Description
Book SynopsisPostcolonial Asylum is concerned with asylum as a key emerging postcolonial field. Through an engagement with asylum legislation, legal theory and ethics, David Farrier argues that the exclusionary culture of host nations casts asylum seekers as contemporary incarnations of the infrahuman object of colonial sovereignty. Postcolonial Asylum includes readings of the work of asylum seeker and postcolonial authors and filmmakers, including J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Leila Aboulela, Stephen Frears, Pawel Pawlikowski and Michael Winterbottom. These readings are framed by the work of postcolonial theorists (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe), as well as other influential thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Étienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman), in order to institute what Spivak calls a ‘step beyond’ postcolonial studies; one that carries with it the insights and limitations of the discipline as it looks to new ways for postcolonial studies to engage with the world.
Trade ReviewA densely theoretical yet politicised and interdisciplinary book that signals an important new trajectory in postcolonial and cultural studies, towards interrogation of the plight of those looking for sanctuary in Europe, Australia and elsewhere. It is at its best in discussing asylum statistics and contexts, and analysing art, photography and literature. Recommended reading, especially for policymakers and tabloid journalists.
Claire Chambers, Times Higher Education -- Claire Chambers * Times Higher Education *
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note to the Reader
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Before the Law
- A scandal for postcolonial studies
- The camp dispositif
- Overview
- 1. Nothing Outside the Law
- The colonization of the in-between
- Kenomatic fetish
- The heritage of colonial infrahumanity
- Necropolitics and national narcissism
- 2. Horizons of Perception
- In/visible relations
- Gorgoneion
- Horizon of perception 1: the camp in the city
- Horizon of perception 2: the camp and the dispersal system
- Horizon of perception 3: the camp and asylum destitution
- 3. Be/held: Ban and Iteration
- Be/held
- Bogus women
- Re/producing 'home'
- Continua
- 4. Allow Me My Destitution
- Parasitic reading and reading parasites
- Dead letters
- Kalumnia and formula
- 'Let me become the echo of a name to you'
- Preference and assumption
- 5. Terms of Hospitality
- The receding refugee
- Asylos/Asylao
- The transgressive step
- The necessary other
- 6. The Politics of Proximity
- Response-ability
- Metaxis
- The journey is the film is the journey
- The limits of dignity
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
