Flickering Presence: Theorizing Race and Racism in the Governmentality of Borders and Migration

Abstract

Analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship examining the bordering, surveillance, securitization and contestation of migratory processes. Yet the critical potential of such research is hampered by the rather limited ways it has managed to make sense of race and racism. While Foucault was insistent that governmentality should orient itself to the understanding of singularities, too often race appears, when treated at all, as a general phenomenon. This article makes two contributions aimed at addressing these shortcomings. First, we survey studies in the governmentality of migration and develop a typology of what we call framings of race – the ways that race appears, is mobilized, or haunts this scholarship. Second, we look to recent debates about race and racism in Science & Technology Studies for useful theoretical innovations that might help us study border- and race-making as mutually constitutive processes.

Doing race in Europe: contested pasts and contemporary practices

“…Significant work has been done on the re‐articulation of race as the ‘molecularization of difference’ (Abu El‐Haj ) in the new genomics (Koenig et al ; Schramm et al ; Wailoo et al ). Other works have focused on race in forensics (M’charek ), or on the distributed presence of race in biometric technologies (Kloppenburg and van der Ploeg ; Pugliese ) as well as in border management regimes (Moffette and Walters ).…”

“…in the new genomics(Koenig et al 2008; Schramm et al 2012; Wailoo et al 2012). Other works have focused on race in forensics (M'charek 2008), or on the distributed presence of race in biometric technologies(Kloppenburg and van der Ploeg 2018;Pugliese 2010) as well as in border management regimes(Moffette and Walters 2018).…”

(Im)moral Borders in Practice

“…We could also add that a more direct engagement with postcolonialism and race would be important to incorporate into this study of morals and ethics at the border in order to examine how these dimensions of international relations might impact migration and border policies. Indeed, although part of the literature takes race into account as a variable of policies (and of their implementation), race has been, as in many other works using the analytics of biopolitics and government to examine migration policies, only a "flickering presence" (Moffette and Walters 2018). Analyses of the co-construction of racial categories and migration policies and practices could shed a different light on the analysis of their moral underpinnings or justifications of border control.…”

Bordering intimacy

“…Despite claims throughout the 1990s that we were increasingly living in a 'borderless' world, late liberal capitalism has instead produced a proliferation of borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). We now have a complex understanding of how mobility is policed and governed in northern states (Walters 2006;Tazzioli 2014;Vaughan-Williams 2015;Jones 2016) but studies still struggle to draw upon postcolonial, decolonial and critical race theory to understand such trajectories (although see Bhambra 2017b;Mayblin 2017;Moffette and Walters 2018;de Noronha 2019). Despite the fact that migration patterns are almost invariably embedded within imperial histories (materialised through kinship, labour patterns, wealth inequalities and linguistic ties), it is surprising how the study of migration and the governance of mobility and borders often overlook or downplay the role of empire, either as historical or contemporary experience (although see Lake and Reynolds 2008;Saucier and Woods 2014;Walia 2014;Danewid 2017).…”