Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:57:53.700Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2020

Nathan K. Hensley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“We saw no issues,” reports the Department of Homeland Security in a self-study of its practices for detaining children at the US–Mexico border, “except one unsanitary bathroom.” The system is working as it should; all is well. “CBP [Customs and Border Protection] facilities we visited,” the report summarizes, “appeared to be operating in compliance with the 2015 National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention, and Search.” A footnote on page 2 of the September 2018 document defines the prisoners at these facilities, the “unaccompanied alien children,” as “aliens under the age of eighteen with no lawful immigration status in the United States and without a parent or legal guardian in the United States ‘available’ to care and [provide] physical custody for them.” Available is in scare quotes. This tic of punctuation discloses to us that the parents of these children have been arrested and removed. They are not available, and cannot take physical custody of their children, because they themselves are in physical custody. In a further typographical error, the word “provide” has been omitted: the children are without a parent or legal guardian in the United States “available” to care and physical custody for them. The dropped word turns “physical custody” into a verb and sets this new action, to physical custody, in tense relation to “care.”

Type
Special Cluster: Commitment
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 391 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “Commitment.” In Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Taylor, Ronald, 177–95. London: Verso, 1977.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A.. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren Gail. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bersani, Leo. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Bush, Laura. “Separating Children from Their Parents at the Border ‘Breaks My Heart.’” Washington Post, 17 June 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/laura-bush-separating-children-from-their-parents-at-the-border-breaks-my-heart/2018/06/17/f2df517a-7287-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html.Google Scholar
Clune, Michael W. “Judgment and Equality.” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 4 (2019): 911–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleman, Calle. “‘The Cry of the Children’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's World and Our Own,” https://editions.covecollective.org/content/cry-children-elizabeth-barrett-brownings-world-and-our-own.Google Scholar
Davis, Thomas S. “Pipelines, Water, and Attachments on an Altered Planet.” Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present conference, New Orleans, October 2018.Google Scholar
DeGooyer, Stephanie. “The Right . . .” In The Right to Have Rights, edited by DeGooyer, Stephanie et al. , 21–44. London: Verso, 2018.Google Scholar
Department of Homeland Security. “Results of Unannounced Inspections of Conditions for Unaccompanied Alien Children in CBP Custody,” 28 September 2018, www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2018-10/OIG-18-87-Sep18.pdf.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. 1854. New York: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Dickerson, Caitlin. “Migrant Children Moved under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City.” New York Times, 30 September 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html.Google Scholar
Driver, Alice. “13,000 Immigrant Children in Federal Detention.” CNN, 1 October 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/opinions/13000-migrant-children-horrifying-reality-driver/index.html.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. 1848. New York: Penguin, 1996.Google Scholar
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855. New York: Penguin, 1996.Google Scholar
Guha, Sumit. “Did the British Empire Depend on Separating Parents and Children?” Imperial and Global Forum, 1 October 2018, https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2018/10/01/did-the-british-empire-depend-on-separating-parents-and-children.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1891. New York: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: Norton, 2019.Google Scholar
Hensley, Nathan K. Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGowan, John. “Response to Michael Clune's ‘Judgment and Equality.’” Unpublished seminar paper. Shared via email, 16 January 2020.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism. Edited by Stefan Collini. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Miroff, Nick, Sacchetti, Maria, and Kim, Seung Min. “Trump's Family Separation Was Flawed from the Start.” Washington Post, 1 October 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trumps-family-separation-policy-was-flawed-from-the-start-watchdog-review-says/2018/10/01/c7134d86-c5ba-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html.Google Scholar
Mufti, Nasser. Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Mullen, Mary. Novel Institutions: Realism, Anachronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Unpublished book manuscript.Google Scholar
Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? Translated by Frechtman, Bernard. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Frank, Adam. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.” In Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Sedgwick, and Frank, , 1–29. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Steinlight, Emily. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Ginger. “Listen to Children Who've Just Been Separated from Their Parents at the Border.” ProPublica, 30 June 2018, www.propublica.org/article/children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy.Google Scholar
Tomkins, Silvan. “What Are Affects?” In Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and Frank, Adam, 33–74. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
“Victorian Teaching Now: Teaching under Trump.” Victorian Studies for the 21st Century. http://v21collective.org/category/pedagogy.Google Scholar