Deporting the Crisis: The Racial Banishment of Formerly Incarcerated Asian Americans in the Dragnet of Empire

• In Event: 30264 - Witnessing the Violences in and of Empire

Abstract

Using xenophobic and “tough on crime” rhetoric, in its first few months, the Trump administration has promulgated a mass deportation and anti-migrant fear mongering campaign. While it has its particularities, it is important to understand this current moment as part of a long history of how the empire/state promotes carcerality as the solution to crisis. If Stuart Hall analyzed policing the “mugging crisis” in the U.K. and Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Jordan T. Camp analyzed incarcerating the crisis in California and in urban spaces of dispossession, in this current conjecture, it is imperative to understand how the state has now turned to deporting the crisis. This paper focuses on the intersection of criminalization and migration (or “crimmigration”) of Asian Americans both in the periphery of Southeast Asia and the imperial core of Southern California. Through interviews and insights from ethnographic observations, I analyze the punishment, dispossession, and resistance of formerly incarcerated and refugee Asian Americans both in Los Angeles and those deported to Cambodia to illuminate experiences and processes of what Ananya Roy calls racial banishment. Thinking through formerly incarcerated, refugee, and deportable Asian American subjectivity provides insights into the ways in which Hall argued that race is structured in domination by class and how the ever-expanding dragnet of control targets “surplus humanity” within global racial capitalism. But amidst this moment of state violence, I also discuss how anti-carceral and anti-deportation organizers establish new forms of solidarity and transcend borders and prison walls in calling for an abolitionist future beyond empire.

Author

• Michael Nishimura, University of California, Santa Barbara