Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law(9 Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines)

Postcolonial 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.

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

About the Author :
David Farrier is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Unsettled Narratives: the Pacific writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London. Routledge, 2007. 'Terms of hospitality: Adbulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea', Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.3 (2008) '"The other is the neighbour": the limits of dignity in Caryl Philips's A Distant Shore', Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.4 (2008) '"The journey is the film is the journey": Michael Winterbottom's In This World', Research in Drama Education 13.2 (2008) 'Unwritable dwellings/unsettled texts: Robert Louis Stevenson's In the South Seas and the Vailima House', International Journal of Scottish Literature 1 (2006) 'Gesturing towards the local: intimate histories in Anil's Ghost', Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 41.1 (2005) 'Charting the "Amnesiac Atlantic": chiastic cartography and Caribbean epic in Derek Walcott's Omeros', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38 (2003)

Review :
A 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. As the first scholarly monograph to examine asylum in relation to postcolonial studies, David Farrier's Postcolonial Asylum makes a theoretically rich contribution to the field. The book is part of a series called 'Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines' and Farrier's study is impressively multi-disciplinary. It combines literary analysis with theoretical discussions drawn from ethics, philosophy, critical legal studies and political theory to mount a persuasive yet constructive challenge to postcolonial theory by leading thinkers such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Achille Mbembe. In a sub-section of the Introduction called 'A Scandal for Postcolonial Studies', Farrier makes his own contribution to wider critiques of postcolonial theory's tendency to present migration as a condition of empowerment. His focus on the specificities of the asylum seeker's condition poses a serious challenge to what he calls 'the dominant postcolonial emphasis on migrancy's creative potential to unsettle fixed notions of boundaries and belonging'. Noting that postcolonial studies has tended to privilege textuality over the material experiences of those who seek asylum, Farrier urges postcolonial theory to 'engage with the world' by focusing on the hierarchized nature of mobility. By adopting this approach, he is able to test how far postcolonial conceptions of migrancy are able to accommodate the figure of the asylum seeker. Ultimately, Farrier frames the encounter between postcolonial studies and the issue of asylum in terms of 'inclusive-exclusive' relationships whereby 'certain lives are constituted as more or less grievable'. In an endlessly constructive vein, however, the figure of the asylum seeker is presented by Farrier as a potential means of reconfiguring theory by gesturing to new yet disturbingly circumscribed states of political belonging. Throughout the study, Farrier argues for close attention to be paid to the distinguishing characteristics of asylum. To seek asylum, he suggests, is to be inducted into 'a condition of waiting, uncertainty and dependency that frustrates any chance for self-creation'. In the ensuing chapters, he seeks a new ethics of reading and responding to the asylum seeker's predicament. Chapter One begins with the contention that postcolonial theory has fetishized metaphors of in-betweenness. Farrier turns to J.M. Coetzee's novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), as a means of attending to the global hierarchies of mobility and of examining the asylum seeker as 'a trope of the infrahuman'. Chapter Two offers innovative readings of Melanie Friend's photographs of UK Immigration Removal Centres as politicized spaces of interruption and protest, while Chapter Three considers the significance of the ban, a term that originates in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy whereby 'the subject of the ban is held within the purview of law's censure but excluded from its protection'. The ban is central to Farrier's understanding of the asylum seeker's place before the law. Through close reference to Kate Adshead's play The Bogus Woman (2009), Stephen Frears' film Dirty PrettyThings (2002), and Leila Aboulela's novel Minaret (2005) and the walking practices of Misha Meyers' 'Way from Home', Farrier examines the extent to which the asylum seeker is able to resist the ban 'by forms of iterative self-staging'. Chapter Four further examines the potential of asylum seekers' narratives to disrupt 'the presuppositional basis of the law' entailed by the ban. And the final chapter presents a challenge to the 'totalizing' ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas by exploring the productions of Australian 'verbatim theatre', which mixes asylum testimonies with performance. Farrier's examination of the theoretical challenges posed by asylum is innovative, imaginative, and compelling. As the summary above indicates, a highlight of the monograph is the scope and range of its textual and visual sources: Farrier draws upon photography, performance art, and film alongside the novel to examine the ethical and theoretical implications of contemporary 'asylum destitution'. By means of lateral yet productive contrapuntal readings, his complex and erudite study deals substantially, sometimes provocatively, with an impressive array of legal and ethical issues. A striking example of this approach is his elaborate reading in Chapter Four of Herman Melville's short story, 'Bartleby, the Scriviner (1853), which is considered alongside recent narratives by asylum seekers. As Farrier points out, 'Bartleby' is 'neither a postcolonial text nor a narrative of asylum', yet Melville's story of a clerk's resistance has attracted the attention of scholars from Hardt and Negri to Gilles Deleuze and Hillis Miller. His imaginative and highly theorized readings of these diverse sources enable the fullest possible consideration of the ethical questions raised by Melville's short story in relation to the asylum seeker's predicament. Among its other achievements, the Chapter paves the way for the study's exploration of reading practices that promote an 'ethical experience of responsibility'. Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester (Con)figuring Sport - Moving worlds 12.1 As the first scholarly monograph to examine asylum in relation to postcolonial studies, David Farrier's Postcolonial Asylum makes a theoretically rich contribution to the field. David Farrier's Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law draws on asylum legislation, ethics and political theory, to highlight the tension between postcolonial studies' emblematic interest in migrancy and the politics and poetics of deterritorialisation ('diaspoetics'), its reconfiguration of the marginal and the peripheral as spaces of embedded agency, and the problematic figure of the asylum seeker. The asylum seeker, Farrier opines, is an unsettling figure for postcolonial studies, one that occludes traditional distinctions between categories of inclusion and exclusion. The book opens with an image documenting a protest staged in February 2002 by Mahzer Ali and other asylum seekers detained at the Woomera Immigration Removal and Processing Centre, Australia. Ali, protesting against the detention of children in the centre, scaled the perimeter fence * he is pictured seminaked and prone, caught unmoving in the razor wire circling the boundary of the centre as his fellow detainees raise a banner bearing the words 'Freedom or Death'. For Farrier, Ali's body, trapped in the razor wire fence of the boundary, caught 'between the spaces of the citizen and non-citizen' (2), best articulates 'the scandal of the refugee' * he 'incarnates the political and ethical absence to which each asylum seeker is relegated' (7). It is precisely this absence that Postcolonial Asylum seeks to interrogate. The introductory chapter makes productive use of Giorgio Agamben's theory of the sovereign ban - as outlined in Homo Sacer (1998) - to demonstrate the legal paradox faced by asylum seekers. The sovereign ban describes 'a condition where the subject of the ban is held within the purview of law's censure but excluded from its protection' (12), such as is the case for the asylum seeker whose asylum claim has been refused. In such circumstances, left only with the (non)choice between deportation or withdrawal of state support and the threat of destitution, the asylum seeker is literally abandoned by the law, but the law remains far from indifferent to them; they are in fact held by the law's vested interest in their exclusion. Unable to stay or return, they incarnate the very worst of border-living. (12) With a focus on UK and Australian asylum regimes, the framing of asylum seekers as contemporary figures of the infrahuman, their departure from within and indeterminate position 'before the law' is developed and expanded in subsequent chapters. Chapter One for instance, examines the use of extraterritorial processing and border 'flexibilization' by both Britain and Australia, in concerted efforts to consolidate sovereign control of the border. Importantly, Farrier supplements Agamben's work with the crucial interventions made by Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe, to suggest that the legal machinations of present day asylum regimes connect to a longer heritage of colonial infrahumanity. Coetzee's Waiting For the Barbarians (1980) is read as 'a parable of the infrahuman within coloniality' (44), and the cases of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solen Young, Australian citizens wrongfully detained under immigration legislation as 'unlawful noncitizen[s]' , demonstrate the convergence of asylum and postcolonial concerns 'in Australia's insistence on the infrahumanity of its indigenous and asylum-seeking populations' (49). Farrier covers a lot of ground; at every stage counterpointing his theoretical discussion with narratives of contemporary asylum legislation and examples of its enforcement, as well as an impressive range of cultural representations of asylum/refugee experience. He grants space in his analysis to, amongst others, Melanie Friend's photography, Tina Gharavi's digital installation work, Pip Starr's documentary Through the Wire (2004), Stephen Frear's film Dirty Pretty Things (2002), and literary novels by Leila Aboulela, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Caryl Phillips. Given the sheer breadth of reference, some readers may be less than satisfied with the occasionally synoptic readings offered. Farrier frequently retreats to the theoretical underpinnings of his argument, but is at his most interesting when he reads - as he often does - representative asylum narratives as works that intervene in prevailing asylum/refugee discourse, and at the same time test the limits of some of the more established theoretical positions within postcolonial studies. Postcolonial Asylum provides a lucid, cogently argued examination of a subject situated at a complex admixture of academic fields. Given the continuously shifting legal and political terrain surrounding the issue of asylum, as Farrier duly acknowledges, it resists easy or comprehensive analysis. In developing a concept of postcolonial asylum, Farrier's approach is explicitly contrapuntal, and he posits a wide range of critical positions, not all of them complementary, but always carefully qualified in his argument. Giorgio Agamben's diagnoses of contemporary biopolitical conditions of existence feature prominently in Farrier's discussion, and readers would be well served with some grounding in Agamben's political theory before approaching this highly theoretical text; however, this does not detract from what remains a challenging and engaging work that certainly charts new ground. Postcolonial Asylum provides a lucid, cogently argued examination of a subject situated at a complex admixture of academic fields.