ABSTRACT
Migration and borders - or more precisely, the spectacles of “border crisis” - have taken center stage in public debate and policy interventions in migrant-“receiving” countries, worldwide. Across the globe, alongside an escalation in border violence, there has likewise proliferated a variety of reactionary right-wing (“populist”) political and social movements that can only be adequately characterized, very frankly, as anti-immigrant fascism. In this context of alarmist yet incessant discourses of migrant/ refugee/ border “crisis,” nonetheless, extra-state formations of anti-immigrant violence merely amplify and supplement the more fundamental violence of the border enforcement regimes of state powers. That is to say, the populist enthusiasm for an increasingly authoritarian politics of borders and migration tends to simply intensify and extend the inherently authoritarian and despotic character of how borders serve as premier sites for the enactment of a state’s sovereign power, particularly as targeted against non-citizen border crossers. Reciprocally, it is this rather routine border authoritarianism that then animates and fuels a wider drift toward right-wing political authoritarianism. Thus, the increasingly fascistic political discourses of “civil war” that depict “domestic” or “internal” rivals as political “enemies” and social “threats” derive much of their elemental momentum from the nationalist metaphysics and nativist ethos of border “war.”
CV
Born and raised in Chicago, Nicholas De Genova is a scholar of migration, borders, race, citizenship, and labor. He is a professor of Anthropology and joined the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies of the University of Houston as Chair in Fall 2018. His academic work has contributed to multiple disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, geography, and political science, as well as contributing to the interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies, migration studies, border studies, citizenship studies, sociolegal studies, urban studies, postcolonial studies, American studies, Latin American studies, and European studies. As a scholar of critical race and ethnic studies, Professor De Genova has been most prominently located in Latino/a/x studies, but his work has also made contributions to African American studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and Arab American studies, and in the European context also to Roma studies. He is a social and political theorist and critic.
The lecture took place in March 2024 at ZiF Bielefeld in context of the research group "Internalizing Borders".