lo Squaderno (Jun 2017)
The Autonomy of Deportation
Abstract
As ostensibly unwanted or undesirable non-citizens, the utter disposability of deportees appears to be finally and conclusively verified by deportation as a sovereign state power’s perfunctory and mundane act of 'taking out the trash.' Hence, it is no accident that, etymologically, the origins of the very word 'deportation' would indicate a carrying away, a removal, a disposal. The eradication of deportees’ individual lives — their personal identities and life trajectories — emerges as a frightfully routine and prosaic fact of deportation. In spite of the sheer violence of the ruptures inflicted though deportation, however, those who have been rendered the objects of this power persistently reassert their own subjectivity. Ethnographic insights into the lived struggles of the deported (as well as their loved ones and communities) elucidates the enduring subjectivity of those who have been made the objects of such sovereign acts of state power and subjected to deportation's techniques of eradication, and illustrates the stubborn incorrigibility of human life against the myriad forces that would seek to enforce its precarity and disposability. In the post-deportation condition, we confront anew the elementary and elemental human freedom of movement, and the incorrigibility of the autonomy and subjectivity of migration. Much as the autonomy of migration instigates a contest in which state power never has the first word, what we may now conceive as the autonomy of deportation — an autonomy and subjectivity of the deported within and against their predicaments of deportation — similarly ensures that state power never has the last word, either.
