Joseph Pugliese

Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race

In this essay, I examine whiteness along two different axes. First, I discuss, in the context of Richard Dyers White , the manner in which discussions of whiteness tend to be decontextualised and dehistoricised. Fundamentally, in White , whiteness is represented in terms of a homogeneous and self-identical category. In the second part of my essay, I focus on how racialised bodies, once they are situated within a specific historico-cultural context, complicate and problematise unitary and homogenised concepts of whiteness. I argue that the power and endurace of whiteness emerges out of its historical dispersions and geo-political mobility.

Crisis heterotopias and border zones of the dead

In this essay, I examine transnational relations of biopower and colonialism in the context of two islands, Lampedusa and Christmas Island. By examining the manner in which both islands have been mobilized by Fortress Europe and Fortress Australia as frontline spaces that must thwart, through imprisonment and deportation, the landfall of asylum seekers and refugees on their shores, I mark their faultline status in the geopolitics of North/South relations. Even as both islands are sites marked by the harrowing presence of immigration prisons, they are also places that are destinations for luxury holidays. Drawing on Michel Foucaults concept of crisis heterotopias, as spaces that can simultaneously accommodate often violently contradictory differences, I attempt to theorize the biopolitical relations that inscribe and organize such sites. Situating them along the faultline of the border, I conclude by bringing into focus the border zones of the refugee dead that inscribe both islands.

The somatechnics of race and whiteness

In this special issue of Social Semiotics, we seek to strengthen the links between critical theories of race and whiteness, and the concept of somatechnics – a neologism intended to suggest, by sup...

In Silico Race and the Heteronomy of Biometric Proxies: Biometrics in the Context of Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism Laws

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government and other governments and organizations throughout the world became greatly interested in this emerging [biometric] human recognition system.... Biometrics are an integral and distinctive part of human beings. As such, they offer a natural convenience and technical efficiency that other authentication mechanisms, which must be mentally remembered or physically produced, do not. For this reason, biometrics can provide identity assurance for countless everyday activities currently protected by traditional means of access control — cards, personal identification numbers (PINs), and passwords.2

The Incommensurability of law to justice : refugees and Australia's Temporary Protection Visa

Abstract In this article, the author examines the effects of Australia’s Temporary Protection Visa regime on the lives of refugees and asylum seekers. In the process, he stages a Levinasian reading on the ethical question of justice in the context of law and politics. This question of justice, he argues, is predicated on the relation with the Other and what Levinas terms a “non-transferable responsibility” to address the call of the Other in their moment of need.

Subcutaneous Law: Embodying the Migration Amendment Act 1992

In the closing scenes of the Four Corners report on Woomera Refugee Detention Centre, ... About Woomera, the reporter, Debbie Whitmont, includes film shot by Australian Correctional Management [ACM] during one of the hunger strikes held by the refugees within the prison.2 Ostensibly, in the face of an unfolding crisis, ACM is filming the hunger strike in order to document the fact that they are trying to assist the refugees on hunger strike. Unexpectedly, however, one of the refugees seizes the moment to speak to the camera in order to articulate a plea to those viewers beyond the confines of the refugee prison. Shaking with emotion, he says: ‘We don’t want to damage to anything to the DIMA [Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs], or we don’t to burn anything. This is a promise. Only we want to harm ourselves.’ Whitmont glosses this detainee’s plea: ‘He tries to explain that detainees have nothing left to use but their bodies to plead their desperation.’ Facing the camera, the refugee continues: ‘We are crying, we are screaming, and we all what, what to do? We have nothing. This is what you want? This is Australians say to us? Please help us, and listen as we are suffering inside.’3

The Event-trauma of the Carceral Post-human

The category of the post-human is, in much contemporary cultural theory, celebrated for marking a liberatory break from the limits of the human body. The post-human is seen, through the grafting of new bio-technologies, as enunciating a range of enhanced corporeal experiences and emancipatory possibilities. In this essay, I complicate the category of the post-human by locating it in the context of Australias Refugee Detention Centres. In this context, in which refugees and asylum seekers are unjustly imprisoned and disenfranchised of fundamental human rights, the underside of Eurocentric conceptualisations of the post-human emerges. I proceed to identify and name the violent production of this subaltern subject as the event-trauma of the carceral post-human.

Necrological Whiteness: the Racial Prosthetics of Template Bodies

One of the key concerns of the interdiscipline of Whiteness Studies is to map the manifold ways in which white supremacy continues to shape epistemologies, cultures and bodies in the context of institutions and their discursive practices. I situate this essay within the contours of this project. My focus will be on the power of whiteness over dead bodies within the discipline of forensic pathology. In deploying the term necrological whiteness I want to examine the manner in which whiteness exercises its signifying grip beyond the biological life of the subject. One would assume that the biological death of the subject would mark a type of absolute terminus that, effectively, would instantiate the final loosening of that racializing power that shapes and inflects the everyday life of the subject. If, however, the life of the subject is shaped by race from the moment of inception through a series of mediating technologies, then the death of the subject by no means signals that the subject is somehow magically transposed to a place beyond race. On the contrary, as I hope to show in this essay, the phase of biological death must be seen as firmly situated within the racializing continuum maintained and reproduced by a cluster of different institutions, authorities and regulative regimes. Even as the body of the corpse begins the irreversible process of molecular dissolution, the imperative to race the subject extends its necrological reach into what can only be termed the institutional (medico-legal) afterlife of the subject. Underpinning this imperative to race the subject are fundamental relations of

Technologies of extraterritorialisation, statist visuality and irregular migrants and refugees

This article examines the increasing use of technologies of surveillance and identification by both the European Union and Australia in order to biopolitically preclude and control the entry of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from the global South. The central concern of the article is how these technologies of extraterritorialisation, as deployed by the state, function to constitute regimes of statist visuality that produce both symbolic and physical forms of violence for their target subjects. In the course of the article, I critically examine the European Unions EUROSUR project, Frontex and its Eurodac system and Australias Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act 2004 in order to stage a comparison of the various modalities of statist visuality deployed by states in their biopolitical governance of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and to bring into critical focus the often lethal effects of these regimes of statist visuality. I conclude by presenting a form of counter-visuality to the states way of seeing by discussing the work of the contemporary Moroccan-French visual artist Bouchra Khalili, whose Mapping Journey Project stands as an agentic resignification and reclamation of the fraught journeys of irregular migrants through the surveilled lands of the global North.

Prosthetics of law and the anomic violence of drones

This article examines the relationship between law and technology in the context of the use of drones by the United States in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Specifically, I examine the relation of law to lethal unmanned aerial combat technologies (drones), which conduct war and killing at a distance, in the context of two seemingly opposed figures: the parenthetical and the prosthetic. The parenthetical relation of law to technology operates to suspend the relation between the executioner who manipulates the killing technology of the drone from the fact of the resultant execution. In this scenario, law is conceived of in the most radically instrumental of understandings: it enables and legitimates the execution while simultaneously suspending the connection between the doer and the deed. The prosthetic relation of law to technology is, conversely, premised on the indissociable articulation between technology and its seeming opposite: the biological human subject. Through a series of instrumental mediations, the biological human actor becomes coextensive with the drone that she or he pilots from the remote ground control station. I examine the use of drones by the United States in the context of the war on terror in order to bring into focus the mutation of robotic war into a type of normalised civic practice. I close the article by refocusing on the relation between law and technology, and in the process I attempt to extrapolate a general theory of law as prosthetic.