By Franco Laguna Correa at OUP: (T)here is a clear concern regarding global migrations, inter-genetic contact zones, and the presence of Muslim communities across Western nations. During the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016, I felt the academic urgency to focus on global migrations as places of conflict and political contact, and today in 2024 this urgency has acquired a more defined intellectual and cognitive pervasion than back then.
On the surface, anti-immigration in the U.K. and the presidential candidacy in the U.S. of a woman with multiple cultural heritages that self-identifies as an African-American are unrelated and respond to different cultural anxieties. Nevertheless, global social reality provides quite a different perspective, particularly because migrations across the globe are triggering mainstream rhetorical responses that appeal to both nativism and genomic anxieties. Furthermore, the recent social media attacks focused on athletes from Algeria and China competing at the Olympics have put into question the western cultural protocols of trans-inclusion at such a competitive and global level as it is the case of the Olympic Games.
While these sociocultural phenomena seem to underscore different biopolitical trajectories (cultural difference, intersectional power dynamics, and postmodern gender re-configurations), they share a common rhetorical point of encounter. The proliferation of global bordering processes at all biopolitical levels emphasizes that our realities of interaction impose more borders than ever upon human experience. Borders no longer are mere fixed invisible divisions set under geopolitical rationales whose main objective is defining national territorialities. Moreover, the circulation of global migrants across national borders and global urban spaces has shifted the interplay between humans and borders internally. Thus, borders are not only serving as external points of biopolitical entry, particularly as cities in Europe and North America (thinking solely about the Western hemisphere) are experiencing an administrative reconfiguration of public spaces, as street policing has incorporated violent exclusionary practices to further distinguish between those who seem to belong from those who fall under the migrant/other category. In addition, public services targeting migrants are strengthening the protocols of national belonging while also defining the routes that migrants endeavor with administrative purposes, such as obtaining transit, residency, and employment permits.
Back in 2016, while teaching at a very conservative liberal arts institution in the southern United States, I made the risky decision to bring into the classroom The Origins of Nazi Violence by Enzo Traverso. Traverso’s monograph rightfully maps the conflicting genealogy of the Nazi regime, framing the extermination camps as an early epitome of European modernity’s industrialization of dehumanization and killing. The reading provoked a blitzkrieg of disapproval among my students. Despite my efforts to situate the reading within contemporary ethical debates, most of them argued that Traverso’s book was dated because Nazis had been already defeated and therefore that kind of “evil” had been successfully eradicated. I clearly remember my anxiety when one of my students angrily expressed that if Traverso’s book was at all useful it was only to place the role of Barack Obama as the main culprit for constantly fueling waves of anti-white racism across the United States. From this particular vantage point, the current attacks of Donald Trump on Kamala Harris’ heritage and racial origins are not at all unfamiliar among the American electorate. These attacks have a precise epistemological origin and are also sanctioned by entire communities. Moreover, these attacks aim at very specific social and cultural places of exclusion, similarly to what Traverso exposes in relation to the Nazi regime.
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