Sarah Sharma

BARING LIFE AND LIFESTYLE IN THE NON-PLACE

In this paper I offer an intervention into two prevailing approaches to the non-place – those spaces of transit that include hotels, airports, theme parks, and refugee camps. The non-place is treated on the one hand as an apolitical space of hypermediated consumption and mobility while, on the other hand, it also figures as exemplary of the biopolitical regulation of life within a ‘contemporary camp’. I argue that the non-place must be read, not as spectacle or camp, but as housing a very specific politics of place wherein the logic of the camp and the spectacle collide. What is of interest to me is not so much the camp as the hidden space of modernity, but how it finds a willing alibi in the spectacular media saturated spaces of capital. Within the non-place, the forces of global corporate capital have found an amiable space to both invest (lifestyle) and reduce (bare life) human life to maximize and optimize its own power.

Taxis as media: a temporal materialist reading of the taxi-cab

Through interviews with Toronto city taxi drivers and frequent business travelers this paper explores how the taxi might be understood as a medium – one that cannot be disarticulated from a particular temporal politics. To understand the taxi as a medium is also to insist that labor, social difference, and the cultural politics of space and time are not external effects or byproducts of media, but rather quite central to how media mediates.

The Biopolitical Economy of Time

This article considers the political limitations of Hardt and Negri’s treatment of time in Empire and offers the concepts of “The Biopolitical Economy of Time” and “Recalibration” as a means to enliven the possibility to demand a social wage for all.

TAXI CAB PUBLICS AND THE PRODUCTION OF BROWN SPACE AFTER 9/11

This paper introduces Brown Space as a conceptual category to understand the particular spatial politics of Brown as an ‘identificatory strategy’ after 9/11. I use the taxi cab and the daily life of the ‘brown’ taxi driver as a vehicle to navigate the new micro-politics of brown in public space. Within the popular imaginary I locate two dominating configurations of the taxi post-9/11 which work together to create Brown Space. The taxi figures prominently in the dark corners of the Right as a roving terrorist cell while it is elevated to an idealized ‘public sphere on wheels’ in the bright sensibility of the liberal imagination. In the first account the driver needs to be eradicated and in the second account the embodied driver is strangely absent. Between this deviant brown and an unacknowledged brown there emerges yet another post-9/11 proclamation of civic life – a renewed public space free of brown.