After Deportation

This chapter discusses important issues regarding post-deportation studies with respect to methods, positionality and social change. Drawing on preliminary fieldwork undertaken in Cape Verde in 2008, it reflects on what these data gathered long ago may suggest and where it may fit in the existing literature. It argues that when examining policies, experiences and interests in (post) deportation, scholars may want to consider how their research approach can mobilise change, or at the very least, how consistencies found across (post) deportation studies may be articulated in a more visible way. Given the political and ethical dimensions of border control and border research, it suggests that more space should be given to in-depth reflections of researchers’ positionality, approach and motivations in researching post-deportation.

From the perspective of a deporting state power, deportation appears to be the final act, the proverbial last word. As ostensibly unwanted or undesirable non-citizens, the utter disposability of deportees appears to be finally and conclusively verified by deportation as a sovereign power’s exercise in virtual “waste removal;” a state’s perfunctory and mundane act of “taking out the trash.” Hence, it is no accident that, etymologically, the origins of the very word “deportation” would indicate a carrying away, a removal, a disposal. The eradication of deportees’ individual lives—their personal identities and life trajectories—emerges as a routine and prosaic fact of deportation. For their part, deportees readily liken the bitterness of their condition to “coming home to nothing,” and “being stuck” with “nowhere to go,” and indeed, oftentimes, with nothing to do, “trapped” in a place that feels “like a prison away from prison.” In spite of the sheer violence of the disjunctures and ruptures inflicted though deportation, however, ethnography confirms that those who have been rendered the objects of this power persistently re-assert their own subjectivity. Such ethnographic insights into the lived struggles of the deported (as well as their loved ones and communities) restore names and identities to those who have been subjected to deportation’s techniques of eradication, elucidates the enduring subjectivity of those who have been made the objects of such sovereign acts of state power, and illustrates the stubborn incorrigibility of human life against the myriad forces that would seek to enforce its precarity and disposability. In the post-deportation condition, we confront anew the elementary and elemental human freedom of movement, and the incorrigibility of the autonomy and subjectivity of migration. Much as the autonomy of migration instigates a contest in which state power never has the first word, what we may now conceive as the autonomy of deportation—an autonomy and subjectivity of the deported within and against their predicaments of deportation—similarly ensures that state power never has the last word, either.