Abstract
Abject spaces are those in and through which increasingly distressed, displaced, and dispossessed peoples are condemned to the status of strangers, outsiders, and aliens (e.g., refugees, unlawful combatants, insurgents, and the conquered) and stripped of their (existent and potential) citizenship (rights of becoming political) in various emerging frontiers, zones, and camps around the world. There has been a veritable outcry against the fact that these people have been reduced to a status without human rights. Yet their being human has not seemed to matter much to the states and their laws that have condemned them to these states of inexistence (figure 9.1). What is the logic of these abject spaces and how do we investigate the practices that sustain them?
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Notes
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 166.
Ibid., p. 175; William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion and the International Police of Aliens,” Citizenship Studies, 7 (2002): 285.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951).
Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness,” in Thinking in Action, trans. M. Dooley and M. Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001).
Peter Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement,” Third World Quarterly, 24 (2003): 1078
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Theory Out of Bounds, vol. 20 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 24–25.
Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 (2004): 297–310.
Nandita Sharma, “Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-Trafficking Campaigns,” Refuge: Canada’s Periodical on Refugees, 21 (2003): 21.
Human Rights Watch, “By Invitation Only”: Australian Asylum Policy (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2002), p. 1.
Human Rights Watch, “Refugees, Migration and Trafficking” in Human Rights Watch World Report 2003 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003).
U.S. Committee for Refugees, World Refugee Survey 2003 Country Report: United Kingdom (Washington, DC: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 2003).
Sarah Gibson, “Accommodating Strangers: British Hospitality and the Asylum Hotel Debate,” Journal for Cultural Research, 7 (2003): 372.
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© 2007 Elizabeth Dauphinee and Cristina Masters
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Isin, E.F., Rygiel, K. (2007). Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps. In: Dauphinee, E., Masters, C. (eds) The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04379-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04379-5_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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