Forced Removal and the Deportspora Imaginary
from Part I - Origins Revisited
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
This chapter begins with a consideration of the importance to sovereignty of the right to deport. Beyond exploring what constitutes sovereignty and how such power is preserved and held, it examines why so little attention has been paid to life after expulsion. Expulsion (real or threatened) kidnaps time, creates unlimited forms of captivity, invigorates shame, normalizes violence, and stabilizes concepts such as citizenship and belonging. Showing the long buried links between colonial and US treatment of Indigenous peoples and contemporary deportation practices, the chapter reveals how knitted into the imaginary of belonging forced removal has become. While scholars have slowly begun exploring the experience of life after forced removal, writers of fiction have taken up the question as well and have begun offering portraits of the experience of navigating detention camps and rebuilding a life that might be sustainable after the violence of expulsion. Novels by Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, Lisa Ko, Helton Habila, Mohshin Hamid, and Jenny Erpenbeck are examined in detail because of their careful attention to living a deportable and deported life.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.