Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, eds. (2022). Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence. Routledge
Reviewed by Dr Bosco Opi, University of South Australia
Mapping Deathscapes, an edited collection, offers a critical and creative analysis of the innovations of Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies, a transnational digital humanities project that maps the sites of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons, and immigration detention centres and in borderlands (Perera and Pugliese, 2015). In so doing, the book unearths contemporary and historical practices that continue to characterise carceral institutions across the settler states in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. The book’s interdisciplinarity is one of its strengths as it draws on a diverse range of post-, de-, and anti-colonial concepts and experiences to construct the Deathscapes project. It draws on artwork and creative forms to offer graphic examples of carceral deaths at the border, as well as in prison cells, and detention camps, that are articulated through a number of case studies explored by each contributor.
The book begins with an account of the welcoming ceremony performed by First Nations elder, Uncle Ray Jackson, and his conferral of Aboriginal passport to those considered undesirable by Australia, notably refugees who arrived on Australian shores seeking international protection. The issuance of this passport as an Aboriginal technology, although not legally recognised by the state, serves to legitimate non-Indigenous peoples’ presence in Australia by those with genuine sovereignty to do so, the Aboriginal people of Australia (Perera and Pugliese, 2015). The welcoming ceremony is in sharp contrast with the moment that settler colonisers raised the Union Jack flag at Port Jackson, Sydney on 26 January 1788. Acknowledging that Indigenous sovereignty was never ceded, the settlers’ terra nullius claim positions the First Nations people as non-existing or already assimilated at the time. The exposition of the conferral of Aboriginal passport is one of the strengths of this book as Uncle Ray demonstrated an internationalist resistance to racialised colonial subjugation put in place by imperial design. By foregrounding the work of Uncle Ray, the book provides a decolonial critique of white sovereignty as an impediment to ending Indigenous carceral deaths.
Globally, racial oppression is still embedded within contemporary carceral institutions. It is within this carceral space that racialised identity is invoked through the biopolitics of difference. In order to decolonise this space, Franz Fanon’s concept of epidermalisation of black racism becomes relevant and is worth exploring. In phenomenological terms, black racism is situated within settler colonial culture which has to be decolonised. Given that carceral detention has always been the foundation of settler states, and remains so, the strength of the book is its abolitionist agenda which not only aims at ending carceral infrastructures, but also at decolonising the endemic racialised logic embedded within it.
In addressing many manifestations of these carceral infrastructures, the book critically addresses the necropolitics of refugees’ death at the borders. In his critical appraisal of borders, Michel de Certeau theorises that the border ‘colonises space’ as it continues to function as a silent theatre (de Certeau 1988: 127). Predicated on this colonial trap, the European Union introduced its externalisation policy in early 2000 to prevent asylum seekers from reaching its shores. For context, border externalisation is the measure taken by states in locations beyond their territorial borders to obstruct, deter or otherwise avert the arrival of refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants who do not have prior authorisation to enter their intended country of destination’ (Crisp, 2019). Here, border externalisation or offshore bordering is associated with neo-imperial politics of difference. In anthropological terms, borders construct differences, cultures, and people. The administration of justice in this space fluctuates between law and no law. Technically, externalisation provides a space where settler law is extended to those it excludes because the law legislates both their inclusion, and their removal. This elasticity is carefully designed to restrict, contain, detect, deny, or capture refugees with impunity. This border chronicle is also one of the strengths of the Deathscapes project (Perera and Pugliese, 2022).
The Deathscapes project is ambitious and commendably broad. Its legacy might be to generate similar interventions through contributions from Africanist decolonial scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Pierre Mbembe. This would extend to colonially bordered Africa which hosts the largest number of people in the camp or ‘carceral humanitarianism’. Funded by the West, these camps position Africa as a ‘major’ site for the reproduction of race and identity politics. For context, the camp was first introduced on the continent of Africa during carceral settler expansion in the 18th century as a laboratory for testing punitive confinement to restrict the Natives from mobility. As a conduit of state violence, carceral camps continue to represent racialised geographies of the postcolonial world. It is not a coincident that Western modernity remains portrayed through carceral humanitarianism. While refugees, whose status are encoded in both the domestic and international laws that constitutes Western modernity, some of their core features such as borders, detention centres, and the camp were pioneered in the colonies (Opi, 2021). This topological elasticity has made the camp, a biopolitical institution, a permanent crisis on this planet.
Mapping Deathscapes makes a significant contribution to decolonial studies as it exposes the death of Indigenous people and refugees in carceral institutions such as detention camps, at the borders, and in prison cells. As a scholarly work, a key contribution is that it has epistemologically bridged the gap between academia and activism.
Click here to view more details on Deathscapes: Mapping Race And Violence In Settler Societies
References
Crisp, J. (2019). Externalisation and the Erosion of Refugee Protection. https:// arts.unimelb.edu.au/school-of-social-and-political-sciences/our-research/ comparative-network-on-refugee-externalisation-policies/blog/externalisationand-the-erosion-of-refugee-protection.
de Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth, New York; Grove Press.
Opi, B. (2021). Refugee coloniality: an Afrocentric analysis of prolonged encampment in Kenya, PhD thesis, Flinders University, Australia.
Sogut, N. (2003). Border’s Capture: Insurrectional Politics, Border-crossing Humans and the New Political. in Borderscape: Hidden Geographies and Politics at the Territory’s Edge, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Perera, S and Pugliese, J. (2015). Detainees on Nauru may have been ‘released,’ but they are not free. The Conversation, October 6. https:/sation.com/detainees-on-nauru-may-have-beenreleased-but-they-are-not-free-48648.
Suvendrini, P. and Joseph, P. (2022). Mapping Deathscapes : Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence, Taylor & Francis Group.