Description
Book SynopsisThrough the main concepts of ‘the coloniality of asylum’ and ‘solidarity as method’, this book links the question of the state to the one of civil society; in so doing, it questions the idea of ‘autonomous politics’, showing how both refugee mobility and solidarity are intimately marked by the coloniality of asylum, in its multiple ramifications of objectification, racialisation and victimisation.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, The Coloniality of Asylum bridges border studies with decolonial theory and the anthropology of the state, and accounts for the mutual production of ‘refugees’ and ‘Europe’. It shows how ‘Europe’ politically, legally and socially produces ‘refugees’ while, in turn, through their border struggles and autonomous movements, ‘refugees’ produce the space of ‘Europe’.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg in the wake of the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’, the book offers a polyphonic account, moving between the standpoints of different subjects and wrestling with questions of protection, freedom, autonomy, solidarity and subjectivity.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Coloniality of Asylum: ‘Race’, ‘Refugeeness’ and ‘Europeanness’
2. Solidarity as Method: On the Intractable Coloniality of Asylum Ethnographies
3. The Blackmail of the Crisis: Volunteering with Refugees in Transit and the Politics of ‘Civil Society’
4. ‘Here to Stay’: Autonomous Movements Across Europe between Incorrigibility and Refugification
5. The Battleground of Asylum: Navigation, Co-optation and Sabotage
6. Thresholds of Asylum: ‘Refugeeness’, Subjectivity and the Resistance to the ‘Coloniality of Being’
7. Refugees Welcome? The Production of Whiteness within Visual, Moral and Social Economies of Solidarity
Conclusions: Consuming the Pain of Refugees
