"I Would Wish Death on You..."
Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime
The political rubric and analytical category of "immigrant detention"
has become both a critically necessary and theoretically troubling
discursive terrain. On the one hand, the racist criminalization and
domestic pursuit of Black and Brown migrant—or assumptive migrant and/or
"undocumented"—bodies is a classical technology of the U.S. white
supremacist state. A situated historical examination of how this racist
statecraft articulates particularly and peculiarly to our
political moment is clearly crucial to understanding, effectively
resisting, and radically opposing/abolishing the specific edifices of
U.S. state violence in their most common institutional terms: Homeland
Security, border policing, wars on (immigrant) gangs, and "illegal
immigrant" control. On the other hand, the rubric of immigrant
detention seems to run the risk of becoming a fetishized political
category that is organically linked to the vexed rhetorics of an alleged
"post-9/11" era. This discursive structure suggests, and sometimes
explicitly asserts, the emergence of multiple "new" forms of racist
state violence in the context of a U.S. "War on Terror," and often
relies on an exceptionalist, ahistorical narration of anti-immigrant
civil and state violence in order to distinguish immigrant
criminalization/detention from other, more politically normalized forms
of institutionalized dehumanization.[1]
Here, I attempt to offer a theoretical framing of the U.S.
carceral-punitive state that departs from narrowing and particularizing
discussions of (allegedly) exceptional and "new" productions of racist
criminalization and policing, by focusing on the political and
historical animus of the U.S. prison regime. That is, I am
concerned not with an inventory of "what the racist state is doing" in
this historical moment, but rather with an analysis of how it is able
to do what it does, and thus a focal attention to the historical
conditions of possibility for the current institutional
formations of migrant criminalization and immigrant detention.
The U.S. prison is a global statecraft, an arrangement and
mobilization of violence that is, from its very inception, already
unhinged from the delimiting "domestic" (or "national") sites to which
it is presumptively tethered. This essay proceeds by examining the
political rubrics of race, gender, and immigration through the analytic
of the U.S. prison regime's globality. This meditation suggests a
genealogy and theory of the U.S. prison regime that resonates the
institutional and historical continuities between 1) the ongoing
technologies of white supremacy organic to the U.S. racial[2]/racist
state[3]; and 2) the array of global (or extra-domestic) technologies of
violence that form the conditions of possibility for social formations
and hegemonies integral to the contemporary moment of U.S. global
dominance. How, then, does "gender" work within the arrangements
of bodily subjection and subjective disarticulation institutionalized by
the prison regime? How does the prison work on "gender," as a
lived body of experience located in the space and time of imprisonment
and carceral state violence? What, in turn, is particularly new or
unique about "immigration" as an institutional extension of the U.S.
prison regime's protocols and territories? Does immigrant
criminalization and imprisonment constitute something qualitatively
different in the social logic and racial technologies of imprisonment?
The recent renaissance of critical political, scholarly, and activist
discourses confronting the unprecedented scale and growth of the U.S.
policing and criminal justice apparatuses has enabled a range of
progressive and radical praxis that demonstrates possibility for
authentic social transformation. Mitigating this vista of political
potential, however, is an insistent theoretical delimitation that
overwhelmingly frames such critical discourses as problems of the
American local, domestic, and/or national—as if the localities and
domesticities of the United States are not already and complexly
enmeshed in the societal ensembles and state produced violences of "the
global." This is to suggest, at the outset, that the arrangement of
juridically coded bodily violence that is coordinated and
institutionalized by the U.S. prison regime generates a logic of
(anti)social formation that fundamentally exceeds the national geography
within which it is nominally situated. These layered, intersectional
technologies of imprisonment (across scales of individualizing and
mass-based techniques of bodily immobilization) have thus come to form
the premises of a global formation that is fundamental to the very
intelligibility of "America"—as an ideological and cultural gravity of
identity and identification, multiply formed signifier of material and
spatial dominion/occupation, and, perhaps most importantly, as a
racially gendered mobilization of militarized policing and juridical
force.
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