Immigrants that moved to Britain as children were deported to Jamaica as “foreign criminals.”
“Citizenship is the global system for the management of colonially partitioned populations.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Luke de Noronha. Luke is an academic and writer working at the University of Manchester. His book is Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of deportation to Jamaica.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Luke de Noronha: Deporting Black Britons is an intimate study of deportation from the UK to Jamaica. It focuses on the life stories of deported people who now live in exile in Jamaica. All moved to the UK as children, and all were defined as ‘foreign criminals’ to justify their banishment. The narrative moves between the UK and Jamaica, the past and the present.
One of the main things this book tries to do is ask questions about the relationship between racism and immigration control. Sometimes these things are thought about in isolation, which I think reflects the difficulty in theorising the relationship between racism and nationalism. There is a tendency to think about the problem of racism within the confines of the nation – our own kind of methodological nationalism – and thus to reify the nation, the border, and citizenship within our anti-racist organising and thinking (even as we see through ideologies of equal, liberal citizenship).
With all the points I am making here, I should emphasise that I am writing about the British context (note my spelling ). I sense that some of these problems afflict organizations and thinkers in the US, but they work differently. Indeed, the book examines racism and immigration control in Britain, and offers an account of postimperial Britain from the perspective of deported people now living in Jamaica.
In later chapters, I think from and about Jamaica and the Caribbean, raising questions about citizenship, frustrated mobilities, and the afterlives of slavery and empire. Here, I found it useful to think about the relationship between the government of mobility and processes of racialisation, which I think is a useful way of thinking about how ‘race’ gets made and remade, and how in a country like Jamaica slavery ‘eats into the present’.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
One of my main frustrations before writing this book concerned those arguments for migrant rights that pivot around individual deservingness, contribution and good citizenship. In the UK, liberal migrant rights advocates tend to invest in narratives on genuine and suffering refugees (admittedly, in response to attacks on ‘bogus asylum seekers’), and to emphasise the talents and contributions of specific migrants. This does nothing to challenge the exclusionary logic of immigration control, with its assertion that states have the right to decide who can stay and on what terms, and who counts as a proper worker, spouse, student or victim of persecution. For radical anti-racists, putting more people into these state categories – making the boxes bigger – is no solution. Instead, we need to explode the categories altogether.
This explains my rationale for focusing on “foreign criminals,” those archetypal “bad migrants.” Arguments on deservingness, contribution, and abject victimhood won’t work for the criminalized, so what arguments do we need? This is where we can learn so much from the politics of prison abolition, with its rejection of punishment and innocence. Once we start unsettling dominant ideas about “crime” and “criminals,” we can then subject the criminal justice system itself to forceful critique, connecting its deadly operation to the similarly racist and violent force of immigration control.
“We can learn so much from the politics of prison abolition.”
Unsurprisingly, in the UK, working class black boys and men are overpoliced and discriminated against at every stage in the justice system – more likely to be stopped, arrested, charged, and convicted to longer custodial terms. And, because young people are increasingly multi-status – excluded from the full rights of citizenship, defined as “migrants” despite personal ties and connections (remember the UK does not have birthright citizenship) – racism in the criminal justice system propels certain people towards deportation. This is the story of the men featured in the book.
The point for organising is that we need to connect our work against punitive criminal justice systems to radical migrant rights politics. Some activists are doing this, making connections and working them through in various actions and campaigns. And so, asking how the book is relevant to organisers might be the wrong way around. My arguments are shaped by these nascent political formations connecting struggles against walls and cages, borders and prisons. And if my book offers anything back, hopefully it’s just some stories, context, and theoretical framing to guide and reaffirm these groups, actions and campaigns.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Ultimately, the book is an indictment of the UK’s violent border regime, and the untold damage it inflicts on individuals, families and communities. However, it is very unlikely that anyone who thinks the immigration system is working will read the book (or, if they do, be swayed by it).
Closer to home though, there are several ideologies and ways of thinking about racism and immigration control that I am trying to challenge. Which arguments stick, provoke and challenge people really depends on the reader.
As noted, I want to encourage people to unlearn arguments about deservingness, innocence and contribution. I also hope the book makes clear the limitations of accounts of racism which focus solely on prejudice, discrimination and bias, as well as those liberal strains of anti-racism that seek inclusion, representation and a seat at the table. There will be no decolonizing of the Home Office or the Foreign Office, for example, and no amount of implicit bias training will substantively change the lives of the people in this book. That much should be self-evident, but it is still worth underlining.
This might also be obvious to your readers, but the book also challenges the colonial amnesia and presentism of so much political discourse and academic work on migration, where nation-states are taken for granted and citizenship goes unquestioned. I argue that citizenship is the global system for the management of colonially partitioned populations.
Citizenship does similar kinds of work to that performed by ‘race’ under empire, legitimating differential incorporation into markets (exploitation, dispossession, extraction) and the immobilisation of the global poor in places of scarcity. It formalises disparities formed by colonialism, while disavowing ‘race’ altogether. Immigration controls therefore reproduce racialized colonial inequalities and hierarchies, but my point is also that not everything remains as it was. If racial distinctions and hierarchies must always be remade, then borders are absolutely central to the reconfiguration of the racist world order.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I came up in my undergraduate study reading Stuart Hall and his many disciples in the British academy. He remains a source of great insight for me, and it was great to read his memoir published during my research, which talks substantively about his early years in Jamaica. I have been very influenced by Paul Gilroy’s restless critique of ethnic absolutisms and the allure of racial thought.
Unsurprisingly, the giants of black radical thought continue to offer great inspiration – CLR James, WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney – and like many others I am nourished by their planetary anti-colonial analysis.
As noted, the literature on prison abolition offers so many tools and tips (Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, etc), but this will all be familiar to your readers. Closer to home, my friend, comrade and ‘auntie’ Gargi Bhattacharyya has been one of my key inspirations – as a thinker, anti-racist and friend – and her work on racial capitalism is so rich and generous. My PhD supervisor, Bridget Anderson, has also been a key source of insight and light, teaching me that No Borders arguments are always the most compelling.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
In some ways this is a pretty bleak book. Given that it attempts to “bear witness” to the damage wrought by deportation, then perhaps unavoidably so. But if it points to new worlds, then it is in the narratives and reflections of the deported people I came to know. They imparted everyday wisdom to me, which I hope I managed to share. As I write in the conclusion:
“What the deported people in this book ultimately remind us is that state definitions of belonging are always transgressed by people who are much more interesting than the racial and national categories which violently delimit them. In multi- status Britain, despite the intensification of everywhere, everyday bordering, people who grow up in the same neighbourhoods, or go to the same schools, or are incarcerated in the same prisons, develop friendships that demonstrate a banal disregard for the logic of the border. This might not be revolutionary, or even political, but it is hopeful.”
New worlds are being prized open by the disenfranchised all the time, however temporary or provisional. If there wasn’t hope in the love, connections, and friendships nourished by innumerable oppressed people, then there would not be much point getting up each day. It is for that reason that we keep going, struggling, and trying, and the people in this book certainly gave me more rather than less reasons to keep going.
Roberto Sirvent is a teacher living in Fullerton, CA.
COMMENTS?
Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport
Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]