This essay investigates the category of the refugee as an instantiation of racial capitalism. To illustrate this conjunction, it first examines international law that defines refugees and, then, looks to specific national jurisprudence that accords different recognition to them. The national contexts discussed are the United States, given that the racial discourse there serves as a ground for the most widely known theorization of racial capitalism via Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, and South Africa, where racial capitalism was first coined. Robinson’s work is briefly elaborated in relation to subsequent scholarship that has engaged and extended the concept of racial capitalism, in relation to the particularities of South Africa racialization, and in relation to zama zamas (unregulated miners, often perceived as foreigners who threaten the Rainbow Nation’s stability in various ways). Given limitations of space, the essay uses the overview of juridical regimes and the excursus on Robinson to rethink the category of refugee. Zama zamas and the history of the South African mining sector as it informs understandings of race are posited as a fruitful direction for further research because these phenomena help to extend the entwinement of race and refugee and the implications of Robinson’s text for understanding refugees anew.
Keyword: law
Concealment, Revelation, and Masquerade in Europe’s Asylum Apparatus: Intimate Life at the Border
In 2010, a landmark UK Supreme Court case was won on behalf of two gay men, from Cameroon and Iran, whose applications for asylum due to sexual identity had previously been rejected on the basis of a prevailing “reasonable tolerability” concept—that is, the view that gay applicants could conceal their homosexuality by acting discreetly upon…
Abolition: At Issue, In Any Case
Toward what does the “prison abolitionist” identity or identification strive? This thread is organized primarily around Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s essay, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” And we think there is not a better place to begin staging the relation between abolition and that to which we refer as “teaching”, with all the compromised valences such work can carry given the state of the educational system today. Indeed, as if to answer the above question about whether there is something affirmed by prison abolitionism, Moten and Harney seem to answer “yes”, there is something. In this essay, I would like to explore this “yes” as it emerges in Moten and Harney’s essay, and how it might unfold in how we imagine our engagements with law.