Conscripts of Migration

Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas

Christopher Ian Foster

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496824233
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas, author Christopher Ian Foster analyzes increasingly urgent questions regarding crises of global immigration by redefining migration in terms of conscription and by studying contemporary literature. Reporting on immigration, whether liberal or conservative, popular or scholarly, leaves out the history in which the Global North helped create outward migration in the Global South. From histories of racial capitalism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism to contemporary neoliberal globalization and the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, countries in the Global North continue to devastate and destabilize the Global South. Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, in different ways, police the effects of their own global policies at their borders. Foster provides a substantial study of a new body of contemporary African diasporic literature called migritude literature. Migritude indicates the work and ideas of a disparate yet distinct group of younger African authors born after independence in the 1960s. Most often migritude authors have lived both in and outside Africa and narrate the experiences of migration under the pressures of globalization. They also emphasize that immigration itself and stereotypes of the immigrant are entangled with the history of colonialism. Authors like Fatou Diome, Shailja Patel, Abdourahman Waberi, Cristina Ali Farah, and others confront critical issues of migrancy, diaspora, departure, return, racism, identity, gender, sexuality, and postcoloniality.

Chapter 1

CONSCRIPTS OF MIGRATION IN
THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

The twenty-first century has appropriately been described as “the age of migration.”¹ Yet the fundamental character of migration has been, and continues to be, one of crisis. The decades-long crisis in the Mediterranean for African immigrants and refugees—a disaster that alone has claimed thirty thousand lives or more in the past few decades—the Syrian refugee crisis, the volatile United States–Mexico border, humanitarian crises in Haiti and elsewhere precipitating displacement, the apartheid-like criminalization of Palestinian movement by the Israeli government, and many other such crises, define our moment. The situation has worsened in the Trump era, an epoch that has seen the rise of overt xenophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant nativism. In early 2017, for example, United States president Donald Trump signed into law a “Muslim ban” preventing immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) from entering the country to, as the Trump administration stated, keep out “radical Islamic terrorism,” despite, as the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would argue, no evidence of impending attacks.² PhD student Saira Rafiee, studying at the City University of New York (my alma mater), was forbidden from re-entering the United States after visiting her family in Iran and was detained for eighteen hours; Nisrin Elamin, a Sudanese PhD student at Stanford University, was also detained arriving in the United States after having completed fieldwork in Sudan for her degree; and, as the American Civil Liberties Union notes, among the many “barred from entering the United States [was] Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an Iraqi man who worked as an interpreter for the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division who ‘spent years keeping US soldiers alive in combat in Iraq.’”³ He was detained at JFK as well. Just days after Trump’s Muslim ban, radical white nationalist Alexandre Bissonnette murdered six worshippers at a mosque in Canada.⁴ Trump’s Muslim ban, his administration’s 2018 “no tolerance” policy rending thousands of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, the Quebec City massacre, as well as the precipitous spike in hate crimes since Trump’s inauguration represent an extreme expression of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and white supremacist policy, practice, and rhetoric already in place in the United States and Europe. How did this come about? How is it connected to the myriad crises characterizing immigration in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How might a study of immigration from an anti-nationalist and African diasporic perspective crystallize our otherwise muddied conceptions and understandings of our contemporary global climate?

This study explores a characteristically Western contradiction regarding immigration and the incisive body of global African literature challenging it. The United Kingdom, France, Italy, the United States, and other powers actually produced the migration that they attempt to police at their borders. Through global economic, political, and cultural processes from the era of high imperialism, decolonization, the cold war, to contemporary neoliberal globalization (neocolonialism), they have devastated nations in the Global South, creating instability and displacement. The Global North’s own implication in the migration they helped create, and the violent processes that catalyze it, are often obscured by draconian immigration regimes and the anti-immigrant and racist discourses that subtend these practices and ideas. In fact, even the way we talk about immigration in the twenty-first century, whether on the right or left—from fear and hatred to benevolent tolerance—hides the plain fact of a deeply asymmetrical world shaped by imperialism, globalization, and nationalism.

Edward Said begins his groundbreaking Culture and Imperialism with an important point about imperialism and ends his book with one regarding immigration. On the substantially global nature of imperialism, he states:

Consider that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 percent but actually held approximately 35 percent of the earth’s surface, and that by 1878 the proportion was 67 percent…. By 1914 … Europe held a grand total of roughly 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis. As a result, says William McNeill in The Pursuit of Power, “the world was united into a single interacting whole as never before.”⁵

Eric J. Hobsbawm, echoing Marx, would confirm not only the totalizing nature of imperialism but its connection to racial capitalism as a world-colonizing economic system. In addition to partitioning the entire world, imperialism would transform it “into a complex of colonial and semi-colonial territories which increasingly evolved into specialized producers of one or two primary products for export to the world market.”⁶ Building upon Said and Hobsbawm, I argue that the management of the movement (and categorization) of populations in the world is not only a by-product of this Western partitioning of the world, but actually shapes it. This is why Edward Said’s second point, ending his book, is so important. He implies that empire and migration are deeply connected:

Imperialism did not end, however. It did not suddenly become “past,” once decolonization had set in motion the dismantling of the classical empires. A legacy of connections still binds countries like Algeria and India to France and Britain respectively. A vast new population of Muslims, Africans, and West Indians from former colonial territories now reside in metropolitan Europe; even Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia today must deal with these dislocations, which are to a large degree the result of imperialism and decolonization. (Said, 282)

Said uses the term dislocation precisely because modern empires created migration in their former colonies, like Algeria or India, through colonization and then police those dislocated populations at home. They punish black and brown people deemed “outsiders” or “foreign” despite the intimate relationship of conquest, while creating and reproducing the myth of Europe or the United States as a whites-only enclave, which of course is historically inaccurate.⁷ In this book, when I refer to empires I include not solely the imperial period but the epoch of neoliberal globalization as well, from about the 1970s to the present.⁸ I follow Quinn Slobodian’s theorization of neoliberalism not as a set of economic and political theories and practices that would create a borderless or stateless world governed by market forces, but as an “extra-economic framework that would secure the continued existence of capitalism” on a global scale and keep it safe by “redesigning states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market … from mass demands for social justice and redistribution equality.”⁹ Neoliberals, he continues, “sought neither the disappearance of the state nor the disappearance of borders” (Slobodian, 2). Furthermore, in Conscripts of Migration I show how neoliberal globalization represented a new way of colonizing the Global South by utilizing both economic and political exploitation via global institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Funds (based in and benefiting the Global North), nation-states, and militaries. Senegalese-French writer Fatou Diome would call these new neoliberal weapons “economic bazookas.”¹⁰ The wholly negative effects of these policies in the Global South continue to be discursively explained away as random side effects of the “free hand of the market” or by racist characterizations of so-called “shit-hole” countries in the Global South, as Donald Trump would openly parrot and others with more decorum would quietly hold to be true. These colonial and neoliberal empires, roughly making up what we might call the Global North, created an entire complex of discourses around migration, often shoring up political and economic projects from imperialism to the present, that, in every case, erase the glaring fact of their own complicity in creating the very dislocations that Said points out above.

Given these histories and our contemporary global configuration, I analyze immigration neither in terms of invasion or free movement but in terms of conscription—and in two ways, the first more general and the second immediate. First, imperialism set the global conditions that dictate how and where one moves, while neoliberal capital continues to destabilize the Global South for the direct benefit of the North. This creates, shapes, and interdicts movement. Second, immigration regimes conscript people via apparatuses like passport hierarchies, checkpoints, borders, documentation, and the legalization of dehumanizing identity categories like “illegal alien,” “sans papier,” and so on. By definition, “conscription” describes the act of forcing a person or people, under duress, to join an army. And indeed colonial powers used forced African conscription to bolster its ranks in both world wars and dating as far back as 1857, which I discuss in more detail in chapters 3 and 6.¹¹ Nearly half a million Africans were conscripted into European armies, for example, in World War I alone.¹² For their service they were met with death, abhorrent racist treatment, and discrimination, and were denied citizenship and equal rights—a chilling parallel to the ways in which immigrants and refugees are treated today. Gebreyesus Hailu’s The Conscript: A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War, which was written in his native language Tigrinya in 1927 but not published until 1950, represents an early Africa-centered narrative of conscription on the continent.¹³

In addition to its literal sense, the term conscript has also been used more broadly by Stanley Diamond, Talal Asad, and David Scott, who describe the violence (both negative and productive) and reach of Western civilization and modernity. I discuss these incisive uses of the term in this introduction. In my title, “conscripts” initially seems an incongruous object to the subject of “migration” since our dominant conception privileges individual choice and agency—one can, ostensibly, freely move or not move. Yet, I want to press against this dominant neoliberal viewpoint on immigration as private and personal—both figurations are variously marketable and reaffirming of “Western democracy”—to suggest that peoples from the Global South, the formerly colonized, and people of color, are already caught up in modern conditions that shape decisions to move or not move. These conditions then continue to catalyze, manage, and organize movement while producing discursive and legal categories that constitute diasporic existence. Conscripts of Migration in its entirety provides evidence to this claim and provides a literary, political, and phenomenological understanding of the literature of contemporary African diasporas, focusing on “migritude” writing and its antecedents in particular, while necessarily attending to various localized and global contours.

To understand immigration, we must take seriously the following two facts: the violence of colonialism created migration and catalyzed displacement, and northern policies of both neoliberal globalization and nationalism in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries continue that trend. Immigrant bans ironically attempt to keep out the baleful effects of the Global North’s own policies while externalizing blame via white supremacist rhetoric. As a young college student in Seattle in 1999, I joined forty thousand other protesters who assembled to challenge the policies of neoliberal globalization at the meeting of the World Trade Organization. Before the worldwide protests of Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017, protesters gathered around the world to oppose America’s imperial invasion of Iraq in 2002–2003 and its history of neocolonial machinations in the region. These movements and complementary global cultural production can be studied via immigration. The literature of new African diasporas, for example, phenomenologically reveal, historicize, and challenge the very nationalist and yet global policies and ideologies of Europe and the United States by focusing on migrant experiences. As I show in chapter 6, Nadifa Mohamed’s first novel Black Mamba Boy shows us how we got to this point by narrativizing migration in the high-imperial era—an important key to understanding our present.

Twenty-first-century African literature increasingly figures immigration as a conscripting force in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. It also lays bare the relationship between migration and empire. Fatou Diome and Shailja Patel indeed connect the disciplining of movement in the twenty-first century with colonialism (see chapters 3 and 2 respectively). Nearing the end of Diome’s novel The Belly of the Atlantic, protagonist Salie reflects on her experience at immigration control upon arrival in France in the late twentieth century, having come from Dakar. She describes it as humiliating, racializing, and biopolitical—she must pay for her own medical exam and give endless accounts of herself. As Salie moves through the liminal space of France’s immigration control, she connects her own and other migrants’ treatment to imperial pasts. “So illness is considered an unacceptable defect that bars access to French territory … in the colonies, for a long time the natives believed that the master never fell ill, so cleverly did everything conspire to maintain the myth of his superiority” (153). The colonial-era management of populations and in particular, their movement, is mirrored in contemporary immigration regimes. Salie parses her experience by writing a poem based on the traditional laments of her village: “Passports, permits, visas / And endless red tape / The new chains of slavery / Bank branch, account number / Address, ethnic origin / The fabric of modern apartheid” (Diome, 154; emphasis in original). I read the migrant of Salie’s poem as being conscripted in two ways. First, the endless red tape shapes the movement of emigrants from formerly colonized places, those apparatuses used to control and document that movement—passports, permits, visas. These are, from the perspective of African migrants, the “new chains of slavery.” Second, Salie refers to a more general condition in which the migrant is, via these apparatuses and their histories, already conscripted, indeed she is woven into the “fabric” of modern apartheid, into late twentieth- and twenty-first-century neoliberal globalization.

In a collection of essays titled Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge argue that “borders and prisons—walls and cages—are global crises. Walls and cages are fundamental to managing the wealth, social inequalities, and opposition to these harms created by capitalism and the present round of neocolonial dispossession.”¹⁴ This contributes to what Loyd calls global apartheid—“a condition in which the wealthiest regions of the world erect physical and bureaucratic barriers against the movement of people from poorer regions of the world” (Loyd et al.). These barriers and attendant identity categories that shape movement combine to make manifest the condition of global or modern apartheid; they suggest that, when we think about movement, immigration, and the world, we should consider the violent expropriation of free movement from the majority of the world’s travelers, issues that contemporary African diasporic literature often engages.

This new literature figures immigration as individual and yet systemic and as integrated into larger global processes as authors are increasingly concerned with African mobility and the forces that animate or deter that mobility. Conscripts of Migration studies the diasporic literature of African women and queer migrants to argue that immigration in the era of neoliberal globalization is transnationally constituted, institutional, and historical. African migrants and the actors narrated in the literature of new African diasporas are conscripted by the conditions that produce them; their movement is catalyzed, shaped, and managed. The script has already been prepared for them. “Long before the ticket is purchased to come to the promised land of Europe,” Donald Carter notes, “this ‘other world’ has insinuated itself into the very fabric of everyday life in the future migrants’ homeland.”¹⁵ Writers like Cristina Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego, for example, address both the dehumanizing identity categories from the perspective of the African migrant or traveler, and the larger structures that weave subjects and movement into the fabric of an increasingly neol...