Postcolonial asylum seeking sanctuary before the law

Postcolonial Asylum
Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 9

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Postcolonialism across the Disciplines
Series Editors
Graham Huggan, University of Leeds
Andrew Thompson, University of Leeds
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for
post�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 acknowl�edged. It will also embrace new critical paradigms and examine the
relation�ship between the transnational/cultural, the global and the �postcolonial.

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Postcolonial Asylum

Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

David Farrier

Liverpool University Press

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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,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available

Web PDF eISBN 978-1-84631-563-3
Print ISBN 978-1-84631-480-3 cased

Typeset in Amerigo by Koinonia, Manchester
Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham & Eastbourne


Contents

Acknowledgements
Note to the Reader
List of Figures

vii
ix
xi

Introduction: Before the Law
A scandal for postcolonial studies
The camp dispositif
Overview

1
1
9
15

1 Nothing Outside the Law
The colonization of the in-between
Kenomatic fetish
The heritage of colonial infrahumanity
Necropolitics and national narcissism

24
24
34
38
49

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

57
57
61
73
77
85

3 Be/held: Ban and Iteration
Be/held
Bogus women
Re/producing ‘home’
Continua

92
92
95

106
114

v

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Contents
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

124
124
130
135
140
147

5 Terms of Hospitality
The receding refugee
Asylos/Asylao
The transgressive step
The necessary other

153
153
156
166
174

6 The Politics of Proximity
Response-ability
Metaxis
The journey is the film is the journey
The limits of dignity

181
181
187
193
201

Afterword209
Bibliography212
Index
228

vi

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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 Migrations; 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, �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

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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

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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

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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.
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.
Figure 3 Still from Pip Starr’s documentary of the Woomera protests,
Through the Wire (2004). Available at through_the_wire>.
Figure 4 Melanie Friend, ‘The Visits Hall, Lindholme Immigration Removal
Centre (IRC) (near Doncaster), April 2006’, from Border Country.
© Melanie Friend 2007.
Figure 5 Still from Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000).
Figure 6 John Perivolaris’s photograph from Walking with Thaer (2008).
Â�Available at refugees/image_makers.html>. © John Perivolaris 2008.
Figure 7 Heidrun Lohr’s photograph of Shahin Shafaei’s performance in
Ros Horin’s Through the Wire (2005).

xii

xii

59

69
83

120
192

xi

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[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.

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

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.

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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
3Rushdie, Step Across This Line, p. 413.
4 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998),
p. 69.

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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:
5Rushdie, Step Across This Line, pp. 408 and 410.
6Suvendrini Perera, ‘What is a Camp?’, Borderlands, 1/1 (2002), 63 paras. Available at
<www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html>. Accessed 12 �January 2009.
7 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture [1994] (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.
56.

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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-athome. 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’
8Bhabha, 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
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 73.
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.

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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 refugeereceiving 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.

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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 firstand 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

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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 �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 ¸Sandru 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.
23Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 63.

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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 �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.
25Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 62.
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.

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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, �hybridizing
discourse characteristic of postcolonial diaspoetics than to the �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
29Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 2; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy,
trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1999), p. 21.
30Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. xvii; Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’,
South Atlantic Quarterly, 103/2–3 (2004), p. 304.
31Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. xxv.
32Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 313.

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(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.
34Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 8–9.
35Malkki, 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.

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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.
43Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 88.

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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.
46Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, pp. 7–8.
47Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, p. 10.
48Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, p. 24.
49 De Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality”’, p. 431.

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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.
51Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 28. Emphasis in the original.
52Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 281–285.

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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

�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
53Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 286.
54Agamben, 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.

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