteriority) and the ‘dehumanization that can also take place through the face’
(i.e., the visage).51
The manner in which the film’s production repeats and reverses the journey
of its subjects creates a form of chiasmus, a rhetorical strategy identified by
Henry Louis Gates and others as a means of reclaiming subject status from
the experience of displacement. Gates describes how, within the context of
Afro-American narratives of displacement, a chiastic structure signals an inten
tion to pursue transformation through ‘repetition and reversal’. Referring
to the famous chiastic statement of self-fashioning in the slave narrative of
Frederick Douglass, ‘You have seen how a man became a slave, you will see how
a slave became a man’, Gates calls chiasmus ‘the central trope of slave narra
tion, in which the slave-object writes himself or herself into a human-subject
through the act of writing’.52 Chiasmus has a particular application for African-
American literary criticism, with its emphasis on formal and informal wordplay
and linguistic invention, but the potential for chiasmus to express liberation in
displacement is broader. Wilson Harris invokes repetition and reversal in his
reflections on the limbo dance of West Indian Carnival, which he traces to the
slave ships of the Middle Passage, where in the cramped conditions ‘the slaves
contorted themselves into human spiders’. Harris relates limbo to West African
Anansi fables, in which a trickster figure often takes the form of a spider, which
were carried to the Caribbean with the slaves. Limbo is both a memorialization
of the privations of the middle passage and an invocation of cultural heritage
that pays special attention to (imaginative) transformation through performance
rather than writing, as we see with Gates. Harris suggests that within the limbo
dance we see enacted ‘the curious dislocation of a chain of miles’; in the ‘limbo
gateway between Africa and the Caribbean’ the experience of displacement

52 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 172.
194

is ‘re-activated in the imagination’. For Harris, this kind of transformation of

displacement through reversal has a chiastic shape: ‘we arrive backwards even
as we voyage forwards’.53 While not a chiasmus itself, this statement accurately
summarizes the action and contours of reversal and renewal that occur through
an affinity with chiasmus.
Chiasmus, then, operates in multiple contexts as a means of countering the
effects of displacement. In In This World the pattern of inversions and repeated
journeys was continued in post-production; Winterbottom describes the experi
ence of editing the scene where Jamal, who replicated the journey to claim
asylum, leaves his family in the Shamshatoo camp:
Jamal was actually in the cutting room now watching it [having returned to the
UK after filming to apply for refugee status]. So by that point he’d become the
character in the film and didn’t know when he’d ever see his brother again,
didn’t know when he’d go back there, and so it was one of the strangest
things, to see the way in which the film that was supposed to be a fiction
based on reality had then become a reality itself.54
The film and its para-contexts assume a chiastic structure in which the journey
is the film, and the film is the journey. As such, it exhibits a series of constant
crossings between fiction and reality, and between the experience of the migrant
and the filmmaker. The film uses strategies of repetition, not to illustrate trans
formation, but as the basis of a self-reflexive focus on the boundaries between
cinematic genres, and an exploration of the conditions that in fact foster an
experience of perpetual displacement. Yet, the film’s attempt to illustrate the
realities of the migrant’s journey by inserting itself into that journey creates
a tension between representation and effacement. In In This World chiasmus
signifies not the potential for the displaced to redefine themselves but a condi
tion of perpetual displacement.
Winterbottom’s interest in making In This World was prompted by a fascina
tion with journeys; in fact, the entire film is organized around stages in the
journey. Teshome Gabriel, in a discussion of the ‘nomad aesthetics’ of black
cinema, invokes chiasmus (albeit without direct reference) to describe the
relationship between the film and the journey: ‘The journey is the link(age);
without it, there is no film. There is no film in and of itself. A film by itself is
therefore meaningless – it conveys nothing. Film exists so that the journey may
exist, and vice versa.’55 Gabriel’s privileging of the journey in relation to the
film, like Harris’s meditations on the limbo dance, gives rise to a chiastic forma
tion. In the manner in which it allows various journeys to overlap and mirror
each other, In This World employs an aesthetic that is dependent on strategies
53 Wilson Harris, The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed.
Andrew Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 157 and 187.
54 Michael Winterbottom (dir.), In This World (UK: Revolution Films, 2002).
55 Teshome H. Gabriel, ‘Thoughts on Nomadic Aesthetics and the Black Independent
Cinema: Traces of a Journey’, in Russell Ferguson, et al. (eds), Out There: Marginalization
and Contemporary Cultures (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), p. 403.
195

Postcolonial Asylum
of boundary-crossing, repetition and reversal, in which the crucial distinction

between fictional and actual crossings is blurred. In fact, Winterbottom and
Grisoni present the crossings of the film itself, and the journey of its Â�production,
as their principal subject. Consequently, it is important to ask in what ways does
the journey of the film itself threaten to overshadow the film of the journey?
At various stages, In This World exhibits features of the documentary, realist
cinema, the epic and the road movie. Grisoni highlights this constant flux in
genres as one of the film’s salient virtues: ‘The most exciting thing [about the
film] is that it is always crossing.’56 Yet the film’s restlessness – crossing generic
boundaries as it crosses between nations – has significantly different implica
tions for filmmaker and subject. This can be observed in two of the genres
referenced by the film: the road movie and the documentary.
Terence Wright has described the road movie as an episodic and finite
progress towards a determined end, beginning with a symbolic dispensing of
objects indicative of the life to be left behind and organized around various
encounters, the overcoming of a major setback and the achievement of the final
destination. 57 In This World exhibits most of these features: Jamal and Enyatul
lah’s journey is blessed by the slaughter of a cow; the narrative is episodic,
constructed from a series of encounters with characters who either assist (the
Kurdish villagers who give them shelter) or hinder (an Iranian border official
who returns them to Pakistan), or whose motives for helping them are selfish
(the fixers whom they pay to move them from point to point). They encounter
a number of setbacks, most especially the disaster of Enyatullah’s death in a
container on the way to Trieste. The film culminates with Jamal’s arrival in
London, the stated endpoint of the journey.
Yet the film also departs from the road movie trope in significant ways.
Jamal and Enyatullah give little indication that they are on a journey of self-
discovery; rather, each stage is dominated by their need to progress to the next
phase. In addition, Winterbottom suggests that, contrary to Wright’s formula,
the journey is not finite. Referring to Jamal’s arrival in London, Winterbottom
remarks that the experience is ‘not necessarily much different to what it would
have been like if they’d stopped in Istanbul, Tehran or wherever’.58 London
acts as an endpoint to the journey only in narrative terms; in other terms, the
essentially arbitrary nature of Jamal’s location has little bearing on his condition
of displacement.
In This World also departs from Wright’s description of the road movie by
playing with the boundary between fiction and reality. In the ‘behind the scenes’
56 ‘Tony Grisoni on In This World and filmmaking on the run with Michael Winterbottom’.
Available at <http://afcarchive.screenaustralia.gov.au/newsandevents/afcnews/converse/
tony_grisoni/newspage_140.aspx>. Accessed 12 November 2007.
57 Terence Wright, ‘Refugees on Screen’, The Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper, 5. Avail
able at <www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/PDFs/workingpaper5.pdf>. Accessed 12 November 2007.
58 Geoff McNab, ‘Michael Winterbottom: Worlds Apart’, Independent (28 February 2003).
Available at <www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/michael-winter
bottom-worlds-apart-598974.html>. Accessed 12 November 2007.
196

documentary that accompanies the DVD version, both writer and director take
pains to stress how the film refused to settle as either fiction or documentary.
This is made especially evident in its casting, as Winterbottom explains:
The first person we met was Imran, who was a travel agent in Peshawar and
he became our fixer for our research trip, and then again fixer while we were
filming, and he also acted [the part of] the fixer in the film. I guess that’s the
relationship between fiction and reality that we tried to follow, in that it’s not
a documentary, people are acting, but generally we found people who would
play themselves in the film, or do things they did in normal life.59
In Imran’s case, his multiple roles as fixer set up a series of reversals and repeti
tions; while moving back and forth between facilitating actual and fictional
journeys, providing documents to allow Jamal and Enyatullah to travel with the
crew and then repeating this in scenes for the film, Imran enacts the chiasmus
that states that the journey is the film is the journey.
Despite his assertion that the film is not a documentary, Winterbottom
does acknowledge it is ‘in a sense a document of the journey we organized for
Jamal and Enyatullah’. It was scripted only to the extent of dictating a series of
scenarios within which the actors were asked ‘to do what they want[ed] to do’.
Yet, despite the filmmaker’s strident efforts to allow the subjects to speak for
themselves, the journey made by the film itself effectively jostles for space with
the journey played out on screen. The use of documentary techniques explic
itly refers to the presence of the filmmaker, creating a tension between (self-)
representation and (self-)effacement; Winterbottom asserts that in editing the
film ‘we weren’t pretending we weren’t there’.60 The most notable elements
of documentary style are the use of animated maps to indicate the progress
of the journey and a voiceover to accompany the opening sequence at the
Shamshatoo camp, in which the resident children look directly into the camera.
This openness about the film’s constructedness does allow us to see beyond its
fictional frame and thus undercuts the demands of a particular fictional genre.
Yet the film is also a document of many journeys, or the point of intersection of
a network of journeys within which the presence of the filmmaker asserts itself,
if not through conventional means such as scripted dialogue then in a more
self-reflexive fashion, using documentary techniques. This foregrounding of the
filmmaker establishes a tension between the mediated and unmediated subject
that risks obscuring the subject to whom it tries so concertedly to give voice.
Winterbottom has stated that in casting the film he wanted ‘two people
who would be examples of, stand in for, all the refugees in Peshawar’ – that
is, he wished to dramatize a condition of displacement rather than individual
stories.61 If this aligns his approach with Malkki’s comment on the ‘tendency to
universalize “the refugee” as a special “kind” of person’, it also recalls her obser
59 Winterbottom, In This World.

197

Postcolonial Asylum
vation that ‘“the refugee” is commonly constituted as a figure who is thought

to “speak” to us in a particular way: wordlessly’.62 While In This World strives
for (and achieves) a high degree of material authenticity in the depiction of the
journey, its tendency to homogenize the story of the journey, presenting Jamal
and Enyatullah as personifying ‘the refugee’ as an object of knowledge, contra
venes Levinas’s injunction against assuming the (ultimately unknowable) face
of the other equates with the (visible, knowable) visage: to allow the viewer to
invest a universalized condition of displacement in an individual refugee risks
effacing their innate humanity.
Consequently, despite its explicit concern to give voice to the invisible
refugee, In This World only implicitly criticizes the biopolitical forces that
affect refugees. The film is in effect bookended by scenes of the camp – by
footage of Shamshatoo and of Jamal’s experience in Sangatte – which call to
mind Agamben’s declaration of the camp as the apogee of biopolitical space.
Aligned with Winterbottom’s comments on the homogeneity of each stage
of the journey, the fact that the narrative ends as it begins with images of
Shamshatoo gives credence to a reading of the film’s portrayal of chiasmus as a
form of perpetual displacement.
It could be argued that by playing on the parallels between the journey
of the film and the film of the journey, Winterbottom attempts to travel in
sympathy with his subject in a similar fashion to Sorious Samura’s documen
tary film Living With Illegals, in which Samura makes the journey from Ceuta to
London in the company of West African migrants.63 Yet while both play with the
boundaries and limits of affinity – Samura is open about how his crew bought
train tickets for him once he had been discovered attempting to travel without
them, for example – In This World introduces a level of ambiguity that is not
wholly resolved by the ingenuity with which it finds ways to allow refugees to
be seen and heard. If the film does present the voice and image of a genuine
refugee who has made the journey to the UK, it only does so anachronously,
as Winterbottom himself admits when he described the strange experience of
editing the footage in the presence of Jamal, once he had applied for asylum.
The chiastic context of its production confers a kind of authenticity on the film,
but nonetheless the film itself, as a fiction whose production was the original
journey, is fixed as the privileged subject.
The experience of movement is central to the film’s ambivalence. Winter
bottom has described how the film came to resemble a kind of illegitimate
migrant; because some regional authorities were uncomfortable with the
filmmaker’s activities, to avoid confiscation, often the producers would have
to carry the previous days’ rushes clandestinely across a border in advance of
the crew. Zygmunt Bauman’s definitions of the tourist and the vagabond – ‘[t]
he tourists move because they find the world within their (global) reach irresist
Refugees in Exile (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 9; Malkki,
‘Speechless Emissaries’, p. 390.
63 Sorius Samura (dir.), Living with Illegals (UK: Channel 4, 2006).
198

ibly attractive – the vagabonds move because they find the world within their
(local) reach unbearably inhospitable’ – seem to be useful here in distinguishing
between the film(maker) and subject. In Eastern Turkey the crew had to pretend
to be tourists (this was possible with the unusually small size of the produc
tion) because of official sensitivities to filming. Such an ability to transform is
a key attribute of the tourist; in contrast, the vagabond is denied ‘the right to
turn into tourists […] allowed neither to stay put […] nor search for a better
place to be’.64 This is illustrated by Jamal who, we are told at the end of the
film, has been given exceptional leave to remain (ELR) status in the UK that will
expire the day before his eighteenth birthday. Although it assumes a chiastic
structure, then, In This World does not engage with the transformative potential
that chiasmus is taken to signify in other contexts of displacement. Rather, the
chiastic reversals and repetitions are representative of the perpetual displace
ment that is the condition of refugees.
As In This World powerfully exposes the way vast numbers of people are
forced to move in search of better prospects, it has great potential profoundly
to move audiences. Yet, in the play between foregrounding and effacing the
voice of its subject, the film stands not only in the place of its subject, but
also in the place of those forces that efface, silence or dehistoricize individual
refugee voices. The waiter who helps Jamal travel from Sangatte to London,
and who dreams of returning to the restaurant in which he worked during
a previous stay, represents another kind of perpetual crossing to which the
filmmakers by necessity had limited access.
In a sense, by aligning the journey of the film with the journey of its subject,
In This World strives for the obverse of Levinasian proximity. Instead of the
asymmetrical relation, it attempts a kind of superimposition (albeit one just
below the surface, at the level of production) of the same and the other. But in
seeking to represent an experience of proximity with its subject that eliminates
difference (and distance), it simply highlights the incongruities between respec
tive experiences of movement. This is not to suggest an innate deficiency in
film as a medium of substitution (or at least any more so than in other forms).
Here Mieke Bal’s video installation Nothing is Missing can be read as a corrective
representation of substitution in film/video. Bal filmed a series of interviews
with women whose adult children had migrated to Europe. The interviews were
conducted by someone intimate to them and connected to the absent child,
either a grandchild or daughter-in-law, but framed so that only the mother
was visible: the camera remained static and fixed on the older woman’s face.
There is no narrative voiceover or non-diegetic sound. The video portraits were
installed in a domestic space – either an actual living room or a room decorated
to resemble one – in which visitors were invited to sit in armchairs and face, as
it were, the women whose video portraits were displayed on monitors arranged
at eye level.
64 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998),
pp. 92–93.
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Postcolonial Asylum
The visitor’s experience was one of multiple substitutions that tested the
relationship between proximity, movement and affectivity. The invitation to sit
facing the video portraits, and the fact that the women’s interlocutors are never
visible, effectively situates the visitor in the place of the interlocutor. Further
more, the domestic setting makes the visitor to the installation also a visitor to
a home, made to witness a number of very intimate exchanges between people
they have never met; that is, they are themselves the guest, the incursive other
within the home (and thus also standing in the place of the absent migrant
children). Finally, the presence of multiple video portraits in the installation
space draws the visitor into a kind of transnational community, in which the
simultaneous narration of multiple distinct but related stories creates an experi
ence akin to Bhabha’s description of continua.
Nothing is Missing recalls Ahmed’s assertion that, ‘attachment takes place
through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others’.65
It emphasizes the fallacy of spatial distance as a curb on affective relations:
the women’s accounts of memories of their absent children illustrate close
ness and intimacy that closes the chain of miles, and the visitor who stands
in the place of both the interlocutor and the migrant also therefore stands in
the gap between these two roles, embodying the distance that the women’s
affectionate recollections so effectively highlight and break down. It represents
a counter to Levinas’s concept of the ‘face’ of the other as the central tenet
of his ethical position, in which ‘[t]he Other becomes my neighbour precisely
through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so
doing recalls my responsibility and calls me into question’.66 The meaning of
the face is not the visage, but the proximity of the other – it signifies a point
of exteriority, exceeding the self, encountered in the other’s presence. Bal’s
insistent ‘facing’ challenges the non-person-based ethics of Levinas, for whom
the other is primarily a trace, or, as Robbens has said, an interruption or distur
bance.67 Instead, her presentation of the absent but presenced other precludes
the fixing of the other that Levinas abhors (the framing of the interviews leaves
nothing, such as an attempt to beautify or render picturesque, which would
constitute a violation of Levinas’s insistence that ‘the face is meaning all by
itself’),68 but without emptying the encounter of its affective, human element.
Here, contrary to In This World, form does not impose upon the act of substitu
tion, but Â�facilitates a mode of standing in that summons a sense of contiguous,
non-totalizing relations.
65 Sara Ahmed, ‘Collective Feelings: or, the Impressions Left by Others’, Theory, Culture,
Society, 21/2 (2004), p. 27.
66 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in Hand, The Levinas Reader, p. 83.
67 Robbens, Altered Readings, p. 31.
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The limits of dignity
Nothing is Missing could be said to initiate a kind of partial conversation, of the

kind Caryl Phillips has predicted will emerge as a consequence of the collapsing
colonial order. He describes a new world order, with ‘limited participation open
to all, and full participation available to none’, representing the opening up of
formerly closed conversations about power and control, and democratizing the
sense of ambiguity in belonging – a global formation where ‘nobody will feel
fully at home’. In spite of these large claims, however, Phillips does not predict
a uniformity of experience. Some will inevitably feel more at home than others,
yet nonetheless he suggests that in this ‘ambiguous hand’ lies the potential for
a better appreciation of, and response to, the demonized displaced.69 Phillips’s
claim informs his 2003 novel A Distant Shore, in which the tentative relationship
between Dorothy, a retired teacher of music suffering a breakdown, and her
neighbour Solomon, an African living clandestinely in England, forms the basis
of a consideration of Levinas’s insistent remark that ‘the other is the Â�neighbour’
and also of that which can move us beyond the asymmetry in Levinas’s thought.70
Dorothy and Solomon (Phillips moves between ‘Solomon’ and the charac
ter’s original name ‘Gabriel’) share a sense of alienation in Weston, the small
northern village to which each is newly arrived, and a fragile sense of personal
dignity. From its opening line, issues of place and dignity are mediated in A
Distant Shore by an ambiguity surrounding the distinction between stranger
and resident: ‘England has changed. These days it’s difficult to tell who’s from
around here and who’s not. Who belongs and who’s a stranger.’71 Dignity
in Phillips’s novel covers a spectrum of behaviour, from simple decorum to
instances of (de)humanization. Yet, constantly, assertions of dignity represent
a call to recognize the limited participation of the asylum seeker.
‘Limit’ refers to both the action of proscribing something and to a point on
the margins. Weston is one such place, a village struggling to define itself; while
the residents have resisted a gentrifying move ‘to change the name of Weston
to Market Weston’, it remains a ‘village […] divided into two’: because of the
poorly integrated new housing development, Stoneleigh, and also its detach
ment from its past. Dorothy remarks that, ‘[t]he only history around these parts
is probably the architecture. The terraces on both sides of the main road are
typical miners’ houses […] However, these houses have all long since been
replumbed, and the muck has been blasted off the faces of most of them so that
they now look almost quaint’. This is compounded by Weston’s sense of inade
quacy in relation to the German and French towns with which it is twinned, the
former ‘bombed flat by the RAF’ and the latter where ‘Jews […] were all rounded
up and sent to the camps’, which make Weston seem ‘a bit tame by compar
ison’. The changes that make it ‘difficult to tell who’s from around here and
69 Phillips, A New World Order, pp. 5–6.

70 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics and politics’, in Hand, The Levinas Reader, p. 294.
71 Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore [2003] (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 3.
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Postcolonial Asylum
who’s not’ identify Weston as suffering what Paul Gilroy has called post-imperial
melancholia, a syndrome rooted in the loss of imperial prestige and a nostalgic
longing to recoup Britain’s ‘long-vanished homogeneity’.72 As the references to
the war experiences of Weston’s civic twins demonstrate, England’s post-war
decline is intimately associated with the disorientation of incursive cultural
heterogeneity, and consequent longing for the past. As a relic of the colonial
order dismissed by Phillips, Weston represents at least some of the factors
limiting the participation of the postcolonial migrant in the new world order.
In the light of Bénédicte Ledent’s comment that, in Phillips’s work, locations
are indicative of the character’s experience, the reference to Nazi abuses of
French Jews is also important;73 ‘the camp’ operates here as a motif of a space
where dignity (recognition of humanity) is utterly denied. Phillips has written
before of the connection between the Nazi concentration camps and European
racism, notably in Higher Ground (1988) and The Nature of Blood (1997). In The
European Tribe (1987) he acknowledges the formative role that awareness of the
camps played in the realization of both his place as a black man in Europe and
his vocation as a writer. Describing the experience of watching a documentary
on the Nazi occupation of Holland, he recalls being troubled by ‘the precari
ousness of my own position in Europe. The many adolescent thoughts that
worried my head can be reduced to one line: “If white people could do that to
white people, then what the hell would they do to me?”’.74 Phillips’s sense of
the camp as a pervasive influence, signifying the limits of belonging in Europe,
corresponds with Agamben’s sense of the camp as the ultimate expression of
the ban, not confined to either a location or historical referents.
Thus both Phillips and Agamben express a sense of the camp as signifying a
limit – the limit – commensurate with Phillips’s sense of the limitations placed
on the migrant’s participation in the new world order and Agamben’s assertion
that the refugee represents a limit on the concept of citizenship. This conver
gence reminds us that the new world order of horizontal participation is also
that of the camp dispositif. The presence and influence of the camp in A Distant
Shore (the novel also includes an account of Solomon’s time in an unnamed
refugee camp in Northern France, almost certainly based on the Red Cross
refugee camp at Sangatte, given that Phillips smuggled himself into Sangatte in
2001 to write an article for the Guardian) therefore represents that which limits
dignity and also the limit, like Spivak’s ‘intermediary stage’ of responsibility, at
which the presence of dignity is acknowledged.
The first section of the novel describes Dorothy and Solomon’s shared preoc
cupation with the preservation of dignity in the face of rejection, which implies
an association between saving face and acknowledging dignity. When he arrives
in England for the first time, literally washed up on the south coast after crossing
72 Phillips, A Distant Shore, pp. 3–4; Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?
[2004] (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 98 and 95.
73 Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2002),
p.â•›â•›150.
74 Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe [1988] (London: Picador, 1993), pp. 66–67.
202

the Channel hanging from the side of a ship, Solomon’s first thought is ‘that
there is no dignity to his predicament’. Dorothy’s relationships with three other
men in the novel – Brian, her estranged husband, and Mahmood and Geoff,
married men with whom she has affairs – all turn on her efforts to maintain a
dignified facade despite diminishing circumstances. By contrast, Dorothy feels
an affinity with Solomon’s self-containment; the meticulous care he takes over
his car complements his general bearing – ‘[t]he way he dresses, or cuts the
lawn, or combs his hair with that sharp razor parting’ – which she both identi
fies with and connects with a sense of being apart: ‘Everything is done with such
precision. Like most folks up here, he keeps himself to himself, but unlike most
of the folks up here, he lives by himself. Like me, he’s a lone bird.’75
This apparent shared concern for appearances, in which human dignity and a
sense of decorum slide into one another, demonstrates one way in which dignity
occupies a limit and place of tension in the novel. Whereas Solomon’s dignified
carriage of his otherness resonates with Dorothy’s own sense of estrangement,
his behaviour, according to standards Dorothy admits are outmoded, also acts
as a kind of limit on his otherness. It is a performance of what is familiar and
reassuring, at least partially obscuring his (to her) unsettling difference. This
is evident in Dorothy’s intolerance of Weston’s homeless. Whereas Solomon’s
strangeness is contained by his attention to appearances, their undignified
appearance (‘with their matted hair and their bottles of meths’) bears inescap
able witness to their alienation, a kind of naked otherness that is far more
disturbing for Dorothy, who always puts on her ‘day face’ as a defence against
naked alienation.76
The novel thus plays with the concept of the ‘limit’ in terms of demarcating
social boundaries, but also in terms of something incomplete or partial (and
thus limited). It is therefore significant that Solomon’s precise care for his car
only partially obscures his otherness, and is also a barrier to his integration in
the neighbourhood. Dorothy admits, ‘I want to tell him that in England you […]
can’t just turn up and start washing your car. People will consider you to be
ignorant and stand-offish’.77 While it associates him with the behavioural stand
ards of a bygone era, Solomon’s car washing also indelibly marks his difference.
In keeping with Levinas’s prescriptions, then, Dorothy’s ambivalent response to
Solomon’s fastidious nature suggests that, rather than diminishing his strange
ness, proximity exposes her own alienation in Weston as a ‘lone bird’.
Their friendship is framed by her tentative approach, moving towards and
retreating from expressions of intimacy. Therefore, bearing in mind the fact
that Solomon introduces himself to Dorothy first as her neighbour, it is worth
asking to what extent she is (response-)able to recognize what is expressed
by the face of the other. As she enters the cul-de-sac in which they both live,
Solomon expresses concern for her welfare, and, in doing so, turns to face
75 Phillips, A Distant Shore, pp. 149 and 14.

77 Phillips, A Distant Shore, p. 16.
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Postcolonial Asylum
her: ‘The dying sun forms a halo around his head and for a moment I find
myself more caught up with this image than with his enquiry. Solomon notices
that my mind has drifted off, but he simply waits until my mind returns.’78
‘The trace’ that shines from the face of the other is a fundamental element of
Levinas’s work on the proximity of the self and the other (‘That trace [of the
infinite] lights up as the face of a neighbour, ambiguously him before whom (or
to whom, without any paternalism) and him for whom I answer’).79 Although
it occurs within a literal face-to-face encounter, Solomon’s face/otherness
presents Dorothy with a trace of an irreducible proximity that identifies him as
the neighbour, for whom she is responsible. She invites him to her house for a
cup of tea: ‘As I turn to walk towards my house, the full glare of the dying sun
hits me in the face. Solomon has been blocking out much of its force, but I now
squeeze my eyes closed against its powerful light.’80 The trace shining in the
face (alterity) of the other is unavoidable, even more so when the face (visage)
has turned away.
It is highly significant, however, that Solomon initiates contact with an expres
sion of concern for Dorothy’s welfare. Here Phillips departs from Levinas, initi
ating through Solomon a reciprocity that Levinas does not concede. Solomon’s
‘face’, his exteriority or otherness, is not merely a call to recognize her own
irreducible alterity, but a (cautious) challenge to Dorothy to go beyond her
own alienation, her ‘day face’, and recognize that proximity can also lead to
a shared experience of responsibility. Levinas’s argument is primarily oriented
towards realizing the otherness within the self: it is, ultimately, an intransitive
and asymmetrical experience of responsibility. This is not to say that Levinas
therefore also repudiates community: what limits this responsibility, and intro
duce what Levinas calls justice, is the presence of a third party, one who is
other than the other who is the neighbour. A response to the frangibility of
humanity resides then in this realization of a chain of others that establishes a
co-citizenry of the I and the other. Yet Levinas’s insistence on the asymmetry
of the original ethical relation remains troubling, despite the progression from
ethics to politics initiated by the third. As David Wood has said, ‘[t]he need
for some sort of workable identity, the struggle for recognition […] do[es] not
dissolve in the exposure to the face of the other’.81 While Levinas’s insistence
that the face is devoid of context subverts the negative construction of the
other (such as the hated ‘asylum seeker’ of right-wing newspaper editorials),
it also dehistoricizes, neglecting the conditions that first caused the other’s
(material) destitution.
Despite its many virtues, then, Levinasian ethics can only offer a partial
response to the asylum seeker’s request to be admitted, sheltered and accepted.
By contrast, Phillips engages directly with the potential within inevitable failure.

81 David Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics After Deconstruction (Albany, NY: State
University of New York, 2005), p. 63.
204

A Distant Shore presents an alternative to the asymmetry of Levinas’s thinking on

proximity, by considering the value of what seem to be, on the surface, limited
or inadequate gestures; both Dorothy and Solomon make gestures towards the
advent of the third party but, crucially, these actions are self-evidently limited
in scope. I argue it is this sense of inadequacy – of inevitable failure – which
enables Phillips to use a form Levinas deeply suspected (the novel) to engage
with Levinasian ethics.
Dorothy’s limited gesture comes in response to Solomon’s murder. When
he reveals he has been receiving abusive letters from people in the village
she expresses a nascent responsibility, ‘as though I am somehow responsible
for these people, whoever they are’, which he reciprocates by expressing a
corresponding sensibility: ‘Sometimes the behaviour of my fellow human
beings makes me ashamed.’ Yet this exchange provokes Dorothy to retreat,
lest Solomon ‘become a problem in my life’, and she resolves to restore the
distance between them by going away for a night.82 When she returns he has
been murdered by a racist gang.
The carelessness of Solomon’s death – found face down in a canal – illus
trates how he has been stripped of dignity. He is, in effect, the homo sacer,
the one who any man may kill. Dorothy’s response, while symptomatic of her
strained emotional state, also indicates at least a partial acceptance (poised
between proximity and distance) of her guiltless responsibility for the other in
death. As Levinas has said: ‘The other man’s death calls me into question, as if,
by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death to
which the other […] is exposed.’83 First, she pins one of the abusive letters to
the notice board of the local pub. As she returns to Stoneleigh, she is troubled
by the grimy condition of Solomon’s car. By cleaning it she gestures towards
restoring dignity to the homo sacer. It is a gesture of sympathy that situates
Dorothy as the other who is also the neighbour. By expressing solidarity with
Solomon in this fashion, she in effect incarnates the otherness he had previ
ously represented.
In this sense, it corresponds with Levinas’s prescription that substitution is
an act of exposure. Yet, unknown to Dorothy, Solomon’s care for his vehicle was
a memorializing of Mike, the former owner, who befriended Solomon during
his first months in England. Her gesture establishes her as part of a chain of
gestures articulating responsibility for the other, thus constituting, however
faintly, Levinas’s condition for justice: ‘the fact of the multiplicity of men and
the presence of someone else next to the Other’.84 The third party inaugurates
justice because they are other than the neighbour – their effectiveness is in that
they make the self ‘an other like the others’.85 The third party, Levinas says,
makes the ‘incomparable subject into a member of society’, limiting therefore
82 Wood, The Step Back, pp. 40, 43 and 45.

83 Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, p. 83.
85 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2nd edn (Edinburgh:
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Postcolonial Asylum
the absolute responsibility of the face-to-face encounter and offering ‘an inces
sant correction to the asymmetry of proximity’.86
It is significant that she uses her jacket to wipe the car clean, as a symbol
of the reserve and decorum that informed her relationship with Solomon; her
concern for appearances becomes an expression of the proximity of the other,
and thus a recognition of their dignity. As with the earlier encounter, however,
Dorothy cannot completely tolerate this proximity. She leaves the cul-de-sac
to visit her parents’ graves, where her attempts to reconcile her conflicting
feelings about Solomon which results in a form of psychic split. She imagines
a conversation with her dead parents in which she justifies her reason for
consorting with a black man as simply that Solomon was a ‘proper gentleman’.
From its beginning, Dorothy’s relationship with Solomon has been founded on
a tension between a sense of affinity and a half-acknowledged sexual attraction.
She concedes that he is ‘a handsome man, which makes me uncomfortable’; the
anxious possibility of an interracial relationship, coupled with the proximity of
her gesture of sympathy, make the splitting of her Self the only way Dorothy can
acknowledge that ‘Solomon was a man who could have made me happy’.87 These
conflicting feelings demonstrate the complexity of working out the relation of
proximity in Levinas’s idea of the other as the neighbour. Solomon’s otherness
draws Dorothy to awareness of her own otherness and to the edge of a recip
rocal relationship, but also provokes her latent prejudice. As she returns home,
this internal crisis is externalized in an encounter with a group of homeless
people, in which she sublimates her inner contradictions by recourse to racial
stereotyping – one of the group ‘looks and sounds like a gypsy, with her black
hair, and her black eyes, and her grimy black hands’ – as her contempt for the
undignified bare life she perceives in them turns into violence:
[W]hen she spits in my direction I feel my blood beginning to boil. It’s awkward,
for I’m not dressed how I want to be dressed. There isn’t much dignity to a
crumpled jacket, but I’m not going to let this stop me from speaking my mind.
But I don’t know what to say.88
Even as she attacks the homeless woman, Dorothy is preoccupied with the
indignity of her clothing (unaware of the indignity of her actions). Despite
these limits on Dorothy’s ‘response-ability’, the jacket that she used to clean
Solomon’s car remains for her a symbol of (limited) dignity, demonstrating how
Phillips’s engagement with dignity at the limit is also an engagement with what
puts limits on dignity.
Solomon also gestures towards the advent of Levinas’s third party. When
he is offered the job of Stoneleigh’s night-watchman, he articulates a sense of
co-citizenship that incorporates also a sense of his responsibility to his fellow
others: ‘I am familiar with this village, and this area, but now it is to be my

87 Phillips, A Distant Shore, pp. 64, 16 and 65.
206

home. I am to be the night-watchman, and my job will be to watch over these

people.’89 Simon Critchley asserts that, ‘the relation of the third is the common
bond, a relation among equals, a we’.90 It is significant that this gesture towards
the constitution of a ‘we’ that acknowledges responsibility occurs chronologi
cally before Solomon’s death, but sequentially at the very end of the novel. In
keeping with Phillips’s sense of the correspondence between migrant experi
ence and the form of writing about that experience, this suggests that, despite
Levinas’s deep suspicion, the work of literature counts among the partial
gestures that constitute the new world order. As Butler has sensitively and
persuasively argued, Levinas’s trenchant opposition to representation, paradox
ically, permits the realization of the ethical within the literary. She observes
that the face is most accurately described in terms of its unrepresentability, ‘in
the sense that it fails to capture and deliver that to which it refers’ – that is the
essential humanity of the other. Therefore, this humanity is not represented by
the face, but ‘indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representa
tion impossible, and […] is conveyed in the impossible representation’.91 Like
the exilic novels whose deep affinity with migrant experience is articulated by
their self-conscious failure fully to encompass it, Phillips’s displacement narra
tive proceeds via this inevitable sense of limitation. As Butler says, the human is,
inevitably, identified with the unrepresentable; the human is ‘that which limits
the success of any representational practice. The face is not “effaced” in this
failure of representation, but is constituted in that very possibility.’92
Acts of substitution, in literature as elsewhere, are, for Phillips, both essen
tial and inadequate. Yet this is precisely the source of their value to reveal what
is innately human. This can be observed in his own act of smuggling himself into
the Sangatte camp, bluffing his way in as a resident and placing himself, however
briefly, in the place of the other, as Dorothy does in cleaning Solomon’s car.
Both are an attempt to bear witness to the effaced condition of the other. Yet,
as Primo Levi has acknowledged, witnessing is an inevitably limited activity; for
Levi, the only true witness is not the survivor but the Musselmann, and it is upon
encountering a contemporary incarnation of the Musselmann in Sangatte that
the limits of Phillips’s capacity to bear witness to the camp are most clearly illus
trated: ‘In the gloom, an Afghan squats on his haunches and contorts his body
into a twisted sculpture that describes misery. Cars, many with British plates,
flash by, but the man does not move a muscle or blink his eyes.’93 The Afghan
Muselmann, utterly passive to the inertia of his predicament, silently articulates
the political subjugation of the migrant as the limit-figure of infrahumanity; his
silence imposes a corresponding silence on Phillips, who looks on at ‘the stream
of hunch-shouldered refugees walking with grim determination in the direction

90 Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 226.
93 Caryl Phillips, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land’, Guardian (17 November 2001). Available at
<www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/nov/17/immigration.books>. Accessed 13 July 2006.
207

Postcolonial Asylum
of the mouth of the tunnel. And I silently wish them all good luck’.94 Phillips’s
silence acknowledges the limitations of his testimony; partial and limited partic
ipation in the new world order, he suggests, is endemic. Yet, in attempting to
make such a gesture, he also affirms Butler’s command that ‘representation
must not only fail, but show its failure’, suggesting that by approaching and
engaging with these limits a greater (if partial) understanding of the terms of
the conversation will be achieved.95
94 Phillips, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land’.

208

Afterword
The world today is confronted with the sustained existence of precarious lives.
Michel Agier1
If, as Gary Boire has said, ‘law is colonialism’s first language’, then in the asylum
age postcolonial sovereign power shows itself to be particularly adept at
finessing its vocabulary.2 Early on the morning of 22 September 2009, around
600 French police, many in riot gear, moved in to evict the residents of the
so-called ‘jungle’ camps in woods on the outskirts of Calais. Two hundred and
seventy-eight destitute Afghan, Eritrean and Iraqi migrants were removed,
including 132 children. Bulldozers then moved in to clear the rudimentary
plastic tents that had sheltered the (overwhelmingly male) migrants, almost
all of whom were intent on travelling clandestinely to the UK. The move was
heralded by the French and British Immigration Ministers, as well as the British
Home Secretary, as a decisive response to a problem that had lingered since
the closure of the Red Cross camp at Sangatte in 2002. The French Immigration
Minister, Eric Bresson, claimed that clearing the camps defended impoverished
migrants against the people-traffickers who used the camps as a base of opera
tions; his British counterpart, Phil Woolas, argued that many of the ‘jungle’
residents must be economic migrants, as otherwise they would have claimed
asylum in France or whichever was the first European country they entered.3
1 Agier, Michel, ‘The Camps of the Twenty-first Century: Corridors, Screening Vestibules
Stop Eject (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2009), p. 238.
2 Gary Boire, ‘Symbolic Violence: Law, Literature, Interpretation’, Ariel, 35/1–2 (2004), p.
231.
3 Angelique Chrisafis and Haroon Siddique, ‘French Police Clear the “Jungle” Migrant Camp
in Calais’, Guardian (22 September 2009). Available at <www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/
sep/22/french-police-jungle-calais>. Accessed 22 September 2009; Angelique Chrisafis,
209

Postcolonial Asylum
The event was presented as an act of cleansing the field, introducing justice and
order where the migrants’ presence signified criminality and disorder.
Behind the political and visual rhetoric of ‘tidying up’, however, the move to
clear the camps presents stark evidence of the deployment of the apparatus of
the camp dispositif against those whose presence disrupts the horizon of percep
tion. The French government had issued several advance warnings that the
camps were to be closed; as a consequence, the majority of the approximately
800 residents had fled by the time the police arrived, and were visible in large
numbers sleeping rough along the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coast or in Calais itself.
According to Sylvie Copyans, an aid worker with the Salam Association, many of
the detained migrants since returned to the Calais area, either following their
release from detention, or, in the case of the children, having escaped.4 The
eviction of the ‘jungle’ demonstrates the torsion within the camp dispositif: as
sovereignty’s deployment of the ban continues to impose a monopoly on even
the most marginal spaces, forcing undesirable migrants to greater and greater
extremes of deprivation, new camps continue to emerge elsewhere, bearing
witness to the central tenet of this book – that the (re)materialization of camps
is an endemic feature of the contemporary asylum landscape.
If it is to engage productively with new global power formations, postcolonial
studies cannot neglect the figure of the asylum seeker within the camp dispositif.
The difficulties this presents are, however, in keeping with postcolonial studies
as a discipline that, as John McLeod says, innately pushes and pulls against itself.5
The interdisciplinary negotiations that asylum places on postcolonial studies are
(to paraphrase Judith Butler on the interplay between race and gender) marked
by necessary shifts in perspective, in which ‘the unmarked character of the
one […] becomes the condition of the articulation of the other’.6 Â�Postcolonial
studies in the asylum age thus presents us with an approach that significantly
resembles Bhabha’s prescription of continua: to adapt Butler again, a ‘set of
sequential readings that expose the partiality of each constitutive reading’.7
The recursive–disjunctive staging of continua that so deeply problematizes the
complacency of the citizen’s ‘we’ also, read here through Butler, constitutes the
same unsettling of a sense of ‘we’ within postcolonial studies. In the preceding
chapters I have presented the interaction between postcolonial studies and the
experiences of asylum seekers in terms of the ban and the citizen’s ‘we’. Both
‘Riot Police Clear Calais Camp as Ministers Accused Over Asylum’, Guardian (22 September
2009). Available at <www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/22/calais-immigration-camp-
france-uk>. Accessed 22 September 2009.
4 BBC World Service, ‘Out of the Jungle’ (29 September 2009). Available at <www.bbc.
co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2009/09/090929_outlook_calais.shtml>. Accessed 4
November 2009.
5 John McLeod, ‘Introduction’, in John McLeod (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial
Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 10.
6 Vikki Bell, ‘On Speech, Race and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith Butler’, in Vikki
Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage
Publishing, 1999), p. 168.
7 Vikki Bell, ‘On Speech, Race and Melancholia’, p. 168.
210

Afterword
are examples of inclusive-exclusive relationships: one excludes by retaining the

abandoned subject in the grip of the law’s censure, the other includes by refer
ring to those who fall outside the definition of the collective. As I have shown,
it is necessary to set these terms to work upon each other in order to unsettle
the terms of belonging and hospitality. Just as the camp dispositif represents a
species of incremental genesis, utilizing its inherent flexibility to dominate all
levels of representation, the forms of resistance that emerge in these spaces
are ‘heterologies’ in Rancière’s sense, multiple disturbances in the topography
of power.
What unifies these various strategies (of incarnating the ban, in the case of
Bartleby or David Oluwale, of acknowledging mutual narratability, in the case of
Abdulrazak Gurnah, or of reaching out from an inevitably partial position, in the
case of Shahin Shafaei or Caryl Phillips) is Butler’s assertion that to say ‘we’ is,
essentially, to posit ‘ourselves outside ourselves’.8 Properly embracing this idea
does not lead simply to an existential cul-de-sac – that ‘we’ are all, in Kristeva’s
words, strangers to ourselves – but to an engagement with the question of
why certain lives are constituted as more or less grievable.9 Michel Agier has
concurred with this point: ‘By grasping human identity at its site of denial,’ he
says, ‘we inquire more directly into its foundations.’10 Agier speaks of refugee
populations the world over as put into a state of quarantine, restricted within
controlled spaces to prevent contamination. Yet, as Spivak has so cogently and
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left the arguments for and against the abolition of borders to others, in favour
of uncovering the way that the border, under the rule of the ban, has become
the site of sovereign psychosis.12 What is most pressing in asylum regimes
throughout Western nations is the atrophication of dignity to the vanishing
point of bare life, a situation that denigrates the dignity of all. In the days
following the eviction of the ‘jungle’, a slogan appeared on a wall outside a
warehouse near Calais, where destitute migrants queued daily for food distrib
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the asylum seeker’s request is really of the most compelling simplicity: ‘Nous
voulons une nouvelle ère et de l’air pour nos enfants’ (We want a new era and
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8 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York:
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11 Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Responsibility’, Boundary 2: An International Journal of Litera-
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12 Matthew Gibney’s The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to
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13 Alexandra Topping, ‘Calais Immigrants Move Out of the “Jungle” into the Wasteland’,
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—— ‘More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globaliza
tion’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 20/2 (2007), pp. 172–192.
Žižek, Slavoj, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
227

Index
The letter n refers to a footnote.
Aboulela, Leila the refugee 9–10, 23, 137

Minaret 22, 94, 111–114 resistance to sovereignty 125, 134,
Adshead, Kate 147–152
The Bogus Woman 22, 94, 102–104, 106, responsibility 176
117–118, 182 singularity 135, 139–141
affectivity 119, 155–156, 182–184, 200 sovereign 10–11, 29, 36–37
Agamben, Giorgio testimony 72–73, 174, 193
and Arendt 9 writings
the ban 12–13, 37, 48–49, 85, 93 ‘Bartleby’ 125, 138–139, 149
on ‘Bartleby’ 125, 132, 138–139, 149 The Coming Community 135, 139–140
and Bhabha 94–95, 116–117, 123 Homo Sacer 10, 12, 25, 29–30, 35n, 37–
biopolitics 9, 14, 34, 38, 107, 121 38, 41, 49, 61, 93, 124, 128–129,
the camp 13–15, 34, 38, 40, 50, 61–73, 136, 138, 141, 148–149, 170
76, 85 ‘K’ 136–37, 170
the camp dispositif 13–15, 198 Means Without End 63, 129, 147–148
criticism of 9–10, 35, 61–63, 140–141, 146, Remnants of Auschwitz 65–68, 72–73,
176–177 174, 176, 193
deconstruction 128 State of Exception 10, 29, 34, 36, 44,
and Derrida 128–129, 146 127, 138, 171, 175
the exception 25, 29–30, 35, 61, 63–64, Agier, Michel 209, 211
127–128, 138, 171, 175 and deterritorialization 27, 48
‘form-of-life’ 146–148 Ahmad, Aijaz 3
the gorgoneion 68, 72–73 Ahmed, Sara 4, 84, 107, 182, 186, 200
homo sacer 10, 21, 38, 40, 116–117, 127, Al-Assad, Mehmet 150–152
151 Al-Jezairy, Zuhair 139–140
and Isin and Rygiel 9, 35, 59, 61–64, 85 Al-Qady, Towfiq
on Kafka 128, 136–137 Nothing but Nothing 183
kalumnia 136–137, 140, 142, 151, 170 Allen, Steve 79
language 10, 41, 138 Ali, Mahzer 2, 4, 7–8, 14–15, 29, 73
law 36–37, 41, 124, 128–129, 136–138, Amini, Abas 14–15, 18, 119n
141, 158, 176 Arendt, Hannah 129, 137
and Mbembe 38, 40 The Human Condition 180n
potentiality 138–141, 148–149, 151 The Origins of Totalitarianism 12–13, 153
race 39–40 ‘We refugees’ 153
and Rancière 9, 15, 23, 59, 61–62, 64 Appadurai, Arjun 4
228

Index
Aspden, Kester 87, 89–90 Sydney Olympics 55

Aston, Elaine 117–118 Tampa, MV 17, 32–32, 49, 51, 55, 99
asylum claim Vivien Solen Young 25, 52–54, 67
as paradox 6–7, 95, 138, 140, 159 ‘white Australia’ policy 5
and decidability 11–12, 125–126, 129–130 see also immigration detention centres,
asylum seeker legislation
and aboriginal Australians 48–56 Auschwitz 65–67, 76
authors see Mehmet Al-Assad, Zuhair
Al-Jezairy, Abas Amini, Angel Bou Back, Les 78, 92
jbiha, Â�Exiled Writers Ink, Dieudonnée-Â� Badran, Alice 80
Marcelle Makenga, Shahin Shafaei, Bal, Mieke 186, 199–201
Himzo Skorpan, Mohsen Soltany-Zand Balibar, Étienne
and citizen 2, 7, 11, 13, 18, 21–22, 48–50, the border 28, 32, 48
52–55, 57–63, 67, 73–77, 90–91, 101, illegality 93
107–111, 113, 118, 121–123, 130, 135, sans papiers 60–61
142–148, 150, 152, 210–211 Bakhtin, Mikhail 6, 27, 93, 142, 145
credibility determinations 101–102, ban, the
104–106, 131–133, 156–165, 167 Agamben on 12–13, 37, 48–49, 85, 93,
decidability 12, 127, 135–136, 142–143, 128–129
147, 149–150, 152, 163, 167 the camp 77, 82, 210
destitution among 86–91, 97–98, 124–125, gender 101, 114
131–134 iteration 93–94, 121
as deterritorialized border 29, 48 and responsibility 181–182
dispersal system 77–78, 85 Bartmann, Sarah 102–103
DNA testing 105n Bashir, Abu-Manneh 28
and family 98–102, 105–106 Bauman, Zygmunt 8–9
as fetish 33–37, 45–46, 98 concentration camp 34–35
gender 94, 98–107, 109–114 and Derrida 11
illegality 12–14, 93, 97– 98, 114, 131 hierarchy of mobility 70, 198–199
labelling 32–33n, 41, 60–61, 102–106, ‘waste humanity’ 96–97, 106
153–156, 167–169, 175, 178, 180, 190 writings
as limit-concept 13, 23, 37, 65–66, 93–94, Life in Fragments 35
137–138 Liquid Times 181–182
lip-sewing 2, 14–15, 150–152 Globalization 1, 70, 198–199
narratives 118, 125–127, 129–136, 139–141, Wasted Lives 9, 96–97
152, 156–163, 165–166, 169, 176–180, Bayley, Claire
211 The Container 183–184, 187
necropolitics beach, the 42, 54, 77–79, 81, 84
as parasite 126–128, 135–136, 141–143, Benhabib, Seyla 113
147, 150–151 Benveniste, Emile 158–159
sexuality 99, 101 Bhabha, Homi
social reproduction 22, 94–98, 106–114 and Agamben 94–95, 116–117, 123
Athiwal, Harmit 38–39 and Balibar 8
Auerbach, Eric 179 continua 88, 114–116, 118, 142, 210
Australia criticism of 27–28, 96
Aboriginal internment 40, 49–50 dissensus 8, 60, 95, 116–117
the beach 42, 54 and Fanon 94–96
‘children overboard’ case 54 on Rich 116
Cornelia Rau 25, 52–54, 67 writings
culture jamming 54–55 The Location of Culture 2–3, 6–9, 60,
Derrida on 146 94–96, 116, 140
Howard government 5 ‘Notes on vernacular cosmopolitanism’
immigration detention in 2, 16–20, 29, 88, 115–116, 142
49–59, 62, 66–67 Bhabha, Jacqueline 100, 104–105
Mabo 51, 54 Bigo, Didier
Migration Act 1992 17, 49n and the dispositif 13, 48, 50, 63–64
Pacific Solution 17, 32–34, 36, 45, 61 Billings, Peter and Richard A. Edwards
Rudd, Kevin 32 132–133, 161
SIEV-X 19 biopolitics 64–65
229

Postcolonial Asylum
Agamben on 9, 14, 34, 38, 82, 107, 121 Chowdhury, Arjun 64

asylum seeker 7, 9, 85, 125 Clayton, Gina 157
gender 100–103, 106 Coetzee, J. M.
homo sacer 38, 40 Waiting for the Barbarians 21, 25, 43–48
Birch, Tony 50 communitas 57, 79–80, 82, 84
Blair, Tony 30, 48 Conrad, Joseph 186
Boal, Augusto 23, 187–193 Cooke, Alexander 141
Boer war 40 Critchley, Simon 127, 145, 205, 207
Boire, Gary 209 Cwerner, Saulo B. 163–163, 175
border, the
and postcolonial studies 2–4, 26–28, 42 Daly, Francis 155
deterritorialized 28–34, 48–49, 62 De Genova, Nicholas 11–12
as colonial fetish 42 De Giorgio, Alessandro 30
frontiers, zones and camps 62, 74 Deleuze, Gilles 125, 131, 136–137, 149, 175
Boujbiha, Angel 55–56, 66–67, 71, 143–144, Dening, Greg 42
150–151 Derrida, Jacques
Broomfield, Nick and Marc Hoerferlin 124 and Agamben 128–129, 146
Brown, Dave 88 criticism of 109–110, 128, 146
Burke, Paul and Tony McEnery 168n decidability 131, 147, 150, 167, 171–172,
Burnside, Julian 17, 32n, 33 180
Burville, Tom 190 hospitality 22, 108–110, 114, 122–123,
Butler, Judith 45–48, 182, 194, 210 146–147, 150, 158–159, 166–167,
and the asylum claim 7 169–172, 178
on Levinas 207–208 iteration 94
on Kafka 128
Calais ‘jungle’ camp 209–211 the law 36, 128–131, 158
camp, the on Levinas 109–110
as apotropaic 68, 71–73, 137 paper 130–131
colonial origins of 40–42, 49–50 responsibility 146–147, 150
concentration camps 34, 40–41, 65–68, writings
72–73, 76, 85, 202 Adieu to Levinas 109–110, 171
and the exception 13, 35, 40, 63–64, 66, 68 ‘Before the law’ 128–131, 153
Guantanamo Bay 34, 62, 76 For What Tomorrow 166
immigration detention ‘Force of law’ 36 128, 131
in the UK 34–36, 38–39, 66, 68–73 ‘Hospitality, justice and responsibility’
in Australia 2, 16–20, 29, 49–59, 62, 167, 180
66–67 ‘Hospitality, perfectibility, respon
see immigration detention centres sibility’ 51, 112–113, 146–147, 167,
Sangatte Red Cross transit camp 76–77 169
as spectacle 74, 79 ‘Hostipitality’ 109, 159
camp dispositif Margins of Philosophy 94
aesthetics of 58–59, 61–73, 77, 191–192 Negotiations 171–172
and Agamben 13–15, 198 Of Hospitality 108, 167, 170–171, 179
the ban 12–13, 37, 64, 77, 82, 85, 93, 210 The Other Heading 109n
and Bigo 13, 28 Paper Machine 130–131, 149–150
deterritorialization 26–34, 41–42, 47, 63, Devadas, Vijay and Chris Prentice 27–28
77, 79, 85, 158, 202, 211 Diamond, Elin 181
disappearance in 58–73, 91, 187–193 Dillon, Michael 7, 23, 145
the epistolarium 18 Diprose, Rosalyn
and Foucault 13, 20–21 response-ability 23, 182
indistinction within 11, 43, 48, 82, 114, 129 Dirlik, Arf
and Isin and Rygiel, 61–64, 85 and Hardt and Negri 26
and the law 37, 158 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 184
resistance to 56–61, 63, 90–91, 93, 95–96, Douglass, Frederick 194
125, 134, 136–152, 171–180, 186–193, Drewe, Robert
210–211 Grace 50
social reproduction 22, 94–98 Dyer, Richard 83–85
Cavarero, Adriana 22, 176–180 Eastmond, Marita 158, 161
chiasmus 194–195, 197, 199 Edkins, Jenny 142
230

Index
Edkins, Jenny and Veronique Pin-Fat 148–149, Frears, Stephen

151 Dirty Pretty Things 22, 94, 107–110
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochs Friend, Melanie
child 111 Border Country 21, 58
Eliot, T. S. 186 Fryer, Peter 5
epistolarium, the
and camp dispositif 18 Gabriel, Teshome 195
Nauru epistolarium 16–20 Gardner, Joy 5
and Levinas 19 as homo sacer 10, 103
EU directive on minimum standards of recep Garner, Steve 83–84
tion 97 Gates, Henry Louis 194
European Convention on Human Rights 86, 98, Gedalof, Irene 94, 107, 113
131, 161 Gell, Alfred 68
exception, the Gharavi, Tina
Agamben on 25, 34–37, 171 Asylum Carwash 115
and the camp 13, 35–36, 61, 63, 65 Gianncopoulos, Maria 51
colonial origins of 38–49 Gibney, Matthew 1, 30, 32, 155, 211
and commandement 44 Gibson, Sarah 71, 108, 172–173
and the law 36–37, 45, 64, 127–130, 132, Gikandi, Simon 6
136, 211 Gilbert, Helen and Jacqueline Lo 192–193
and necropolitics 38 Gilroy, Paul 2
and race 39–43, 46 and Agamben 40
Schmitt on 10–11, 162 concentration camp 35
and sovereignty 10–11, 25, 127–129, 146, and Mbembe 21, 39–43
157 racism 40–42, 84, 173
and visibility 68 post-imperial melancholia 78, 85, 202
Exiled Writers Ink 134n, 139n, 144n slave plantations 41
extra-territorial processing writings
Italy and Lampudesa 28 After Empire 40, 47, 78, 84, 173, 202
Pacific Solution 17, 32–34, 36, 45, 63 Between Camps 10, 35, 41–42, 101
Sangatte Agreement 30, 63 Gombrich, E. H.
and the UK 30–31, 71 Gorgon myth 68
and the USA 28n Good, Anthony 19, 160–161
Fanon, Frantz 181, 185 Goodwin-Gill, Guy and Rachel Adams 32–33,
Bhabha and 94–97 36–37
writings Gormley, Anthony 78
Black Skin, White Masks 95, 104, 127 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 211
The Wretched of the Earth 96 By the Sea 22, 158, 167–176, 178–180,
Fassin, Didier 76–77, 105, 161n 185
Féher, Ferenc and Agnes Heller 172
Fekete, Liz 42n, 70, 79 Hage, Ghassan
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub 160 ethnic caging 56
fetish 33–37, 42, 45–48, 66, 98 paranoid nationalism 52–53, 76–77
Foster, Kevin 108 racism 42
Foucault, Michel whiteness 77
the dispositif 13, 20–21, 49 worrying 54, 76
panoptic systems 66 writings
writings Against Paranoid Nationalism 52–55, 76
‘The confession of the flesh’ 13, 21, 49 White Nation 54–56, 77, 143, 155–156
‘The Subject and power’ 148n Haider, Jörg 73, 75
France Hall, Alex 72
L’affaire du foulard 113 Hall, Stuart 2, 174
Bresson, Eric 209 and identity 140, 160–161
Calais ‘jungle’ camp 209–211 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri
Sangatte Red Cross transit camp 76–77, asylum 26
202, 207–208 ‘Bartleby’ 125, 176
Sans papiers 60–61, 130, 175–176 the camp dispositif 28
Sarkozy, Nicolas 76 the deterritorialized border 25–29, 32,
see also legislation 48–49
231

Postcolonial Asylum
postcolonial studies 27 Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre

writings [UK] 69, 71, 165
Empire 25–26, 30, 37, 48–49, 176 Woomera Immigration Removal and
Multitude 25–26 Processing Centre [Australia] 2, 29,
Harris, Wilson 2, 175, 186, 194–195 57–59, 61
Hayden, Bridget 155–156 Villawood Immigration Detention Centre
Hayter, Teresa 61, 168n [Australia] 50, 142–143
Hazou, Rand 190 Independent Asylum Commission 101, 157,
Hegel, G. F. W. 40 165–166
hijab 113 Isin, Engin
Hill Maher, Kristen 111 ‘Theorizing acts of citizenship’ 90–91
Hintjens, Helen 39 Isin, Engin, and Kim Rygiel 9, 35, 58, 61–64,
homo sacer, the 10, 21, 29, 38, 40, 82, 103, 77–78
116–117, 126–127, 151, 205 ‘Abject spaces: frontiers, zones and camps’
Honig, Bonnie 88 9, 35, 62–64, 74
Horin, Ros ‘Of other global cities: frontiers, zones and
Through the Wire 182–183, 186, 188–193 camps’ 62
hospitality discourse iteration
asylum hotel debate 71, 172 camp dispositif 22, 93
in ‘Bartleby’ 135, 142 hospitality discourse 94–98, 106–114
decidability 171–172 and resistance 99–100, 114–123
Derrida on 103, 108–110, 114, 122–123,
146–147, 150, 166–167, 169–172, Jacquemet, Marco 162
178–180 Jamieson, Nigel 55
and gender 103, 106–114 In Our Name 183
Levinas on 109–110 Jestovic, Slvija 75
and postcolonial studies 108, 171
reading 124–127 Kafka, Franz
hybridity 2–3, 8, 27, 93–94, 142, 145 The Trial 128–129, 136–137
Keneally, Thomas
immigration detention centres The Tyrant’s Novel 53
Baxter Immigration Removal and Process Kevin, Tony
ing Centre [Australia] 50 A Certain Maritime Incident 183
Campsfield House Immigration Removal Klein, Naomi 24
Centre [UK] 69, 102, 103 Kneebone, Susan 105–106
Christmas Island Immigration Detention Kristeva, Julia 117–118, 211
Centre [Australia] 32, 50n Kureishi, Hanif 2, 5
Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre Kushner, Tony 168
[UK] 35–36n, 69, 71
Curtin Immigration Detention Centre Lange, Dorothea 103
[Australia] 188 law
Dover Immigration Removal Centre [UK] Agamben on 36–37, 41, 124, 128–129
35–36n, 69 and anthropology 19
Haslar Immigration Removal Centre [UK] asylum seeker narratives 127, 135–140
35–36n, 69 Derrida on 128–131
Harmondsworth Immigration Removal the exception 36–37, 44, 46, 64, 66,
Centre [UK] 69 128–130, 132, 136–137, 211
Lindholme Immigration Removal Centre and literature 125, 130–131, 158
[UK] 35–36n, 69 and narrative 153, 156–163, 165
Manus Islands Immigration Detention as parasitic 128–129
Centre [Australia] 32 sovereignty 24, 33, 36–37, 41, 93
Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre Lazarus, Neil 3
[Australia] 50n Ledent, Bénédicte 202
Nauru Immigration Detention Centre [Aus Leeds, history of immigration to 87–88
tralia] 17, 32 legislation 29
Northern Immigration Detention Centre 1906 Aliens Act [UK] 5
[Australia] 50 1958 Migration Act [Australia] 33n
Tinsley House Immigration Removal Centre 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act [UK] 5
[UK] 69 1971 Immigration Act [UK] 5, 34
232

Index
1987 Immigration (Carrier’s Liability) Act Mamouney, Don

[UK] 30 Citizen X 182
1989 Children’s Act [UK] 99 Manne, Robert 17
1992 Migration Act [Australia] 17, 49n Mapanje, Jack 115, 117, 159–160
1993 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act Marfleet, Phil 168
[UK] 33n Margree, Liz
1993 Pasqua Laws (France) 60 Trodden 119, 121
1997 Debré Laws (France) 61 Maryns, Katrijn 163
1999 Immigration and Asylum Act [UK] 12, Mazierska, Ewa and Laura Rascaroli 79
29, 31, 77–79, 163–164 Mbembe, Achille
Section 4 12, 86, 97–98, 124 the colonial frontier 42–43
Section 8 97 commandement 44–49
Section 95 86 and Gilroy 21, 39–43
2001 Border Protection Bill [Australia] 33 necropower 9, 38–39, 48, 114
2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum racism 40, 46
Act [UK] 70, 86, 97, 164 slave plantations 41, 43
Section 55 131–133 writings
2004 Asylum and Immigration (Treatment ‘Necropolitics’ 14, 38–43, 46
of Claimants, etc.) Act [UK] 86 On the Postcolony 40–41, 44
Section 9 88, 98, 104, 108 ‘On the postcolony: a brief response’
2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality 45, 47, 49
Act [UK] ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’
Section 44 99 45–48, 114
2009 Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Melville, Herman
Act [UK] ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ 22, 125–127,
Sections 39 and 44 154 131–136, 138–143, 149–152, 175–176,
Levi, Primo 72–73, 116 178–179, 185, 211
Levinas, Emmanuel Mignolo, Walter 4n
criticism of 146, 184–185, 204 migrant labour 106–115, 123
Derrida on 109–110 Millar, Graeme
ethics 90, 145, 193, 204–205 Beheld 92–94
the face 67, 184, 198, 200, 203–207 Millbank, Jenny 156, 162
and hospitality 109–110 Miller, J. Hillis
representation 185, 190, 205, 207 on ‘Bartleby’ 125–126, 134–135, 139, 141,
responsibility 22–23, 67, 126, 145–146, 151
181, 184–185, 187, 201, 204, 206 criticism of 127
the said and the saying 127, 187, 191 parasite 126–127, 134
substitution 184–186, 188, 199–200, 205, reading and ethics 125–127, 147, 151
207 writings
the third 19, 91, 145, 204–207 ‘The critic as host’ 125–126, 147
writings Versions of Pygmalion 125, 127, 150,
Ethics and Infinity 67, 145, 184, 205 152
‘Ethics and politics’ 201 Mills, Catherine 38, 146, 176
‘Ethics as first philosophy’ 200, 205 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 29–34
Otherwise than Being 145, 184–185, 204, Morrison, Toni 92
206 multiculturalism 112
Totality and Infinity 185 muselmann, the 65–68, 116–117, 207
Lewis, Hannah 86 Myers, Misha
Linden, Sonja and Perivolaris 119, 121
Asylum Dialogues 182 Vocalatitude 118
Asylum Monologues 182 Way from Home 22, 95, 118–119, 121–123,
Linds, Warren 188 186
Luibhéid, Eithne 101–102
Nazhad, Gaylan
McLeod, John 210 Welcome to England 130
Macklin, Audrey 156, 162 necropolitics 9, 38–39, 68
Makenga, Dieudonnée-Marcelle 134–135 and biopolitics 41n, 121
Malkki, Liisa 9, 15, 35, 72, 82, 158, 169, New Asylum Model 88, 104, 144, 160,
197–198 164–166, 168
233

Postcolonial Asylum
non-refoulement 32–33 postcolonial studies 8, 23

Nyers, Peter 64n visibility and speech 59, 72, 74, 88–89, 190
and the border 28, 48 writings
Disagreement 58–59, 64, 74–75, 81–82,
Obama, Barack 34 88–89
Oluwale, David 5, 58, 64, 87–91, 185, 211 The Politics of Aesthetics 20
O’Neill, Maggie 119 ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of
Orr, John 80 Man?’ 8–9, 15, 145
Rau, Cornelia 25, 52–54, 67
Pacific Solution 17, 32–34, 36, 45, 61 reading
Parry, Benita 3, 26–27 contrapuntal reading 125–126
Pawlikowski, Pawel and ethics 22, 125–130, 140–147, 150–152
Last Resort 21, 58, 64, 77–85 and J. Hillis Miller 125–127
Perera, Suvendrini 2, 41n, 49–50, 57 refugee
performance theory 75, 182–184, 187–193 Agamben on 9–10, 23
Perivolaris, John Arendt on 129, 137, 153
Walking with Thaer 119–122 origins of 12–13, 35, 106, 137, 153–155
Peutz, Natalie 140 as speechless 9, 15, 72, 169, 174–176,
Phelan, Peggy 186 198
Phillips, Caryl 211 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of
and Agamben 202 Refugees [United Nations] 32–33n, 99,
Sangatte 202, 207–208 129, 137, 154, 156, 164
writings 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of
A Distant Shore 23, 186, 201–207 Refugees [United Nations] 154
The European Tribe 202 Reynolds, Sile and Helen Muggeridge 30–31
Foreigners: Three English Lives 21, 58, 64, Rich, Adrienne 115
87–91, 185 Rigo, Enrica 47, 144, 164, 186
Higher Ground 202 Roberts, Les 79
The Nature of Blood 202 Rosello, Mireille
A New World Order 186, 201 sans papiers 60
Plaut, W. Gunther 159 Rushdie, Salman 4–5
Polzer, Tara and Laura Hammond 57 and Sebastião Salgado 1–2, 15
Powell, Enoch 41 writings
postcolonial studies 160 The Satanic Verses 92–93
and asylum 6–23, 49, 95, 141, 181, 210 Step Across This Line 1–2
the ban 94
cosmopolitanism 6 Said, Edward
criticism of 3–5, 27 ‘Reflections on Exile’ 24
and hospitality 108, 171 Sales, Rosemary 79
globalization 4–5 Salgado, Sebastião 1–2, 4, 15
Puttick, Keith 133 Salverson, Julie 187
Samura, Sorius
racism Living with Illegals 198
Agamben and 39–40 San Juan, E. 3, 96
and colonialism 40–42, 46 Sangatte Red Cross transit camp 76–77, 202,
and the homo sacer 40, 103 207–208
and gender 101–102 sans papiers 60–61, 130, 175–176
Gilroy on 40–42, 84 Schechner, Richard 183
Hage on 42, 76–77 Schengen Agreements 11
whiteness 53–54, 77, 82–85 Schlingensief, Christophe 21, 73
xeno-racism 42, 84 Ausländer Raus! 58, 64, 73–77, 85, 185
Rajaram, Prem Kumar 17, 32, 138, 143–144 Schlunke, Katrina 42, 49
Rancière, Jacques Schmitt, Carl
consensus 74–75, 82, 90 Political Theology 10–11, 29, 162
disappearance 15, 21, 58–59, 122 Schütz, Anton 137
dissensus 64, 82, 85, 122–123, 145 securitisation 11, 14, 28n, 41
heterologies 20–21, 211 Seu, Bruna Irena 102
politics and police 59–61, 64, 77, 81–82, Shafaei, Shahin 211
87, 89–90, 95, 190 influence of Boal 188–193
234

Index
performance in Through the Wire 186–193 UK

Refugitive 23, 186, 188–191, 193 Amini, Abas 14–15, 18, 119n
Shamshatoo refugee camp [Pakistan] 195, Afghan hijackers 43, 48
197–198 asylum deaths 38–39, 43
Shields, Rob 78–79, 81 asylum destitution 86–91, 97–98, 124–125,
Simon, Roger and Claudia Eppert 191 131–134
Sivanandan, A. 42 asylum hotel debate 71, 172
Skorpan, Himzo 144 the beach 77–79, 81, 84
Smith, Andrew 3 Blair, Tony 30, 48
Sofsky, Wolfgang 65 Blunkett, David 98, 133
Soja, Edward 81 ‘Campsfield Nine’ 102, 104
Solen Young, Vivien 25, 52–54, 67 Cochrane, Kelso 5
Soltany-Zand, Mohsen 142–148, 150–151, 188 dispersal system 77–78, 85
sovereignty extra-territorial processing in 30–31, 71
Agamben on 10–11, 29, 36–37 Gardner, Joy 5, 10, 103
and decidability 10–11, 49, 167, 170 Gatwick ‘No Borders’ camp 63
deterritorialization 26–34, 155 immigration detention in 34–36, 38–39, 66,
exception 10–11, 25, 29, 34–37, 127–129, 68–73
141–142, 146, 157, 162 Hughes, Beverly 98
fetish 33, 36–37 Lawrence, Stephen 5
homo sacer 128, 148, 151 Oluwale, David 5, 58, 64, 87–91, 185, 211
and hospitality 167 Reid, John 43, 48
indistinction 25–27, 33, 36–37, 43, 93, Woolas, Phil 209
117 see also immigration detention centres,
law 24, 33, 36–37, 41, 93 legislation
speech act theory 7, 170
Spijkerboer, Thomas 105–106 Van Gennep, Arnold 78–79
Spivak, Gayatri Chaktravorty verbatim theatre 23, 182–184, 187–193
the new subaltern 5, 15–16, 100–101
on postcolonial studies 5, 95 Wadiwel, Dinesh 49–50, 52
responsibility 182, 202, 211 Wadjularbinna 55–56
writings Waldenfells, Bernard 126n
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 16 Walter, Natasha 182
In Other Worlds 16, 125–126 Walters, William 61, 91
‘The new Subaltern’ 5, 95 Warner, Daniel 4, 153–154
‘Responsibility’ 182, 211 Watson, Irene 51–52
Squire, Vikki 9, 11, 14, 41, 43, 61, 63 Wertenbaker, Timberlake
Stanley, Liz 17–18 Credible Witness 182
Starr, Pip whiteness 53–54, 77, 82–85
Through the Wire 57–59 Whyte, Jessica 37, 128
Steinbock, Daniel J. 154 Winterbottom, Michael
Sturke, James 43, 48 In This World 23, 186, 193–200
Szticki, Jerzy 154 Whitlock, Gillian 16–19, 129–130
Wood, David 204–205
Tampa, MV 17, 32–34, 49, 51, 55, 99 Woodcock, Penny
Taylor, Diane 86 Exodus 78
testimony 73, 124–125, 129–130, 136, 160, Wright, Terence 82, 103, 196
174, 182–184, 190–193, 208
Thomas, Robert 100, 1560157, 161–162, 165n, Yakov, Perry 45
166 York, Sheona and Nancy Fancott 86
Trollope, Anthony 51n Young, Robert 93–94
Turner, Victor 79, 82
Tyler, Imogen 9, 66 Zephaniah, Benjamin 10
Zetter, Roger 22, 103, 168
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 127 Žižek, Slavoj, 44, 125
235

(David Farrier) Postcolonial Asylum Seeking Sanct

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(David Farrier) Postcolonial Asylum Seeking Sanct

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Postcolonial Asylum

Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 9

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Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for

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Liverpool University Press

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Copyright © 2011 David Farrier

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Web PDF eISBN 978-1-84631-563-3

Typeset in Amerigo by Koinonia, Manchester

Introduction: Before the Law 1

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4 Allow Me My Destitution 124

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I am grateful to the following people for granting permission to reproduce the

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Figure 1 Sebastião Salgado, ‘Border Crossing Mexico/USA’, from pages

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Figure 1 Sebastião Salgado, ‘Border Crossing Mexico/USA’, from pages 30–31

[Image removed for digital edition as electronic rights not granted.]

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A scandal for postcolonial studies

To begin with, two scenes (see Figures 1 and 2).

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5 Rushdie, Step Across This Line, pp. 408 and 410.

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To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and ambiguities

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16 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and

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Such a scandalous inbetweenness is also, I suggest, a scandal for postcolonial

29 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 2; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy,

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(typo)graphically illustrates the incursion of what Achille Mbembe has called

The camp dispositif

It should be acknowledged that a tendency to universalize displacement is as

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40 Benjamin Zephaniah, Propa Propaganda (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), p.

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assertion that, ‘sovereign is he who can decide on the state of exception’.44

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is writing about undocumented Mexican migrants in the US, his argument is

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53 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 286.

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He sewed up his lips so that he could speak out.

57 Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security’, p. 44.

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Malkki’s observation, that the archetypal refugee is typically represented as ‘a

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64 Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoriciza­

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detained at the behest of the Australian government on the Pacific island of

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they were originally intended to sustain.75 The Nauru epistolarium compiled by

75 Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondence’, Autobiog-

64 Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoriciza

In ‘Reflections on Exile’, Edward Said insists on a distinction between the promi

of the camp makes it necessary to read back, as it were, sovereignty’s occupa