Prem Kumar Rajaram

Disruptive writing and a critique of territoriality

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote of the territorialising of the world, describing the commodification of space; its parcelling out and regimentation ensuring stable, unvarying coherence. Territorialised space, when well regulated, becomes a settled base for the political and for notions of political identity, heritage and kinship. Kenan Ferguson describes this as ‘the location and creation of civilization in a specific consumption of the land, as well as the subsequent delegitimation of those with different conceptions of it.’ The contemporary state is the receptacle of human ambition and desires, with history, allegiance and kinship understood in terms of its borders; there is a retrospective history premised on strategic forgetting and the cultivation of a collective memory coherent before the contemporary state.

Dystopic Geographies of Empire

Through an economy of contemporary colonial power, this article examines the twin tropes of discipline and aesthetic representation in order to trace the intimate effects of contemporary colonial power on bodies placed in spaces of exception.

Introduction: Geography and the Reconceptualization of Politics

An introduction to a special issue, this article explores the form of the political founded upon spatial transformation: an enabling framework of recognition setting parameters for the sayable and unsayable. It points especially to techniques of discipline, repression, and exhibition through which control over space is maintained and to the ambivalence, contradiction, and paradox inherent in place.

Refugees: Geographical Aspects

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by J. Bascom, volume 19, pp. 12895–12901,

Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes

ABSTRACT Refugees and migrants are often studied as though they have no relation to the racial and class structures of the societies in which they reside. They are strangers to be governed by ‘integration’ policy and border management. Refugees and migrants are, however, subjects of contemporary capitalism struggling to render themselves valuable capitalist modes of production. I study the government of refugees and migrants in order to examine capitalist value regimes. Societal values and hierarchies reflected in capitalist modes of production impact on struggles of racialised subaltern groups to translate body power into valued labour. Marx’s account of surplus populations points to the common marginalisations of people called ‘refugees’ and other subaltern groups struggling to translate their body power into valorised labour. The essay includes a study of the gentrification of a district in Budapest, and its transformation into a means for the reproduction of capital, leading to the marginalisation of groups who no longer fit the new value regimes. Studying refugees as surplus populations allows for a sense of the common marginalisations of subaltern and racialised groups before capitalism, and questions the treatment of refugees and migrants as ‘strangers’.

Historicising ‘asylum’ and responsibility

Territorial rule ‘begins’ with an assertion of who deserves protection and who does not. The question of responsibility and its limits is integral to the making and maintenance of a nation state. But a modern refugee rights regime externalises the question of asylum. Asylum claims are made by strangers dealt with by bureaucracies. How has this come to pass? How has responsibility become thought in terms of the territorial state and the society and order it begets? In this article, I try to make the case through a historical example that asylum is not external to the constitution of the nation state, rather territorial rule begins by figuring out who to protect and who not to. At the core of these ideas about protection and responsibility is a notion of political subjectivity, which is graduated, hierarchical and centred on the state. The privileging of an ahistorical idea of how political subjectivity has been so limited has contributed to the externalisation of asylum, where the troubling questions of to whom we are responsible and whom not barely figure because asylum claims become the subject of a technicalised procedure. In this article, I focus on the British colonial authoritys encounter with native slaves seeking asylum in Perak.