Conflicts of Mobility and the Mobility of Conflict: Rightlessness, Presence, Subjectivity, Freedom

TY - JOUR

T1 - Conflicts of Mobility and the Mobility of Conflict

T2 - Rightlessness, Presence, Subjectivity, Freedom

AU - De Genova, Nicholas

PY - 2009/12

Y1 - 2009/12

N2 - With the ascendancy in the United States of the Homeland Security State, a peculiar ‘war against terrorism’ has been persistently waged against migrant non-citizens as its special targets. With utter rightlessness increasingly enforced as a defining horizon for migrants, the unprecedented upsurge of protest that took the country by storm in 2006, nonetheless, refigured the agonistic notion of ‘immigrants’ rights' as a prominent feature of political debate. If the state and capital work assiduously to render migrant labour a tractable object, therefore, the robust defiance of migrant workers (both the undocumented and guestworkers) audaciously reaffirms the primacy of labour as subject. Indeed, migrant workers have asserted their autonomy and prerogative through insubordinate acts calling attention to the mere corporeal fact of their deportable presence. Thus, the insurgent presence of migrant bodies emerges as a palpably corporeal and spatial form of subjectivity, and all the substantive social relationality that it manifests.

AB - With the ascendancy in the United States of the Homeland Security State, a peculiar ‘war against terrorism’ has been persistently waged against migrant non-citizens as its special targets. With utter rightlessness increasingly enforced as a defining horizon for migrants, the unprecedented upsurge of protest that took the country by storm in 2006, nonetheless, refigured the agonistic notion of ‘immigrants’ rights' as a prominent feature of political debate. If the state and capital work assiduously to render migrant labour a tractable object, therefore, the robust defiance of migrant workers (both the undocumented and guestworkers) audaciously reaffirms the primacy of labour as subject. Indeed, migrant workers have asserted their autonomy and prerogative through insubordinate acts calling attention to the mere corporeal fact of their deportable presence. Thus, the insurgent presence of migrant bodies emerges as a palpably corporeal and spatial form of subjectivity, and all the substantive social relationality that it manifests.

U2 - 10.1057/sub.2009.22

DO - 10.1057/sub.2009.22

M3 - Article

SN - 1755-6341

VL - 29

SP - 445

EP - 466

JO - Subjectivity

JF - Subjectivity

IS - 1

ER -