Across the border and into the cold: hieleras and the punishment of asylum-seeking Central American women in the United States

Thousands of Central American families are fleeing from violence in their own countries and seeking protection in the US. However, once they enter the country they are immediately confined in temporary holding cells – also called hieleras (iceboxes) due to their extremely low temperatures, where they undergo violence and neglect. The hieleras become the site where the categories of the asylum-seeker, the immigrant, and the criminal become conflated. Asylum-seekers entering the country also enter an already existing racialized structure where Latina/o subjects have been criminalized. This article analyzes the hieleras through a Foucauldian and a transnational feminist lens, and argues that these holding cells work as a site for punishing border crossers and deterring them (and others like them) from pursuing the asylum process; which are displays of both sovereign power and disciplinary power.     

Prison Decayed: Cinematic Penal Discourse and Populism 1995–2005

The increased populist and punitive turn in criminal justice policy in the United Kingdom over recent years has led to punishment becoming politicised, harsher and more ostentatious. The role of media and popular culture discourses of prison is rarely examined in this account. Adopting a Foucauldian discourse analysis of prison films released over the past 10 years, this article explores the prison film as one important element of the discursive regime. It seeks to investigate what representational practices are at work, how they limit the meaning of prison and prisoners, and how this may contribute to debates about the nature and aim of prison in contemporary society. It argues that several discursive practices exist in cinematic representations of the incarceration that strengthen support for the use of prison. The explicit and recurring depiction of violence in most prison films over the past 10 years, while appearing to offer evidence for prison reform, does the opposite. This paper suggests that discourses around the futility and inhumanity of incarceration are scant, replaced by scenes of prison violence; rape and death appear, which appear to exist purely for the pleasure of the spectator: a generic feature of the prison film. Secondly, prisoners are largely constructed as an inhuman other: a danger to society and deserving of harsh punishment. Consequently, the discursive regime of prison in cinema over the past decade constructs prison as not only necessary, but as the only process for crime control and reduction.     

Antipodean Enlightenment

Abstract

In his monumental collection Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity, György Markus lays down the conceptual framework for the theorisation of modern high culture across the cultural spheres and articulates an account of cultural pragmatics or cultural relations – author, text and public – in the domains of science, arts and the humanities. He explores in great detail the conceptual keystones in the evolution of the cultural self-understanding of modernity from the enlightenment until today. Markus’s work resonates with a deep understanding of the historico-cultural terrain being covered and the conceptual issues at play.     

The dissolution of the Asiation mode of production

The article is an attempt to trace out the contradictions accompanying the integration of a pre-capitalist formation into the world economy. Historical examples are taken from the Ottoman Empire, which, it is claimed, can be characterised as a transformation of the Asiatic Mode of Production. As merchant capital begins to dissolve the existing relations of production, a struggle over the division of the surplus ensues. This struggle is discussed first in the context of an economy with a negligible escape of surplus, and secondly when the surplus transfer abroad begins to condition the contradictions within. In the first situation merchant capital in its trading and production-organizing functions, claims a larger portion of the surplus which traditionally belonged to the ruling class of the pre-capitalist formation. The result of this struggle is analysed under two different assumptions: one that the division of the surplus is achieved without the intervention of the political instance, and two that the state becomes the platform for the struggle.

When the economy begins to lose some of its surplus abroad, the internal contradictions are aggravated. The eventual consequence of the loss is a balance-of-payments crisis, as a result of which the merchant class will find themselves discredited, and the political balances may shift in favour of the traditional ruling class. The conclusion states that this series of contradictions is characteristic of the history of peripheral capitalism.     

The politics of the culture of control: undoing genealogy

The third volume of David Garland's trilogy attempts to characterize recent developments in the field of crime control and criminal justice in terms of the emergence of a ‘culture of control’. For these purposes the author claims to use the genealogical method developed by Michel Foucault. This essay argues that Garland's selective reliance on this method amounts to an undoing of the Foucauldian ‘project’ insofar as it re-introduces the objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy which Foucault had tried to subvert throughout his work. This undoing entails profound consequences for the politics of The Culture of Control, which concludes on a reformist proposition that forsakes a form of resistance grounded on the awareness of its own, intrinsic limitations.     

The literal truth about terrorism: an analysis of post-9/11 popular US non-fiction books on terrorism

More books with the word ‘terrorism’ in the title have been published in the twenty-first century than the combined total of all such books prior to that. Over half of these were on the subject of ‘Islamic terrorism’. The sheer volume of such texts, without even taking into consideration their contents, contributed to rendering as ‘true’, the existence of the phenomenon they publicised. Such an increase in the literature on the subject of Islamic terrorism was made possible by an overall relaxation of usually strict enunciative rules and regulations governing discursive production. This article explores the effects of the loosening of the latter controls through an analysis of popular non-fiction books published on the subject of terrorism in the United States in the early years of the ‘war on terror’ and the authors of these books, as the existence of these texts – never mind their influence – has been ignored by terrorism scholars to date.     

Film Review

Piracy is far from a new phenomenon (with records of piracy dating back to the 1600s), yet over the course of the past decade, it has become a focus of the international political community. Drawing from Foucault and Gramsci, we suggest that the ‘problem’ of piracy today, in particular off the coast of Somalia, is framed in a discourse to reify and support a broader ‘regime of truth’ embedded in global state-corporate economic interests. We further suggest that equating the Somalia piracy to terrorism and as a global threat to peace and maritime security serves as the political discourse designed to legitimate militarized policy responses rather than addressing the underlying conditions in Somalia that are facilitating the instances of piracy. While piracy was once a state-organized crime committed for the purposes of capital accumulation, the current framing and overly militarized responses are based on protecting states’ capital interests rather than addressing the root of the problem at hand, inadvertently providing a venue under which the conditions and ongoing deterioration of the Somalia state not only continue but remain marginalized and unaddressed.     

The Russian mafia: Expulsion of law

The purpose of this paper will be to determine whether the conditions that exist in present‐day Russia are congruent with Foucault's claim that power in modern societies is not ensured by law and punishment but by normalization and control, which go beyond the state and its apparatuses, and that law plays an increasingly subordinate role within contemporary disciplinary society. I will also see what conclusions can be drawn from the Russian‐Soviet case that are relevant to evaluating the paradigms supplied by Foucault in deciphering the modalities of power in the modern world. In what sense can he help us understand how discipline and law in Imperial and Soviet Russia created the necessary conditions for the emergence of the Russian Mafia? Law has been transformed in the hands of the Russian Mafia and has expanded its spheres of influence rather than being displaced. The conditions that exist in present‐day Russia can be applied to Foucault's claim that power in modern societies is not ensured by law and punishment but by normalization and control which go beyond the state and its apparatuses. But it is not the case that law plays an increasingly subordinate role in present‐day Russia. Rather, it is no longer controlled by the sovereign power of the monarchy or by the Soviet state and its apparatuses, but is now predominately controlled by the Russian Mafia.     

Flooding Wall Street: Echoes from the Future of Resistance around Climate Change

The global capitalist system is ravaging ecosystems at a staggering and accelerating scale as it transgresses multiple ecological planetary boundaries, from massive species extinction to climate change, radically threatening life on this planet. Through analyzing power as a network of intersecting sets of relations, we can start to appreciate capitalism and the state not as entities, but as comprised by social relationships and local operations of power. This perspective reveals how effective resistance can be conceived in the form of destituent power – not as a direct clash with constituted power but instead as the withdrawal of our energies from and obedience to the political order. This destituent approach proceeds by deactivating the subjugating relationships constituting the system, thereby opening spaces to undertake constantly evolving experiments of developing new harmonious social and ecological relationships. Actions to disrupt and delegitimize the operations of capital, like Flood Wall Street, serve as tentative glimpses of ascendant destituent forces assembling against ecological collapse. The further challenge becomes how to connect the multiplicity of resistances, thought not in terms of a unity as a homogenous movement, but through actively cultivating their transversal relations across the rhizomatic network of experiments in practices of destituent power striving to realize new worlds.