Making Dead to Let Live

• In Event: Ethnography Caucus: Ethnography in the Age of Trump II

Abstract

As part of a larger project on brown death and the new reach of borders, this paper critically explores methodological and theoretical questions concerning the ethics and efficacy of doing expert testimony as an anthropologist, as a scholars of Latinx Studies, an anthropologist, and ethnographer in support of people facing deportation or removal proceedings during the rise of Trump. Would-be asylum seekers must be made dead to let live.
To be made dead to let live involves tapping into what Achille Mbembe termed "imperial racisms" and their cultivation in liberal sites extraordinaire, such as the courtroom. In these cases, it involves mobilizing already longstanding circulating discourses about certain terrain and people, as corrupt, violent, and hopeless, rife as in examples with "bad hombres" and "rapists." To be a successful, ethnographer as expert involves knowingly drawing on such offensive knowledges. It involves searching for those fields of discourse that taps into dominant white sensibilities about the Third World as zones of abandonment, and that mobilize macabre, racially offensive, representations, as a way to disrupt the deportation regime and its increasingly routinized detention practices, while perhaps have the perverse effect of shoring up white supremacist calls for banning immigrants or walling off the United States.
I will situate the dynamics of these legal proceedings as reflective of certain structures of feelings of the rise imminent in Trumpism and their deep continuities with the Obama and related prototypes of liberalism. The spectacular yet routine police killings of black people, their ongoing experience of mass incarceration; the often erased sovereignty-affirming capacity of settler violence exercised against native peoples as in DAPL, the BAN on Muslims; and related draconian phenomena legal contemplations over the life of noncitizens and their banishment, this demands a critical return to the debates on the crisis of representation that rocked anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s. This moment perhaps marks the apex of Latinx anthropology and also marks the solidifying of a neo-Boasian consensus of race as a social construct in anthropology and allied fields that feeds contemporary ethnographic sensibilities and reverberates through and through liberal governmentalities home and abroad.

Author

• Gilberto Rosas, University of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign